The Lets Read Podcast - 357: MY ALASKAN HORROR STORY | 11 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 343

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Alaska & delivery driversHAVE 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:Vinted - https://www.vinted.com

I grew up in a group home in the Midwest. My foster parents tried, but I hit the road once I turned 18. Now, I worked my way across the country moving from place to place once I had enough cash in my pocket from working odd jobs. But of all the weird jobs I worked, from fish processor to theme park security, the strangest one of all was up in Alaska, where I worked as a projectionist at a small-town movie theater. No, I first landed in Anchorage in 1998 and then ended up trekking across the interior to see all Alaska had to offer. I ended up in Fort Yukon for a while, then after heading out about 45 miles northwest, I came to a little town called Venetai. It's deep in Indian country, and the tribal government out there was fiercely independent and proud of it.

And when you see where they live, you understand why they're so protective over it. I saw more top-tier hunting and fishing spots out there than any other place in America, all surrounding a town of about 180 people, give or take. Now, there are no roads going in or out of town, so you either get there by plane or by trail, or not at all. And then, since the grocery stores run out of stuff pretty quick, a lot of folks live hand-to-mouth either by rifle or rod. There's a lot of wood stoves to save money in the winters, and Lord knows they need them out there.

But while we weren't so far north that we got those endless days and nights at either end of the year, we got some killer northern light shows, especially in the deep winter. Venetai Village is maybe 95% native, but there's about half a dozen outsiders, mostly from the lower 48, who, like me, ended up landing there one way or another. I remember bumming around for a while just getting to know the place in its tribal culture. And then one day, I got word that the projectionist's... at the old movie theater was throwing in the towel, and someone was needed to take his place. Now, I didn't know squat about working a projector, but since the pay was decent and no one else

was stepping up to the plate on account of how boring it was supposed to be, I figured why the hell not. Now, I'd really taken a liking to Venetize, so I was glad to be sticking around, but I quickly figured out why no one had jumped at the chance to do that job. First off, the movie theater was just a huge semi-soundproof shed with a projectionist platform at the back and a bunch of old church pews and folding chairs to make up the rows of seating. There was no actual heating in there, so aside from an old space heater which just about stopped the whole theater from freezing over,

you had to wrap up warm and maybe bring a little vodka if you wanted to get through the night. And then secondly, the library of reels they had was nothing short of abominable. There were a lot of old reels from the 50s and 60s, and not the good ones either. There was one titled The Robot vs. the Aztec mummy about a mad scientist who had to construct a combat droid to fight off an evil Aztec mummy he accidentally awakened. And then a movie called Earth versus the Spider, which is pretty much what you imagine it to be. The movies were terrible.

But no one really cared, and every Saturday night you'd get at least a dozen younger men with beers, just hanging out and making fun of whatever crap movie I decided to show. They'd seen all of them a hundred times, too, so much that they were yelling out lines along with the actors and mimicking the action whenever the robot and mummy were fighting, or when the cops were trying to kill the spider with a whole bunch of DDT. It was one of their only forms of entertainment. A place friends hung out, a place parents could drop their kids off for a couple of hours whenever the family-friendly stuff was playing on a Sunday.

and that means a lot to some of them, and I felt they deserved better. I started a small grassroots campaign, raised a little money for the theater, and then started calling around places in Anchorage and Fairbanks, seeing if anyone had any old movie reels they wanted to part with. Sometimes I'd get a whole bunch of stuff, mostly more of the same bad movies from decades ago, but at least they were new. In one box I got Attack of the Eye creatures and The Day the Earth froze, and all the Saturday night moviegoers were thrilled to be able to make fun of a brand new, terrible movie.

People actually started showing up to see some of the quote-unquote premieres I'd host, and then as revenue went up, I could afford to fix up the theater a little until the whole thing became sort of like a personal project to me and brought me more joy than I ever thought possible. At least until one night, after closing, when I was going through a box of reels that I got from Fairbanks, I hadn't inventoried yet, and I came across an unlabeled can that looked a little different than the rest. It's past midnight, and I was getting pretty tired, but I guess curiosity got the better of me.

And so I opened the can, hooked the reel up to the projector, and then hit the motor after shutting off the lights. I'm expecting a title sequence of some kind, even just a vanity plate to let me know who made the movie. But there's nothing like that at all. The film just sort of flashed into life, no sound at all, showing maybe four or five flaming torches surrounding a big old tree. There was a jump cut, and then to my shock, I saw a masked man with no clothes on and start walking around the tree. I say mask, but it was more like a kind of helmet almost.

I couldn't make out much detail right then because of the distance between him and the camera, but I could see that there was a part covering his face and hair, and then a whole bunch of sticks or twigs sticking out of the back, like they were hair or a mane or something. He was circling the tree, naked from the neck down, and from the way he was moving his arm, it looked like he was dousing the bark of the tree in some kind of fluid. I might be wrong, and he was just kind of waving whatever was in his hand in its direction, but either way, it looked almost ceremonial. I figured that I must have been watching somebody's home movie and that whoever had filmed it was into some pretty freaky stuff.

Turns out, that wasn't even the half of it, because after the naked guy finished this little lap around the tree, there was another jump cut, and after a brief moment of seeing nothing but the trees and those flaming torches, a whole bunch of people came walking into frame. The one I'd seen previously was in the lead, and as he walked towards the tree again from off-camera, three similarly undressed men guided another into the frame,

Now, this man was naked, too, but unlike the men guiding him, who were also wearing wooden helmet mask, this man's head was bare, and he was also showing a great deal of difficulty in walking. Now, it was like he'd either been drugged or was drunk out of his mind, but either way, he didn't seem to protest as the masked men urged him forward. And then when they got him in the trunk, they turned him around, and then started tying what look like rope around his wrists. The guy wasn't struggling at all. He didn't fight back.

He just let two of the men tie each of his wrists before they walked around the tree out of sight where they presumably tied the ropes together to hold the man in place. You could kind of see him wobbling in place, but he didn't try to escape. And that's what really put me on guard and left me completely unprepared for what was about to come. There appeared to be another jump cut because after the man, maskless man's arms were tied, the shot suddenly changed so that one of the masked men was standing in front of them while the others were kneeling in a line closer to the camera.

In all the other shots, the maskless man was still, but kind of wobbly, whereas in this latest shot, he looked like he was struggling against the ropes. I couldn't see him very well thanks to the guy standing in front of him, but I could see enough to know that he was sort of pulling and tugging on the ropes, trying to get himself free, but he couldn't. The next thing, the man in front starts hitting him. At least it looked like he was hitting him. He did that over and over while the Tide Man struggled until suddenly, the struggling stopped completely. I thought he might have knocked the guy out or something because you could see him go kind of limp against the tree with only the ropes holding him up.

But then, the man in the front stepped out of the way, and what I saw shocked me so much I almost fell out of my chair. The man tied to the tree, the one who'd been wobbly, then still, then struggling, had been mutilated. The naked man with a mask started gesturing to the bloody mess, and the tree-nealing men started going wild, waving their arms and looking up to the sky. And then the standing man, stepping towards the tied one, and from what I could tell, it looked like he started to almost reach into the guy's body. And that was all I could watch. and in a sort of half-panic, I turned off the projector and the theater went dark again.

I think I sat there for a minute or two in total shock, wondering if what I'd seen was even real. As something of a movie buff, I knew all too well that a clever director could fake something like that, and with those jump cuts being so obvious, I kept telling myself it was all clever editing and special effects. But what I couldn't make sense of was just how convincing the victim had been, how they must have been a damn fine actor to pull off that kind of performance. I also couldn't figure out how the filmmaker managed to get hold of such a convincing prop, because when he stepped away from that butchered body, I hadn't seen anything that realistic in all my movie watching life.

I kept telling myself it wasn't real, that it couldn't have been real. But of all the dumb movie deaths I'd seen and all the dumb movies I'd watched over the past couple of months, nothing prompted that sort of intense physical reaction in me like seeing that butchered man tied to that tree. I knew I had to do something, even if I took it to the cops who told me it was nothing but an amateur horror movie, and I'd gotten myself into a panic over nothing, because I'd rather be wrong and relaxed than keep on wondering what the hell I'd just witnessed. In the next morning, I went to talk with Pete, Venetized VPSO, which stands for a village public safety officer. and these are the folks to assist state troopers in policing the more remote villages,

and since he obviously couldn't help the situation much, Pete told me to head into Fairbanks and talk to the troopers there. My next stop was to talk with one of the pilots who flew a daily air taxi down to Fairbanks. Passengers only paid a small fare to cover the pilots pay, and the fuel came out of the tribal taxation fund so that everyone could afford to get to Fairbanks for all that kind of stuff. And this meant all I needed to do was buy a ticket. ticket, wait for the next flight, and then an hour later we were landing in Fairbanks. I was hungry, and I had a bunch of stuff I needed to do while I was there, but all that

needed to wait until I'd stopped by the state trooper building. The guy I talked to said anything that happened up in Indian country was covered by the rural services unit, and if I didn't mind waiting, he could get one of their two RSU troopers back to headquarters so I could talk with him. And that was how I met a trooper named Sheldon Yazzie. Yazzie was a great big bear of a man with tan skin, dark eyes, and one heck of a hairline, too. He wore a black mustache and goatee, and he wore them well, too, but he also had this smile that lit up the room and made me instantly feel at ease, even with that movie reel sitting in my backpack. I asked him if we could talk in private, so he walked me into the tiny rural services

his office that he had there, then after taking a seat, I took that reel out and told him what was on it. As he can imagine, he lost that bright smile of his as I went over what I saw. I told him how I could tell from the quality of the recording that it had to be at least 20 years old, and there was no sound to go with it, so I didn't hear any names or voices. But he agreed that if it was real, then it sure as hell needed to be investigated. And since I didn't have a phone where I was staying, Yazi said that he said that, that he'd call the Venetai Tribal Council building if he had any updates for me. And then after shaking his hand, I went about my business in Fairbanks and then flew back up to Venetai late in the afternoon.

