The Lets Read Podcast - 349: I LIVED IN A CURSED APPALACHIAN VILLAGE | 7 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 335

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the Appalachian Trail & Small Towns.HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inektToday's episode is sponsored by:- Quince- Omaha Steaks - Go to https://OmahaSteaks.com and use promo code READ at checkout for $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. 

On the East Coast, you're among the first to see the daybreak over the horizon. And when you do, you might start to understand why it's easy to feel a little brighter in Halifax. Of course, stormy days still come. But it's never long until darkness fades, coming off like a heavy coat. Maybe you're looking to shed some of your shadows, too. And if you are, there's no better place to just lighten up. Discover Halifax. When thirst strikes and your energy begins to fade, one hero rises above the rest.

Introducing the superpower smoothie from Zhu Booster. A bright sun-charged burst of mangoes, bananas, and blue spirulina. An out-of-this-world smoothie. Just in time for the new Supergirl movie. Discover your power and channel your inner superhero. Fly into your local Zhu Booster and experience it for yourself today. And see Supergirl, only in theaters June 26. Growing up in Portland, Maine, I always looked up to my big brother Tommy. He was funny, he was brave,

and he was by far the best player on his high school football team. He was so good that his coaches were talking about scholarships by the time his senior year rolled around. But Tommy had other plans, and in 1964, he took a bullet flying a helicopter over in Vietnam. And in typical Tommy fashion, he managed to fly his bird back to base, and he even landed the thing before. passing out. Doctors fought to save his life, but sadly he didn't make it through the surgery, and we lost him. I was 13 when we got the news, and it broke us. It was the worst thing that ever happened to us, and it took five long years before we even felt like a family again. But then just as we were starting to shake off the grief and regain some sense of normalcy,

the draft happened. I was 18, unemployed, and ripe to be picked out for mandatory. military service, and when my parents realized this, they freaked. Mom almost lost her mind thinking that she might lose a second son to the same God-forsaken war, and Dad wasn't much better. But unlike Tommy, who wanted to go to Vietnam, because he wanted to fly helicopters on Uncle Sam's dime, I had a way out. An old friend of my mom's had a brother in the church, and if he pulled a few strings, he could get me a scholarship for an undergrad course at the University of Maine. And because if I was destined for the seminary,

I could dodge the draft and avoid Vietnam altogether. And the plan was for me to skip out once the draft ended. But to my surprise, studying the Bible gave me back a sort of hope that losing Tommy had taken away. Faith proved a potent medicine, so when it came time to leave, I decided to stick around instead. Now, for me, the church was all about service,

not just God, but to my fellow man, and so I relished any and all opportunities to volunteer with charitable organizations. Naturally, I preferred to work in places which needed that charity most, and this was how I became involved in the schoolhouse project. It was started in the late 70s by the main council of churches as a means of providing Sunday school services to kids in underprivileged areas. They had a chapter down in Florida, one in Oklahoma, and another in Arkansas. but they wanted to open a fourth chapter in the state of Virginia, and they wanted me to spearhead it. I considered it a great honor, so I accepted the offer on the spot. Then in the late spring of 1977, I was headed down to where Kentucky meets the two Virginias to start up my Sunday school. Now here's where some of you are going to take issue with the way that I tell this story, and for that I'm just going to apologize in advance.

But I once promised a man that, should I ever formally retell it, I'd be able to tell it. protect the identities of the innocent to preserve what little peace gods allowed them in the time they have left. And so with that in mind, let's just say that I was headed to a little town with the pseudonym of Ashby and way out in the hollers of Appalachian, Virginia. And for those who don't know what a holler is, it's basically like small valleys which carve up Appalach's rolling hills, and one of the best words I can use to describe them as arterial. In a five-mile radius, they might be 15 to 20 of them, all hidden away around the highways on which small towns spring up,

with Ashby being one of them. And by the time I got there, coal was the basis of the town's economy, and with the oil crisis plaguing the mid-70s, as you might remember, the town's business was booming. Folks were moving themselves into Ashby by the dozen after getting themselves jobs in the minds. And although the town's two churches were enough to cater to the new arrivals, there was no Sunday school teacher to teach the ever-rising number of kids.

And that, boys and girls, is where I came in. After renting a small single bedroom and a local boarding house, I set about introducing myself to the local preachers. And then once I had their blessing, I cobbled together a small tent, some chairs, and a chalkboard. I'd once believed that growing a full, and attentive classroom would take patience. But from that very first Sunday, my tent was just about full to bursting. I taught the kids all about Jonah and the whale. They always loved that one,

and how God can help us out even what all seems lost. And then when it came to feedback from parents, the only complaints seemed to be that there weren't enough chairs. But the next Sunday, almost every set of parents brought some piece of lawn furniture or an old folding chair, just about anything they could get their hands on. And over time, the Virginia chapter of the Schoolhouse Project proved a resounding success. Ashby might have been a poor community, but people were rich in spirit, and through meeting the parents of children I taught, I became familiar with almost everyone in town. Some parents genuinely wanted their children to be taught scripture. Others simply wanted someone to watch them for an hour while they fought

through their hangovers, and I came to suspect the mother of a boy named Joshua fell firmly into that second camp. She didn't seem very interested in talking to me when she came to collect him on Sunday mornings. She just appreciated me being there to watch him. And so when little Joshua didn't show up to Sunday school for two weeks running, I became a little worried. I called over to his mom's place, a little trailer on the edge of town, and was relieved to hear that Joshua had just been under the weather. But when I next saw him at Sunday school, he still looked very pale, and he seemed much more timid than usual. After giving the kids some paper in crayons and asking them to draw an animal that they think would have been on Noah's Ark, I took Joshua to one side

and asked him how he was. He must have been no more than seven or eight years old, and he wasn't the most confident of children. But when he told me that he'd been sick and had to stay home, he couldn't look me in the eyes at all. When I asked him what kind of illness he'd been suffering from, Joshua said that he didn't know. He just knew that it made him want to sleep a whole bunch until he suddenly felt better again. That all sounded pretty regular to me, so I didn't press him on it. But before he went back to his seat, Joshua told me about a dream that he had when he was sick. He said that the first time he fell asleep, after getting so sick he couldn't stand up anymore,

he dreamed that he was walking through a patch of underpants trees. Hearing the words underpants trees and sequence took me so off guard that at first I sort of laughed a little bit. Joshua smiled too as I confirmed what he'd said and then he told me how these big old make-do dolls come out from behind the trunks of the underpants trees and started to play with him. Now for those that don't know, a make-do doll is a sort of Appalachian tradition or at least something that became one over time. The concept was brought over by English and Scottish immigrants in the 1800s and refers to a doll that's cobbled together from old scraps of things, one you make-do with. They come in all shapes and sizes,

but a lot of make-do dolls are simply cloth sacks that have been stuffed and had faces stitched on them. And so when Joshua said a bunch of make-do dolls came out of the trees, I pictured a bunch of silly-looking sackmen with scraps of hair and silly hats with big old smiles stitched onto their fronts. Joshua said if he had dreams like that every time he got sick, then getting sick wouldn't be so bad. The only thing was, after he had it, he felt worse than ever,

and he slept for the longest time before he finally started to feel better again. It's hard to even say this now, but at the time I just sort of laughed. I told Josh that it was the silliest dream I'd ever heard of, and he must have had one heck of an imagination to dream something like that up. He smiled again, and then, before he returned to his seat, he said something which made my heart sink. He said the next time he got so sick he fell down, he hoped that he wouldn't have to sleep out in the woods again. Now, looking back, I'm not sure how I got through the remainder of that lesson, but somehow I sort of powered through it. And usually it was Josh that struggled to look at me in the eye, but when his mom came to get him, it was me that had trouble looking at her.

What Josh told me stayed on my mind for the rest of that Sunday, and then the next morning, I used the phone at the boarding house to call the county sheriff's office. A few hours later, a young deputy that I'll just call Isaac, arrived at the boarding house, and when I laid out everything Joshua had told me, deputy Isaac said that he'd make sure little Joshua was being taken care of, but he also warned me that, in Appalachia, taken care of was a relative term. Folks had to work so hard and so long just to keep food on the table that even the good ones didn't have the time to watch their kids 24-7.

Then if the department went around filing neglect cases on everyone who let their kids run off into the haulers, half the county would be up on charges. Isaac could head over to Josh's place, talk to his parents, even give them a warning, but they weren't going to transform overnight, at least not while their grocery run looked like it came from a distillery. and I knew I couldn't help people who didn't want to change.

But I also knew that having the law breathing down their necks might prompt Josh's mom to change their ways, so I was appreciative nonetheless. Isaac called me back a few days later, saying the situation likely wasn't as bad as I thought. Joshua had collapsed in the woods all right, but his mom went and found him after sundown following a frantic search, at which point she took him home and nursed him back to health.

And as you can imagine, this was music to my ears. I didn't want to cause his parents any trouble. I just wanted to make sure little Josh was okay. And then since there were no more repeat absences and no more strange dreams, I believed that that was the end of my concerns. Another six weeks went by without a vent and the only sadness I felt was knowing that one day I'd have to pack up and return to Maine. Some might call the place very boring, but to me, the town had such a peace,

simplicity about it. Very little happened in Nashby, and so when something did happen, it was the talk of the town. I remember calling into the grocery store one day, saying hi to Chet behind the counter, and then immediately being hit with, hey, pastor, did you hear about the fire over in God beholler? It turned out that, just as Chet said, there had been a fire in a place called God be Holler, which, coincidentally, was host to an old abandoned plague town that folks believed was haunted. Still a relative newcomer, I'd never heard of the place when he first mentioned it. But Chet soon filled me in on his history and how if it wasn't for the town of Godby's suffering and outbreak of plague just after the Civil War, Ashby might not exist at all.

