The Lets Read Podcast - 36: Episode 034 | Jogging & Glitch In The Matrix Stories | 27 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

Welcome to the thirty fourth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Crazy Neighbors, Jogging & Glitch In The Matrix experiences.  HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON- ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music: Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvrqVSJE8E PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca I'm a 23 year old male and this is my first apartment. It's actually a duplex but the neighbors on the back side seem nice and nobody in the community ever had any issues with them. I moved in with my best friend over a year ago and everything seemed great. I spent many nights here with him before I moved in and I never had a problem. The neighbors seemed nice and the neighborhood as a whole isn't too bad. We have your standard crackheads that stroll up and down the road but nothing too bad.

Before I moved in I made sure I introduced myself to the neighbors and asked them if they ever had any problems to which they assured me they have not. My roommate is a marine and he was deployed to Afghanistan shortly after I moved in. The first month of me living here by myself was great. It was quiet and calm and that was something I never really had at my parents house. I have five siblings that were always over there with their family so it was always loud. Needless to say I was enjoying myself and my new independence. After the first month of my roommate being gone I noticed that my neighbors in the back side of the duplex, we'll call them Joe and Susan, started to get into arguments a lot. They were usually over within a couple of minutes so I never really paid any attention to it. Over time, a couple of minutes turned into an hour and then two hours

and then all night. The yelling got louder and I could hear things being thrown around and broken all the time. It sounded like they were constantly moving furniture and smashing glass. I was annoyed by this and debated on calling the police but I decided against it because I doubted anything would be done about it. My sleep schedule started to get worse over time and I would constantly wake up covered in sweat and paranoid that someone was watching me. I usually have one to two sleep paralysis episodes a week so I just attributed it to that and thought it was just getting worse. Six months into my roommate's deployment Susan started to kick Joe out almost every week.

He would pack his things and get into his car and drive away screaming at her the whole time. When Susan would leave for work she worked nights. I would oftentimes hear him come back and slam more things around and leave before she got home. Sometimes though Joe would come back and move furniture or what sounded like that at least and I would never hear him leave. Susan would come home and I wouldn't hear any fighting or any more noise. It was often on like this for several months before the first major incident happened. It was 3am and I snapped out of sleep and a cold sweat. I could hear screaming and glass breaking from Joe and Susan's side of the complex. They were at it again. I peered through my blinds in my bedroom just in time to see Joe throw a TV

through their side door. I quickly called 911 and my landlord to explain the situation. Both the cops and the landlord showed up at around the same time. My landlord, Ken, asked me what happened so I gave him the past 5 months history of their fights and the noises I've been dealing with. The cops arrested Joe and Ken told Susan that if Joe came back he would evict them both. I'm sure you can guess that Joe didn't move out. He bonded out the next day and immediately came back and pounded on my front door. I opened it to see what he wanted and when I opened the door I could see that he had a large kitchen knife in his hand. I anticipated this and he wasn't expecting me to be pointing my AR-15 directly at his heart. I said, Joe, did you need something? Did you put me in jail? No, the police put you in jail. All I did was call them.

You better watch yourself, kid. You have to sleep some time. At this point, I closed the door and called my my landlord Ken. I explained to him what happened and he showed up with the police 5 minutes later. I never heard Joe start his car and leave but when the police searched his side of the house they couldn't find him. They stationed an officer outside of the duplex for a week but he never showed back up. Everything was quiet for the next few months with the exception of the constant noise of what I thought was furniture moving around. I didn't see him or hear him arguing and I thought my life was going back to normal. The only thing wrong now was me constantly waking

up covered in sweat and my sleep paralysis. Let me explain what it's like to those of you who have never had sleep paralysis. You wake up and you cannot move a muscle. Your mind is awake but your body isn't. It's common to hallucinate crazy things almost as if you're dreaming so when I would wake up every night unable to move, covered in sweat and seeing the same dark figure standing at the foot of my bed, I just assumed it was my sleep paralysis and that it wasn't real. I assumed that until the day my roommate got back. It was around 2am when my roommate heard the same furniture moving noises I described to him. Having just gotten back from an

active combat zone, he wasn't taking any chances. He grabbed his service weapon and sidearm and proceeded to clear the house. Every room was cleared except for my room. My bedroom door doesn't have a lock on it so he opened the door and turned on the light and that's when the gunshot woke me up. When I came to my senses my roommate was standing over Joe screaming at him to stay on the ground and he was telling me to call the police. I didn't understand the full gravity of the situation until after Joe was placed in an ambulance and the police sat me and my roommate down to figure out what happened. Apparently my roommate was sitting on the couch in the living room when he heard movement coming from the ceiling. Assuming it was an animal he

didn't really pay attention to it. That was until we heard something hit the ground in one of the back rooms. After he opened my bedroom door he saw Joe standing over my bed with a knife. The same knife he pulled on me earlier in the year. My roommate didn't hesitate and placed a shot in Joe's right shoulder. I was not aware that there was a crawl space to the attic in my closet. When the police crawled up there, my blood ran ice cold. I could hear it. What I thought was moving furniture was actually Joe in the attic crawling to my side of the complex.

Apparently that's where he hid when his wife would kick him out and I would never actually see him leave. That's where he hid when the police were looking for him. And then it occurred to me that I was having the same hallucination of a man at the foot of my bed almost every single night. He was watching me while I slept and could have taken my life whenever he wanted. The case is still active. I've changed names and left out a lot of details so I don't compromise the case but since he's been in custody, I have yet to have that hallucination of a man

standing at the edge of my bed. I am a male, a single child and at the time this happened I was 9 or 10 years old. I was a tall but out of shape kid, not overweight though. Smart, imaginative, but very shy and with a tendency to be distrustful of others and lie due to what I later discovered was my dad gaslighting me all my life. This happened when me and my parents were traveling in Spain. We had visited family, I'm half Spanish, in Barcelona a week earlier and we're now in a city called Tarragona, staying in an amusement park and resort called Port Adventura. At the

end of our second to last night there, we stayed in the park until nightfall. The park was closing later as they were having a light show at the lake by the Mediterranean area. The park was themed around different exotic areas of the world. We weren't going to stay to see it, we were all too tired. Before leaving my mom needed to go to the information center to confirm if all the items we had purchased during our day had been shipped to our room as we were checking out the next morning. So my dad was sitting at some chairs to wait while my mom and I stood in line. I needed to go to the bathroom and figure that since there was no rush at the moment I'd ask and go now and my mom said yes. I asked if I could go alone as I felt embarrassed

to take my dad along and my relationship with him had begun to deteriorate by then. She thought for a second and said yes but make sure to be careful. Not that she was worried I'd get lost, I had a copy of the map. I went on my way, walking out of the dark square where the building was and saw on the map the closest bathroom was in the Mediterranean area where the show was set to begin in a few minutes. I sighed, frustrated to have to walk all the way over there. When I made the turn from the square to the lakeside path that circled around the lake I was met with a large crowd of people blocking pretty much all the path. Even more frustrated

I prepared my perdona mise as I pushed and shoved through to the bathrooms, about halfway down the street. Once inside, not much seemed off at first. Lots of little kids with their parents, a group of men in what looks to be their late twenties messing around near the hand dryer and a man at the last urinal in his thirties, if I had to guess, staring at me. Or at least it looked like he was for a second. Looking at him instantly made me uncomfortable. He looked out of place, wearing a grey hoodie with the hood up, old worn out jeans and what looked to be leather military looking boots. He also seemed to be alone and alert. Body was very still, head slightly to the side but not moving, eyes darting around the room occasionally staring someone down. Not the kind of person you'd expect in an amusement

park. You look more like some creeper you find late at night in the woods. As I walked to the stalls, all of them were full except the last one right across from this guy. Perfect, just my luck. As I walked toward the stall I felt his stare lock on me, looked in his direction and saw him looking at me. I felt as if though I was being sized up and quickly ran into the stall and locked it. As I was doing my business I watched hisots threw the gap under the door. He wasn't leaving. I convinced myself he just really needed to go, but it again felt off. I had been sitting, doing exactly what you'd expect for two or three minutes. It doesn't take any guy that long to relieve himself at a urinal.

I started becoming really nervous. After I was done, I didn't flush until I was opening the door. I wanted to get out as quickly and quietly as possible as I immediately turned and walked towards the sinks. I saw a movement in my peripheral vision and instinctively stepped to the side. I glanced back and this creep was looking at me. With a frustrated look and a glare, Hand reached out. He tried to grab me. My entire body felt cold as I turned and walked as fast as possible out of the bathrooms, not even bothering to wash my hands. Outside, the crowd had grown larger as music started to build up and an announcer spoke. The show was beginning and everyone was looking at the lake.

Despite what had just happened I was awed for a few seconds. Enormous fountains had projections on the mist they created showing a giant head speaking. I broke out of my trance when I felt the urge to look behind me and to the shock of absolutely nobody but myself the creeper was walking out of the bathroom, cold stare locked on me. He was fiddling with his back pocket, taking something out and I was absolutely determined not to find out what it was. As I turned to run, I was met with a huge crowd of people. There was no way I was going to be able to run through the mass and the music and narration covered any attempts to try and get their attention. The guy was getting way too close. Adrenaline overpowered my shyness and I just pushed the people in front of me apart and darted into the crowd.

I pushed through as fast as I could, desperately looking for a path with less people back to the empty street, back to the plaza. Every time I glanced back he was right behind me following through the same openings I made. After what felt like an eternity of pushing and shoving to get away from this man, I finally saw the end of the crowd and burst out into a full sprint as soon as I was out. I could hear stomping behind me as I ran. Considering I was out of shape, asthmatic and recovering from anemia, needless to say he was gaining on me rapidly. The more I ran the dizzier I felt. The turn back to the square in front of me spinning, the maintenance gate at the end of

the alleyway appearing to open as I heard the man behind me shouting in a language I did not know. No, it was opening. I saw another man, similarly dressed, was coming out of the dark maintenance gate running at me. I felt a spark through my body and time seemed to slow down. With a movement I can only describe as a near sliding drift, I made the sharpest turn of my life right next to a wall into the square as I heard shouting behind me and a hand hit my coat, barely missing a grab on my hood. I was crying desperately. I ran right into the info center and just about tackled my mom's leg. What are you doing? You almost knocked me over, she said with a stern voice. She saw I was crying and immediately lightened the tone she asked what was wrong but i was just huffing and barely breathing trying to catch my breath

she told me to go talk to my dad as the lady at the desk was talking to her that moment and she'd come talk to me as soon as she was done i sat next to my dad and told him everything but he completely brushed it off saying I'd just imagined it and to stop lying and overreacting at nothing. I just sat and sobbed in silence as he went back to reading some book he'd bought. On the tram back to the hotel I tried telling my mom what had happened but my dad cut me off and said I was overreacting at my imagination that I must have just been spooked and imagined someone chasing me. My mom believed me, again gaslighted and conditioned all our lives and the subject was completely dropped. My relationship with my father and our

family dynamic has improved but everything I bring up gets brushed off as me just being an imaginative lying little kid and I was never in danger. I don't care what they think, I remember it too vividly to ever forget. Even today whenever I'm in a crowd I can't help but search for the most clear path to run through and tend to avoid crowded loud places whenever possible. It just goes to show you when it comes to abductions, crowds can be just as dangerous as deserted dark areas. The distracted sea of people and loud noises can mask many terrible things. I guess the best place to start would be some backstory about my great-grandfather. Growing up, my family had told me many stories about the man. The most important was that he built the apartment building I live in,

along with the two houses on either side of the building that my family also lived in when I was a kid and still do today. Growing it up, it felt like being in a small community. This led to us kids asking many questions about our family history. So here goes. In 1954, my great-grandfather Murphy built this building as a motel. He named it Ace Motel. How he acquired the land is an interesting story. I never wanted to believe this as a kid, but everyone always told me he had won it in a poker game. Maybe that is where the inspiration for the name came from. A little bit of background about my grandparents.