I checked back in with Pete, the village public safety officer that I mentioned before, telling him all about handing that reel over his evidence. We still didn't know where it came from and only roughly when it was made, so we each decided it was best to keep quiet about me finding it and simply wait for, from a call from Yazi to find out what the state troopers had to say. And then a few days later, one of the staff from the village council came over to the movie theater and said I had a call waiting from the cops over in Fairbanks. I know I must have turned a few heads running all the way across the road, but I didn't want

to keep Trooper Yazi waiting. And I also figured that it was too soon to have cracked the case, but I assumed that he might have something for me. But unfortunately, on that part, I was wrong. Yazi said he and his superior had the displeasure of watching the reel together on a projector they borrowed from someone. And then by the time it had finished, every state trooper in the building was packed into that dark conference room, with her eyes glued to what was happening on that big white wall in front of them. They were horrified, as they should have been, and their first port call was the Fairbanks junk shop that I sourced the box of reels from.

Unsurprisingly, the owner apparently had nothing to do with the crimes and couldn't even remember where in the heck the reel had come from. He said people called by to drop stuff off and pick things up all the time, with some coming as far as Delta Junction or Grant Creek. There was no way he'd be able to ID the person who brought it in. And since there were no security cameras around his store, there was no going through it to figure out who did. They did get a couple of clues, though. Not much, but it was something. First off, the tree the victim was tied to was IDed as a white spruce, the most common kind of tree in Alaska's uplands. White spruce are also common around the Great Lakes in New England, but since the reel apparently came from Fairbanks,

there was a really good chance that the reel had been filmed in Alaska. Now, the reel wasn't manufactured in Canada, but it was made back in the mid-70s, which not only lined up with the time I figured it was filmed, but also lined up with a couple of people going missing from Anchorage and the surrounding towns over the course about four or five years. I remember feeling my stomach drop as I realized what Trooper Yazzie was saying. That's some goddamn murder cult had been operating around Anchorage in the 70s and that what we'd seen might have constituted just one of half a dozen separate murders. The only prints they were able to pull off the can were that of the junk shop owner

and another set of unidentified prints that they assumed were mine. Yazzie asked if I minded stopping by the Fairbanks' AST building next time I was in town so I could be fingerprinted. I did as he asked, and the prints were confirmed to be mine. And while it was there, I asked Yazzie where'd they go from there, like if they had any way of chasing up leads or tracking down clues, and his response was disappointing to say the least. I know they had nothing to go on in terms of who was doing the killing in that home movie.

but I'd really hope that chasing up serial numbers and whatnot would yield results. And so when I was basically told, keep ordering boxes of reels and keep us updated if you find anything else, I'm thinking, wait, it's down to me to go hunting for other reels? And that's not what Yazi was asking me. It sure as hell felt like it at the time, but that's not what he was asking. They just figured that rather than put all the time and resources into sourcing every unlabeled film can in Alaska, it'd be better to just circulate word of what they'd found and hope someone somewhere found something. Trooper Yazzie had been really helpful on the phone, and I knew it wasn't his call to just do nothing about the home movie murder,

but I was still hugely frustrated the response by the state troopers. I guess it wasn't even their fault either because they had superiors to deal with, and it was probably them that determined there wasn't enough to warrant a full-funded investigation. At least not until they had more than one reel and more than exactly zero avenues of investigation they had at that moment. And so while I did kind of resent having to do it, I went into overdrive in terms of sourcing movie reels from places, calling as far as Anchorage, but also Vancouver and Seattle to see what I could get my hands on. I received more shipments of reels brought in by the Venetai Air Taxi than I ever had before. But even after months and months of searching and sourcing,

I didn't find a single other unlabeled real, let alone one with similar contents as the first. I had to wait years, literally years before I came across another unlabeled film can. But when I did, even with all that time having passed, it was like I could feel the color draining from my face. It was the spring of 1999 when I found that first can of film, and I didn't find the second until late summer of 2001. But the moment I set eyes on it, I practically ran to the projector, hooked up the film, and fired up the motor after turning the lights out. There was that same long wait before any picture showed up, not title cards or vanity plates or anything like that, and I found myself both hoping it was from the same people, while at the same time hoping it was just nothing. But then the second I saw flaming torches flash onto the screen, lighting up the dark night around them,

I knew it was from the same sick bastards who made that first tape I saw. The torches weren't surrounding a tree this time. They were all lined up on either side of what looked to be a huge tepee made of hundreds of wooden sticks. There were two more torches by the entrance, and just guessing, that thing must have been maybe 15 feet tall and just as wide. It was no small construction, and then as I'm looking at it, wondering just how long it'd take to put something like that to. together, there's a jump cut, and another one of those naked guys appears wearing one of those wooden helmet things. He walks up to the opening of the huge stick-made teepee thing, and then, after picking up one of the torches, he walks inside and starts lighting the inner walls on fire.

I could see the orange glow pick up in the darkness as the flames took, turning the dark inside of the teepe, this terrible orange, and I figured the guy would walk out slowly, just as slowly as he walked in, but he didn't move. There was a jump cut, and more of the teepee was on fire. The flames rising as the sticks caught, and the things started to burn in earnest. And then at the same time, what I believe to be the same three figures as the first movie, came walking to the shot, each wearing the same thing as the last time. I could see the guy who lit the teepe on fire, standing perfectly still inside of it,

still holding his torch. There must have been quite a lot of smoke. and heat in that thing too, but the guy didn't seem to move a muscle. And seconds later, the three approaching figures each filled into the TP's interior along with him. There was another jump cut, showing the TP all the way up in flames, and again I could clearly see all four figures inside of it. They must have been roasting alive in there, but they didn't seem to be moving a muscle. And then just as I started to wonder if what I was seeing was real, there was another cut, to show the teepee collapsing in a shower of flames and sparks. I showed Pete the VPSO, and while he seemed

shocked at first, watching those freaky-looking nudists walking into the burning teepee, he had the same reaction I did at one of those final jump cuts. He asked how he could be sure that those dudes were still inside once it was really burning, and how they might use the little clever editing to make it look like they were. And he made a great point, and my first thoughts involved them faking their own deaths or something along those lines to throw the cops off their trail. Pete said that was impossible, but we still couldn't rule anything out, and the most important thing was getting the can of film to the state troopers in Fairbanks. Again, I thought the cops might be able to get some kind of clue from that reel.

Like maybe they'd gotten reports of other huge sick TPs like that so they could sort of, I don't know, triangulate the place that they were operating out of. Now, I knew that they could track serial numbers, check shipments and all that kind of stuff, so once again I found myself hoping my contribution might crack this case. But as it turned out, handing that tape over did way more harm than good. Yazzie explained how his superiors had reacted much the same as we had to all those sudden jump cuts towards the end of the footage. And instead of going with my theory, the whole thing was meant to confuse law enforcement, they started openly questioning whether the whole thing was even legitimate at all.

Yazi said one senior trooper suggested it was some film school kids' home movie horror show and that the whole thing had been a huge waste of time. Besides, even if both movies were real, the second one didn't show any crime, but open burning, which for first-timers is nothing but a misdemeanor without the proper permit. And at best, it could be used to tie the men to any of the other crimes that might occur into the future, but without a positive idea on the victim from the first movie, there was nowhere for them to go and nothing for them to do. The burning teepee was just another dead end.

Trooper Yazzi said that that one trooper floated the idea that it was me who'd made those movies, fake them, I mean, and scaring folks with them was how I got my kicks. I was only Trooper Yazzie arguing that I didn't seem the type that stopped them flying up to Venetai to search where I was staying and have a talk with me. and while I appreciate him fighting my corner in that respect, I was mad as hell at them for making out that I was just some prankster, and not someone just honestly trying to help out.

Now, once again, there was no real inventory at the thrift store that I purchased the reel from, as once again it came in a set of around two dozen old movie reels. The state troopers didn't even pay the place a visit that time. They just called to make sure that there was no record. Meaning for all intent and purpose, the TAVE could have been my own creation, and I was just lying about where it had come from. Yeah, he was just as frustrated as I was, but he wasn't surprised. He said Alaska has more unsolved disappearances than any other place in America,

so much that people don't even bother looking sometimes. If a kid goes missing in a park or something, that tends to be a big deal. But a grown man, especially someone from the outer states who's not very experienced in the outdoors, people just tend to think, ah, they're a goner, and move on. It's a harsh way to look at things, I guess, but just like Yazi said, people have found way too many skeletons surrounded by Berskat to have hopes someone might still be out there, especially after they've been missing for more than a few days.

He said the best we could hope for is that some more of those real showed up and that they'd showed victims, perps, and locations in more detail, and that's even assuming that there were other versions. victims, and that wasn't just the end of the trail right there. I ended up going on another ordering spree, sourcing unlabeled reels and boxes of junk from all over Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and one time I was awake a whole 24 hours burning through unlabeled cans of film, stuck in that limbo of hoping that I'd get lucky, while praying that there weren't any more of those horrifying home movies out there.

And then before long, I realized what it was doing to me. My little quest for justice had turned into some blind obsession, and my work at the movie theater was starting to suffer as a result. Now, I'd think about those masked and naked maniacs all goddamn day, and then when I go to bed at night, I dream about them too. I started to lose sleep, and I stopped eating. The reels became an obsession, and just about everyone around me could see it, too. Pete and the support officer recognized at first, I guess, and told me that maybe, just maybe, my time in Venetai had come to a and it was time to move on. I guess it was right. Last time I stayed anywhere for almost three years, I was a kid of single-digit ages being raised by a foster family, and maybe that was it.