He said scores of poor folks had their homes nailed shut out there, and while an effort was made later to burn the place down, some of the quarantined homes still stood. The hauler was way overgrown, meaning you had to be a fool to head in there if you didn't want snake bit. But Chet also told me that even if it wasn't, folks would still avoid God be holler like the plague, on account of it being haunted. Chet said that he'd already heard rumors that the fire was of spectral origins, that the restless ghosts of the plague victims were trying to finish the job of purifying the place.

but in both Chet's and my own humble opinions, the cause was more likely to be a cigarette butt, freshly flicked from some teenager's fingers. The fire had raged all night, then been extinguished by fire crews shortly after dawn, and generally speaking, the townsfolk treated the fire as an isolated anomaly, but in truth it was the first in a chain of events that by then could never be stopped. Around six weeks prior to my return to Maine, three of Ashby's residents disappeared overnight. One of the men owned a small trucking business, so we'll just call him the trucker, and another was a supervisor at one of the county's few functioning sawmills, so we'll just call him the logger.

And both were respectable members of Ashby's community, and, from what I can gather, had no prior dealings with the law. But the same could not be said for the third man. and for reasons that'll become obvious, I'll simply refer to this man as the brother. But for now, all you need to know is that the brother was a deadbeat alcoholic who lived in a poorly kept trailer in the same park as little Joshua and his mom. Unlike the other two missing men, the brother was most certainly known to the police, and in addition to his long list of priors, he was a constant thorn in the side of Ashby's citizens.

He'd drink, he'd steal, he'd steal, he'd. He'd start fights, and in what I considered a delicious twist of irony, was the brother of none other than Deputy Isaac. Learning this sparked a deep sympathy in me. Isaac's brother, ever the black sheep of the family, had finally fallen victim to his own poor choices, and had no doubt ended up in some serious trouble. It certainly didn't seem to be some innocent and spontaneous vacation as the three men barely knew each other. Neither had they left any kind of notes, so given the brother's history, it was assumed their disappearances were of a criminal nature.

Some feared the brother had murdered the two men following some kind of altercation and had left after hiding their body somewhere. Others suggested a mutually beneficial plot had gone bad, for example, maybe a drug deal had gone wrong. Needless to say, the men did not return, and as time went by, Ashby's residence grew more and more despondent. They launched public appeals, made missing posters, and walked the woods surrounding the town while calling out the missing men's names. Then as the posters and the search parties started to dwindle, so did their hope, and that's when the vigil started. Folks would walk

the streets looking somber and holding candles, all silently praying for the missing men's return. I joined every single one, although it filled me with anguish, especially to see Deputy Isaac among the crowd, the terrible look of grief in his eyes. At the time, I believed his experience as a police officer was robbing him of hope, how he must have seen too many bodies at too many crime scenes to believe the men had taken an impromptu fishing trip or were laying low after a deal went wrong. I approached him and asked if he wanted to talk, but he declined my invitation. Now, maybe a week or so after the final vigil, a hope tree was erected inside one of Ashby's

churches. Now it was little more than a sheet of cardboard, cut out in the shape of a tree which had pictures of the three missing men attached to it. But joining them were flowers, candles around the bottom, and notes that folks had written expressing hope for their return. It was shaped like a pine tree, simple but beautiful, much like the metaphor the church's preacher used when he said their hope, like God's love, was evergreen. But then one night, somebody slipped into the church under the cover of darkness and trashed that beautiful hope tree in a very violent manner. And the town was shocked to its very core. Ashby was a place where things like that just didn't happen.

People respected their neighbors just fine, but that wasn't anything compared to their respect for the sanctity of the church. So to have someone doing something so violent, to something that meant so much to folks, people were outraged. They demanded the county sheriff tracked down the person that did it, and potential witnesses were urged to come forward. People were tense, very tense, and it broke my heart to see those usually peaceful, loving people suddenly turn on each other like they did.

Folks who weren't on the best of terms with the missing suffered thinly veiled accusations, and one town meeting descended into a yelling contest before it was concluded. Now, I suppose it was the thought of how close they were to catching the culprit that got people so excited, because in the commission of the crime, the perpetrator had left something behind. It was a mask, a full head cover made of sackcloth and stitched onto the outside and was a smiley face. Everyone in Ashby knew it was a case of find whoever owned the mask and you had your perp. But the sheriff never did locate its owner. But it wasn't the mask owner who left it at the scene. It was someone else. I just didn't find out who until the night before

I drove back to Maine when the boarding house I was staying at received a call, which was a call, which was intended for me. It was Deputy Isaac calling, but he didn't sound his usual self as he asked if I was free to talk. When I told him he was welcome to stop by at the boarding house, he told me it was a conversation best conducted in private, and this is why we arranged a meet in darkness a few miles down the road, not far from the entrance to the burned-out Godby-Holler. I rather naively believed that I was in for yet another emotional goodbye. A great many of Ashby's residents had been saddened by my imminent departure, and many a tear had been shed, and so I believe the macho man, Deputy Isaac, didn't want his tears visible to the public, and in a sense I was correct.

They were tears, and there was a goodbye, but Deputy Isaac also had a story from me, one that so shook me so deeply that I still think about it, sometimes daily, even after all these years. and it was after dark when I drove over to the proposed meeting spot, and then after parking my car I got out and waited patiently for Isaac's arrival. He walked out of the darkness not long after, alone, and with a bottle of liquor in his hand. I could tell that he was sauced just from the way he was walking, and it was then that I got the impression that it wasn't going to be the emotional goodbye that I believed it to be. In fact, by the looks of him, I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a little scared,

of Deputy Isaac that night right then. After exchanging a few awkward pleasantries, I asked Isaac what he wanted to talk to me about. He didn't reply right away, and instead he took a long drink from the bottle of his hand, while he appeared to gather his thoughts. And when Isaac asked if he could make a confession to me as a pastor, I told him things didn't exactly work like that in the Presbyterian church. If he wanted to make a confession, he could do so directly to God, because while God's sees and knows all, he certainly appreciates a little personal honesty from his children.

Isaac said something about how a one-on-one with God wouldn't cut it, not at that current moment anyway. And instead he wanted to jawbone with someone man to man, not man to God. And I understood, so I asked what he wanted to confess. But before he spoke, Isaac said the only reason that he was talking to me was that I was leaving from Maine in the morning. He asked if I was ever going to come back someday, and when I replied, yes, hopefully, he told me to push that idea right out of my mind. He was about to tell me something that no one could ever know, not anyone who lived around Ashby anyway. And so once he told me, I was to stay away and for good, too, and if I didn't promise as such, then he wouldn't say another word. And I figured that since

Isaac obviously wanted so badly to share what was on his mind, the dutiful thing to do was honor his wishes and swear myself to at least partial silence. And once he secured my promise, Isaac told me that a few days before the fire and God be holler, he bumped into an old co-worker while in the next county over. This old co-worker of Isaac's now worked for the Russell County sheriffs, and when Isaac asked him how things were going, his old co-worker shared details of a recent investigation with him. The week prior, Isaac's old co-worker arrested a teenage prostit.

for solicitation. And then while in the back of his car, the girl started talking about a recent assault that she'd been subjected to. Now at first, the old partner thought that she was just making it up to buy herself some sympathy, along with some time out of her cell with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. But when she got going, the old partner realized that her story was for real. The girl said a John picked her up for a date and then drove her someplace before parking his truck and offering her a beer. The girl said she took it, and then they drank together as they talked terms, so to speak. And that was pretty much the last thing she remembered until she woke up in the woods, all black and blue and feeling sore as hell. She wasn't sure what she'd been drugged with.

She just knew that it must have been some pretty potent stuff, because all she remembered was being taken to a haunted house by a masked man, and how when they were dragging her out again, the leaves on the trees turned into underpants right before her eyes. Isaac's old co-worker wanted to know what kind of drug might cause hallucinations, unconsciousness, and memory loss. And Isaac replied that there was a bunch of stuff that induced such effects, one of which was called Rufis, or Rohypnal, these days. But as he talked, his mind had long since started to wander.

On his drive back toward Ashby, Isaac couldn't take his mind off what his old coworker had said, about the leaves turning into underpants. He'd heard that same thing somewhere before, and recently, too, and then finally it clicked. He remembered how little Joshua had mentioned underpants trees to me at Sunday school, and it was a minor detail I'd mentioned in passing, but, as I'm sure you'll agree, the image stuck. Isaac considered how unlikely it was that two people, who'd apparently no connection whatsoever, had dreamed up the exact same imagery just months apart. He then thought about the girl being taken to a haunted house.