My great-grandmother was what you call a stenographer for a man by the name of Mr. Ayers. He was the owner of the company called L.S. Ayers, that my father described as being the Macy's of the 50s. For any of you that don't know what a stenographer is, it is a person who writes in a type of shorthand to quickly get down large amounts of information while possibly two or more people are speaking to each other. This and a number of other things led to my great-grandparents being well known and respected in their community. In the many years they were alive, many had even worked for my grandparents in the nursing home or had relatives staying there. Being busy people that didn't have time for much, it was said you never wanted to play my grandparents in a game of cards. Because of Birth Avenue in Indianapolis where they used to live, they would host poker nights for a man by the name of John Dillinger, a mob boss through the 1930s

and 40s. After doing some research of this gentleman, I soon found out some pretty cool things. John Herbert Dillinger was a gangster during the Great American Depression. He had gotten himself into a number of shady situations with a group called the Dillinger Gang. According to stories, they had been accused of robbing around 24 banks, and as some stories go, one of these banks was right here in Indianapolis. People have since told me that they even made a couple of movies about him and that he was right up there with Bonnie and Clyde. When it came to the media and sorts around that time. but moving on to my story because of them having ties with this man and hosting card night at their house where it was told Dillinger had attended this is why you never wanted to play either of my great-grandparents in a game of cards because as many had witnessed themselves they would never

lose me and my cousins like to believe that maybe this is why he named the building Ace Motel perhaps his winning hand that granted him the deed to this property had been won with an ace who knows here is a postcard from the time period of the building my father showed me this after telling me this story fun fact about the post, the black car that is parked in the middle is my great-grandfather's car. For my great-grandfather, putting this building here made perfect sense. The road that runs in front of my house used to be the main road coming in and out of Cincinnati to Indianapolis. Shortly after the motel was built, they started construction for Interstate 74, which ran right alongside the main

road in front of the building. Ironically, many of the construction workers stayed in the motel at this time, but would later put the motel out of business due to the highway being finished. This is what led to the remodel of the building in 1963. Great-grandfather Murphy had decided to turn the residence into a nursing home and changed the name from Ace Motel to Ace Placid Nursing Home. Now, I did not have a picture of the building in 1963, but I do have one of the buildings that has always hung in my living room. This one was taken in 1996. It shows how he basically just added a wide section onto the front of the building Making a long hallway where the nurses could have walked from one end of the building to the other It also shows the red brick on the far left house that he built in 1968

That my father moved into when he was 10 with his family My dad's twin brother still lives there today Now back to the building into when he was 10 with his family. My dad's twin brother still lives there today. Now back to the building. When it was built it always had a living quarters which is where my great-grandparents lived in in the latter years where my parents stayed after my dad got the building running. During its time as a nursing home the living quarters were turned into the nursing quarters since it had a kitchen in it. Unlike the rest of the rooms in the building, which were just original motel rooms, they consisted of nothing but a big room with a large window and a single person shower.

I still use one of the original showers today. During this time a lot of my family, including my dad's sisters and nieces, worked here as nurses and helped out around the place. Growing up my dad had never really wanted anything to do with the building. He had it hard enough growing up and just wanted to pursue his dreams in electrical work rather than settle into the family business. When the building closed down in 1981, after my great grandmother was left to take care of it after Granddad Murphy passed away in 1972, Dad and a number of other things that were demanded to bring it up to code. After years of this, she finally gave in and was forced to shut down, leading into the five to six years the building was abandoned. During this time, Dad had started working at a TV and VCR repair shop in Indianapolis while he was finishing up college. But when he had left, he didn't realize how bad things were for his nephew.

After moving away, my dad's nephew Charlie came to live with his mother. Charlie hadn't been getting along with his mother Linda and was doing his best to get away from the situation. Dad had reached out to him by inviting Charlie up to the shop in the city, eventually getting Charlie and my dad's twin brother a job working there with him. The two of them had always gotten along. Dad told me many stories about them working on cars together in the garage. So from what I can grasp, they were pretty close. Even though he loved Charlie and his family my dad had always dreamed of working as an electrical technician engineer for Disney World and was even saving money up to ship himself down to Florida after he graduated. So it was a huge

shock to my father who two years after the shutdown in 81 Charlie hung himself in the abandoned nursing home in the dead of winter. Using one of the big industrial pipes for the sprinkler system in the building that great-grandmother had been demanded to put in. The family was stunned and even possibly blamed themselves for not being there more for him. Oftentimes us kids would sit and listen to my family question back and forth with each other trying to figure out why he had done it. Some say he was failing school and had wanted to join the military but his grades and attendance were poor keeping him from doing so. Another stated that he had a girlfriend around this time that his best friend ended up sleeping with and this could have played a major part in his depression, not to mention the things going

on at home. Lastly, and honestly the most chilling, which I had heard them mention more than once, was that Charlie was involved with a pretty bad bunch and that there was a good possibility one of them could have asked him to do something he didn't want to do, so to avoid doing so, he took his own life. My dad's twin brother was the one who had found him and had immediately took him down. Dad said later that the cops had yelled at him, telling my dad's brother he should have left him alone till they got there, that now this case could be even more complicated, making him the number one suspect. Frantic and furious, my uncle asked how on earth they expected him to be able to just leave him like that. It was his nephew.

Needless to say, my family was pretty appalled by the way the local authorities were addressing it. I think the weight of what had happened started to sink into my family, but mostly my father. He started to feel as though maybe he needed to care as much as our granddad had which is what led to my dad's choice to take the money he was saving up to go to Florida and bought his first tank of fuel for the building in the winter of 86. My great-grandmother passed away in 87 almost exactly a year after dad finally started to make some progress on the building. This however gave him comfort knowing she got to see him get the water and heat running before she passed away. She was able to have peace in knowing that the family was

not going to be left with a huge debt and a burden to take care of. The expression labor of love was never more a truer saying for my family. It's also interesting to add many of my family members recall seeing Charlie in different parts of the building and around the property for the years following his death but I could spend all day typing out those stories. I'm just going to leave that for another time. But Charlie's death was only the beginning for the twisted and unusual things that happened here. Perhaps a bad omen. Moving forward to about 1989 my dad had helped my friends and people of the community with turning the newly heated building that was still pretty much in shambles

into a livable rentable apartment. Some gave him money to stay in, others paid their way with labor by helping him with the hundreds of things that needed to be done to this place. There were holes in the ceiling, no carpet or any type of flooring at all in large partitions of the building. The only places that were even remotely livable at the time were the rooms that had been originally motel rooms to the building, to which Dad fixed up nice enough for himself and a few people to stay in. Dad tells me stories

about how they would take anything that worked as far as appliances just so that they could try and fix them and have working appliances for the apartments. Taking old used sections of carpet and laying them down to at least have some type of carpet on the floor. So, to see how this building looks today, it's so crazy to think how horrible the start was for him. Around this time, my father had rented to a man named Bob, who was close friends with another gentleman named Randy, but everyone called him Rudy. They rented the very end apartment on the right-hand side of the building if you are looking at the picture,

and stayed there for quite some time until this unusual fall day in 89. For this next part of the story, I'm going to start with one of my aunt's perspectives of this event, since it was what she returned home to that night after work. Heading home from work my aunt was driving down the road that ran right in front of the apartment building. As she got close to the home she started to see the red and blue lights from cop cars and ambulances ahead. Starting to panic my aunt raced into the parking lot trying to get past all the cop cars to the driveway of the house

on the left, desperately worried about her newborn twin girls inside. My twin cousin that I grew up with were very premature due to my aunt being almost 40 when she got pregnant, the newborn twins had been hooked up to machines at home after they returned from the hospital. So this gave good reason for why my aunt was so panicked that something may have happened to them. But after further examination, it was indeed not her girls who were in trouble. All around the parking lot parked cop cars and ambulances, complete chaos with people standing outside wondering what's going on. From what can be seen, the center of attention was the end apartment, where Bob and Rudy had been staying. Walking into the door of the last apartment the scene that was displayed before everyone's eyes was

nothing less than described as a horror story. My father, covered in blood, sat on the floor next to Rudy, laying flat on the ground with a giant hole in his head and a gun in one of his hands. Dad, the brave kind-hearted man he is, had tried to save his life by wrapping his hand and trying to stop him from bleeding to death, but there was no saving him. There were pieces of his skull and brain all over the wall behind them and the blood had poured out all over the carpet. Dad told me it was one of the most horrible things he had ever seen, but he had learned his lesson from when Charlie had hung himself. Made sure not to touch the gun that lay in Rudy's hands, making it obvious what had happened. Police did their best to help dad clean up some of the mess

after taking his body away. There was still so much dad had to do before it ever looked like it had never happened. Dad said after Rudy's death he had to talk to Bob about what had happened and dad couldn't believe what he heard. Bob said that for the last few weeks Rudy had been acting kind of strange. Rudy was known for being kind of a radical guy so what was next in the story was not so unbelievable to most of his fellow friends and neighbors. He said that Rudy had been sitting across from him in the kitchen of the apartment rambling on about something before he had asked Bob if he wanted to play a game of Russian roulette. Rudy had done this party trick before. Most always thought it was just him being cool or trying to act cool so they just kind of went

along with it when the trigger would click and nothing would happen. They had always assumed that the chambers were really just empty. It was just like Rudy to just want to rattle with the thought of life and death in his head. Bob said he did what he always did, spun the gun and of course it landed on him. He held the gun up to his head and what happened next, Bob said he will never forget. He pulled the trigger, the loaded sound of the gun rang out as Bob watched his best friend's head fly back and put him on the floor. Dad said Bob was depressed for weeks. Out of sympathy he understood as it became hard for him to pay my father rent as the months went on. So fast forward a little bit to about 1990 when my father met my lovely mother and had been living in the original living

quarters for a while as dad was still working on dividing the large middle portion of the building into separate apartments. So where my parents bedroom was positioned was connected to a larger section of the building where there was access to other motel rooms some of my dad's friends had been sleeping in. One night as my parents are passed out in their bed after a little fun together my mother was snuggled up next to my exhausted father, who had been working tirelessly at the repair shop that day and later fixing stuff up at the building when he returned home. As my mother lay there in the darkness of their small bedroom fast

asleep, she starts to feel something reach up and touch her leg from the side of the bed. Frozen for a moment, my mother begins to panic, instantly knowing that this hand she was feeling is not her husband's. Freaking out she stands up flying out of bed and slams the bedroom door shut before proceeding to flip the bedroom light on. Screaming with panic in her voice she shouts for my father to wake up. Too scared to look under the bed for herself to see what had touched her. My father jolted awake by the sudden commotion going on in their bedroom. After a moment, finally piecing together what my mother was shouting about, he went to look under

the bed and to their horror, their buddy Clifford's son crawled out from underneath their bed. Now, this next part made me laugh so hard. For a second, I thought my parents were messing with me, but mom said that this kid was now standing there in the middle of their bedroom in a ninja suit. I'm sitting here dying with laughter as she is telling me this. After my laughing fit, I looked at my parents and asked, why though? My dad sat there for a moment before saying he didn't know. He was only like maybe 15 and him and someone else were really into ninja stuff. My mother continues with the story a little going on to say how she remembers walking next door to my uncle's house looking for Clifford.