I come to the end of my time and that obsession of mine was just a way of my conscious kind of rebelling against putting down roots. I moved on down to Anchorage, and then with the skills that I picked up in Venetai, I ended up working as a projectionist at a much more professional operation, but there's not a day that goes by where I don't think about those unlabeled film cans, and I don't think I'll ever be able to forget the horrors they contained. Long-time listener, first-time writer. I'm a woman in her early 20s working my way through college and trying to come out the other side with as little dead as possible.

I've never had a reason to write into you before, but, bro, something majorly effed up happened to me last month, and I'm thinking, dang, I'm going to send this into Let's Read. And so I do a bit of this, a bit of that, but one of my hustles is working as an Uber-Eats driver when I have spare time for my other jobs or from going to the gym. I always got to be on that graph. You know what I'm saying, Brosef? No, anyways, this one day I get an order that comes up on the app, a McDonald's delivery, and I accept it because I'm nearby. I don't recognize the address, which is odd because I know this town pretty well, but whatever.

I took the order, waited longer than usual for the teenage workers to get their thumbs out of their butts and prepare the food, and then off I headed to my delivery location. It turns out it was right at the edge of the perimeter that were allowed to deliver within, so basically the food was going to be cold as crap when it got there. And still, not my problem, I thought. They ordered it knowing the expected delivery time, and that's what microwaves are for. Now, I only say this because the further I got from the McDonald's, the more run down in Grody the neighborhood, got. We started in a sort of run-down urban area in the first place and then drove through a suburb that looked like it had been cursed by the demon of poverty itself. It kind of looked like the way movies portrayed Detroit when they're trying to emphasize how bad it can be, but also maybe

even more abandoned. There was barely any graffiti, which was weird, like even the criminals and the youth gangs didn't want to hang out in this area, it seemed, and no wonder I'd never heard of the place before. Now, I heard fear being described on a podcast as bone prickles not long ago. And that term struck me as perfect. Driving with this goddamn McDonald's, the smell of fries and Big Macs making me feel kind of sick, I started suffering with the bone prickles. And the moment I heard the guy say that phrase in the podcast, I knew exactly what he meant. It's like when your entire body tingles and prickles, thanks to some kind of unspecified fear. And I was feeling this just by driving to the delivery location. Now, eventually,

Eventually, I reached this address, and it was on the very edge of some run-down suburbia. Now, if this house had been the only occupied property on the block, I wouldn't have been surprised. The rest of the houses were completely dark, boarded up, and run down. This one house had lights spilling out of every window and chill, relaxing music, playing loud enough for me to hear as I pulled up to the curb outside. Some kind of pop, punk, or something kind of fun. I manhandled the bag that keeps the food warm, although with how long it had taken to arrive at that location, I didn't have much faith in their fries being hot anymore. Again, everything had fallen within the promised delivery time, so no issues there. I hauled butt up the driveway, surprised at how heavy their food order was, and I knocked.

It took a few knocks before the volume of the music inside lowered, and the door was answered by a pretty-looking guy, a very reassuring gentleman. Now, he must have been in his mid-20s, and he was wearing a band tea and had a goofy expression that made me think that he might have been stoned. Now, I explained that I was there to deliver the food, and he yelled back in the house that some chick was here with the McDonald's, had anyone ordered any food. I explained that that was a pretty large order, so maybe it was for a bunch of them, and he seemed pretty confused by this. Now, he said that there was only three of them in the house, and they'd recently gotten a delivery pizza, so he couldn't really explain who'd ordered the food. the McDonald's. I showed him the app and confirmed 100% that the address was correct, and he asked me to wait on the porch while he went and checked with the rest of the guys, and so I was just stuck standing there while I heard vague noises from within. Muffled voices turned into banging and almost

shouting, and I began to feel that bone prickle again. Eventually, this goofy streamer reappeared to the front door. Now, remember, I still had the food in the thermal bag at this point, and he apologized profusely saying he was an idiot and the other guys had ordered McDonald's as well as pizza and everything was all good. However, just as I started to unzip the bag, he told me to hang on because they wanted to offer me a tip. I told them they could do it through the app and they didn't have to do it at all, but this guy was absolutely adamant that they were going to give me $10 for the trouble, so if I could just wait on the porch again, he'd head inside and get the cash. And who even keeps cash around these days, to be honest?

Now, anyways, this time he left the door open just enough for me to see inside. The front door opened into the living room, and I was kind of impressed how clean and frankly awesome the place looked. They had framed posters on the wall, a couple of pinball tables in the corner, and an expensive-looking flat-screen TV. Now, this didn't seem to be the room that they were hanging out in either, and I sort of nosily peered around to see where my new delivery friend had gone to find my tip. Now I saw him milling about back and forth past the door to what seemed to be a kitchen, and then calling out down a set of stairs to what look like a basement. I wondered if they had an even more impressive home theater system down there or something, and I wondered if it was just one of those cases where someone with money buys a house

that looks run down from the outside in an abandoned neighborhood area and then just uses the crappy exterior to actually mask a really awesome dwelling. Now, still, it was none of my business. Now, eventually my new friend came back with $10.69, and I just politely laughed at the obvious joke. Now, I finally fished out the huge bags of McDonald's out of the insulated bag, and I could tell already that by now they were cold, and I figured I just wouldn't make mention of it. This guy had kept me on the porch long enough at this point. Now, after thanks and some goodbyes, I headed back to my car, got in, and then check for more jobs.

There was another one at the same McDonald's, so I figured why not? It had just come through, so by the time I reached the restaurant, the order should be ready. So I started to drive off. I have one of those reversing cameras in my car, and I admit I rely on it a little bit too much, so my rearview mirror isn't perfectly aligned like it should be. Instead, it lets me view the back seat, something I'd adjusted for it recently when I was taking my niece and nephew out for, ironically, McDonald's. And as such, glancing into the rear seat,

View Mirror allowed me to notice that there was someone lying on the floor in the back seat. No, I could tell he was a guy in his mid-20s, and I also could tell that he was holding some kind of weird knife, and I don't know how to describe it. It was clearly some type of kitchen implement, but I'd never seen a knife like that before. And I suddenly realized that the delivery customers had kept me at the door for so long without turning back to my own vehicle that it could have allowed one of them to actually slip inside. Now, I didn't expect to be more than a minute or two, so I didn't lock the car behind me. And now, I was regretting that immensely. What the hell did this guy have planned for me? He was just laying there, staring off blankly like he was waiting

for something, clutching that kitchen blade. Now, obviously, whatever he had planned was nothing good. And the first thing I did was I decided to do a stop looking in the rearview mirror. and I didn't want him to see that I'd seen him. Now, obviously, this was all happening within a split second. My heart was absolutely pounding, and I was certain that this was how I would die, with my throat slit as I was heading to an Uber Eats delivery. Now, up ahead I saw the lights of a gas station. I kept my speed normal, and I didn't allow myself to react at all, and then moments before I reached the turning into the gas station, I shot forward, screeched into the parking lot, leapt out of my car and then ran into that gas station.

Now, I must have sounded like some crazy woman, yelling how a delivery customer stoner McDonald's order guy was hiding in my backseat and had a weird knife and I didn't know what he had planned and blah, blah, blah. I was just trying to explain the events and my theory and how I thought the delivery customer had distracted me and I was almost telling all of this at once. Now, the clerk and older man looked at me like I was on meth,

understandably so, and then started to ask me to explain everything again. However, he kind of froze and his mouth was now hanging open, and then I followed his gaze. An absolutely ridiculously tall man was kind of unfolding himself from my back seat, and we watched as he fled into the darkness of the night. Now, bear in mind, this was on the edge of the suburbs, so he fled into some kind of forested area. And from the expression on his face, I couldn't even claim to this day that he meant me harm, and almost looked like he was petrified too. Of course, that didn't stop me calling the cops. They got to the gas station really fast and searched the nearby area. They did, in fact,

find a knife nearby. Apparently it was some kind of fish knife for sushi, but it had nothing on it. When they paid to visit the delivery customers, they were just as baffled as I was. Everyone was accounted for, which they could prove, and nobody who lived there matched to the description. that I gave with a guy who'd crept into my back seat. Now, I never did find out who he was or what his motives were. I didn't quit my delivery job or anything silly like that. I just took to actually locking the car door whenever I stepped out to make a delivery, regardless of how brief I thought I would be.

And always, I always checked the back seat no matter what. Something tells me that the guy hiding out in my car didn't mean me harm. But the look of fear and alarm on his face as we watched him flee makes me think that someone out there would have done us more harm than I can even fathom if they'd found it. It's one of those creepy mysteries that I'm grateful didn't turn into an unsolved murder and has finally given me something to write into you about. But like they say, be careful what you wish for, because I feel like this was a cautionary tale where the lesson is that it's far better not to wish you had a scary story to share with internet people.

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With no seller fees, you keep everything you earn, and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the U.S. on Vinted. I grew up in Western Georgia, and for as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a pilot. I thought about the Air Force for a while, mostly for the speed, but the high-discipline environment wouldn't have done me any good, but then once I had about 1,500 hours under my belt, I heard about some pretty lucrative opportunities up north.

way north too, like in Alaska. I landed an anchorage back in 2011 with enough money to bum around for a few weeks, enjoying all that seafood and the clean, cool air they got up there. And then while I was at it, I went around knocking on the doors of a few air taxi outfits and asked that they needed any pilots. I figured positions up there would be majorly competitive, given the perks of the job. But I found a vacancy at the third place I called, an operation out of Talkeetna, hauling hunters, fishermen, and mail to remote air strips.

I'd be flying some beat-up bold Cessna 180 at first, but I could work my way up to bigger and bigger loads. And then as long as I didn't spook the passengers or bend any metal, I was told that there'd always be work for me up in the land of the midnight sun, as they say. And the best thing about my job, by a country mile, was the freedom you got up there. You're basically an independent contractor, so not quite your own boss, but close enough to get all the benefits. And then cruising over all those jagged peaks and glaciers, all God's own artwork, that makes every single flight feel like a brand new adventure. On a clear day, you can spot moose from 500 feet up, with all those puffy white clouds off in the distance looking like floating mountain ranges for miles either side of you.