There was only one place near Ashby he knew to be haunted, quote unquote. And that place was God Beholler, home of the old half-scorched plague town that nobody ever dared visit. Now with all those thoughts running around his mind, Deputy Isaac decided to stop by God Beholler on his way back to Ashby. It had been untouched for more than 100 years by that point, meaning anything short of a tank would have trouble driving through without getting stuck. And so Isaac hopped out of his truck and then went wandering into the haunted Godby holler after dark, armed with nothing but a flashlight and a pistol. He walked and walked, feeling his leg getting cut to ribbons by thorny aloes and jimson weed pods,

and while he found the half-burned plague town of Godby with no problem, he didn't find any underpants trees. Isaac carried on walking, looping back around to cover the whole hauler. Then on his way back, tucked into a shady corner, he found a clearing ring by unusually colored dogwood trees. Because it wasn't just white dogwood flowers decorating those trees, and when Isaac shone his flashlight into them, he saw dozens of pairs of differently colored underwear, all hanging from branches. Deputy Isaac said that he put it all together on the spot. If the assault of that teenage girl was for real,

and she hadn't simply hallucinated the underpants tree or the men in the sackcloth masks who look like make-dew dolls, then neither had little Joshua. Now what made it all worse was that all those pairs of underpants dangling from the branches look like trophies. And if that was the case, then the number of victims had to be in the high double figures. How long had these monsters been active in taking their victims to God beholler?

Who were they? And how it had taken until then for it all to come to light? These were all things Deputy Isaac pondered to himself as he walked back to his truck to grab the spare can of gasoline that he kept in the back of his truck. And he knew it wasn't a good idea to burn evidence like that, and that by doing so, he was potentially jeopardizing the prosecution's case should it get to a court of law. but Isaac didn't care. He wanted the men behind those sack cloth masks

to know their crimes had been uncovered because once the cat was out of the bag, all he had to do was sit back and watch whose dog started barking. Isaac soaked those dogwood trees in gasoline, set them on fire, and watched them burn for a while before heading back into Ashby. And then the next morning,

the fire was the talk of the town. Isaac played his part as the oblivious deputy, but took the opportunity to gauge folks' reactions when he asked them, did you hear about the fire up in God be holler? Everyone he asked replied with innocent surprise, everyone except his deadbeat brother who mysteriously had a bust to catch not long after hearing the news. Deputy Isaac found that incredibly coincidental, so he drove over to his brother's trailer to take a look around, and it was there, hidden away. in the back of a messy closet, that Isaac found a bag containing a sackcloth mask with a

smiley face stitched onto the front. Isaac's brother returned home later that night to a dark and seemingly empty trailer, but waiting for him in that closet which contained the sackcloth mask was his sheriff's deputy brother. Isaac said he had to torture him to get the full story because not the law and not even gun to his head scared him enough to reveal the truth. Isaac had to stuff his brother's mouth with a wet rag while he beat him. And then after he broke the first finger, his brother started to talk. He, the logger, and the trucker, had been picking out victims for almost a decade by that point. They didn't do it often, just whenever the brother needed money so bad that he was willing to lure a child into the woods

to drink a special bottle of sodie pop that he'd laced with downers. Only the brother got so used to dosing kids that he messed up supremely, when it came to drugging that teenage prostitute. And that was his one big mistake. And by pure happenstance, it made its way back to him in a way that he could never have predicted. Having learned that his brother, his own flesh and blood, was practically the lynchpin in a local predator ring.

Isaac had some serious thinking to do. He ended up untying his brother from the chair that he'd bound him to, and then after popping the caps off a couple of beers, Isaac said he'd fix everything. All his brother needed to do was call up his two buddies and arrange a meeting so Isaac could figure out which creases needed to be smoothed out. He said his brother was so grateful that he cried, and in the service of covering up his crimes, was only too willing to set up that meeting. But once he did, and he relayed the time and location, Isaac grabbed his brother by the throat and strangled him to death right there in his trailer. Later that night, he drove out to the meeting place and waited for the trucker and logger,

and then when they'd showed up, all that waited for them was judgment. Deputy Isaac said that he threw the two men's bodies in the trunk along with his brothers, and then he drove to an old abandoned mine that he knew of a few counties over and tossed their bodies down a very derelict shaft. Isaac said at first he had no doubt that he'd done the right thing. He said the legal system in this country is kind of like a sieve, and since some crimes slipped through the cracks, he couldn't bear to sit back and let that happen after a full-blown confession from one of the perps. He didn't regret killing the logger or the trucker, but the memory of that look in his brother's eyes, the one he got when he realized his own brother was going to end him, it haunted Deputy Isaac. He remembered the story of Cain and Abel, and albeit in very different circumstances,

began asking himself the same thing Cain did, that question being, am I my brother's keeper? He began wondering if he should have helped his brother, not by covering up his crimes, but by putting him in handcuffs and protecting him from himself. And that's when Deputy Isaac asked me, in my most humble opinion,

if I believed a man who'd murdered his own brother would be allowed to enter heaven. I told him he'd have to make a very good case before the Lord because the oldest of the oldest laws still read, thou shalt not kill. But I also said that if what he told me was the God's honest truth, then certain provisions might be made for a man who'd killed to protect the innocent from,

and I say this with no hyperbole whatsoever, the power of Satan. Isaac told me that the only reason he was sharing all this with me, and me alone, was that the people of Ashby were simply not able to handle the truth. And aside from his brother, The missing men had both been pillars of their community, and if the truth was known, it would tear the fabric of that community apart.

The same effect would be achieved if the whole thing went to trial, and the truth came out that way. And so instead, Deputy Isaac decided to dispense justice both personally and privately. The only real question that remained was whether or not he could live with a memory of killing his own flesh and blood. I still think a deputy Isaac and his brother, even all this time later, because there's a line from the book of Chronicles I wish I'd shared with him that night that we met near God beholler. If my people, who were called by my name, humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. But there's also a virk from Ezekiel that I wish I'd shared with him too, one which reads, So I will tear down the wall which you plastered over with whitewash and bring it down to the ground so that its foundations is laid bare. And when it falls, you will be consumed in its midst, and you will know that I am the Lord.

It's a verse all about the consequences of concealing evil deeds, and how when men lay them bare and allow the wicked to be consumed by their own misdeeds, they become the instruments of God. because in this life, for the next, there will be consequences for those who inflict wickedness, especially upon the innocent. And I believe that enough to bet my mortal soul on it. So peace be upon you, Deputy Isaac. You know who you are, and you're still in my prayers. During the summer I always switch up my wardrobe to include lighter and more breathable pieces, something that feels easygoing, yet still looks put together.

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And for the first seven years of my life, it was a privilege. to live in such a peaceful, picturesque place. And then, the day after my seventh birthday, a lady I'd never seen before in my life tried to murder me. So this was in the summer of 1957. All the boats were out on the lake, and me and my friends were playing out in my family's front yard. None of the smaller lakeside houses had backyards

and instead had docks and jetties which stretched out into the water. But then whoever built them figured that they, to have front lawns too, so front lawns they got. It had been a real scorcher of a day, so me and my buddies have been alternating between jumping off the dock at the back of our house and running around the front yard in our swimming trunks. The lake path was just feet away, but folks always drove down it nice and slow, and being in such a small town, the people driving past would sometimes wave to us because everyone knew everyone in those days. Now anyways, we're playing in the front yard, running around playing tag or whatever it was, when we spot a car coming down the road towards us.

Now, naturally, we're curious as to who it is, so we start lollygagging not far from the edge of the road to watch the approach. Sometimes we'd recognize people by their cars and sometimes not, especially in the summertime when all the tourists were in town. And the same was true for this car, a pale green Dodge region that didn't ring any bells for us. We watched it sort of trundling towards us, expecting it to keep the same low speeds, but as it got closer, it started to speed up. As the regent's engine started to roar, I started to back up, and I guess it was out a pure instinct, in which case it was pure instinct which saved my life. Because backing up gave me, all three of us, really, the head start that we needed to get the heck out of the way when that

regent veered onto the grass and came barreling towards us. We screamed as we ran for cover, hearing that coming up behind us at what must have been 60 to 70 miles per hour. If the driver hadn't been blind drunk, she might have had the motor skills to turn that wheel enough to hit us. But she was. So after careening right past us, she smashed into the tree in the front yard of old Mr. Finster next door. And we assumed it had to have been an accident, and a terrible one at that, because the poor lady really did smash into that tree. She obliterated that poor regent and gave herself some of her own. pretty serious injuries by the looks of things too, because when she got out of that car,

she had blood all down her face and blouse. She looked young, younger than my mom, but older than my eldest sister, and I remember she was pretty, too. And I also remember one of my buddies shouting, lady, lady, are you okay? You know, the kind of dumb rhetorical question people ask when someone is clearly not okay. And I guess I didn't know what to expect from her at the time. I didn't know whether she'd give us a thumbs up and an A-OK or drop down dead right there. But what I definitely wasn't expecting was this bloodied, battered young woman to lock eyes with me

and for her eyes to have this look of pure hatred in them. That was probably the most scared I've ever been in my life at that point, like something from a nightmare. But it was nothing to what came next. We only locked eyes for a matter of a second, but it felt like much longer, and that elastic moment only ended once the lady started stumbling around to the region's passenger seat. Suddenly, I heard a lady behind me, y'all, oh my God! I turned to look, and saw one of our neighbors in the big houses on the other side of the road had come out of her house and was looking on in horror at what I believed was the stumbling

lady in her wrecked car. That's not what scared her so much she yelled out, because when I turned back to the wrecked car, I saw the injured lady dragging a gun from the passenger seat. I didn't know it at the time because I thought all guns were rifles and couldn't conceive of the fact that that lady only had two shells in what was a long double-barrel shotgun. So when she pulled it from her car and shakily aimed it towards me, I just thought, I'm dead. It didn't matter that her first shot missed because as me and my buddies ran screaming towards our house, I thought that lady'd keep on shooting till she got us.