When she found him tired eyeyed and half-dressed and she began to tell him that his son was under her bed. He didn't believe her at first but after coming back to see his son dressed in all black from head to toe there was no denying he had been trying to test some of those ninja skills this evening. Talking for a moment I told my mother when I originally tried to recall this story one of the first things that came to mind was I wonder how cutting me off she finished my sentence for me how long he had been waiting under the bed before we noticed him laughing once again I said yeah she looked around the room nervously for a second taking a hit from her cigarette. She said,

I thought about that too. Even though my parents laugh now when they think back to this, my mother said she will never forget how horrified she had been when she noticed someone had been hiding under her bed and just from her while she slept. This next event is the last one I have before I have to get my own personal experience I've had while living here, and it's one that my sister had told me. This one is not necessarily haunted, but kind of strange to think about since it's the kind of thing that you would not be able to do today without possibly getting your whole family killed. So she told me that while we lived in the middle apartment before dad moved, used to be one big one we live in today. There was a night she can recall that she will never forget. I had just been born not too long before this happened and my crib sat in mom and dad's room across from my sister's,

which if you were to walk to each other from each room and meet in the middle, to your left would be a wide opening from the hall that led into the rest of the apartment. From there you could see the front door, along with a portion of the kitchen and the entire living room. Late one night my sister woke up to a voice coming from the front of the apartment. Hello, someone said as my sister's heart jumped out of her chest. Creeping out of her door and down the hall to the opening to peek out and look over at the front door. Only to see a strange man standing in front of the desk

my father had sitting just inside the door as he opened it. He did this since from the outside, the middle apartment still kind of looked like a main entrance. Staring out, heart pounding, my sister watched as the man reached for the bell ring phone that sat on top of the desk she thought he must have gotten stranded on the highway and saw the neon sign out front that says ace apartments and decided to see if there was anyone here to ask for help still watching my sister step back further into the darkness as she saw my dad emerge from his bedroom obviously also hearing this man come in. Calm as can be he asked the man who he is and if he needs any help and proceeds to put on a pot of coffee for him and the stranger obviously uninterested now and seeing that

she had nothing to worry about my sister stepped back into her room and went to sleep. But it is crazy to think about how my dad had felt so comfortable that he just left the doors unlocked and would welcome people in. We still leave our doors unlocked today. Kind of more to do with the fact that we all work different hours. But also because still today none of us feel threatened by anything. To feel the need to lock our doors though we don't just openly invite strangers into our house anymore. Another small incident that had happened that my sister reminded me while I was writing this was a story that took place shortly after my dad had

moved me, my mom and my sister into the apartment that we still live in today. So one day when my sister was home alone from school this big truck broke down right outside the building on the highway just on the other side of the fence. Why this was so scary for my sister though was because she saw the people emerging from this truck she noticed that were circus performers. Going on she said that there was a bearded lady, two midgets and this really creepy tall guy. Not wanting to open the door, my sister began to freak out, completely spooked by this group of people walking around. Making matters worse, she said that some of the people even proceeded to

look through the cracks in the blinds, saying, I see you there, trying to get her to open the door. Scared, my sister ran out the back slide glass door over to our neighbor's son's window frantically telling him to let her in, that there were crazy circus people walking around the building. Soon after telling his father, Dustin's dad went to check, come to find out that they needed help obtaining some tools and that they could fix the flat on their car. But nevertheless, my sister was scared out of her mind and when they were all coming up to the windows looking at her trying to get her attention. Sometimes the things that have happened here just kind of blow my mind. It all started in the summer of 2018. I had just graduated and had gotten exceedingly bored with my life.

I thought it would be a good idea to download Kik to kill some time and make friends. Before long, I discovered the group chat feature. I joined a few groups and all was well until someone messaged one of my groups asking for help. We'll call this person Izzy. I wanted to make sure that they were okay so I sent them a private message. They asked for my help with their diagnosed borderline personality disorder and I told them that they should seek a nearby mental health professional before getting wrong advice on the internet and how that can be dangerous in regards to mental illness considering there are entire communities dedicated to self-diagnosis and anti-recovery.

They proceeded to call me rude and an idiot along with a couple of more half-baked names in an attempt to guilt me into catering to their wants and I continued to say no. They then told me they'd find me and jump me, etc, etc. I brought this conversation to the attention of a group administrator and Izzy was removed from the group. All done, right? No. A couple of days went by and Izzy started messaging me asking all sorts of personal questions. Unbeknownst to him, all of the information I've given him is grotesquely false, all the while feeding me information on who he is. As the days go along it becomes clear that they have a deluded attraction to me. They began sending me lewd photos of other women and very questionable

photos of young girls. I proceeded to block this person thinking that'd be the end of it. A month or so passes and I'm just chatting about makeup in one of the group chats when one of the recently joined members starts calling me terrible names, saying they were going to do even worse things to me. Obviously they were removed but I received a direct message from them. They were sending photos of me from my Instagram that I hadn't advertised to the girls in chat or anyone else on kick. I immediately knew it was Izzy from the way they spoke and when I called them out on it and asked how they found my Instagram. They sent me a poorly photoshopped

nude of me with my head on some star's body. They threatened to send it to everyone on my Facebook friends list unless I sent them photos of my feet for their pleasure. Joke's on Izzy, my friends list can't be viewed by anyone other than myself. I declined, blocked, and created a new account so perhaps they couldn't contact me again. This effort provided to be fruitless and they kept fining account after account and sending poorly made photos as well as more very inappropriate photos of other girls and photos from my Instagram. The police couldn't do anything because Izzy is a 19 or 20 something male from Brampton, Ontario in Canada. They aren't in our jurisdiction and they've not shown up and hurt me so they're not deemed a real threat despite the numerous threats to do terrible things to me.

By this point I had several friends threatening Izzy in an attempt to help me and even several retired officers trying to scare him off. I sent him screenshots to his family members and friends lists. Nothing came of that. I called his campus security and told them what was happening but they couldn't help me. I stopped eating and began pulling out my eyelashes because I was so petrified of this person finding me. They seemed to come after me every single time they felt a certain urge of any kind. They made multitudes of fake photos of me and saved a ton of photos of me from my Instagram to their phone. They even told other people we were in love and he needed to have me or he would end himself, which frankly at that point I almost wish he would because then he couldn't bother me anymore. Finally,

my boyfriend and I changed our Instagram usernames so we could potentially lose Izzy on our social media trail and I told Izzy every bit of information I know about him, including his full name, all of his social media accounts, student ID number, the campus he attends, his sister's names, their places of work, where they attend church and photos of all of them. I haven't heard anything in a month and I finally deactivated my kick account. This horror went on for nine months. Nine months of Izzy's saying he loves me and he wants me and he wants to do incredibly terrible things to me. Nine months of attempted threats and

manipulation. Nine months of threats against myself, my friends and my boyfriend who I didn't tell any of this in depth to so he wouldn't get involved and become a target. I finally concluded that Izzy may have erotomania and maybe sociopathy in addition to his BPD. I no longer go anywhere unarmed. I don't even walk 25 feet to the trash can without my knife. If a car makes more than one turn in the same direction as me I start to panic. I have folders upon folders of information and screenshots from the events in case he does decide to attack me and one of us ends up dead. I want everyone to hear this story so if you know Izzy in real life, you can help him get help. He is dangerous and he will end up hurting someone.

If you do use sites like Kik do not reveal any personal identifying information. It's not safe and you really don't want a cyber stalker on your hands. My grandma lived on a huge farm when I was a little kid and I loved going to stay with her as I love animals and a farm as any little kid's dreamland. She owned a lot of land and my brother and I were allowed to go anywhere we wanted as long as we stayed on the property and came back before dark. One day we decided to follow a creek all the way to its end, which resulted in us crossing the fence and leaving my grandma's property. We soon came across an old run-down cabin and for some reason we decided to go inside. Young curiosity, I guess. As we stepped inside, it was as if we walked into a totally different cabin. From the outside it was very old and almost falling apart.

But on the inside it was as if a family lived here. There were dishes on the table as if they had just had dinner and it actually smelled like spaghetti. The beds were all made up perfectly. The furniture was outdated but still in good condition. The floor and the wallpaper in good condition. No dust or cobwebs, no dirt or damp smell. It was warm. It was as if the family left in a hurry and left all of their belongings behind,

and definitely not that long ago. We ran all the way back to my grandma's house excited to tell her about our new discovery. After some good scolding after leaving the property and a game of 20 questions my grandma wanted to see this place for herself because her closest neighbor wasn't even near the area we were describing to her. We all three set off to find the cabin. We followed the creek as we had done before, passed the fence, went all the way out to find the cabin we followed the creek as we had done before past the fence went all the way out to where the cabin was except this time there was no cabin it was gone we looked for an hour trying to find it and couldn't my grandma finally decided it was time to go back she was pretty mad at us for leaving the property but

she never discredited our claims of seeing this cabin. I look back on it and lots of weird things happen on the farm. I just never realized it until I was older. The supernatural is also very drawn to my grandma and brother. They both have many paranormal experiences that I have personally seen. They just weren't happening to me. A bit of background. I used to live on the second floor of a four-story building in my childhood. The place used to be a jewelry store owned by my grandfather and by my great-grandfather before him. Our family had two such stores with similar construction and we also lived in the upper floors. This particular building is the larger one. This wasn't in the US so the construction

is wonky. The first floor was the storefront with a set of stairs behind a door leading down to a dark basement where we stored stuff. The front door has a huge and heavy steel shutter with a lock on it that rolls down from above and seals off the front of the building. The machine to open it was constantly broke so we attached a chain to the rolling mechanism on the side of the shutters so that it could be manually opened once unlocked. There is a chain inside and outside attached to the shutter. The second floor contains the kitchen and a Japanese style bedroom built with aromatic hinoki wood complete with a set of sliding doors and all. It had antique no-masks hanging on one wall and a bathroom inside. Everybody called this the Japanese room. My great-grandfather was a

Japanese sailor and a successful cloth merchant and had commissioned the room to be built shortly before his death. Geckos often came into the bathroom inside the Japanese room from the window there but I liked them and didn't mind having them around. Sometimes I could hear the geckos chirping at night. Coming out from the Japanese room, there is a wooden step with sliding wooden panels underneath where we stored slippers and shoes. The Japanese room is directly across from the kitchen. At the back of the kitchen was a door leading to a balcony from which we could view our enclosed yard. Next to the balcony door is a flight of stairs leading up to the third floor. The third floor has three bedrooms and a large bathroom.

The fourth floor housed our ancestral shrine and a storage area with another balcony and a door which we sometimes opened to air out the shrine room. The shrine room was lined with photos of our deceased ancestors and had a big censer for incense atop a huge wooden table set designed for this purpose. The table space not taken up by the censer was topped with candles, ceremonial offerings, incense trays, accordion folded sutras, wooden drums, scrolls, and other shrine stuff. Incense sticks were often burning there before our ancestors' stoic faces, the long wisps of smoke wafting from the ashen tips of the red incense sticks waving like white ribbons in the still air. I had never seen anyone empty the censer. The huge vessel contained a vast quantity of ash from countless incense sticks

burned over an untold number of years. When I was around five years old, I was in the Japanese room with my grandma and my dog since we all slept together in that room. I woke up in the middle of the night to get some water from the kitchen. I simply slid open the door and walked out to the kitchen like usual but noticed it was unusually dark. The screen over the balcony door was pulled down explaining the darkness. I thought I saw a lingering smoke crawling about the ceiling but I didn't think much of it since we often burn incense in the shrine room and my uncle and grandfather all smoked. I figured maybe someone used the balcony for a smoke break or the shrine room smoke came down or something.