You feel like a real maverick, too, sometimes. Standing on gravel bars or frozen lakes that make most spit-shined airline pilots piss their pants. But then there are the downsides, the primary one being the weather. I've never flown anywhere that can turn from a bluebird to a whiteout in a matter of mere minutes. One second, it's chilly but otherwise a manageable flight. And then the next thing, you're dodging ice like it's taken a deep and personal disliking to you. One bad call on fuel or wind, and you're toast, and even if you do somehow manage to land safely in the Great American Wilderness, you're hiking back to base with a hungry bear on your trail most

likely. Because out there, walking with a limp or an open wound is like walking around with a big old sign above your head saying, dinner is served. Parts take forever to ship to Alaska for manufacturers, so maintenance is always a pain in the ass. And sometimes it's so lonely out there with nothing but your VHF radio that you actually miss having some babysitter and air traffic control checking in to bother you every couple of minutes. And that kind of brings me around to one of the hairiest scrapes I ever had up there, almost nine years ago now, back in the early fall of 2017. It was September 6th, a Wednesday to be exact, and I was flying a whole bunch of supplies from Bethel up to a camp near the Yukon River and my old 185 on skis. Oh, and the skis part refers to these hydraulic

wheel skis that we use for snowy conditions, because you can't use regular landing gear on a snowpack. Now, anyway, the weather brief said marginal VFR, meaning that there was a high risk of encountering low ceilings, fog, and generally poor visibility, particularly in the more mountainous areas. But with ceilings dropping fairly low, I figured that I could at least dodge the very worst of it. Once she was all loaded up, I hopped into my 185 and got her up in the air with no problems. And then for about 40 minutes or so, everything was going just fine as I'm weaving between patches of cloud like I've done a thousand times before. And then suddenly, my luck ran out. And I was faced with a cloud bank right up in front of me, no dodging it, and it looked as thick as potato

soup. It looked like nothing but a whole bunch of rain clouds at first, the kind that are almost filled to bursting with the super cool droplets they get. Now, I thought worst case, I'd get a wet windscreen and bad visibility for a minute or two. But then after punching into it and watching almost all the light disappear, my engine started to surge like it was choking, and then it sputtered out altogether. RPM started dropping off, and I grabbed the carb heat up to full before switching fuel tanks, but it was no good. My engine wasn't responding. My instruments are going haywire, and I figured the pito tube must have been frozen solid

because my air speeds reading zero. And I also heard the telltale vibration in my propellers icing up, which is obviously really bad news because I need them to be able to spin. And the longer I went without engines, the worst the out-trial. come would be. And so it occurs to me that I might have to ditch in the bush, in which case, I might as well end up as bear bait. Oh, and it might sound crazy, but we generally don't wear parachutes, as going down with the plane can sometimes be a hell of a lot safer than parachuting into trees or into a mountain. Anyway, my main concern is that I'm about to start auguring in,

which is basically when a plane starts plummeting to the ground while spinning really fast. Now, my control stick doesn't seem to be responding at all, which should have meant that I was in big trouble and I was about to start free-falling. But when I looked at the altitude, it was holding steady. I remember thinking it was possible that the ice was messing with the static, but just like the gauge suggested, the plane kept sailing along smooth as silk through the clouds. Now, I can't overstate what little sense that made to me, and it wasn't like I was some newbie greenhorn who couldn't interpret my dials and gauges. No engine meant no power. No power means. No power. meant no propellers, and no propellers meant that I should have been quickly losing altitude,

and yet somehow I was still cruising along like nothing had happened, and my plane was working just fine, because that seemed impossible, and on the assumption that I was losing altitude, I tried to drop the flaps to slow my bird down, but for some reason my controls were almost completely unresponsive. The yoke, which is what we call the control stick, was barely budging, but I hadn't been without RPMs for long enough for the hinges on my flaps to be locked up with ice. And that's the point where I really start to panic. I've been nervous from the very start of it, but the fear only hit when I realized that even with what must have been 1800 flight hours by that point, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

I fell back on my training, feeling myself sweating in spite of the cold as the fear and adrenaline pumped through my blood. I ran through the restart checklist in my head, which is part of our emergency procedures to regain engine power after an in-flight engine failure or a flame out. Now, I'd just about reached the sixth step in ensuring my throttle was slightly open, when out of nowhere, this whole airframe started shaking like a chihuahua taking a dump. I'd never been so scared as I was then when my plane started to shake like that. I mean, shaking is the wrong word. it was more like it was vibrating in mid-air. It was so rough that I genuinely thought like, this is it, and that at any moment I was going to watch my planes start to rattle apart at the seams.

My whole body was vibrating along with it, and I had to grit my teeth to keep from chattering as I kept hearing the ping, ping, ping of icicles slinging off the prop and pinging against the fuselage. It's hard to overstate just how screwed it seemed I was, and I remember thinking that I was a goddamn fool for listening to all the old salts who told me a parachute just meant a long, slow, and painful death, either freezing up on a mountainside or getting eaten alive by some animal.

I'd have given my whole damn nut sack for a parachute in that moment. But then, just as all hopes seemed lost and that feeling of despair was set to overwhelm me completely, my plane suddenly broke through the cloud into all clear head, and my engine suddenly coughed back to life. The power surged, my controls loosened up, and then after quickly leveling off and checking all of my gauges twice, I think I just about lost my mind for a second. I remember yelling, out of girl, there you go, baby, there she is!

And then laughing my ass off as the engine began to hum all nice and loud again. It was the second greatest feeling of relief and happiness I'd ever felt, second only to the one I felt when my now wife gave birth to a healthy baby girl. I felt like the luckiest son of a bitch to ever grace the skies. But then, knowing my luck must be seriously running dry after such a close call, I used my map to locate the nearest airstrip and then immediately made a bee-line for it. I managed to raise someone down there on my radio, so they were expecting me when I brought my plane in,

and managed to land her with the greasy side down. But when I climbed out and started stumbling over to what passed for the pilot's lounge, my knees were just about knocking together from the adrenaline dump as I trudged through the snow. An older man, who turned out to be an airplane mechanic, came out into the snow to greet me as I got closer. I was so shaken up that I could barely talk, but after getting me inside, pouring me a stiff drink, and then sitting me down in front of a warm fire for a while,

I started to feel like my old self again. There was another guy in there who, I think, was just a friend of the mechanic, and they both sat and stunned silence as I told them what just happened to me. I knew neither of them were pilots, so I tried to make it as clear as possible just how weird it all was, and how I'd never encountered anything like it in all my thousands of hours of flying. But as it turns out, it wasn't the first time either of my two companions had heard of something like that happening to a bush pilot up there. The mechanic said that he was originally from Idaho, and he'd been fixing up light aircraft in Alaska for some 20-odd years. And in his experience, strange stuff like that occurred a lot more than anyone liked to admit. He said as long as he'd been up there, the pilots have been telling him weird stories about all kinds of different stuff,

be it seeing strange crafts flying past them at supersonic speeds, or having their aircraft start acting funny when, just like me, they passed through what they think. thought was just a rain cloud. He said the strangest of the stories come from those who fly at night, how they talk of strange lights in the sky, disappearing from one place and then appearing again in another in the blink of an eye. When they were just about done going over all that strange crap they'd heard over the years, the engineer and his buddy told me that I was lucky to have landed my plane, and that it's not uncommon for pilots to take to the skies, only to never to be heard from again. I waited a couple of more hours for the weather to clear, and

than I kept on towards my destination with no further problems, but I've never forgotten what happened that day. And sometimes I get a cold sweat seeing a particularly dark set of storm clouds, because if I'm ever unlucky enough to have a second run-in with whatever happened that day, I might end up as one of those pilots that's never heard from again. So I'm from England, and I won't say where so as not to docks myself or lose my job, but I'm a postwoman or a postie as we say here, and I love my job. I work a rural route and I've been on the same route for years.

Thanks to some pleading and a friendship with the head postmaster, normally posties get shifted around all the time. And so I kind of know everyone on my little route, at least everyone who makes themselves known to me anyway. There was Stu, a mature student who would always be waiting at the door whenever the mail came and shared his latest work on marine biology with me. I hadn't started out as being remotely interested in marine biology, but Stu had mentioned a few things in passing, and I'd been hooked, pun intended. Now, there was old Mrs. Raider, who always seemed to have some insane medical ailment, which she relayed to me with the greatest of glee, and I became convinced that she was a medical miracle.

And then there was the four bottoms, an extremely flamboyant glam rock band by night in a middle-aged polycule who enjoyed cardigans and gardening by day. And then there was Joe and Joanne, two twins with rich parents who often got Amazon parcels in the mail. And I've never seen two kids who were more spoiled but more grateful for everything they'd got. Now, the one guy I never got to know was Farmer McKay, the allegedly grouchy postman hating farmer who lived in the small holding on the outskirts of town. Now, the called a farm would be extremely generous, but it did have a few goats, a couple of sheep, a pig, and some chickens. and it was also filthy, even by farm standards, and as far as I know, he made an entire living selling eggs and milk to locals. Now, I got to admit, I prefer Sainsbury's.

Now, one day, for the first time in about six years of doing this route, I was shocked to find that I had a collection for McKay's farm. Not everyone knows this, but you can book Royal Mail to collect parcels often for free, instead of having to take them to a post office. McKay had booked a free collection with instructions absolutely not to knock and disturb him, but instead find the package in an outhouse which he kindly uploaded the picture of, so there was no mistaking it. I made sure that I wore my wellies that day as I didn't fancy waiting across the sludge that McKay called a yard.