But of course, she only had one more shot, so she lowered the shotgun and came scrambling across the grass towards us. Nobody was home at my place. My mom and older sister had gone for a walk, and they'd told us, but we hadn't heard. And that's something I'm very thankful for in retrospect, because I hate it. hate to think what would have happened if my mom or sister opened the door and gave the crazy lady a shot on all four or five of us. And since we saw her getting closer to us, we ran from the front door and towards the dock to get away from her. It was pretty much the only option available to us at the time, so we ran and we kept on running, expecting another shot to come at any moment. But it didn't.

Not until we dived into the water, by which point it was this semi-muted blank. coming from behind us above the water surface. Now, I was sure that I'd been shot. I just couldn't feel it for some reason. But as I stopped for a moment near the sandy bottom and checked my legs and back, there weren't any wounds. And although I was still too scared to surface for quite some time, it was only when I ran out of breath that I returned to the surface, and after taking a huge lungful of air,

I saw one of our neighbors successfully wrestling the shotgun from that lady's hands. He tossed it in the water, and then went about taking the lady down to the wooden deck before he asked if anyone was hurt. Thankfully, we were all fine, but the lady was screaming up an absolute storm. She was already hurt from the crash, and whatever happened to her was made a lot worse by our neighbor throwing her down onto the wooden decking. He then started yelling at us to go get someone, but we weren't even out of the water before someone else showed up carrying a unaware that the lady had already been disarmed and taken down. Our neighbor yelled at him to go call the cops, and then the man with a rifle went back the way

that he came. Our neighbor, still pinning the lady to the deck, told us to get the hell back to the house and out of sight, and we were all so frightened of the hysterical way that she was behaving that we did just that. We walked around the house, so all we could hear were her screams, and then watched and waited until the police showed up to drag the lady away. When my mom got back, she was hysterical too. I mean, you can see it from her perspective.

No sooner does she head out for a walk with my sister, but some crazy lady shows up to try and run me and my friends down and shoot us. She felt terrible for not having been there to protect us when really we were all damn lucky that she and my sisters weren't there because that crazy lady hadn't chosen to go after me and my friends. friends just for the heck of it. In fact, she wasn't targeting my friends at all. She was after me, and incidentally my older sisters, and it's a miracle no one but her was hurt. When the cops got her back to the station and she slept off her booze, the lady sang like a canary and answered

every question the cops had. She told them how she and my dad had been having an affair, and that he'd promised to run away with her and leave his wife and kids, us behind. But then one day, he changed his mind and decided he was better off where he was. This infuriated the lady that he was cheating with, so much so that she threatened to murder his family. But my dad's response, psh, no, you will not. She told him that she was deadly serious, no pun intended here, but he still didn't think that she'd actually go through with it. But this made her even angrier. And less than a week later, she got drunk on her father's alcohol, took a shotgun, and then rode his car across town to do the deed before she lost the stomach for it. And that's what I mean

when I talk about how lucky we were. Because if she wasn't drunk and she hadn't crushed her car and smashed her head against the steering wheel, I might very well not be around to write this. At first, the police officers only told my father the reasons why that lady tried to kill. and he didn't see fit to tell my mother the full story. But as you can imagine, it was only a matter of time before she found out what really happened that day. And it caused the largest fight my parents have ever had. And coincidentally, it was the final one they ever had, too. As a short while later, Mom took us south of the border to the United States,

and the four of us, me, Mom, and my two sisters lived in New York City for a number of years before Mom remarried and went to live on Long Island with our stepdad. We only got the full story of what happened next some years later, how the crazy lady went to jail, how my dad ended up drinking himself to death when it finally hit him that he'd almost got us all killed. I know it wasn't exactly his fault that the lady went nuts and was out for blood,

but I imagine the whole thing would have been avoided if he'd just, I don't know, kept it in his pants. And sometimes I think about my dad and what it must have been like in the final days of his life. I wonder if the memories of his greed and pride were torturing him, or if he'd found just the right cocktail of booze to numb the pain enough to slip away without a single cogent moment of regret. I try not to feel too bad for him, though, because I know there's an alternate timeline, where he's drinking himself to death and feeling, oh, so sorry for himself, next to four freshly filled graves, mine, my moms, and my two sisters. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati, and thankfully, I had a boring and rather uneventful childhood. Both my mom and dad were from Cincere, and three out of our four grandparents

were, too. But my grandpa on my mom's side was from North Carolina, and not from Charlotte or Greensboro either. He was from a little town called Jefferson, way out in what you might call Appalachia. I've never personally visited the place, and I'm sure it has its charms, but my grandpa, Joe, always had very mixed feelings about the place, and I guess a lot of that was down to him serving as a deputy sheriff in the Ash County Sheriff's office for just over 10 years. He said that the job showed him the very best of humanity, but also the very worst of it, too.

And in a place like Appalachia, the highs are high, but the lows might just be lower than any other place in the country. He said it's like there's something in the water out there, something which puts a little piece of darkness, and even the most good-hearted of people. Meaning while he had plenty of heartwarming stories, he had plenty of frighteners too. And this is one of those frighteners.

Grandpa served as a deputy for most of the 80s and was one of the deputies on site when a plane full of cocaine was forced to land at the county airport due to bad weather. It was a national news story, and whenever some big-shot newsreader talked about the cops who found the coke, Grandpa used to think, heck, they're talking about me. But this isn't about that.

Like I said, this one is a real frightener, and the story starts with a sweet old man by the name of Mr. Levi. Mr. Levi was a sweet old widower who lived in a beautiful home just off of Candlelight Drive. He used to run the old town barber's shop till he sold it to the man who'd owned it for the next 40 years or so. And then after his retirement, he took care of his wife till she sadly passed away. Now, after she passed, Mr. Levi spent a lot of time eating pie at the Jeff Cafe, or paying visits to the barbershop to make sure that the new owner was taking care of the place. But the thing he was best known for around town was raising money for the Ash County Humane Society.

Grandpa said Mr. Levi wasn't even really an animal lover. It was his late wife that adored cats and dogs and the like. But in her memory, he worked tirelessly to ensure the Humane Society's furry friend, wanted for nothing. And as you can imagine, Mr. Levi was a popular man around town and a man of routine. Without fail, he'd stop by the cafe every morning, and he'd show up at the barbershop every afternoon except Sundays. So one day, when Mr. Levi didn't show up to the cafe, the owner and the proprietor got a little

worried. She decided to call the sheriff, and it was my grandpa that was given the task of going to check out, sweet old Mr. Levi. He said he drove over from the sheriff's office and knocked on Mr. Levi's door. He didn't get any answer, and then when he walked around to the back to see if the door there was unlocked, he found it wide open. Grandpa said that when he first walked into the house, he could hear the sound of a kid's show playing on the TV. He said for some reason the sound put him at ease as if nothing bad could ever happen while a kid's cartoon is playing on the television. And he called out from Mr. Levi, but heard nothing but the same.

sounds of that cartoon. And then he turned into the TV room and he found Mr. Levi's body, propped up in a blood-soaked easy chair and missing its head. But then, according to my grandpa, it was hard to tell if it was the beheading that had killed him, because the cause of death could have just as easily been the massive blunt force trauma to his feet and shins, or the 78 stab wounds later discovered around his chest, neck and stomach. Grandpa said it was a guy, goddamn bloodbath, the worst murder scene he'd ever had the misfortune of witnessing. And right away, the question on everyone's lips was, Why the hell would someone do that to sweet old Mr. Levi?

Right away, Grandpa and his fellow deputies hit a brick wall. There were no witnesses, no fingerprints, and nothing seemed to have been taken from Mr. Levi's home. Whoever killed him slipped in and out quickly and quietly, and it inflicted a hideous amount of damage before they disappeared into the night again. The sheriff and his boys were stumped. They approached the case from every possible angle and chased on every possible lead, but when all was said and done, they were no close to defining Mr. Levi's killer than they were the day that they found his body. As the department got more and more desperate, the sheriff asked my grandpa to do a little research into Mr. Levi's family, to see if any relatives were around for us to talk to. And that's how he

discovered that Mr. Levi was a distant descendant of a man named Emmanuel Willis Wilson. Now, a lot of you are going to be asking who the heck is that guy, and I asked myself that same question when my grandpa first said his name. Well, Emmanuel Willis Wilson was the seventh governor of West Virginia, and he's famous for two things. Number one, he had an extended term as governor due to an electoral dispute, and number two, he refused to extradite a man. He refused to extradite a named William Hatfield to Kentucky for crimes against its citizens. William Hatfield, better known to some as Devil Ants Hatfield, was the patriarch of the Hatfield family, who from 1863 to 1891 fought a blood feud with the McCoy family

who were headed up by Old Randall McCoy. It all started because most of the people around there fought for the Confederacy, but a McCoy named Asa Harmon McCoy fought for the Union, While old Asa gets bushwhacked, old Randall suspects the Hatfields, and then the rest is history. And the feud got so intense that it gained national attention because at one point it looked more like a straight-up war than just a family rivalry. People threw their lot in with either side, which made them targets for raids by night riders on the other side. And it was like the civil war all over again. And then when authorities in Kentucky tried to bring the Hatfields to justice, Governor Immy. Emmanuel Wilson stepped in and made sure that that didn't happen.