Not a very healthy environment for me since I was prematurely born and was constantly having nosebleeds and coughs from all of the smoke but I didn't know that it was so bad until years later. I was also young and stupid and there was no way smoke could travel down two floors from the shrine room since the shrine room's doors were always closed when the room was not in use and that's not how smoke works. If the room even produced remotely close to the amount of smoke that would be needed for it to travel two stories down, there surely would have been a fire and a smell, but there wasn't. The smoke on the ceiling swirled about and I spent a second or two looking

at it, confirming there was indeed smoke before I flicked on the ceiling light. When the light came on, I could no longer see the smoke. I attributedicked on the ceiling light. When the light came on, I could no longer see the smoke. I attributed this to the glare of the ceiling lights. I drank some water, set the glass on the counter and turned off the light, preparing to go back to the Japanese room, back to sleep. I immediately noticed now there was no smoke along the ceiling anymore which I immediately found super strange. It had been there less than a minute ago. Could a draft or something have blown it away that quickly? I turned to see if the balcony door was partially open. It wasn't. I then turned left to see if the smoke was coming down from upstairs. From the ceiling where the stairs came down I

began to see smoke drifting down slowly from the staircase to the second floor. I immediately froze in terror since this time the smoke was behaving strangely. Instead of drifting freely through the air like normal smoke it clung to the back wall as it descended as though climbing down to my floor along the wall. Even as it came around the corner, I saw that it turned sharply and none of it went down to the floor or off the wall and into the air. It was as though the smoke was alive, adhering to the wall and coming toward me. I bolted through the kitchen back into the Japanese room and slid the paper screen doors closed. I don't know how I managed

to fall back asleep. The dogs didn't seem to detect anything amiss and behaved the same as always. No barks, strange stares, perked ears, nothing. I moved to the US not long afterward. During my time away from the old jewelry store, my grandfather died and everyone got split up. A portrait of my grandfather is now on the wall of the shrine room. My father now lives in the old jewelry store and the wares all got moved over to the smaller one, now owned and operated by an uncle. The first floor is now a tea room where my father's friends would gather and chat, sparsely furnished with a few bookshelves.

He is messy and who knows what got shoved down into the basement storage. When I visited, I tried to go down but it was too dark and dirty so I didn't move anything around or stay in there long. He would often let his buddies crash in the Japanese room if they needed to but the room was basically relegated to a guest room. My father used to be a gang member and he has a huge circle of mysterious friends. He is very social and constantly has people over for various odd reasons. One of my cousins, let's call her Jenny, moved into the third floor in my absence several years after I relocated to the US. Jenny had a gambling problem and couldn't afford to rent at her old apartment, so she moved into one of the spare rooms. My father lived in

the room across the hall from hers. One night, she called her good friend, let's call her Kate, to come over to pick her up to go drinking at a bar. I think this was in the 2000s when people had those primitive black and white cell phones. Kate offered to drive. Jenny thought it would take Kate about 15 minutes to arrive so she continued doing her makeup and reading her magazines and listening to her girly pop music. At the time my father wasn't home and all the other rooms in the house aside from his and Jenny's were unoccupied. It was around 8pm. About 10 minutes later Jenny heard the steel shutter over the front door being rolled up. She assumed it was my father returning home so she didn't think much of it and continued doing her makeup and messing with her clothes. A few minutes passed and nobody came upstairs.

She thought maybe my father just had to grab something real quick and left but the shutter never closed. Jenny heard the sound of Kate's car arriving outside a few minutes later. Maybe Kate bumped into my father or something on the way in and they chatted as my father was leaving or something. Either way Kate could let herself in even with the shutter down since Kate had a spare key and could open the side door. Jenny continued to do her makeup and listen to her music. At the time, my father wasn't home and all the other rooms in the house aside from his and Jenny's were unoccupied. It was around 8pm.

About 10 minutes later, Jenny heard the steel shutter over the front door being rolled up. She assumed it was my father returning home so she didn't think much of it and continued doing her makeup and messing with her clothes. A few minutes passed and nobody came upstairs. She thought maybe my father just had to grab something real quick and left. But the shutter never closed. Jenny heard the sound of Kate's car arriving outside a few minutes later. Maybe Kate bumped into my father or something on the way in and they chatted as my father was leaving or something. Either way, Kate could let herself in even with the shutter down since Kate had a spare key and could open the side door. Jenny trusted her like family and they had been good friends since elementary school.

Jenny continued to do her makeup and listen to her music, preoccupied with what she was doing. By the time she was done, easily 10 minutes had elapsed since she first heard Kate's car. She didn't hear Kate coming up and turned down her music a little trying to hear outside. After 10 minutes went by before Kate's footsteps were heard coming up to the third floor and she came upstairs to Jenny's room. Sorry, Kate said. Did you wait long? Yeah, Jenny replied. I heard your car. How come it took you so long to get upstairs? Fight with your boyfriend again or something? No, I wasn't on the phone. I left it in the car. I was planning on just coming up to

get you and then we could just get to the bar since I really want to drink. I'm glad I had one before I got here though. Kate laughed. What do you mean? Jenny asked. Did you drive drunk or something? Jenny didn't like Kate driving after drinking a lot and cabs were inexpensive to hail in their area. No, Kate responded smiling. I had a drink with the nice lady in the Japanese room. Jenny was confused. Lady? Yeah, the one living in the Japanese room downstairs. When I walked up to get you, she was in the room and called me over to introduce herself and talk to me. I mentioned we were going to the bar. The lady had a bottle of sake on the bedside table with some fancy cups and we drank some together. Kate knew of my father's tendency to always have all sorts of people over so she

didn't think much of seeing the new face. She takes good care of that room too, it looks so beautiful now, like new. Jenny instantly turned pale. Nobody is living in the Japanese room, Kate. The house is empty except for this room and the one across the hall. Upon hearing this Kate became frightened and the two girls began to shiver. Hesitantly the two went downstairs and approached the Japanese room. The paper screens were closed. When they slid open one door the room was dark and there was nobody inside. There was no sign of any lady in the room and no bottle of sake anywhere. There was no bedside table. There never was one in that room. Even the cups were gone. The room was the same aged room it had always been, not the beautiful

scene Kate had recalled in her description to Jenny. They went down to the first floor and it was just as dark as the Japanese room. The steel shutter was down. Nobody had opened it. The girls would have easily heard the loud noises of the rolling steel shutter and the impossible to hide clanging noise of it hitting the floor, even from upstairs if it got close. And only my father had the key for the steel shutter. Kate only has the side door key. Kate, wasn't the shutter up when you came in? Jenny asked. I used the side door, Kate said trailing off. The shutter was closed. Before you got here, I heard the shutter shutter open i never heard it close jenny felt patches of goosebumps surfacing on her skin white with fear the two girls went outside and jumped into kate's

car they called my father on his cell phone and he told them he had been out of town and wouldn't be back for another day even drinking at the bar couldn't ease their minds and get them to stop thinking about what had just happened. Jenny refused to return to the house that night and moved out shortly after. Kate died in a car accident a few months later, so Jenny is the only person who can recall this story. It is very memorable because Kate died on her own birthday. It's quite ill-fated, dying on the day of your birth, leaving this world in a split second when you were also brought into it through hours of hard work that very day on part of your mother,

who labored through sweat and tears to birth you and who mourns through sweat and tears when you exit the world. Jenny told me the story when she came to visit me in the US and I believed her. Although I have visited the Japanese room a couple of times over the years and even slept there as I once did years ago, I have always found it to be a comforting place with a nostalgic feeling to it. I haven't seen anything odd since my smoke encounter but the place does give off an otherworldly vibe Especially at night when I'm the only person there Cousin Jenny still refuses to go back into that building even though my father still lives there

I told Jenny about something this reminded me of about the story of Hades and Persephone And how the ancient Greeks thought that eating or drinking anything from one's captor would doom a person to return to that captor. She said nothing and just looked scared. I wondered if the lady in the Japanese room was a spirit that tricked Kate into drinking the sake. As you know, if you know this old myth, Hades convinced Persephone to eat pomegranate seeds while they were in the underworld and she was forced to return there because she had eaten there. Could entering the Japanese room, beguiled by the prospect of a chat and a drink, and actually drinking the sake,

have bound Kate to something supernatural? Was that room, for a brief moment, another realm when Kate ventured in to enjoy a drink with our mysterious guest? Was my family hiding some of that room's history from me? Was there something dark that nobody has told me about? Did the building have some sort of history or secret? Kate's deadly accident shortly after this event seems like too much of a coincidence to be natural, certainly. During many a sleepless night I have thought about this eerie tale and my own experience in that building, contemplated the nature of the Japanese room without coming up with any rational explanation. At the time, it was during a hot summer and I was 11 years old, during the killer clown epidemic in the US. One night I had woken at 1am and wanting to play on my new Google Chromebook laptop, I sneaked into our family room which

goes past our front door. Note if you enter from our front door to the right is a hallway narrowed by a bunch of unpacked boxes and furniture and you enter an even tinier hallway. To the left is where my dad sleeps and if you go right there's the towel closet, the bathroom, and me in my brother's room. I passed the front door to get to my laptop and thought I saw what looked like a man in the center of my neighborhood's cul-de-sac, standing as though like a soldier would, with a gun in what seemed to be his left hand, a long rifle. The barrel was pointed up like how soldiers stand. Thanks to the fluorescent orange lighting I couldn't really see what he looked like but it was obviously a male. He had a tall strong build

and I could tell he was a male from how big his feet looked from so far away. Terrified 11 year old me ran to grab my laptop as quietly as possible. On the way back curiosity took the better of me. I walked up to the front door and peeked out through the windows and the guy looked like he was crouched behind a garbage can and he looked like he was staring straight at me. I held back a scream as I ran into my room and shut the door. Shutting my curtains and hyperventilating, I turned on the the lights terrified to go to sleep. A few hours go by without disturbance and I put my laptop under my bed and close my eyes. I didn't turn off the lights and I was still terrified of what I had seen though I know for the next moment could be explained away

by June bugs I'm still not sure. For the next few minutes while I tried to sleep something started tapping on my window. Lightly at first and paced out. Then it got more rapid and louder. I curled up under my blanket and for minutes I listened to that tapping. Tap. Tap. The next morning I talked to my mom about it and she said that she had been talking to the other neighbors and said that someone had purchased the patch of forest across from our house and seemed to be hunting in it now remember my neighborhood was filled with kids every house had kids in it my mother and my neighbors had a whole discussion about how he shouldn't have been hunting in a resident filled area especially with kids in it. I still get scared thinking about it and even telling it now

gives me a shiver up my spine. What would have happened if I hadn't seen him? Would he have tried to shoot me? Would he have tried to break into my home. I have a male cousin in Taiwan who is six years younger than me. I'll call him Ben to keep things simple. The following story is about his high school girlfriend. We'll call her Hana to keep things simple. Hana's family is part Japanese since her family married into a Japanese one which then remained in Taiwan around the time of World War II. As far as Ben and I know, she's still around and doing her own thing. When Ben was a sophomore in high school, he was obsessed with finding a girlfriend. He had always been since junior high but even though he wasn't a bad looking kid,