It turns out I made the right call because the mud leading to the safe place outhouse was almost up to my ankles. When I opened the outhouse, I was met with a smell that almost made me gag. I didn't even want to look at what else he kept in there, but thankfully the royal mailbox was visible right at the front, so I grabbed it and headed back to my van. Now, halfway back to my vehicle, I noticed that the parcel was leaking. Real disgusting, foul-smelling liquid dripping out of the bottom of the box. Well, there's absolutely no way that I can take this as a collection for a million reasons. And now, I also couldn't just abandon it, which meant

that I had to break his cardinal rule, and go knock on his door and tell him that, unfortunately, Fortunately, I couldn't accept his collection. Halfway between my van and the front door of the farm, the package I'm carrying sort of collapses inward. The bottom falls out and the contents spill all over my bottom half. Now, let me tell you, I've smelled some bad smells in my time. Before I became a postwoman, I was a nursing assistant in my late teens and early 20s, and there was this one old lady that I treated who, I would swear, had death himself living in her nether, other regions. This made that smell like flowers and cinnamon. It was a pile of rotting,

liquefying organs, and now it was covering as much of my legs and torso as it managed to besmirch. I dropped the destroyed parcel and threw up there and then, which really didn't help matters. And now I was kind of mad at Farmer McKay. There are extremely strict rules about what you can and can't mail in the UK, and rotting, liquefied awful as dead. definitely a forbidden item. I didn't even need to check the handbook to know about that. But then I started looking at all that stuff. Maybe my imagination was running away from me, but I was sure that I could make out part of a human spine among the gore. An eyeball winked out at me, clearly fresher than some of the other unspecified parts that covered me, the ground, and everywhere.

Now, I suddenly got this idea that McKay was trying to use the postal service to hide evidence of a crime. And standing out there in the open in the center of this small holding in the middle of nowhere, I suddenly felt very vulnerable and exposed. At this point, I didn't know what to do. I was convinced my colleagues would give me absolute crap if I'd fled the scene, but I started picturing Farmer McKay hiding behind a curtain, looking out one of the windows, a cocked shotgun aimed right at me. And so I kind of ran toward the main house.

As the front door began to open before I even reached the porch, I wondered if I'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. But the man who stood on the doorstep wasn't Farmer McKay. I could see the resemblance, but he was a much younger man, and as he took in the sight of me covered in those organs and trembling in fear, I could see genuine guilt and regret on his face. He didn't invite me inside. He can hardly blame him.

I was dripping in unspecified corpse juices. But there on the doorstep, he explained that Farmer McKay had been taken away by doctors, the day before, after increasingly strange and erratic behavior that had gone unnoticed by his family. He apologized profusely for the parcel collection being overlooked because they should have known that something was awry. McKay never sent packages. I was severely shaken, not least because I couldn't face the idea of getting in my beloved post van covered in this. And thankfully, the grandson, as that's who he turned out to be, helped me hose off the worst of it before I had to be. I had to back to my van. It's what I saw on the back that really caused this to be a scary story, though.

I made the mistake of glancing into the dilapidated barn as I trekked across the mud to my post van, and I only caught a quick glimpse because I looked away as quickly as possible. But no matter how many hot showers I took to wash off all those juices and the gore from my body, I can never scrub the sight that I saw from my mind. In the barn, Farmer McKay had piled what were presumed all of his animals. I couldn't make out which species they were. They'd all melted into one festering indiscernible pile of corpses. A number of empty cardboard boxes sat nearby, and I can only assume McKay planned on shipping the remains of his animals to various places. To this day, it drives me mad that I never checked and don't remember who the recipient of the original parcel was.

I have no idea what his motive was for mailing these liquefied parts, and I guess, that's partly the problem with whatever was wrong with him, dementia or whatever had befallen him. It doesn't make sense. He could have been aiming for revenge on his enemies, and he could have believed that he was shipping genuine prime cuts to customers of his farm. Either way, I'm not sure I ever want to know. The McKay small holding was demolished not long after, and after what I saw, I can't say I'm at all sorry that it became one less stop on my postal route.

Long-time listener here from Anchorage, Alaska. And while I spent most of my life down here, I grew up on the far western coast in a place called Point Hope. Living in Point Hope felt like you were living in this frozen bubble at the very edge of the world, far from anything warm, cool, or relevant. It felt like no one else in America knew that we were out there. Heck, even the sun forgets about us for a month each year. And as you can imagine, winters were bad, even for Alaska. Some years the whole town would end up buried under seven-foot snow drifts, and sometimes the wind would come in so hard off the sea that it wasn't safe to go outside. School would be canceled if it dipped below minus 40, which happened at least two dozen times growing up, and even on the nicer days, we'd bundle up in these giant parkas that made us all look like different colored Kenys from South Park.

We'd build snowmen and snow shelters out in their front yards, or at least try to anyway, because half the time they'd collapse on us and we'd end up having snowball fights till our fingers went numb through our gloves. In terms of demographics, there's a big anupiac element in town, so I grew up hearing all kinds of stories from elders about the times that came before. We were told how before the gold rush, people would survive on nothing but seal or caribou meat. In times it changed so much that the Iditarod mushers now rolled through town on fancy sleds made of feather-light alloys instead of the more traditional wood, rope, and tuss. Now, we used to hear some incredible stories of tough hearts and sharp minds,

but we also heard a few creepy ones, too, and for me, there was none more creepy than the story of what happened to a kindly older elder named Kimik. Now, back during the time of my grandparents, so the 40s and 50s, Uncle Kimmick, as they called him, lived out on the vast, widespread tundra to the east of Point Hope. He was a gentle middle-aged man whose weathered face told the story of the life he lived. And wherever he went, he'd be wearing his thick fur-line parka made from caribou hide.

And at a time when everyone was wearing fancy, down-insulated coats, he cut a very prominent figure around town. His name meant dog in his language, and while I understand that to be an insult in a lot of cultures, to Uncle Kimmick, it was the highest kind of compliment. because his one great love in life were his dogs. Uncle Kimick was an expert attending to his team of eight loyal sled dogs. They were a mix of huskies and Malamutes with all sorts of thick coats, loud voices, and boundless energy.

He treated each one and every one of them like family, and fed them scraps of seal and fish that he hunted, even if it meant that he himself had to sometimes go without. He was a tough man, a survivor. But Uncle Kimick was also known around Point Hope for being the sweetest old man you could ever hope to meet. He'd stop and talk with people whenever he came into town in a sled, and any trouble you'd had, he'd be there to help mend a fishing net or offer his sage advice on carving ivory. Point Hope's residents didn't see him much during the summertime. He had all the hairs, berries, and seagull wine he could drink.

Look it up, by the way. But during the long polar nights in the wintertime, when the sun disappears, for around 31 days, Uncle Kimmock used to mushes dogs into town at least once a week to pick up supplies. It's not pitch black all the time, and for a few hours around midday, the skies turn these sort of soft shades of red, violet, and amber and gold for just a few glorious hours. It really does make for an incredible sight to see, but for the rest of the time, it's complete darkness outside. As you can imagine, people look to just about anything to raise their spirits, so I believe them, when they say that Uncle Kimmik visits were celebrated. Kids would flock to pet the dogs and shopkeepers

would have his supply order set aside. Flower for pelaga bread, ammunition to keep him safe, and tea to help keep him warm at night when the temperatures really dipped. He preferred the solitude of his isolated sod-roofed cabin that he kept warm with seal oil lamps, but sure loved those trips and would often stick around town for a few hours talking to folks after trading for his supplies. But then one day, in the late afternoon after the skies had gone dark again, Uncle Kimmock took off into the tundra again while waving everyone goodbye. But as he disappeared into darkness, with the light of his sled getting smaller and smaller, the people of point hope saw a lightning storm suddenly burst into life in front of them. It was my grandpa who told me

the story, and not only did he claim to have witnessed that lightning storm with his own two eyes, he said it was the single eerieest thing he had ever seen. He wasn't the only one to see it. He spoke to plenty of older people who remembered that strange electrical storm, and the reason everyone remembered the storm is so strange was because of how silent it was. There was no greater gusts of wind and no thunder collapse after each fork of lightning struck, but that's actually very explainable, as thunder only tends to travel around 15 miles before the sound drops off.

off. Everyone in town saw it as one of the many strange sights the far north has to offer, then went about their business as normal. About a week went by, and everyone was looking forward to Uncle Kimmick's return. They figured that he must be running low on the old firewater because everyone loves a drink when it's night all goddamn day. But Kimmick didn't show, and after three days of getting more and more worried about him, a group of volunteers went off into the tundra to go look for him. They wrapped up warm. gathered up their high-powered flashlights, and then after taking off on ski-dos and dog sleds of their own, they got about ten miles before they found Uncle Kimmick's sled.

The sled was lying on its side, the hand-reels all smashed up by something, and then his dog harness was empty, too, with all eight of them having been scattered to the winds. They're not tied or locked into the harness, so that wasn't all that shocking, considering the sled itself had turned over, and at first Uncle Kimmock was nowhere to be found. But then, maybe only a hundred yards or so from where his turned over sled was, they started finding pieces of his clothes all torn up. And then finally, they found him, or at least what was left of him anyway. The man's clothes had been shredded, but even so, there wasn't much left of him to cover up.

The men who found him said it looked like he'd been eaten by a polar bear, one that had probably shared him with its cubs. But unless it happened to ambush him pretty good, which is, real hard out there in the treeless tundra, then it wasn't a bear that got him. It must have been his dogs. Some of the other guys who found him said the damage to his skin and bones made it look like a frenzied and sustained attack for more than a couple of animals. But there was no confusing that till they found the escaped dogs and analyzed their droppings. The same group of volunteers went off searching for them and, with the dogs being hungry and staying as a very loud pack, it shouldn't have been

all that hard to find them. But here's the kicker. Not a single one of old Uncle Kimmick's sled dogs was ever. Not then. Not in the future. Not ever. After they found his body, people started connecting his death to the weird lightning storm that happened that night. People said it must have spooked his dogs and that he must have been right in the middle of that lightning storm when it came down, or at least close enough to the strikes that it scared the ever-living crap out of them. And that's the only reason people could believe Kimmick's sled dogs might attack him, that they must have been out of their minds with terror. But he loved those dogs like family, and everyone knew how much they loved him back.