Devil Ants Hatfield was so appreciative of Governor Wilson's efforts that he named one of the sons after him, and to this day, Wilson is still considered the man who could have put an end to all of that and chose not to. It's possible that if he cooperated with Kentucky's extradition request, he too would have been killed. But by refusing to bring the Hatfields to justice, Governor Wilson wrote himself into the story whether he intended to or not. And this meant that it wasn't completely out of the question that Mr. Levi's murder had been connected to those committed by the Hatfields and the McCoys. But Grandpa said the idea was so ridiculous at first that it actually made the deputies laugh when someone made a joking offhand suggestion of it. But then, as avenues of investigation dwindled and they found themselves increasingly clutching its draws,

someone in the department decided to do a little research on the family lineages of Jefferson's residence. And when he did, he found something unbelievable. One of the men of the McCoy side of the feud was a man by the name of Bad Frank Phillips. Now, Bad Frank ended up dying a couple of years after the feud officially ended, after getting himself shot in the leg during a drunken argument. But word has it, his death left a whole bunch of daughters without a father. Since their mother couldn't look after them, she went about marrying these girls off to just about anyone capable of taking care of them.

And they all take their husband's names, have daughters of their own, and those daughters had their own daughters and so on and so forth, until Philip's blood had been diluted to the point that it's barely even detectable. Unless, of course, a person takes the time to map the family lineage of Jefferson's residence, at which point you discover that an unusually large number of bad Frank's descendants, ended up settling in none other than Ash County, North Carolina. Out of Jefferson's 1,500 residents, my grandpa's fellow deputy, figured that at least 11 of them were blood relatives of bad Frank Phillips,

and those were just the folks that he could confirm were his descendants. That meant that overnight, their list of suspects went from zero to almost a dozen different people. But that was if, and only if, the department was going to entertain the idea that Mr. Levi's murder was in fact a continuation of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, almost a hundred years after its official conclusion. But then, seeing as they had nothing else to go on, the sheriff decided to work down the list of names to see which had alibis for the night of Levi's murder,

and which didn't. And then out of the 11 individual names on that hypothetical list of suspects, the sheriff discovered only one of them had a solid alibi. The sheriff invited a couple of them down to the department. Nothing serious, just to ask a few innocent but probing questions. And then by the time four or five of them had been interviewed, the department was split in two. One side thought the other was making a mountain out of a molehill,

and they were seeing patterns that weren't really there. But the other half, Grandpa included, thought just about any of those 11 people could have been responsible for the murder. Grandpa thinks the most likely scenario involves someone doing a little ancestry research and then finding out about the feud and their connection to it. The same person must have researched the ancestries of everyone else in town, found out who Mr. Levi was related to, and for some godforsaken reason, decided to add to the feud's body count.

And the best way of figuring out who that was would be to find out who'd been thumbing through the records because they're all available to the public down at the county courthouse. But they don't keep lists of the people who do that. All you got to do is ask permission, and at the time, the courthouse didn't have security cameras, just a lone deputy who kept the peace during hearings. I remember my grandpa telling me all of this,

and then when he got to that last part about not being able to prove who did it, he stopped and shook his head. I understood why without him needing to tell me, as he was frustrated and I was too, because he told me a story that didn't have an ending. All he left Jefferson with was his theories and suspicions, and a desire to get the heck out of a town where people still murdered each other over age-old scores. This episode is sponsored by Omaha Steaks. Before Omaha Steaks, buying protein usually meant grabbing whatever looked decent at the store and hoping for the best. It was convenient, but the quality and flavor were often just average. Omaha steaks changed that

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Pichina was home to around 500 people, families who had been there for generations. We had a difficult time living from the land, while the rest of Russia seemed to rush past ahead of us in politics and technology. Winters were terrible, with temperatures dropping as low as negative 40 degrees Celsius or even lower. Snow would pile up so high that we would have to make tunnel paths between the houses. We would burn wood or coal in our stoves to stay warm, and cars had to be left running all night sometimes just to keep the engines from freezing.

Summer was better, much better, but there was still things which made it hard. like the middle of summer where there was daylight for almost a week, or the swarms of mosquitoes that plague us at night and leave us with bites. But summer also gave us the chance to gather berries or fish in the rivers, because even during the easier times of the year, our lives revolved around survival. As the oldest daughter and a family of five children, I helped mama with household chores from a very young age. I would help milk the cow, feed the chickens, and I would help chop firewood, too.

And this was a very important part of our lives because the only heating that we had came from a traditional Russian stove made of bricks. Once the sun had risen, we would bake bread and make kasha, a kind of buckwheat porridge for our breakfast. Our school was a one-room building a few kilometers away, and we were taught math, Russian literature, and history. But that history was simply a mix of Soviet propaganda and horror stories from the early 90s when everything fell apart after parents. Estroika. And after school, I'd help tend the vegetable garden and summer or men closed by candlelight in winter. Meals were simple, potatoes, cabbage, pickled mushrooms from the forest, and whenever meat Papa could hunt or trade for. My grandmother, a tough babushka who survived Stalin's era, taught me embroidery and herbal remedies and told us how life was better when Papa Yosef was in

charge. We didn't have much, and we didn't get internet until 2011. and even then only at the community center. But since electricity was unreliable, blackouts were common, especially in remote areas, so sometimes there was no TV or radio at all. As a teenager, seeing pictures and videos online made me long for life in a big city like Nova Zibirsk or even Moscow, where a girl could study or find a job. But for Siberian children like me, opportunities in those places were few and far between. Little did I know, but one day I would get my wish.

But we have a saying in Russia, one that I hear is very similar to an English phrase. Be wary of your desire. One night, in the winter of 2022, the village was awoken by the sound of a very large and very loud explosion. The boom of the explosion woke everybody up, but it sounded very distant as it was so high in the sky. But then, the shockwave hit us. making everything rattle and shake, and you could hear the sound of children crying in their beds all over the village. I called out to my papa to ask him what was going on. He said he didn't know as he put on his boots and clothes and then ran out into the snow to look up into the sky.

We all did, some not even bothering to put on shoes or overcoats. And when he looked up into the sky, we saw it. There was a huge fireball, so large I would never have imagined it possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. and it lit up the sky like hell itself had replaced the clouds. We all stood there watching as the flames burned out, churning out smoke so thick it blocked out the moon. And then the first pieces of debris started falling to Earth. It was just small pieces at first that pitter pattered off the roof of our homes like raindrops.

But then the larger pieces started to hit the ground too, and those did not sound so pleasant, especially not the pieces that screamed as they burned. We had to take cover in our homes as pieces of whatever had exploded above us smashed into our houses. It was the most scared I had ever been in my life, and my mother and father used their own bodies to shield us as large pieces of metal began smashing into the house. I have a memory of my father, rushing to soak a blanket and water before throwing it over a piece of flaming debris that had smashed through our roof. He stopped our home from burning to the ground, but others were not so lucky. Eight people lost their lives that night and almost twice the amount of homes burned to the ground.

In the morning, we looked outside and gasped at the destruction. We were used to taking care of ourselves, so we did not expect any help from the local government, not for weeks or even months anyway. So when a large number of soldiers arrived that very same day, we were all very happy. But they were not there to help us. Not really. And the first thing that they did was tell us to stop a tent. attempting to clean up and repair our homes. They were not there to help us rebuild our homes.

They had arrived to take us away from them. They explained it was too dangerous to stay there and that if we joined the medic camp that they had arranged for us, they could feed us and treat our wounded until it was safe to return again. This we welcomed much more readily and the army were true to their word as conditions of the camp were good. Their medics treated our wounded and we were all interviewed by the same pair of officers who were very sympathetic and consoling in their questioning. We had suffered a terrible tragedy and they simply wanted to figure out what had happened. They also assured us that our home would be rebuilt and we'd be able to return as soon as it was safe to do so. But this was just one of the many lies to us and soon it became clear that

something strange was going on. Apart from a few particular incidents, we were never treated poorly by the soldiers or their officers, but they did make it clear that the additional medical examinations that we were subjected to were not voluntary. People who had cuts, bruises, or broken bones treated were being dragged back into the medical tents to have their blood drawn and their bodies examined. This happened to everybody, too, not just those that have been hurt by the falling debris, and it happened again and again and again. They were testing for something, they would not tell us what they were testing for. And after weeks of this, of living intense and eating military food, there was a small rebellion

in the camp and we demanded to be able to return to our homes. The high-ranking officers told us that that area had not been repaired and rebuilt yet, so it was not safe for us to return. But we were sick of being told this. My dad said repairs would take no more than a week and most if everybody shared the work, but Army engineers had supposedly been working on it for three weeks and with nothing to show for it. In the end, the high-ranking officers told us that they would figure something out, and we took this to mean that they were returning us to Pichina.