he behaved pretty stupidly and didn't know how to talk to girls, scaring them all off whenever he would try to ask one out. Ben was always trying to look cool, doing stupid stuff like getting into gambling, smoking and even shoplifting. He once told me he borrowed over $200 from a friend whom he didn't intend to repay, which earned him a nice beating from me. Basically, he acted like the guy's friend to get him to trust him and leverage that friendship to take his advantage. The stupid part was Ben didn't even really enjoy acting like

a bad kid. He just wanted to look cool and have girls and other kids admire him. The path he took really disappointed me because not only did he refuse to take over his father's motorcycle repair business years later, his older sister was also a gambler who had caused her own father a lot of grief. Their father is my uncle and I felt awful how all his kids turned out to be terrible despite his best efforts at parenting. Ben is the type of guy who only knows to listen if you speak with your fists. To look even cooler, Ben joined a gang and got a ridiculous tattoo on the back of his neck. It was a cringy thing, a pair of bright red lips with hot kiss and cursive below it. Ben didn't know any English, never been with a girl,

never had a girlfriend yet. He went and got a tattoo he wouldn't be able to remove for the rest of his life. Yeah, Ben was really stupid and even today he still is. I have a hard time believing he's related to me. I still remember sighing, shaking my head and telling him what a moron he was when he told me about how he got a bunch of middle school boys to beat up the owner of a convenience store who gave him a hard time when he was caught shoplifting. The image of a bunch of scrawny junior high boys with balls that had barely dropped trying to look tough was laughable no matter how I pictured it. But Ben was so proud of that achievement as though he were some kind of

mafia boss, which he surely wasn't. He was just a stupid, insecure, cowardly kid trying way too hard. Ben couldn't even drink more than two beers before being floored, which was a bit lame since even the girls in the family could handle more. Despite his behavior, I don't think he's a bad person per se, he just isn't very bright. Somehow, Ben finally got a girlfriend in the middle of his sophomore year of high school. Hannah was a year younger than him and was an attractive girl with flawless porcelain skin, a trim figure, flowing dark hair and eyes which could entrance a man. Ben was puny for his age, but Hannah was shorter, so it worked out.

She wasn't particularly busty, but she wasn't washboard flat either. I saw pictures of her, some naughty and indecent, when Ben showed them to me on his phone. I told him he must have gotten lucky. A lot of boys liked Hannah and had pursued a relationship with her, but ultimately backed off, either breaking up with her or ultimately backed off, either breaking up with her or not getting together in the first place. Ben's cringeworthy stubbornness earned him a date which he astoundingly didn't screw up. Two became an item shortly after that. They got together less than two weeks after that date which I thought was rather hasty. Ben loved to brag about how Hannah was his sexy girlfriend and the two

would be inappropriately lovey-dovey in public no matter where they went. He probably loved the status the relationship gave him more than he actually loved Hannah. Hannah was an odd girl though. Despite her perfect appearance, she too wasn't very smart and constantly flunked her tests. A match made in heaven, I thought. Hana was a believer in the occult and frequently paid attention to things like feng shui, astrology, and other such things. Hana claimed she could tell what a person was like by counting the number of strokes used to write that person's name. She told Ben her grandmother had been a witch and that there were several shamans and omyoji in her family line.

Taiwan is a place where adherence to supernatural beliefs isn't unheard of and people are often more spiritual than here in the US, so hearing this didn't immediately trigger a red flag. Compared to Ben's blue-collar family, Hana's family was extremely wealthy. She lived in an ancient huge house on a property with a size measurable only in acres. The home was renovated to have automated gates, maids, butlers, all that. I once went to Hana's house with Ben when he wanted to introduce her to me. I heard she liked donuts so I brought a box when I visited, not wanting to go empty handed. Hana was thoroughly

lacking in manners, doing things like offering Ben a pair of slippers but not offering me a pair. She brought scalding hot tea out and glasses rather than the usual clay cups, making them difficult to drink from. We had snacks to eat but there was no waste bin in the room and she let wrappers and crumbs pile up on the table we were sitting at. She had servants, but didn't tell them to do anything for us. She didn't even see us out the door when we left. Something about her made me bristle with disdain. Although I'm very strict with manners, customs, and social etiquette, I thought perhaps she was just a clueless high school girl after all and didn't dwell on it. Even though she didn't do anything bad to me, she was a beautiful girl in her own right and her house was lavishly furnished,

I instinctively was put off by her and didn't like the feeling of being in her house. By the time Ben and Hana had been together for already a month, they were already doing the dirty, if you know what I mean. Ben would always boast about how his girlfriend wouldn't make him use protection or other birth control like it was something insignificant and I'd get really irritated. Ben said Hana always urged him to do it and would wrap her legs around him to make sure he did. He thought himself so cool for it, as though doing this was some kind of superpower. He didn't even really care about how to satisfy Hana, since there came to be whispers among Hana's friends that Ben was terrible and Hana still stayed in the relationship. But Ben was irresponsible and had absolutely no idea what having a kid would entail. I've seen people whose entire lives are thrown off track due to the sudden 18 year obligation in the form of a mistake kid. If he ended up with a child to feed I was certain his already overburdened father would need to help him out and his father would be too kind to refuse. Now that I think about it, his father's willingness to always bust his kids out of their binds may have been

contributing to why they all ended up being awful. He never let his kids burn themselves with their own mistakes so they would keep going on thinking daddy would take care of their trash. I think I only put up with Ben because he is related to me and family is a big deal. He and I shared no interests aside from both liking an anime called One Piece but we didn't even like the same characters. When I warned Ben about what he was doing and the potentiality of having kids and diseases and the like he was almost surprised at what he was hearing. Evidently nobody ever taught him anything or he just didn't care. He was almost giddy when he told me Hannah was fine with simply terminating if anything happened.

I almost wanted to kick him in the groin to stop him from reproducing. Maybe I should have. Predictably with Ben and Hannah's stupid behavior inciting people around them to anger, drama stirred up at their high school. Ben tried to tell me other people were the ones who wouldn't mind their own business but I, knowing Ben probably better than he knew himself knew people were rightfully angry at them due to their crass, unclassy behavior. Other kids began to bully Ben and some of the girls picked on Hannah

angered by the couple's arrogant demeanor and behavior. I kind of want to say they deserved it for acting like idiots, but I'm not a man who enjoys unnecessary conflict or who wishes bad things for other people. To protect themselves from those who dislike them, Ben and Hannah were constantly surrounded by their acquaintances and friends, equally vapid and spoiled schoolchildren without a sense of honor or dignity. It was common for something to happen and for them to break off relationships with their best friend ex, only to turn around and go, why is my new best friend now?

They took the dislike others had toward them as a sort of status symbol and trotted around as though they were high profile celebrities who naturally would have haters. They would all go drinking on the weekends, often ditch class, spoke back when their teachers talked to them, continued to be involved in gang related activities and even got into fights. I'm sure their fights were just a bunch of delinquent kids beating one hapless victim though. His life was a complete and utter train wreck and I was glad not to be a part of. Cops were involved a handful of times and were so irritated even the policeman's friend who knew Ben's father from their time in the army threatened to take Ben in if he caused any more trouble. I found the fact that there were entire groups of kids with Ben's personality at his high school alarming and disheartening. How were people raising their kids? Eventually,

when Ben got to his third year of high school, Hana introduced Ben to the occult. Ben, being the needle brain he is, couldn't comprehend the rituals and the numbers and positions of the stars and other things. Apparently, this is where Hana excelled though. Hana was terrible at school work but could memorize even the most difficult incantations, remember what every little line in a person's palm meant, and remember the positions of the planets on any given day without needing to look it up. Hana performed an omyo-yodo hot water divination early each morning to get an idea of what sort of decision she should make that day, a literal morning ritual. She went to the north, east, south, and west parts of her garden in that order to gather fresh bamboo leaves at 5.30 every morning, even if she was hungover, sick, or tired. A special

pot containing rainwater was heated over a fire fueled by dried bamboo leaves. The steam billowing around her, issuing from droplets of hot water sprinkled on her white road body with a new bundle of bamboo leaves each morning, was said to grant visions. It seemed her family's legacy was not ending with her. One thing Ben did somewhat understand, however, was when Hana told him their family kept Kwekiya or ghost children. These are essentially spirits of miscarried or aborted children bound to a master who could then command them to do various things ranging from stealing to vandalism. These ghost children according to legend would follow their master's commands and could be passed down from generation to generation and were often used for their master's benefit.

These spirits' power would increase with age and through the use of various rituals to the point where stories have been told about them being used to torment or hurt people. Ben thought this explained Hannah's family's vast wealth and land. Hannah wanted to introduce Ben to her ghost children but Ben refused, saddening Hannah. Even dim-witted Ben could recognize when he stumbled into something he was not prepared for. Although he openly said he didn't believe in the occult and would often say the same to Hannah, he must have felt at least a twinge of fear deep within himself and began seeing Hannah in a different light. Hannah showed him how she used a needle to extract blood from her tongue every week, which would

be gathered in a cup and then placed into a small shrine in her room to be used to nourish the ghost children, keeping them strong and bound to her will. She would give them other offerings too, such as raw meat and toys, and performed strange rituals to communicate with them in her dreams. According to my grandmother who grew up in a farming village in central Taiwan and has some knowledge of the occult herself, a kwee kea can be created in various different ways. One method is from the master to cut off the head of the fetus to extract oil from it in which the fetus's bones

would be soaked, preserved, and stored. Another way was to preserve the entire fetus with a special liquid embalming technique and to store it in a container inside the master's home. Yet another method involved carving a replacement body from bone and soaking it in corpse oil extracted from the fetus. Various ingredients were used for preservation and different methods created quikia of different strengths or those with different powers and temperaments. The gender of the fetus also mattered. Girls were more vicious and suitable for attacking others,

but were harder for the master to control, while boys were more obedient but less cunning, requiring assigned tasks to be explained by the master in great detail if they were to be properly completed. All the methods my grandmother mentioned involved storing the fetus in some way, but what technique did Hannah's family use and where did they store the ones allegedly in the house? Ben had been to her place many times and had explored most of the sprawling estate but hadn't turned up anything horrible like a dead fetus. My grandmother wanted to know why Ben and

I suddenly asked her about this but we simply said we saw it in a horror movie and were curious. My grandmother has many scary stories from her youth and even though she didn't dare practice magic herself, her early life had been steeped in shamanic tradition and many of her fellow villagers had been practitioners. Shamans and their families would sometimes use supernatural influences to topple rival households and secure economic success. Their methods ranged from using simple good luck charms to using curses, supernatural diseases, and bound spirits such as ghost children. Over time, supernatural warfare was seen as a detriment to the stability and cohesiveness of communities, and the practice of laying curses and such became frowned upon.