But even if Uncle Kimmock did get struck by lightning, which is what some folks believe, it'd take a whole lot of starving before his dog saw fit to eat him. And they most definitely wouldn't have done it right away. But if that truly is the case, then what the hell happened out there? and what the hell happened to Uncle Kimick's dogs? They never found any of their remains out there, and no one in any of the distant towns reported a pack a stray sled dogs running through their town.

So then, where the hell did they go? No one ever did figure out what happened to old Uncle Kimmock, and in the years that followed, people were extra careful about where they traveled after dark and when, especially during the polar nights, when it seemed like something just might be lurking out there among the endless dark of the Alaskan Tundra. So I'm not much of a storyteller, so I'll try my best here,

but I've always wanted to try my hand at putting this story down on paper. In the early 90s, I was a bicycle courier for a local mom-and-pop pizza joint here in New York City. I got on the job while I was still in high school, thanks to my dad being a regular customer at the store, and getting to know one of the owners, the husband, who will just call Pop Soul. Pop and Mama's soul ran the pizza joint and had been running it for as long as I can remember. It had been my favorite pizza place ever since I was a little kid, and I'd even had a couple of birthday parties there,

even though I was only really designed for a handful of dine-in customers. And then beyond that, it became a staple that every birthday, same for my sister, we'd get copious amounts of sole pizza pies. That's not to mention the pizzas we'd get just because, because good God, once you tried soul, Cole's Pizza nowhere in NYC compared. And my brother, who'd left home by the time I was six or seven, never seemed to eat at that pizza place. And when I asked him one time, he just said that he wasn't a fan of a lot of things about them, quote unquote. So one day, my dad calls me aside and says,

son, I got you your dream job. Now, at the time, I wanted to be a military sniper or an F-18 pilot or a pro-street racer or something like that, but I was pretty sure that dad hadn't, hooked me up with something like that. But when he told me that I was going to be a bicycle delivery boy for sole pizza, I was almost as psyched, especially because this meant that I got one free pizza a week and a 10% discount off orders like all the time. And I got to ride my bike all over the city, something I loved doing anyway while getting some cash in my pocket to see me through the last year of high school. What could be better, I thought? And things went absolutely smoothly with sole pizza for the first month or so.

According to Pop Sol, I was, quote, the best goddamn bike boy they'd ever had, and hiring me was the best decision he'd ever made since marrying Mama Soul. And considering he had kids and had no doubts made other major decisions since then, I wasn't sure I believed all this praise, but I wasn't going to argue if Pop wanted to keep me sweet. Now, the free pizza was a kicker, too. The first couple of weeks, I was too shy to ask for anything but a margarita. But then one day, Pop says, Come on, son. I know you like your pies heavy with toppings. Go nuts. Ask for whatever you want.

And so I did. I tried out so many combinations, so many wild pizza mixtures that, by God, I wish I could remember some of them, because I swear if I could, I could start my own pizza chain with pre-made pizzas using toppings that nobody ever thought of before, but are absolutely heaven-sent. Now, unfortunately, the events that happened a few months into my time at Soul's Pizza kind of made me forget everything that had gone down, other than the incident. Now, I still remember the fateful order that kicked everything off, though. It was a double pepperoni with extra cheese, side order of garlic bread, too. And the delivery address was downtown, somewhere I wasn't familiar with, but I checked the location on a map. Yeah, no MapQuest or GPS, or whatever was back then.

and I figured that I could get there pretty easily, so I loaded up the pizza, leaped on my bike, and headed toward what I thought was the optimal route to my location. It turns out the location was a series of warehouses, and I should have realized something was wrong then and there, although it wasn't entirely unheard of that we'd delivered to places of work or other odd locations. I stopped the bike, trying to work out exactly where Warehouse 13 was in this maze of identical metal sheds, when suddenly a van comes screeching out of nowhere and pulls to a stop inches from my bike. I'm just kind of left confused at this point,

so much so that I don't react when the four masked men come bursting out of the back of the van and just full body snatch me off of my bike, each of them grabbing a limb to stop me from thrashing, and then throw me into the back of the van. Now, stupidly, I remember that the first thing I yelled was that, hey, there was a pizza on that bike. and it was going to get cold and had to be delivered before the 35-minute delivery promise was up. Now, one of the three masked men who'd climb back into the rear of the van with me seemed to find this crazy hilarious and couldn't stop laughing.

And I guess the fourth man had gotten into the front passenger seat because another of the guy's open palms slapped the dividing wall, indicating to the driver that we should head off. Now, I winced as I heard the sound and felt the crunch of my bike being run over as the van drove forward. and the next thing I know, I felt a little prick on the side of my neck. One of the guys had shot me up with something, and it only took a minute or two before I was fully out. Now, after being completely blacked out, the next thing I knew, I woke up in what appeared to be a basement. It wasn't some dirty basement, though. It appeared to be at least carpeted and somewhat high quality, which for some reason I found reassuring in the moment. A couple of the men were there, too, and at no point did they...

remove their mass, which I knew from watching way too many action and spy movies might actually be a good sign. Now, they barely spoke to me, but told me that I'd be fine as long as they just shut up and stayed put and did anything I was told. I spent the next three days in that basement, and I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't hell, although the constant fear that they could turn on me and kill me in any moment, you know, it was just kind of a buzzkill. Now, I was given one meal a day and a glass of water whenever I asked for one, and I was also escorted to the bathroom in an adjoining room whenever I asked to go. Now, it was the one meal a day that had me curious, though. It was pizza. Every meal was pizza. And not just pizza, but pizza from another rival mom-and-pop pizza restaurant

a few blocks over from the joint I worked at. Now, naturally, I assumed that this was some pizza parla gang turf war, and I couldn't have been more wrong, though. Being fed pizza from the rival joint was just the kidnapper's idea of a joke, I guess. And so after three days of being vaguely threatened with death but treated bizarrely well, I was shot up again with whatever knocked me out the last time. And the next thing I know, I'm lying on the sidewalk outside of Seoul pizza. My old place of employment was now boarded up with crime scene tape covering a number of the boards. Eventually, after pulling myself together and heading into a pharmacy to grab some Tylenol, bizarrely, the kidnappers had dropped me off with $20 in my shirt pocket, despite the

fact that I was carrying no cash when they grabbed me, and then I made my way to the local police station. Then I told them everything, how I'd been grabbed, how I'd been strangely well-treated, and how sole pizza was now closed down. Now, the desk sergeant was really weird and strange when he responded, like I really had to encourage him to take the details of my story down. and eventually he did so going through the motions, but then he gave me this sort of knowing look and told me that I should count myself lucky, because the people I worked for, the lovely, elderly

couple who had been a pizza joint staple since I was a kid, were not good people at all. He then explained that there had been a police raid while I was kidnapped and wasn't that weird and lucky that I hadn't been caught in the crossfire and ended up safe. And then he asked me to pass his regards to my much older brother, who, who himself was a cop working vice at another department. Now, it was all incredibly baffling and strange, at least until I spent some time thinking about it. You see, I'm pretty sure that the guys who kidnapped me were the cops,

doing a favor for my brother, and I'd think he wanted to ensure that I wasn't wrapped up in all of that. And so instead of doing what any sensible brother would do by taking me aside and explaining things, he had his cop friends kidnapped me and scare me half to death as a way of ensuring that I didn't accidentally get shot and killed. And that's the best case scenario I can come up with anyway. Everything else results in me

coming even closer to almost dying, and that's all too hard to comprehend. My brother has sadly passed away now, so I can't ask him, but I'd like to think that he was my guardian angel that day. Otherwise, it was mere luck in the grace of God that prevented me from losing my entire life of becoming a pizza delivery boy from my favorite childhood restaurant. When I was a little kid, For reasons I won't go into, I live with my maternal grandparents around 80% of the time. Time spent with mom and her various boyfriends was not so good. But on the other hand, grandma doted over me. Grandpa was stoic, a regimental man who showed me nothing but respect, but we weren't close in the same way grandma and I were.

From an early age, I'd learn that being coddled was a bad thing. So I made sure to try my best and live up to grandpa's belief that I should be a real man, trademark. And then when he wasn't looking, which was most of the time, I'd happily let grandma baby me and treat me like her special little boy. Cookies, treats, a dollar slipped in my pocket here and there, and the kind of freedom and pleasant treatment that I most certainly did not get at home on the rare occasions when mom was ruled suitable to look after me, and also decided to make the effort to demand that her mother send me back to her. Now, thankfully, by the time I reached around 12 years old, I'm pretty sure mom had either completely given up caring or forgotten that I existed altogether.

The last time I saw her involved a screaming fight in my grandparents silently marching me away from the house. I haven't seen her spoken to my mother since in ten years and I'd be lying if I said I regret it. Everything with Grandma and Grandpa was like a dream compared to my upbringing. Like I said, as an ex-army guy, Grandpa could be a bit regimental, but I never actually got to see him act out any of his warnings. I think he just felt like he should make vague rumblings about being a straight,

father figure. Honestly, the idea of disappointing Grandpa and not growing up into a good, clean, classic man was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow by itself, but maybe that's just who I was, a very regular, normal guy. Now, one of my favorite activities with Grandma was the Christmas card run. There would be no mailing Christmas cards with Grandma, at least not to anyone within a 40-minute driving distance of our home, and Grandma and Grandpa were both extremely popular figures in the community, so they had a pretty extensive Christmas card list. Right up until my early teens, I used to get genuinely excited about doing the Christmas card rounds with Grandma in early December, and it really felt like the season had truly begun.