Instead, they announced that we were being moved to a suburb outside Moscow called Mutishi. After a journey of many days by train and road, we arrived at our new home, a towering apartment block surrounded by many others just. like it. But once closer, we saw ours was much different. There was a fence and guards. Medical facilities had been set up on the bottom floor, although we were supposedly free to come and go. A person needed a series of military approvals to do so, which made things impossible for people who wanted to leave. And the same routine played out for us. More military food, more medical tests, and more interviews with different officers about what we saw in the sky that night. And I told

the same story over and over. Explosion, fireball, debris, then terror. There was nothing more I could tell them, because that was all I knew. But still, they asked me many questions like they were waiting for me to say something that would finally satisfy them. Now, for weeks, we were told that Pachinia was finally being rebuilt after the engineers had cleared away all the rubble on debris. But even when they said it was finished, they still found reasons to keep. us in that apartment block. My father applied for a leaveer's permit again and again and again, and then over and over he was told, no, you have not the right paper, or no, you did not complete this paper properly, and had to go back to start again. I remember my mother crying one night and

asking if we could ever get to leave that place, and then one day, my father came back to our apartment with a big smile on his face and told us we were leaving. I only found out later, but my father told me that he had found two guards doing something that they shouldn't have. He didn't say exactly what that thing was, only that they would be in a lot of trouble if their officers found out what they were doing. The two soldiers asked my father what he wanted in order to keep quiet. Apparently, we were too special to simply murder to keep us quiet, and he told them he wanted to leave with his family. My mother was terrified. She believed it was a trick in that the soldiers would murder him. But it was no trick.

Their word was true, and the next time my father applied for a leaving permit, it was granted. We were only the third family to be permitted to leave the apartment block, and when my father met with the father of another family, he was warned that things were not over for us. The man was working as a garbage collector to earn enough money to travel back to Pachina, as the government would not give him the money themselves for him to travel. Another sign that they did not want us to return. But that was not all. He realized that whenever he left the apartment that they were renting for just a few rubles a week, he was being followed.

Sometimes by two men in a car and sometimes by one man just walking, but he was certain of it. Papa said that then he made a decision that he would leave Russia and seek asylum in another country. I can't tell you which country this is, for reasons of personal safety, but we were very happy to be granted a hearing based on claims. of medical experimentation. Papa said the person he talked to from the government here was appalled when they heard about what we had all been through, and Papa even spoke to another man from the government who asked more questions about the explosion. We've been waiting for our application to be processed for a long time now, but we are very

sure that asylum will be granted to us. Sometimes I worry it will not, and we will be forced to live in another place for another long time while we wait once more, just like in the camp and the apartment. But this is only my second biggest fear returning to Russia. My first is what will happen if Russia comes for us. More than 30 years ago, way back in 1995, I drove down to North Carolina for a camping weekend with some old friends of mine. And the place was called Standing Deer Campground and was sort of nestled into the foothills of the Great Smokies, and it was probably one of the most fun weekends that I'd had in a while. We hadn't seen each other in quite some time, so it was awesome to have a little reunion like that.

And then on Monday morning, it was actually kind of emotional having to pack up and leave when I think that I'd have happily spent the rest of my days drinking wine coolers and talking trash with the girls. I set my goodbyes, loaded up my car, and then realized that I didn't have enough gas to make it back to Indianapolis, which is where I was based at the time. Then when I asked one of the camp's admin team to direct me to a gas station, they said all I had to do was follow the Southern Road out of camp, and there was one near another campground called River Valley. I followed his instructions, and then, lo and behold, there was the gas station,

nestled into a bend in the road on top of a small hill. When I parked my car near one of the pumps, I saw it was one of those pay-first kind of deals, so I paid for my gas, walked back to my car, and then started filling my tank. But then, as I'm watching the little numbers get higher and higher, something catches my eye from way over near the trees at the edge of the station. And like I said, the gas station was sitting on top of a small hill with gentle slopes on two sides and roads leading away from the two other sides. Both sides with gentle slopes on them were covered in trees, so when I saw movement, I looked over to see nothing and no one, and I thought it was just the shadows playing tricks on me. But then seconds later, I see it again. And that time, it definitely wasn't some trick of the light.

There was a man. His head and shoulders leaning out from behind a tree, and it looked like he was just sort of watching the gas station. He was standing in the shadows, so I couldn't see him clearly. But I swear we locked eyes for a couple of seconds. And he then started walking up the slope out of the trees and into the daylight. And when he did, I saw just how. monstrous he looked up close. If I had to guess, I'd say that the guy was in his 30s,

but if you told me the guy was 50 or a 20-year-old with the hardest paper route ever, I'd have totally believed it. He was so skinny he looked like he was starving, and there were all kinds of sores all over his arms, which were entirely exposed thanks to him wearing a tank so dirty, it seemed impossible that it had been once white. As he got closer, I saw just how bloodshot his eyes were, sunken deep into dark, never-sleep sockets. And I could also see what I later found out was called his meth mouth, how his teeth were either black, brown, or missing entirely. He walked all twitchy, too, and that's the best way I can describe it, like there was so much dark energy inside of him that it was trying to burst its way out. He looked like a walking nightmare, and what was worse,

he was walking straight at me. And then just as I looked around to see if anyone else was seeing the same thing I was, the guy reached behind his back and then pulled out the crappiest, dirtiest-looking handgun I'd ever seen. I knew he was going to point it at me, because aside from the clerk inside the station, there was just no one else around. I remember throwing my hands up, palms out flat and facing him,

and then watching the store clerk just sitting there, none the wiser to what was happening. Well, one side of my brain is thinking, oh God, please just take my car and go. The other half is thinking, I need to make a whole bunch of noise so this clerk realizes what's happening. And so the first thing I do was yell out. Please don't shoot me! Nice and loud. And the guy must have seen my eyes darting over to the clerk because he turned to look at him,

just in time for the both of us to see him realize what was going on, and then run off into the back. Now, I'm thinking, and, okay, he's either going to call the cops or he's going to get a gun, which was obviously great for me, but not so good for the meth head robbing me because it put him on the clock. Now he turned back to me and just said, Keys, wallet, now, in this raspy voice.

I tossed my keys over to him and begged him for a second time not to shoot me, and the keys landed maybe a yard or two away, so he had to bend down to pick them up. But after taking his eye off of me for a second, He acted like I was about to lunch for him or something. Now, he kind of jumped back, aimed his gun at me again, and then started breathing heavily while getting very twitchy again. I told him I wasn't going to do anything,

that I didn't have a gun or anything like that. I just wanted him to take my car and go because I was scared out of my mind. Now, the relief that I felt when the guy lowered the gun was like a wave washing over me, but I barely moved a muscle. I just took a few steps back from the car so he wouldn't run over my toes driving off, but kept my upper body still as a statue

for fear of making him twitchy again. But then just as he was about to open my driver's door and climb into my car, the guy stopped, then turned his head to look at me. It was like time stood still for a second. One moment I was in the clear, the next, I was dragged back into that twitchy, scab-covered nightmare again.

Now I guess he figured that since the coughs were probably on their way, I'd be giving his description and passing on my license plate number to the cops within a matter of minutes. And then in the moment, I guess his solution to that was to shut me up for good, by killing me. He pointed the gun at me again, but that time he wasn't just pointing it at me. He was aiming it at me, two hands, looking down the sights, probably pointing it right at my head. I thought that was it, that my time was up, and despite once picturing myself, passing on in the bed surrounded by grandchildren, I was going to die in a rural gas station in Appalachia. It's so weird to think about it now, but I was so keyed up and hyper-focused because of

the adrenaline that I actually remember seeing the guy's finger start to tense and flex as he pulled the trigger. The next thing I remember was the bang, and I expected to be knocked off my feet. But instead of me flying back onto the concrete with a hole in my head or chest, I watched. as the meth head's gun exploded in his hand. I remember watching it burst into pieces and then fall out of what was left of the meth head's hand. It looks shredded, like raw steak, just strips of flesh and meat dangling there for a moment of silence after the bang. And then the meth head started screaming. And he didn't just scream, though.

He fell back on his butt, holding his shredded hand by the wrist as blood started to pull. whore from it like a goddamn fountain. He screamed and screamed, all while I was frozen to the spot, and then maybe only a second after he started yelling at me, you bitch, I'll kill you. I saw the store clerk walk out of the gas station with some kind of long gun, either a shotgun or a rifle. I couldn't tell which. And he yelled at that meth head not to move another inch because he'd already started

trying to get back on his feet, and if he did, he'd get his head blown off too. The meth head then directed all of his anger at the gun holding clerk, but he did as he ordered and didn't move. The clerk said the cops were on their way and that he'd take things from there, and then told me to get in my car and get out of there, and to never, ever come back. I figured the cops might need to take a statement from me, but the clerk said he saw everything.

And I guess that he could tell that I wasn't from around there, being right next to a popular campground and all, and I didn't know it at the time, but getting the heck on out of there and back on the road was the best thing for me. I needed to get away from that freak who tried to kill me, and I needed to get away from all that blood of his on the ground. What happened that day was one of the worst things to ever happen to me, and I didn't need it extended for a single moment longer than necessary.