I searched online and was able to further confirm what my grandmother said. Storage of the fetus is necessary in order to bind a ghost child to the master. Although I didn't really believe this stuff myself, I found it fascinating such an ancient practice could have survived in the modern day. Hannah's family must have handed down this tradition since time immemorial. I figured there was a shared belief in ghost children across many Asian cultures, so the practice must have began somewhere and then spread out as information traveled to various regions. Actually, now that I think back on it, was it more like convergent evolution,

developing in various unrelated cultures independently, simply because using ghost children actually worked? Ben and Hana's relationship began to deteriorate. It was Ben's fault because he had a wandering eye, but he would pin things on Hana by telling people how Hana could no longer sleep with him after every termination, how her chest wasn't big enough, how things were just too off for her and more cruel things like that

which no respectful man would ever say to a woman. Ben neglected Hannah, especially during her time of the month since he said that was gross and thought that she was useless during that time. He complained about everything about her saying that her hair was unsightly or too long and how it felt scratchy and unpleasant if she trimmed and shaved it too short. Hannah made no move to break off the relationship. Instead she kept loyally putting up with Ben and I couldn't figure out how she was doing it. The relationship with her made Ben have a big head even though he pretty much just got lucky when he landed on Hana. Ben's treatment of Hana got worse even though no other girl would have found him tolerable. There was no new ship for him to jump onto. I think this was why the two ended up together,

ultimately for two years. I would not have known these details of Ben and Hana's intimate encounters if Ben had not even an ounce of maturity, restraint, or class. There are some things you should keep between yourself and your significant other. Ben, being a kid, didn't have much money and often blew what he had on tobacco, betel nut, terrible smokes and booze. He suddenly broke up with Hannah one day over text message while he was at her house and she was at the convenience store. It was obviously planned despite whatever nonsense lie Ben tried to feed me. Ben had found another girl he liked, a fresh new toy, and he was waiting

for the right time to break it to Hannah. Before Hannah could get home, he grabbed some of the gifts he had given her during the course of their relationship, such as a ring, a necklace, a purse in the closet, some clothes. He figured he could save money this way on gifts for the other girls and now that he no longer wanted Hana, he could recoup some of the financial losses. It was a really messed up thing to do and I truly felt sorry for Hana. Although I remember her as a girl with no manners, my anger had waned over the years. In the end, she had been loyal while my cousin Ben had been a total idiot. A few weeks later, I heard from Ben that Hana was stalking him,

begging him to come back so they could be together. She was pregnant again due to Ben having knocked her up before he broke it off. She pleaded with him to at least accompany her to the clinic. He refused and Hana went alone. Ben cursed at her over the phone and told her to stop stalking him as she cried. He told Hana he had taken his gifts back and gave to another girl so Hana could just go away because he didn't love her anymore. She could end herself for all he cared. Hana cried even harder. The beginning of Ben's next relationship was a disaster. The girl was cold and didn't take him seriously. She drank with her guy friends and was lousy at texting Ben back. The gifts he had stolen for her had gone missing so he didn't have any material wealth to ply her with. Upset, he texted Hannah and asked her if

she took the items, to which she got a chilling response. Hannah told Ben she had sent her ghost children to retrieve the stolen things and had cursed his new relationship, sending him a picture of the items he had stolen, now in her possession. Ben found it hard to believe that Hannah could have snuck into his home since his room was on the second story of his father's motorcycle shop and his father and dogs were always on the first floor. There was no way to his room except past his father's desk and up the staircase. When it wasn't the hours of 9am to 7pm, the front of the store would be locked up with a heavy steel shutter. Furthermore, Ben's father had video cameras set up of the store would be locked up with a heavy steel shutter. Furthermore,

Ben's father had video cameras set up around the store parameter and in the store itself. Ben reviewed all of the footage between the day he talked to Hana on the phone to the day he noticed the items for the new girl missing, finding nothing in the tapes. Nobody had gone up to his room or gotten past his father's desk where the dogs were. Being the fool he is, Ben resolved to retrieve the gifts he had stolen. He skipped school one day, went to Hannah's home and climbed over the gate. He was trying to find an alternative entrance into the house through a side door window when he noticed a small door and an alcove under the house visible from the rear corner of the garden.

Curiously, he went down a wooden step and into the alcove where he was met with an extremely narrow locked wooden door that looked aged and weathered. The door felt hollow as though eaten by termites and beaten down on by decades of rain and sunlight. In his anger, he figured he didn't need to break the lock on the shoddy old door since the door itself looked frail enough. Surprisingly, he was actually right. Ben's shoulder crashed into the door causing it to splinter apart cracking at the hinges. A second shoulder ram sent the door inward even further. A third wedge opened the slats of wood and Ben thought he could now access the house.

The door led to an area he had never been before. A series of more wooden steps leading down into some kind of cave-like storage cellar or basement. Ben hoped there would be a way to the first floor of Hannah's house from this area. The corridor down into the depths was dark and damp but Ben could see a string hanging off a light bulb from the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs which he committed to memory and reached for when he got to the bottom of the rickety old steps despite the distance of the subterranean chamber from the sunlight at the surface the chamber was warm like a womb maybe there was something in here he could smash or steal from Hana to

get even with her. Permeating the room was the smell of the earth. Ben pulled the cord to turn the light which flickered on and momentarily blinded him. He looked around and saw the small room was lined with moldy wooden shelves. On the shelves were jars, pots, urns, and bottles. Some appeared ancient and looked to be made of clay, terracotta, and ceramic. Others were made of glass and were also clearly old, discolored by impurities, coated with dust, and still, others were newer, appearing to be mason jars. The newest looking jars sat on the far right corner of the room on the top level of one shelf. There was a wooden stool in front of the shelf.

Curious about this discovery, Ben crossed the room and reached up to grab one of the newer jars. As he did so, however, his eyes became level with an older jar on the shelf a level below. Through the dust on the jar he could see there was liquid in it and that there was a lump at the bottom. The liquid was cloudy as though whatever was inside had been preserved crudely and had gradually degraded, remaining only partially intact. Ben's fingers reached the jar he sought which was perfectly clean and recently added to the shelf. As with the other containers, something was at the bottom. Squinting in the partial darkness, Ben saw a red label atop the

jar's lid. It read, Birthday, followed by a date from just a few days earlier. The writing was certainly Hana's. When his eyes focused, Ben discovered a thing at the bottom of the jar, curled up like a little cooked shrimp, was in fact, a fetus. It was steeped in a translucent pinkish orange liquid. The fetus couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 weeks old. Ben was utterly horrified and took a step backward to the center of the room. From there he could see the top level of the shelf had several newer jars. He then realized that there was a fetus in every corner in the room. Some were so old the birthdays were directly carved into the surface of the containers and used as an archaic calendar system

Ben didn't recognize. Hana had been keeping the fetuses from her pregnancies with Ben as ghost children. Was this why she kept putting up with himancies with Ben as ghost children. Was this why she kept putting up with him? To get more ghost children? Ben lifted the clay lid from an urn which contained what appeared to be an entire baby. It was pale and pickled in the mysterious fluid, probably a stillborn or miscarriage. Its eyelids were open, a shriveled raisin of an eyeball visible in each socket still attached to its ocular nerve

The small body must have spent countless years submerged within the container Its lips and mouth distorted by time into a silent scream A length of wrinkled umbilical curl protruded from its belly Up from the urn wafted an earthly herbal smell The stench of stagnant well water and rotting leaves. The ghastly discovery made Ben extremely sick and frightened, and he fled the room, never to return. He never did steal back his gifts to Hannah and avoided her at school whenever possible. Hannah must have known Ben was the person who broke the door to the area where she stored

those horrors and it must have angered her because Hannah no longer stalked Ben after that and no longer texted him about being together. But on some occasions, he could see her watching him from the corner of his eye in the classroom. This disturbed Ben so much that he almost wished he'd done better in school as to not get held back a year. Ben's new relationship dissolved shortly after he found the ghost children. Whenever I think about how these fetuses are still in that room in Hana's house, and how they have some of my family's blood still in them, some of my blood in them,

I can't help but feel creeped out. And some of those pickled fetuses entombed within sealed jars and steeped in a warm darkness deeper than that of any bedroom. My body is linked with Hana's. My flesh and fluids intermingled with hers. Who knows what Hana can do? And who knows what other relics she has? And who knows what her family members can do. We never did get to meet them. Imagine it happened to you. Whether or not you believe in the power of the occult, it's hard not to feel this story was about 13. My sister and I, I'll call her H, invited this boy over to do general pre-teen stuff.

You know, make prank calls, tell stupid jokes, the usual. This boy we invited, K, revealed to us that he had brought a Ouija board. H and I were hesitant, but decided to give it a go anyways. We set up the game, turned out all the lights and even lit a small circle of candles around us. After asking a few questions with no response we decided to put it away. For the rest of the night we all were uneasy but didn't think much of it. We all chalked it up to being a little uneasy from playing the game. Later that night while I was trying to go to bed I heard growling near the

door. I just pulled my blanket over my head and went to sleep. Move on to the next day my dad caught wind of last night's game thanks to Kay. Dad actually said that he would take us to a local place known to be a tree where slaves would end their lives later when darkness came we actually went we got out of the car and set up the game now i can't remember what name it gave us so we'll just say connor connor said he was a slave as expected and said he had hung himself. We were getting a little freaked out and H was begging us to stop so we said goodbye. It didn't let us go, so we swiftly packed up the board and retreated to the car. The next day was interesting.

Things were constantly moving places and a plate got shattered from falling off the counter. We got some lighter fluid and burned that board that night. Thankfully, everything has seemed to go back to normal since then. My name is Amy and I assure you the following event is true and actually happened to me in the spring of 2015. I will, to the best of my memory, relay the horrifying events of that day and the successive days after it. Please keep in mind, it has been nearly four years since this occurrence, so I may forget or otherwise unintentionally leave out certain aspects of the tale. So with all that said, here's the tale of that awful day. For context, I'll tell you readers a small bit of my background, in order to make the rest make more sense.

Since my early teen years, I had been a hardcore runner. Regardless of the surface or distance, I've probably at least attempted it. My favorite style is trail running by far. I love the constant change of elevation and last second decision making involved in it. I will admit, at times I'm not very pleased about running in the mud. More than once, I've ended up falling rear end over Teaketto after slipping on an especially muddy corner, but thankfully the area I live in stays relatively dry. Now that I've got the preliminaries out of the way I'll get to the real story. The day this all happened I was running a long course in a park not far from my apartment. The park was actually more of a natural preserve. It was made

up of 10 acres of prairie and the remainder was made up of forest. The forest took up a good 20 acres or so and had all types of trails, dirt and concrete. I of course spent my time on the dirt trails and had broken them into several different courses. The trail I was on consisted of 2 miles of open grass and the remainder, 5 miles, was all forested. I'm well aware that it sounds as if I'm stringing you along but I promise it will make sense soon. Anyway, I just started to run and was making good time as I entered the woods. The first leg of the course was relatively flat and continued on for at least a mile. The day wasn't too hot, about 85 degrees but the light breeze blowing through the trees felt good.