I loved it, right up until the time I stopped loving it anymore because we both almost died, purely, for delivering Christmas cards. It was a crisp, cold morning, the kind that you don't mind being cold because it feels like Christmases in the air. We were headed to the third delivery of the day. This year, we had so many cards to hand-deliver that we set aside that Thursday and Friday. The recipients were an elderly couple, older than Grandma and Grandpa, who they went to bingo with and occasionally got together with, along with a few other couples from that social circle. I forget their names now, bizarrely, but we'll just call them the James couple. Mr. James was one of those quiet, bald and bespeckled guys who

Grandpa had told me, almost disapprovingly, was into model trains and birdwatching. He'd never served in the army due to a bum knee. Again, something Grandpa told me, although this time he almost said it with regret for the man, like the fella had missed out in life by not having dodge bullets and nam like Grandpa had. Mrs. James was known as something of a firecracker, and more than once she'd accused newcomers of cheating at bingo and woe-betide anyone who promised her bottles of baked goods for various sales and raffles and then didn't end up delivering. And the plan was just to walk up to the front door, slide the card through the mail slot,

and then leave. Sometimes we'd knock and spend five minutes with Grandma shooting the breeze. But the Jameses weren't really small-talk material, just friendly enough to be on the Christmas list. We had just reached the front door when an ear-splitting crash rocked my world, and the door splintered outwards. I dove left. Grandma dived right, and,

It's a miracle neither of us were hit. We were both disoriented from the sound of the shot, which left us with a kind of disorienting tinnitus. And over the din we could hear Mrs. James yelling, seemingly at Mr. James about the hussy he'd been seeing. More shotgun blast could be heard from inside the house, and Mr. James was arguing in an almost infuriatingly calm voice that Mrs. James needed to be reasonable about this

and understand that men have needs and that she meant nothing to him. Now to this day I have no idea why Grandma didn't just force us to high-tail it back to the car, but she always was a bit of a gossiper. Instead, she encouraged me to crouch down, hidden behind a brick wall, and we listened as the James couple argued with each other, punctuated by shotgun blasts that didn't seem to come close to hitting their targets, but we're shooting splinters out of the wooden walls, blowing out windows and all sorts of stuff. Now how Mr. James had the absolute balls to face down his obvious,

insane wife I'll never know. All I can assume is that he was somehow 100% confident that she wouldn't shoot him. However, they had no idea anyone was outside and while grandma made me crouch there, gathering the gossip while I trembled in complete terror, another shotgun blast came bursting through the window right above my head. Now a piece of the buckshot even clipped my ear, I think, and I started screaming, thinking I've been shot. And that's what shook grandma out of her lunacy. She had to get a grandson out of there, and get me out of there. She did. And with superhuman strength, Grandma swooped me up over her shoulder and power ran toward the car, successfully managed to open the driver's side door and throw me through in one fell swoop. And then she dived in behind me,

and finally, we drove around the block from the James' house. Now these were the days before cell phones, but thankfully someone had called the cops, and suddenly screaming sirens and lights came charging down the street. Grandma said that that was our cue to leave because we had too many cards to deliver and not enough time to give a statement to the police. Besides, they never even know we were there. A long story short, I had nightmares for months afterwards about delivering Christmas cards that blew up in my hand. Mrs. James was charged with criminal damage, neglect, and mishandling of a firearm, but received a suspended sentence. This was aided by the fact that Mr. James did not press charge. and in fact the couple stayed together after all that ordeal.

Grandma and Grandpa avoided them as best as possible at Bingo, though, and did not socialize with them anymore. They never admitted to the couple that we'd been there that day, and frankly, I'm glad because I'm not sure that I could have stomached having to face Mrs. James again as she tried to apologize for almost accidentally killing us. We still continued delivering Christmas cards together for the next few years until my high school studies meant that I was a little too busy to spend as much time with grandma. But I'm happy to report that after that insane shooting incident,

Grandpa removed the James' couple from her Christmas list, and we never had to deliver to them again. I'm a long-haul trucker, proud partner in my 18-wheeler Lucy, and I have been for approximately 18 years. This story I've got to share is from my first few years on the job when I was still a little youngling, excited by everything and not yet world-wary, as they say. I love the CB radio, for one,

and I'd always have a chat with fellow drivers if anyone was acting particularly talky on a given night. These days, I barely bothered to answer it unless I'm really bored, because, frankly, most other people are boring as dog crap, and I have no interest in what they have to say. Now, back then, though, there was this other trucker who'd often be yammering away on the CB, mostly to himself.

He went by the name of, boxcar Willie, I guess probably after that singer. Now, we didn't use real names, we just had call signs. Mine was effing Ironhide, like the transformer, but also because I thought that I was a clever bastard calling myself Ironhide when I spent 80% of my working hours sitting on my butt driving that truck. Boxcar Willie isn't hugely important to this story, but he is important, so just bear with me. Now when this all began, me and Boxcar Willie were chatting away about some of the dumbest crap imaginable. Aliens, Bigfoot, Chubacobbers, all that kind of stuff. And to this day, I don't know if he was screwing with me, but Willie claimed that not only did he believe in all of this stuff,

he had evidence of it in the remote trailer he lived in when he wasn't off trucking. Occasionally another trucker would chime in to let me know that Boxcar Willie was full of dog dew and he was just winding me up. but Willie played it dead straight. He swore blind that he'd come face to face with Bigfoot one time when he'd had to stop for that hairy fella in the middle of the dark mountain road. But Christ, who knows? The point is, all this talk about Bigfoot encrypted for some reason made me hungry as hell, so when the next rest stop sign lit up,

I decided that I was just going to pull in and get myself the biggest hot dog man has ever seen, or at least the biggest one that the gas station sold. So that's exactly what I did. The dogs had clearly been cooking on that spinning grill for way longer than as healthy, and they looked about as appetizing as a shrunken head, but I didn't care. I got two of them. Piled them ass high with onions, mustard, and ketchup, and then threw in one of those crushed ice slushies, a huge one,

and fumbled my way back to my truck. I pulled out of that rest stop and proudly told Boxcar Willie and whoever else was listening that I just landed the best pair of dogs this side of the Midwest. I may have been exaggerating on that title a little, and weren't they just jealous? Now, of course, Willie had a story about this one time that he found a roadside hawk dog seller who only appeared once every ten years or some nonsense. He was entertaining, if nothing else, the biggest liar you ever met, who wasn't a politician. Now, anyway, my route is pretty straight and clear for the next hundred miles,

so I'm feeling pretty safe about munching down on one of my overcooked dogs, wrapped in a bun that was even more disappointingly stale than I'd hoped for. And that's when I heard it. A noise from behind me from inside the trailer. Of course I made the mistake of telling boxcar Willie who began to psych me up with tales of cryptids and ghouls who preyed on truckers. Naturally, this was a load of horse manure, but I was unsettled by the sound, if only because I was driving an extremely straight bit of road and I didn't like the idea that some cargo actually came loose. Now, after a while, the sound stopped, and I figured whatever it was had kind of sorted itself out.

Now, I forget what I was carrying at the time, but it was kind of a heavy electrical goods situation that couldn't really easily get damaged, so I paid it no mind and carried on driving. And then I heard some more noise from behind me. I listened real hard, but by now I'm convinced that there are footsteps in the back of the trailer. I mentioned this to Willie, who, of course, has a story of something similar, only this one gets under my side. skin and actually spooks me. I can't even remember the crap that he shared at the time. Now on top of that, I'd finished my hot dog, drank way too much of my slushy, and I needed a piss. And there was no rest stop for miles, so I pulled onto the shoulder, scanned the darkness for any vehicles. There clearly were none coming for quite a few solid minutes and got out. I took a piss first. I didn't want to pee myself in fear of whatever might be in that trailer.

And then I examined the trailer itself. It was full. fully locked and sealed in a completely satisfactory manner, really. And the idea that someone had gotten in while I was getting my gross hot dogs was really unlikely. And yet, I pulled open the back doors of the trailer. About to yell gotcha, almost as a joke to myself, and as soon as I started to pull open those doors, they came flying towards me, and I had to leap backwards to avoid getting smacked. An absolutely deranged, elderly woman came leaping out. She was wearing torn-up jeans in an absolutely filthy bra.

Nothing else. In her hand, she was gripping my exact own knife that I kept in the trailer in case I needed to slice through any of the plastic ties that kept boxes in place. And this woman, I swear to God, hissed at me and lunged at me, and with a strength way unexpected for a woman of seemingly her age. She shoved me onto my ass so hard that I had a bruised tailbone for a week, and then she saw her. swiped at me with that exacto knife, more of a warning than anything else, and disappeared around the side of the cab. Now, I'm not one to get knocked on my butt by anyone, let alone a methed-out granny, so I scrambled to my feet and headed to that cab. Instead of being long gone, the old woman was sitting in the driver's seat, munching away on my second hot dog, and a look of pure bliss is on her

face. I slammed the driver's side door shut, locked it with the fob from outside, and then called the cops. Thankfully, I did actually have service. And it took them over an hour to show up, during which time I watched as the meth head grandma ate my hot dog, finished my slushy, and then just fell asleep behind the wheel of my 18-wheeler. And when the cops finally got there, they picked her up. They couldn't get any straight answer out of her about how she'd gotten into my trailer, and she apparently couldn't even speak English at all. I checked the cargo, and she'd done no damage to anything back there, so, when the cops asked if I wanted to press any charges for assault,