I didn't recognize what wisdom that was until much later when I realized how much worse it had been if it became a whole horrible chapter in my life, instead of just this horrible one-off event that I got to walk away from right then. I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in rural Minnesota, and I guess in a lot of ways my childhood was a lot like any other kids out there on the plains. I watched a lot of TV, went to church with my family wherever we could, and me and my brother even had ourselves a Commodore 64. But then, since we grew up in what could only be described as a strict and very insular religious cult,

TV consisted of purely faith-based programming. Whenever we could meant every day and twice on Sundays, and even our Commodore games had to be scripture-based as nothing remotely secular was permitted. And the best way I can describe it, it was like living in a bubble, or maybe more like a snow globe in the winter times. Now, we were part of one group and then another,

and then one day we were on our own and with just my grandpa the shepherd the faithful which comprised of my own family and a handful of others living on a remote farm complex. Life revolved around the Bible and farm work, and we started mornings at 5.30 a.m. with communal prayers in the big old barn the men had painted black and repurposed as a chapel. And we prayed to God to protect us through the impending end times, but then if someone got sick, we dedicated a lot of prayer time to them.

And boy did we need to, because my grandpa called us to reject all forms of modern medicine in favor of purely spiritual healing. Now he called it the devil's crutch, and that a person who utilized it was wearing their lack of faith like a badge of honor, and its two such incidents which shaped my belief system growing up, one for better and one for worse. I remember the winter my little brother came down with something that I now realized was probably pneumonia. We prayed day and night while my grandpa laid hands on him trying to draw out the demons that so plagued his body. We even fasted for a whole day as penitence and flagellation were believed to be very powerful methods of what Grandpa called expiation, but which I came to

understand was punishing oneself before God. There were no doctors, no antibiotics, just anointing oil and spoken prayer around his body, and then when he pulled through, Grandpa declared it a miracle. Now, looking back, it was probably just sheer luck. that my brother survived his bout of illness, and we were indescribably happy that he had. But not every child survived the winters, and I remember attending not one, but two winter funerals before the age of 10, where the coffins laid to rest were heart-breakingly small. Now, we didn't report any births or death to the county, and I'm pretty sure Grandpa found a way for us to avoid paying taxes, too. I know we had money, but aside from things that they could use

to indoctrinate us children, we tried to avoid any kind of luxuries, especially modern ones. We did a lot of bartering with nearby farms, and my dad's generation was the last to have things like birth certificates or social security numbers. Outsiders were considered worldly, which contrary to what the word actually means, was not a good thing to us on the farm. The faithless were to be pitied and evangelized from afar, but never trusted or mingled with. Our little cloister had to be absolute, so there was no public schools, no trips into town without strict supervision,

and no friends beyond the kids from the other families who lived with us. Daily life was a mix of joy and fear. Summers meant berry picking and swimming in the creek, with bonfires where we'd sing and share testimonies of faith. But all that was to distract us from the fact that we were right in the middle of the end times and the outside world was about to crumble in Satan's grip. Winters were harsh, huddled around wood stoves or memorizing scripture by flashlight whenever the generators were on the fritz.

You think Christmas time might be an excuse to live a little, but Grandpa declared it to be co-opted by the greed of the faithless. We got together on Christmas to have dinner and pray together, but the rest was spent in the big black chapel, praying in thanks for the birth of our Lord and Savior. I find it strange when people these days talk about the 90s, in the sense that outsiders had this shared sense of culture, or what the Germans might call zeitgeist or spirit of the times. They talk about Seinfeld, VHS tapes, and MTV. But for me, it was like watching through a cracked fence. We'd catch glimpses of the first Gulf War on the TV, which was terrifying for us because Grandpa considered it as further evidence that we were living through the end times.

He said all those tanks and soldiers would soon be turned on us and by a government that didn't just reject God, but embrace Satan and all his demons. The Internet was a way to spy on us. Ruby Ridge and Waco were further proof of a government that hated us and then forget about Y2K, which was Grandpa's favorite sermon subject for about three months straight. We drilled in preparation of government raids, hiding in root cellars with weapons close at hand, to the point that when people talk about life back in the 50s, when fear of Russian A-bombs were at their highest, I think sounds awfully familiar, actually. But now, since I've told you about the event which confirmed my faith,

my brother surviving his illness, allow me to tell you about the one which destroyed it. Not long before my 15th birthday during the fall of 1997, my grandma was making dinner from my grandpa when she suddenly attacked him with a knife for what Grandpa claimed was no earthly reason whatsoever. Looking back on it, I think he said something to her, something which finally drove her over the edge and filled her with a murderous rage.

I don't know exactly what that thing was, and it's obviously pure speculation on my part, but whatever it was that happened that day, it sent my grandma into a frenzy. I saw her myself as a group of menfolk dragged her off to the chapel, her home in hospice for the next several weeks, and she was well and truly beside herself. She was kicking and fighting, screaming and hollering, and I only recognized her by the dress that she was wearing, too, because the men marching her off to the chapel had to wrap a cloth around her head to keep her from biting them. It was horrifying to watch, and all I could do was run to my mother to ask her what was going on. At the time she didn't know, and it was only later that

she came to tell me, grandma had been possessed by a demon. Now, watching my hysterical grandmother dragged away to be shackled to a bed in the old chapel was beyond horrifying to me. And so it might come as a surprise to some of you that I was actually very optimistic in the days that followed. I believed wholeheartedly that grandma would be fine because not only did she have my grandpa at her side, day and night, laying hands on her and reciting scripture, but she had everyone on the farm praying to God on her behalf. We couldn't use the old barn turned chapel anymore, and not since grandma had taken up residence there, but on Grandpa's direction, we prayed in our homes instead and begged God's forgiveness so that he might cast the demons out of Grandma. Now, I had no doubt

in my mind that it all worked. After all, it had worked when my brother was sick, but over time, Grandma didn't seem to be getting better at all, and instead, she only got worse. She slept mostly during the daytime, so school and morning prayers were mostly quiet. But at nighttime, when she woke up, we could hear her screams from her homes. They weren't loud, as the barn was quite a distance away from the residential buildings, but they were always there, lingering in the background after dark, and they'd last until Grandma either lost her voice or passed out around dawn. I didn't find this out until much later on because they didn't tell his kids everything.

But one morning, Grandpa came back from tending to Grandma all night looking pale and deflated. He normally came back tired, but content and confident of Grandma's recovery. But that morning, he seemed anything but. He told my dad, his son-in-law, that he'd come to learn of something during the night, something which terrified him. And I apologized in advance for the theology last day. but it'll help you understand why grandpa was so terrified. So, Leviathan is a real scary dude.

It's supposedly one of the demon princes of hell, which is a badass title, if ever there was one, and in the Bible he's described as having impenetrable scales, so basically invincible, and it also has the ability to breathe fire like a dragon, even though it likes to dwell in the ocean. Make that make sense, I guess. But that means, from a purely fine,

fundamentalist Christian perspective, Leviathan is the very last demon prince that you'll want to be invaded by. His impenetrable scales make it very hard to dislodge him from a host's body, and his breath of fire denotes an extremely corrosive effect on said host. But then, again, some of you might be surprised at how happy Grandpa was when he realized this. You see, he had no doubt in his mind that God would grant him the power to defeat Leviathan. After all, he was, he He was on the righteous path. But what's more, the Bible prophesizes that the torturous serpent, denoting Leviathan, will be served up to the righteous during the end of days.

Basically, Grandpa believed God was granting him the opportunity to defeat the demon prince Leviathan, serve it up to the righteous, and bring about the end of days. Obviously, in this context, end of days simply refers to the rapture, which, from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, is like the best thing ever, I guess. And so now you understand why grandpa was so terrified when he realized grandma wasn't getting better. It wasn't just that he was losing her,

it's that if Leviathan really was about to claim his wife's soul, it was because God had deemed him unworthy of the honor and had promptly deserted him. And if God had deserted him, then he deserted us all. I obviously wasn't privy to the honor. this information, but I felt Grandpa's fear. We all did. We heard it in his sermons. We read it in the lines on his face after those late nights praying at his screaming wife's bedside. But above all,

we felt it when he had us encircling the barn, man, woman, and child to pray aloud for grandma's mortal soul. She screamed and wailed throughout that whole affair, yelling things like, he's the devil, you need to get out, get far away from here. And at the time, we thought they were the words of a demon prince. And now, I think they might have been the sanest words to grace my ears in all my young life. And when we were done praying, we all went back home to pray some more before dinner. We ate in silence, trying not to hear the screams, as that monster I called a grandpa resorted to quite literally trying to beat the devil out of my poor suffering grandmother. And finally, after weeks of waiting and worrying, my parents were

My parents told me it was time to wish Grandma goodbye. We all lined up outside the barn and went inside in our twos and threes, and it was quiet by then. Grandma was too weak to scream anymore. And so after we shuffled up to the grubby old mattress that she was lying on, she didn't say a word. She was looking at us, but I don't think she saw us, you know. I think Grandpa might have done something to her head, and I don't know what, but something bad. All she did was take shallow breaths and stare at us blankly as we said her tearful goodbyes and then walked out of that barn. Grandpa stood watch the whole time, looking empty-eyed and defeated.

He was a man who'd failed, a man whose God had deserted him, and it ended up being the end of him. After Grandma passed away and we held a little funeral for her after laying her to rest in our secret cemetery, Grandpa went into a period of deep prayer. The chapel stayed off limits as Grandpa would head inside every day and kneel by the side of that old mattress to pray for Grandma's soul. At least, that's what we thought he was doing. But looking back on it, I think it was more like he was going there to starve himself and reflect on what he'd done with his life. He lost weight, his sermons got shorter, and we'd see him out of the chapel less and less and less, until one day I heard that he got up early in the morning.

wandered off into the woods, and was never seen again. My dad, who took over his duties as his male heir, claimed that he must have been taken by the angels to go be with grandma. I don't know exactly what had happened to him personally, but I can hazard a guess. Once he was gone, things stayed the same for a little while, but was my dad at the helm, things started to get much more lax around the farm.