Once I blew through that first section I entered the longest section. This length was very up and down. You had to cross at least two small creeks and it ended at a large hill. When I crossed the first creek I was able to see the big hill far in the distance. You couldn't always see this far but this was happening in the very early spring so the foliage was still thin on the trees. I was happy to see no one else was running or hiking the trail that day. Sometimes I would have to detour or slow down in order to avoid others, but today the whole park appeared to be empty. It couldn't have taken me more than 15 seconds to get through that section and downhill to the second creek bed. As I approached the creek,

I slowed a bit and turned my body slightly to the right so bed. As I approached the creek I slowed a bit and turned my body slightly to the right so I could sidestep down the hill. When I was about halfway down the hill someone tried to tackle me. I'm not sure exactly where he was hidden. I do know there is a large oak tree and other bushes growing up at the top of the hill at the inside corner, the corner I was facing. Regardless, I was struck from the right side. He was likely hiding there. Regardless of his hiding place, I felt that I had been sideswiped by a bull. He had knocked me a good five yards across the creek and into the water. Luckily, there was barely any water in the creek, so I had no chance of drowning. As a matter of fact I think

it was the cool water that kept me conscious. Somehow it wasn't long before I regained my wits about me and tried to get up. It was definitely painful but by now my fight or flight instincts were kicking in. It was obvious to me that he hadn't tackled me because he wanted to talk. As I propped up my elbows, I looked over to the figure out where he landed. His body was laying almost upside down, his head pointing to the water. In my opinion, he had drastically underestimated how hard he had hit me. He looked to have slammed into the bank of the creek at a corner. His eyes were flickering open and closed, I guess waking after being knocked out but I wasn't sure how long he'd stay that way. So I struggled to my feet and began

jogging back up the trail the way I had just come from. Every step was painful. I was more hobbling than running but I just wanted to get back to my car. When I finally reached the first creek I glanced back to see if he was behind me but he was not. I chose to jump to the other bank instead of going up and down each side. The landing caused me to buckle and fall but by this time my adrenaline was pumping too much. My hope was that I could get out into the open and get help from someone or at least get to my car and get away. The flat section ahead was much easier to pass through, however when I was about halfway through it I could hear him yelling. I'm not sure

what he was saying but he certainly sounded angry. I was well aware that if he wasn't as hurt as me he'd be able to catch me quickly. Thinking about this just forced me to push myself harder. My stubbornness paid off as I broke out from the trees and onto the small patch of grass leading to the parking lot. When I looked up I caught sight of a couple getting out of their truck. I used every ounce of effort I had left by yelling at them but they had already seen me. After hobbling another 20 yards or so I fell to the feet of the wife and started bawling my eyes out. I stopped long enough to give them a very quick synopsis of what had happened. The whole time I was sitting in the grass, I was expecting my attacker to come out of the woods, but he never did.

The husband of the couple called 911 and in a matter of minutes, I was on my way to the hospital. When the officers arrived at the ER I told them everything that had happened and described my attacker as well as I could. They did mention in passing that a suspicious man had been seen hanging around the park recently and my attacker may have been the same man but I never discovered if they were one and the same. After they left I broke down into another crying episode but this time it was out of joy. I've never been so happy to be alive. As far as injuries I got off with bruised ribs and a slight concussion. The rest was just sore muscles. In the weeks and months that followed

I spent a fair amount of time and money on counseling. I didn't think it would be a wise decision to carry around all that fear and anger for the rest of my life and as a result I've been able to go back to that park and run those trails again. With, mind you, pepper spray in my fanny pack. I had considered carrying a gun but I figured it would just slow me down. Despite my light-hearted joking, do not think I don't take that incident and incidences like this seriously. I've just always believed humor is a great way to deal with stress. Like I said I did eventually make it back to the park and their awesome trails. I was determined early on not to let some psycho ruin my favorite hobby for me and he wasn't. When it came to my attacker he was caught a year later

all the way across town attempting to assault a young woman in another Parks restroom. His predilection for Parks tipped the police off that he may have been the same guy. They leaned on him for an hour or two before he admitted to attacking me. He also added this little gem to his confession and told the cops that he had broken two ribs and got a concussion from tackling me. I admit, I couldn't help but laugh at that one. Myself and my family have always made activity in the outdoors a top priority. My parents had passed on their love for the outdoors to me and I paired it with my infatuation with running. Together, these two activities have ensured the health and fitness of us all since my wife and I met at a 5k race as it happens.

The wife was one of those new moms sporting one of those running strollers, insistent on being back on the road within a few weeks after the birth of our first child. This was the pattern after she had each one. Her persistence has always been one of the biggest things I loved about her. As our kids grew older, they would each join us on our daily runs, taking in the clean air while their peers locked themselves away playing games, slowly becoming more and more obese. While running was never required in our home, we certainly did our best to encourage some form of outdoor physical activity. Two of our children also chose to play extracurricular activities at school and their coaches always insisted that them growing up jogging had helped them greatly.

Our oldest made all state in his age group and despite winning a full scholarship for basketball, he still spent the majority of his time focusing on the cross-country team. I bring up our oldest especially because it was he that I was helping in training for a half marathon when the whole family was present to witness a horrible and ultimately sad event in the history of our family, an event that would fail to be overshadowed until the death of my beautiful wife to cancer. As I said, I was assisting in the training of our oldest son for a yearly half marathon that we have locally to benefit breast cancer. I definitely didn't mind helping him train. Besides, I had tidbits of experience to

pass on to him since I had won this very same half when I was his age. Not once, but twice. On this day, I had been in the park running some drills with him when my wife and our two younger daughters joined us. We all had decided to take a quick couple of laps over our favorite 5 mile path and then race back home for dinner. The loser would have to do the dishes. I knew my daughters hated doing the dishes so I figured they'd be extra motivated to win. Anyway, we were all about halfway through our first circuit when we ran into a family friend, Craig, about 20 yards ahead of us. He wasn't in any real hurry so we waved and said hi as we all passed him. He kindly waved back and went back to listening to his walkman. Unfortunately, there was

a section of our loop that required us to cross a street. It wasn't an especially busy street, but I never liked stopping to activate the crosswalk signal. Since I was at the front of the pack with my son, I ran up ahead and pushed the front of the pack with my son I ran up ahead and pushed the button so the others could cross traffic without having to stop. As usual traffic was light so I didn't have to wait more than a few seconds for the signal to light up. When it did I continued my running through the intersection and back into the other side of the park. The rest of the family was close behind and also were able to get across the street quickly. By the time they reached the street, Craig had caught up and was close behind

my wife who was running anchor at the back of the pack. My guess was that he had sped up to avoid having to wait for the light. The truth is, the citizens had been trying to get the city to move the intersection further down the road and away from the park for years. Many of the parents were concerned because their children often had to cross that street to get to the ball fields. The fact is, no one liked that intersection. When Craig reached the street, he was only 10 yards at the most, behind my wife and moving at a rapid pace. Craig made it to the center island of the street and made it about another two feet before he was struck by a car. The car was going at least 50 miles per hour when it hit him. His body rolled up the hood and then back to the ground in a matter of seconds. The worst part

was that the car continued to move another 20 yards or so before it stopped, dragging Craig underneath it the whole way. Of course, we ran to help Craig and make sure that he was okay, but he wasn't. I'll admit that that second, I wanted to grab the driver from the car and beat the life out of them, but once I realized that the driver was just an old woman who could barely see over the steering wheel, my fury turned to disgust tinged with pity. She sat in the car, too scared to get out. You could see the utter fear in her eyes. I quickly composed myself and approached her window. While I did this, my wife was speaking to the 911 dispatcher telling her the situation. I did my best to talk calmly to the poor woman and ensure her no one would hurt her.

We did need her to back her car up a little so the paramedics could treat him. As I spoke to her, it seemed like she didn't totally get what I was saying. I was beyond feeling sorry for her at this point. I pulled her door open and reached for the shifter and put the car into neutral. The whole time she continued to have a lost look on her face. Once it was out of gear I yelled up to my son to carefully push the car backward and off of Craig. I could hear the sirens getting closer as I put the car into park and took the keys and put them in my pocket. The last thing I wanted was to have this senile woman hurt anyone else by driving away. My son checked his pulse and although being

weak it was there. Craig wasn't conscious at the time but we were optimistic because he was still breathing when the ambulance took him away. When the police showed up they questioned us all about what we saw. I took one of the officers aside and told him what I suspected about the old woman. He went to the car and spoke with her for just a moment and then returned to talk to his partner. They decided to contact a family member to come pick her up and they would tow the car to the police garage to look it over for malfunctions. She was obviously not competent and shouldn't have been driving anywhere else. After talking to her again for a little while they finally were able to get the number for

her daughter They called her to pick her up and once she arrived and realized what had happened She was horrified The entire time while this was going on the old woman didn't ask what was going on or say sorry or anything She sat with a blank look on her face Totally oblivious to her surroundings Her family had to have noticed her condition at some point before she got this bad. Either that or they had been neglecting her. I'm still not sure which is

worse. When we were finally allowed to go we all headed to the hospital. Once it was known where he was going the officer had called Craig's wife Melissa to notify her of the accident and at which hospital he would be going to. She was an awful mess when we got there. Craig was in surgery and they had little hope he'd survive. We stayed with her until the doctor came out two hours later to tell us he had passed. The collision had done way too much damage for them to repair. I decided it would be better if I took the kids home and my wife wanted to stay with Melissa to provide support. On the way home it seemed right to discuss the situation with my children and gauge how they were coping with it. Despite being in their later teens I wasn't sure

how something so horrible would affect them, especially my twin daughters who were only 14 at the time. To my surprise they were all sad of course but recognized death was a part of life and something that could catch up to us at any time. I was so surprised by their mature way of handling it, children never ceased to amaze me. My wife stayed with Melissa for a few days and joined the rest of us for the funeral. Melissa continued to live in our neighborhood for another three months before she chose to move her and their young son back east to be near her mother. When it comes to the old woman, I do know she was never charged with any crime related to the death of Craig. Most of the information I've attained comes from news reports in the following days and months after his death.

One particular article in the paper said that the authorities had deemed her incompetent and as a result decided not to seek charges against her. It also said that the 87 year old would have her license revoked and in the future she would be cared for by her daughter. My wife also told me that when Melissa was made aware the city wouldn't be charging the old woman, she wasn't mad. She was just happy to hear that she wouldn't be free to drive anymore and possibly harm anyone else. I think they should give that woman a medal. I can guarantee you that if some dotty old woman ran down my wife and got off scot-free, I wouldn't be calm about it. Then again, that's why women are better than us and they are far kinder. Despite our sadness, we did our best to pick up where we

had left off and live a good life. My son and I continued his training all the way up to the race. I'll save that story for another time, but I will say now that he did very well. I've prattled on long enough, so I'll wrap this story up. I guess I'll leave you all with a gentle little reminder. Please remember this, when you are driving your car, you have a responsibility to be mindful of those around you, whether that may be a bicycle, motorcycle, or on foot. Please remember that they are your fellow humans and deserve the same level of respect and caution you would give to another motorist. In other words, keep your head out of your butt and watch out for other people. Thank you all for taking the time of day to read this remembrance

of an old friend. Please save a spot in your prayers for Craig's wife and child and bless every one of you for reading such a long-winded story written down by a lonely old man. I'm going to start this story by telling you not to give people the finger, especially when you're a pedestrian and they are in a car. Now I'll tell you why. At the time I had this particular run-in with a motorist, I was training to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I had been a runner since high school, but I had only recently been convinced to try for a major marathon. My friend that had talked me into it told me my first goal should be to time well in some local races first.