I just decided against that, so long as they made sure that she got the help that she clearly needed. Plus, I had a deadline to make, and I was already a whole bunch behind schedule. As I finished my delivery, I shared that story with the CB radio, and you can best believe that Boxcar Willie had some kind of bat-crap story about a ghostly woman who matched her description. But this time, it was the first time I could see through the fact

he was clearly making it up on the fly. His silly ghost stories were nothing compared to the real fear of facing down an unhinged woman being with a sharp weapon, never knowing how they'll react. I hope the old lady got the support she needed. I try not to think about how she got into my trailer. I'm pretty sure she must have snuck in when I originally loaded the cargo, which meant that she'd been back there for a good six hours before I caught her. I'm just glad things played out the way they did, and some poor worker boy at the end station didn't end up taking a blow. laid to the throat. Now, people are strange, scary, and weird, and that's why these days I keep to myself,

and instead of spending all my time answering the CB, I learn to appreciate the solitude that being a trucker allows. No, I'm just going to admit this up front. I was an absolute a-hole in college, like the kind of smug, not quite rich, jokester, prankster who thinks he's way funnier than he is. And I'm also glad this was around 15 years ago, because a few years, you know, years later and I genuinely think that I would have tried to launch a career as one of those intolerable YouTube pranksters. You know the ones I'm talking about. Now thankfully my pranking

days extended solely to being the class clown. Then this led to a certain fraternity paying attention to me and encouraging me to pledge so I did. Honestly, I love the hazing. I was the one getting prank short, but it made me the center of attention and I was always up for going a step further than my fellow pledges. Now looking back, I probably came across like the most cringe, try-hard imaginable, and the fratbrose scouting me out must have thought that they'd lucked out with a clueless gooner like me. Now, I still wondered to this day whether if things had turned out differently, I would have been rejected from the fraternity anyway, and I kind of think that maybe I would have as the ultimate prank. And so when I was doing my initiation, it was back

when Amazon had just gotten really big, and with their meteoric rise, we'd also seen a decline in the quality of delivery drivers. It was that weird period between Amazon drivers treating your packages like a Gumba from Mario and ring doorbells only existing for the rich and famous. And so regularly, Amazon packages were just free for the taking, dumped into people's yards or left on their front doorsteps ready for some complete idiot like me to come along and swipe them and then inevitably trash the contents unless it was something really good, which it never was. Now, I'm not a must have stolen upwards of 15 packages from poor, stupid Amazon customers. Now, one time I got a box of lingerie and another time there was this weiner pump,

and those are literally the only two remotely interesting things I stole. Mostly I just took people's vitamins, a dog bowl, a little plush toy, and some exercise equipment and other assorted stuff. And then one day, I saw it. A large tantalizing package sitting on a doorstep just there for the taking. It had to be something good, like a microwave oven or a custom kitchen delivery. It just had to be, and I knew it. I could feel it in my bones, so I had my idiot cameraman, another pledge,

film me creeping up to do a crab walk and a hoodie in jeans like I was some type of T-Moo eyedubs. And then I grasped the package with both hands and yanked it backwards. It exploded. And I don't mean one of those cute glitter bombs that they use now. I mean, it literally exploded. It burned my face and scorched my hoodie, the polyester, right to my skin. No, I was screaming and disoriented in an absolute agony. My cameraman, the coward that he was, had already shrieked and ran away.

And then they came, leaping out of the bushes, a group of masked men waiting for me to try to steal that package. I was down for the count, suffering from what felt like third-degree burns, but realistically were probably only first degree. They felt worse, though, as the masked men started kicking and punching me. They were yelling at me for being a thief, a scum, a criminal. They said I was everything wrong with America, that it was ruining the fabric of this goddamn country, all because I tried to steal an Amazon package as part of a fraternity prank. And you know what? I can't disagree with them. I was a prick, and I deserved a kicking, and I can't say I deserved the shattered eye socket or the permanent limp or the shattered arm that required a metal rod to hold it together, and maybe that

punishment was a bit extreme. But at the time, I did convince myself that I deserved it. And the paramedics were called by a neighbor, obviously, long after the masked men had disappeared. But I told them I was jumped by a gang of young people from arrival of college, and no, I had no idea who they were, and I preferred that they didn't pursue the crime if possible. And the cops honestly seemed all too happy to oblige. Less work. less paperwork, I guess. I really did convince myself that I had it coming, and maybe I was right. Maybe I did.

But here's the really weird part, though. I went back to that house months later, and I wasn't sure if I'd approach or not, but I decided to just watch for my car for a while. Maybe it had new owners. Maybe this wasn't who I tried to steal the package from. But the people living in the house now were a young family with two young kids. None of them seemed like the type to be involved in a violent assault. And so to this day, I don't know if I was targeted by someone related to the household or a group of violent vigilantes who were going after people like me.

Now, the latter idea is kind of terrifying because it kind of makes me wonder. What if they decided that I haven't changed my ways enough and come after me again? Now, I've tried my best. I've tried to be a clean living boy and one thing's for sure. I did not pursue joining that fraternity after all. And a regular dorm room and weekly chess club is all the excitement I want in my life. Thank you very much. So something absolutely insane happened to me the other day, and I don't know who else to tell other than the cops, obviously, which I haven't done, and I hope you'll understand why.

It was like 10 p.m. and I was just hanging out at home alone. My girlfriend was studying, so she wasn't over that night, and I heard a crash from outside and just kind of dismissed it as being the usual neighborhood crap. And then there was a knock at the door. I was a bit unsettled, obviously. I don't live in the safest neighborhood in the world. And so I look through the peephole and there's a pizza delivery guy standing there wearing what is clearly the uniform of a very famous pizza delivery brand. I can see over his shoulder that he has a branded delivery van as well, so, okay, cool, seems pretty safe. But I didn't order pizza. Maybe my girlfriend did as a sort of treat, so I opened the door to the guy and begin to explain to him that I didn't order that myself. Was there maybe some kind of note? Was it definitely the right address, etc.? Now, the guy just looks at me, removes the hot pizza from his bag, and then hurls the entire pie straight in my face.

Now, it would have been comical if not for the fact it was searing hot. There was melted lava cheese running down my face, and I was suddenly freaking out in fight or flight mode due to the unexpected sudden assault. And I tried to mumble what the F through the pizza that's now dripping off my face and reach up to try and wipe the hot cheese out of my eyes. and that's when the delivery driver aims a swift, hefty kick straight between my legs, kicking me square in the nuts. Naturally, I doubled over in absolute agony, which at least had the bonus effect of causing any remnant pizza to droop off my face, and I'm just there gasping for air,

gripping the side of the door suddenly convinced that this lunatic driver as some kind of pizza-based serial killer is going to plunge a knife deep into my chest. Now, I tried to mumble and ask what the hell was. was going on, and then I distinctly and clearly hear this pizza guy, who I swear to God, sounds like that acne-ridden teen from The Simpsons go, this is for my mother, you scum-suck, psycho. I'm just absolutely floored. I have no idea who this guy is or who his mother is or what I've done to her.

Possibilities start running through my head, but I barely have time to consider them when he sort of croaks and squeaks and then says, oh, I'm so sorry. I've come to this wrong address. I'm so sorry. I managed to look up through tears of pain to see him run through my yard and leap into his very clearly branded pizza delivery car. And then he drives away at full speed. And that's when I realized that the crash I heard from earlier was this delivery psycho driving over my mailbox. And so I went inside and cleaned myself up and thankfully realized that I haven't suffered any serious damage from the scalding pizza to my face. And so naturally the first thing I do is call up my local pizza place that had that name and ask them if they had a delivery driver in the area.

Apparently they'd have been expecting my call because the girl in the other end of the line, who sounds like a pretty young person herself, suddenly starts begging me not to call the cops and apologizing over and over saying that if I knew the full story, I'd understand. Now I asked the girl to tell me the full story and she just said she can't. But if I promise not to call the cops, my next three pizzas will be free, and then I can order another free pizza every six months. And I genuinely weighed the option. I mean, it would be insane to take them up on that offer, right? But I'm a broke college student at the time.

No harm was done. I have a funny story to tell friends, and I'm getting multiple free pizzas out of this deal. Plus, if someone has screwed with my mom in the way that was serious enough to cause this guy to act like this, I guess I can probably sympathize. And so I didn't call the cops and I took them up on the offer of the free pizzas. The first one arrived tonight. Do you think I did the right thing? I guess I'm just kind of easily bought. This happened to my dad back in the 1960s and he's given me permission to share it with you. He worked as a paper boy for quite a few years back in the days when kids made a decent living hurling papers from their bikes as they cycle past. Dad, however, went that extra

They actually stopped at every house and gently placed the paper on the front stoop. It made him a real popular paperboy, and come Christmas time, he'd often find a little thank you card and a tip pinned to the door of some of his deliveries. Now, one woman took a real shine to him, I guess, a real shine, as it was around February and for the first time ever, this old woman was waiting on the porch for him. She invited him in for a drink and a vague insinuation that there would be a financial reward following that, i.e. a tip. And so Dad, the naive little kid he was, followed the old woman into her house and drank a drink with her. Now, the next thing he knows, he's suddenly waking up tied

to a dining room chair, and the old woman is cavorting in front of him, naked as the day she was born, rambling about how she'd been craving a man's touch. Of course, Dad's like eight years old at this point and totally horrified by everything that's going on. Thankfully, Also being an eight-year-old, he's able to squeeze his way out of the pathetic knots that this perverted old hag has tied around him. And so screaming bloody murder, Dad manages to pull himself free from the naked old woman's dining chair, and then basically fling himself from the house, leap onto his bike, and catapult himself through town back to the grocery store that he worked for. And when he got there, the owner took him aside and a weird turn of events offered him $10, a hell of a lot of money back. then to keep quiet about the whole ordeal.

Now, he promised he wouldn't have to deliver papers to that old woman again, as long as he kept quiet and accepted the money. Of course, dad being the dumb eight-year-old, he just took the deal without a moment's hesitation. It's become something of a family legend now, and the woman passed away not long after, and we never did find out the cause, motive, or twist behind any of it. We have no idea why she decided my dad would be the perfect male touch for her. and frankly, none of us wanted to know. It's just one of those things.

There are weird people out there. Be careful, especially of strange old women. 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.