One big contributing factor was our need for an attorney, and someone had the bright idea to groom one of us kids as the farm's pro bono attorney after pitching in to put us through college. Well, since the oldest and smartest kid was me, I'm not bragging, I'm just saying. I was picked to be the farm's undercover agent in the outside world. Get educated, become an attorney, come home and defend the farm. And this was their plan anyway, but needless to say, it didn't work out. If seeing what they did to grandma planted the seed of doubt in my mind, going to college poured a whole bunch of water all over it.

I had to pick a private Christian college. I couldn't pick anywhere, but transitioning from a fundamental Christian homeschool environment to an actual college just tore my whole worldview apart. I still believe in God, in a manner of speaking anyway. But at college I encountered all kinds of Gnosticism, mandaism, and Manichaeism, and it had me questioning everything, not just what I've been told by grandpa and my parents. Then the more I realized I'd been taught a lie, the more I realized my grandma hadn't simply passed away. She'd been murdered. And I entered a period of deep, clawing depression, not just because my entire worldview had collapsed,

but because it was too late to bring my grandpa to justice. The only thing that gave me even the smallest flicker of hope was the idea that, that my parents, along with the others who'd kept grandma starved and confined to the chapel, could taste a small portion of that same justice. I was planning on cutting them off anyway, at least until I could find it in my heart to forgive them what they'd done to me. But when I called the cops in that area and told them all about what had happened with my grandma, I knew that they'd do more to rubber-stamp that family divorce than anything I could

possibly think of. The cops paid them a visit, asked some questions, and concluded. that there was very little chance of gaining any convictions, given the man with all the answers, was now deceased. I figured that was the case, so I wasn't too disappointed. But the tension I felt when my parents' letters started appearing in my school mailbox was on another level. I had to deny it was me. I couldn't come clean until I'd finished my education, and I actually didn't come entirely clean until I'd saved enough money to pay my college back and could walk away from my family with only a small souvenir of guilt.

I just wish I had the ladyballs to do it in person because when it came time to confess my attempt to get them arrested, I could only bring myself to do it by letter. I didn't have to fear the flurry of correspondence that would have come if I hadn't added a little postscript, one which detailed me moving someplace they'd never, ever find me. But I sometimes imagine how furious my father was. But furious or not, he cashed that check

and with that, I bought my freedom. As I said earlier, I still believe in God, just not in any sense my grandpa would ever sanction. I honor my mother and father by praying for them, not every night, but most nights. I don't know if they've seen the error of their ways or even if that old farm still exists anymore. I just know I can't be friendly with a man who had a hand in the murder

of his own beloved mother. Hey, Joel, my name's Kieran, and I'm not. from Glasgow. And when he was still with us, my old granddad, God rest of soul, told me a story that I think he'll enjoy reading. He moved to Glasgow back in the 40s when he was still a teenager, so his dad could work in the munitions factory since the war was on. But he grew up in this little coastal village called Strone. The name comes from the Scottish Gaelic fur nose, and if you look at Strone on a map, the peninsula that Strone is situated on really does look like a big old schnazer. But don't let the name fool you because I visited Strone with my granddad and it really is

beautiful. But it's also a place with a very dark secret, albeit a very open secret these days, and when my granddad let me in on one day after a few too many drums of whiskey. And so back in the 1900s before World War I, Strone was exactly what it is now, just smaller. It's this charming Wee Village with nary a care in the world, full of smiley happy people who all said hello when they passed each other on the shore road. There's a beautiful golf course that the town's sort of sandwiches, so Strone would get all kinds of bigwigs and wealthy types coming through, and making the cafe and pub owners very happy lightening their pockets. Everything's going wonderfully. The police constable has nothing to do but stroll around whistling to himself until one day when the town's post office suddenly

burns down. And in doing so, it unleashes a scandal of what at the time was considered epic proportions. The post office was first spotted a blaze just after sunset in October, and although the townsfolk fought bravely to douse the flames, the post office burned to the ground overnight. Fearing the postmaster in his two assistants to be victims of the blaze, the village constable enlisted two trusted men in sifting through the rubble. Then when he was finished, he announced both good and bad news. The good news was that no human remains had been located among the ashes, meaning the postmaster and his assistants were no doubt still alive. The bad news, on the other hand, was that they appeared to have absconded with over a thousand pounds belonging to the town's post office savings

bank. The trio consisted of the postmaster, a Mr. Doggish, who was a middle-aged bachelor, and two spinsters, Mrs. Robertson and Mrs. McKenzie. Since none had any family in the village, it stood the reason that they'd be inclined to abscond. But the village was still shocked to its absolute core as it constituted the town's most high-profile crimes since the 1700s, when a gang of smugglers murdered the village officer while bringing goods to shore. At a village church service one Sunday, the vicar invited the town's policeman to address his congregation. Constable McAllister announced that he was doing everything he could to bring the trio to justice and return the stolen money.

He was even working in conjunction with police forces in Glasgow in Belfast and that officers in Glasgow believe that they were hot on the trio's trail. Not even a week later, Constable McAllister had more good news for the congregation. Police had raided a home in Clyde Bank, believing it to be the missing trio's safe house. and by the looks of things, Doglish, Robertson, and McKenzie had fled just minutes prior, but they left behind a large bag of banknotes. The post office savings money had been recovered.

Now, naturally, the money's return was the cause of much celebration around Strone. Celebrations, the pub landlords, were only too happy to facilitate for their own financial gain, but it was all a lie. The truth didn't come out for another 25 years, years, not until one of the men who helped Constable McAllister sift through the rubble of the post

office was on his deathbed. Constable McAllister himself had long since passed away following a short but valiant battle against an aggressive cancer and had resigned to take the secret to his grave. Yet one of the men he trusted to do the same eventually proved he could not. He was said to have expressed a deep remorse at helping tarnish the good names of two innocent women in Mrs. McKenzie and Mrs. Robertson. Because not only, had they not been involved in any kind of plot to rob the post office's savings, there had been no such theft at all. According to him, this is the true story of what happened the morning after the fire.

Having been up most of the night trying to put out the fire, most of the village was still asleep during the dawn hours. This gave Constable McAllister and his two-hand-picked men plenty of time to comb through the ashes of the post office alone, which is how they found the bones of the postmaster along with his two assistants. The men were obviously bemused as why the trio hadn't escaped once they realized there was a fire. The post office was a relatively small building, so it's likely they noticed something burning fairly quickly.

But upon examining the post office's two doors, they discovered both had been locked tight. And not only that, but the keys appear to have been in the clothing of the post office. Postmaster himself. Since the scene didn't make any sense, the constable asked his two pals to keep watch over it while he gained access to the postmaster's home. He intended on searching his home for clues to what had happened. He didn't have to look past the kitchen, though.

On the table, Postmaster Dalglish had left an extensive handwritten note, describing exactly why he'd chosen to lock himself in his two assistants in the post office before personally setting it on fire. And the note was long and rambling, but the essence was this. Doglish believed his two assistants were, as he phrased it, no longer who they claimed to be. He claimed they posed a significant threat to the people of Strone, as well as the wider world. And since their power meant that they could not be outmatched in a head-on confrontation, Doglish explained that he had no choice but to use the only means available to him. He would suddenly lock the post office, set it on fire, then keep the two beings, the word he used, from escaping before they died from smoke inhalation.

McAllister later told one of the men guarding the post that it was the single most disturbing thing he'd seen put to page, the ramblings of a madman. And if words spread of what the postmaster had done, there was no telling how it had effect the village and its people. And as I mentioned earlier, a big portion of the village's income came from nearby. a golf course, and if the wealthy stopped patronizing it while staying in the village hotels and drinking in the village pubs, then it'd have a terrible effect on its economy. There was also the matter of reputation, something which was far more important back then than it is now. These days, people are all about exposing and talking and therapeutizing, but back then, and I hope you don't mind if I try to coin a phrase, but a stiff upper lip was valued far, far higher,

than a wobbly lower one. But above all, Constable McAllister knew that having such a terrible murderous insanity visit Strone would have an indelible effect on its people for generations to come. There'd be rumors of hauntings. The story would traumatize children, and all kinds of penny-dreadful journalists would come slithering around, poking their snouts into places they didn't belong. And so, Constable McAllister made what you might call an executive decision. and covered everything up.

Sacrificing the reputations of the deceased for the reputation of the village. A dying man spoke his peace and the secret was out. But since it was only spoken around a few choice relatives, it didn't exactly spread like wildfire. Instead of spreading overnight, it took years of quiet whispers for the truth to spread. And even then, many dismissed it as a ghastly rumor spread by bored schoolchildren. But my granddad, on the other hand, he swore by it. He said that one night, in the year before his family moved themselves to Glasgow, someone dug up Mrs. McKenzie's grave in the middle of the night.

It must have taken them all bloody night to do so. But I don't think they neglected to fill the grave back in or put the lid back on the coffin through lack of time. It was to prove that the grave of old Mrs. McKenzie, whose remains were supposed to have been buried after perishing in the past, post office fire was empty. 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.