So logically I signed up for an upcoming race in our town planned for a couple of months ahead. With the first step done, the next step was to run, run, and run some more. Since I saw that as the easy part, I trained as much as I could every day while trying not to overtrain. Considering I didn't have a coach, I had to get my information from books and magazines and the internet. Some of it was good, but most of it was terrible. By the second week, I decided to just create my own system based on my 20 plus years of experience and it proved to be a wise choice. My times grew faster as my distances got longer. I had appeared to have come across a great thing and still considering selling it. I'm very aware all of you reading this don't really give a flip about

that stuff but since I've seen other writers posting here use this format I figured the whole starting with the background thing was the way to go. After all I'm a runner and an engineer not a writer but on this day I was doing my long distance run and the area I was in was a residential area not far from my place. On my long distance days, I would run out 15 miles to the edge of town and then back to my house. This part of my routine was only done once a week because it was so exhausting, but I figured if I could run 30 miles, 26.2 should be easier. It didn't prove to be true but you have to fail to learn. So I had made it out the 15 miles and was making my way back

when I had the problem. I was still a good 10 miles from home and I felt like I was about to hit the wall. I'm sure all the runners out there can tell their non-running friends what hitting the wall means. Anyway, I was trying with every fiber in my body from stopping when some jerk in an SUV sped up behind me on the road. Apparently I wasn't going fast enough for him and he had to let me know. I was running in the bike lane but I guess he felt the whole road belonged to him. He swung around me and leaned on his horn for 15 or so seconds as he passed me. At this point I was barely hanging on and was in no mood for some smug jerk in a gas guzzler. Without thinking I gave him the bird and thought nothing else about it. He must have taken issue with this gesture because I quickly heard the

squealing of tires and saw him step down from his SUV and begin walking toward me. He was only about 5 foot 5 and had a bit of a beer belly. When I first noticed this I couldn't help but chuckle at the sight. He continued walking towards me with a twisted scowl on his face, the whole time saying nothing. We approached each other quickly because of each of our forward momentum and once he got about a foot away from me I began to tell him I was sorry and explain the situation to him. Before I could get one word from my mouth I saw him pull back his right fist. The last thing I remember was the feeling of it smashing into my chin. Honestly I'm not sure how long it was out but when I finally got my wits about me, the guy

in the SUV was gone. It also didn't take long for me to notice my side was also hurt. I can only assume he kicked me once or twice before he left. Luckily, I had landed on the grassy part next to the curb and not on the street where I could have hit my head and possibly died. I woke up in the grass, so that's the only conclusion I could come to. I doubt he was kind enough to place my body out of the road after he just kicked me around. It took a few minutes to get myself together before I started my walk home, but after a few minutes of walking, I called my buddy to come pick me up. On the ride back home, I explained what what had happened and he recommended I go to the police but considering I had no license plate number or name for the guy it would have been

a waste of time. Besides I couldn't help but believe it was my own fault anyway. In the area I lived it's a bad idea to flip someone off regardless of the reason. Folks don't take that particular gesture well. Because of my injuries, I wisely chose to take several days off from training. I also decided not to take that route again. I could never be certain that dude wouldn't drive up on me again and do the same thing or worse to me. Once I felt well enough to go back to running, I planned on some new routes and went back to work. I was somewhat jumpy when cars approached behind me on the road for a little while but I was soon able to put the incident to the back of my

mind and power ahead. When the time came for the local race I ran it and placed decently. I continued entering in races and eventually made the qualifying time I needed but I guess due to overwhelming numbers of qualifying applicants I didn't make it and to be honest I'm glad I didn't. That was the 2013 marathon and we all know what happened that year. I was a bit shaken up about what had happened so I skipped the next year's race. However the itch took over soon after the 2014 running and I went back to work and believe it or not, I made it into the 2015 race. It was the most fun I've ever had. If anyone out there had ever considered trying it, I say go for it. Since then, I've ran a few marathons each year, none as big as Boston, but I still enjoy them.

Every day I step out of my door to run, I remind myself to keep control of my emotions and to treat others around me with the respect they deserve. I highly recommend you do the same in your daily life regardless of how you fill your day. You never know the quality of day the person next to you is having. He may have just caught his wife cheating or lost a loved one and is just waiting for someone to push him. Just by flipping another human the bird, you could end up just like I did. Or worse, you could lose your life. This story I'm about to post won't sound nearly as terrifying as many of the others I've read here, but I promise you, if you would have been in my shoes at the time this happened,

any normal person would have been scared out of their minds just as I was. That day was forecasted to be a rainy one, but by 9am the sun had come out and was its usual raging self. The road I was running on was somewhat off the beaten path and due to this the traffic was very light. My other reason for being on it was because of the stomach flu I had just gotten over. Normally I wouldn't have dreamed of going for a run if I was sick but that day I woke up feeling great and was eager to take advantage of it. I hadn't run for almost four days so I felt it was important to get back into the swing of things. What does this have to do with having a stomach flu you ask? Well,

any of the runners on here will tell you that sometimes you are forced to evacuate while running and the road I was running on was wooded on both sides and relatively secluded. Therefore, if my bowels demanded release I would run into the woods and do as I was told. Since this situation had occurred before but in a much less convenient area, I was going to be ready this time. With that said, let's carry on. The section of road that I was on was a five mile circle. On most days I ran this area, I would double the distance, run in a circle twice in other words, but under the circumstances, I decided to go light in case I started feeling ill again. I had made it two and a half miles and was circling back to my car when I felt those familiar cramps in my stomach I had been experiencing for the last three days.

Without hesitating, I made a dash into the woods on my right hand side. I ran as far as I could into the woods before I was unable to hold it anymore. At that point I yanked down my shorts and let go, just in time. It lasted a few minutes before the cramps finally let up. Once they did I took the wet wipes from my pocket and cleaned up. This whole time I had not looked forward. Mostly I was focused on the ground, begging for the pain to end, but once I had finished I got the presence of mind to look around for anyone else. It wasn't like I was expecting any other people to be around, but my modesty seemed to take over.

Just before I turned back toward the direction of the road I half-heartedly scanned about 180 degrees in front of me and caught sight of a blue object about 40-50 yards away. Curious, I stopped to focus on what it was. After a couple of seconds I realized it was a person, probably male, based on size, wearing what looked to be jeans and a blue jean jacket. His back was to me and from what I could tell, he didn't know I was there in the woods with him. I continued watching him for a few minutes more when I realized he was digging with a shovel. When he stopped to remove his jacket, I crouched down behind a large tree in front of me. Now, I was starting to get nervous. I was a man, in an

out-of-the-way part of the forest, digging a hole. This wasn't a little hole either. I stayed there behind that tree watching him for at least 15 minutes and the only time he stopped was when he removed his jacket. Plus he was there before I arrived so he must have been burying something pretty big. Our soil was loose and sandy so he could get deep in no time. I soon realized that the longer I stayed in those woods, the more likely it was that he would see me, and if he was doing what I thought he was, he'd have to do something to prevent me from going to the cops. Getting out of there sounded better and better the longer I stayed, so I waited for an opportunity to take off the second he turned back completely to me.

I slowly backed out. As I did, I continued to watch him to make sure he wouldn't see or hear me. Fortunately for me, I got away unseen. Once I made it back to the road, I ran the remaining two plus miles back to my car, possibly the fastest I ever have in my life. Now I'm going to tell you the part that's going to make you call me stupid. When I returned home and thought about what I had saw, I thought it would be a bad idea to call the police. After all, what would I tell them? I was taking a dump in the woods and saw a guy digging a hole? At the time I was sure they would blow me off but the longer I dwelled upon it I realized I was scared more than anything. I was a single woman living alone. If he found out who called the cops on him

and they were unable to find anything, I could end up being the next person buried in those woods. So basically, I talked myself out of it. I made a compromise after a few days and decided to search the internet for any missing persons in our area or surrounding ones. If there were, I would make an anonymous call. For the next days and weeks, I continued to check but came up empty. I did end up finding out I lived in a pretty safe area. That was good. Nevertheless, I kept what I saw firmly in the back of my mind just in case anything popped up. Even though I continued running, I never went back to that road. I haven't even driven down it and hopefully never will.

Anytime I even get near to that part of town, I break out into a sweat and my heart starts pounding. Not quite a panic attack, but darn close. In the six months since it happened, I often find myself second-guessing my decision. I can't help but think that I may have helped someone get away with a heinous crime. However, if I get anywhere near to making the call, I fall apart. Have I allowed my fear to make me an accessory to a crime? What would you all have done that day under those circumstances? Has anyone else reading this been put into this position? Please, everybody, don't hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments. After all, it's not too late for me to make that call.

If you just discovered your whole life was a lie, what would you do? How would you act? How could you go on not knowing who you truly were? Would you be able to continue living? Would you ever be able to trust another human again? These are only a few of the myriad of questions I ask myself and pose to you. Before I go ahead I'll provide a tad bit of background. I have been planning for a school related trip to Europe for quite some time, and as part of that planning, I needed my birth certificate to get a passport.

No birth certificate meant no trip, so it was very important that I get it. When I went to my parents and told them I needed it, they suddenly began attempting to talk me out of the trip. This was strange considering they had been the ones who had talked me into going in the first place. told them I needed it, they suddenly began attempting to talk me out of the trip. This was strange considering they had been the ones who had talked me into going in the first place. Their behavior had made me very suspicious. As the deadline to get my passport got closer and closer, my repeated requests for the certificate fell on deaf ears and anytime I asked for a reason, they would change the subject. Finally, the last day for me to get my passport in time came, and I had had enough. I went to my parents and demanded they give me my birth certificate.

When they tried to change the subject, I exploded on them and demanded it again. Since I have always been a quiet and calm child, my outbursts shocked them. But it appeared to have finally worked. My father silently walked into his office and came out with it inside a manila envelope and said nothing to me as he handed it to me. I was so exasperated I said nothing either. Putting it quickly into my backpack, I hurried off to school. After school, I headed to the post office to finally get my passport. As I waited in line I happened to open the manila envelope and pull out the birth certificate.

Since I had never actually seen it I was curious to see what it looked like. While I read through I was confused by what I saw. When I looked at that line that listed my father's name the one listed did not match my father's and the same applied to my mother's name. For a second I thought my father had perhaps given me his birth certificate by accident. I had never known my grandparents so I thought for a moment that the names listed were theirs but once I checked the line where my names were listed, my name was indeed there but my last name was different. Now I was totally confused. Desperate I looked at the birth date line and it matched. None of this made any sense but it did

seem to answer the questions I had about their evasiveness. Before I went anywhere I was going to have to find out what was happening. I left the post office empty-handed but not without a head full of questions. When I got home I guess my face gave me away. The looks on my parents' faces told me they knew I had seen it. I attempted to be calm at first but my emotions took over. I began attacking them with questions, not waiting for the answers. My mother approached me and attempted to calm me down but my emotions were driving me mad. She stood silently while I ranted and once it began to slow down, she asked me to join them at the table. I hesitated at first but when she put her hand on my shoulder, I guess to reassure me, I sat down and braced myself for what I was about to

hear. Then my father began to talk and he asked if I could sit and listen and not say anything till he finished. I simply nodded in the affirmative and prepared myself for the unknown. Darling, although we are not your biological parents, we love you just as if we were. We adopted you when you were around three years old. We were unable to have children and when we saw you, we fell in love with you right away. Regardless of what you're about to hear, never forget any of that, okay? Assuming he was looking for an answer, I nodded my head. If what I was about to hear was any more shocking than what I'd heard so far,

I wasn't sure I'd be able to handle it. Your mother was a fine woman. She worked for me at the car wash. She was the kind of person that would light up a room by just being in it. She got pregnant with you barely out of high school and she had had a hard time at first but she got on her feet pretty quickly. Now your daddy was her boyfriend at the time but he couldn't handle being a father and ran off. Unfortunately he died in a motorcycle accident not long after you were born. Your mother never knew about that. Actually no one knew about that until a few years later. The thing is darling your birth mother didn't leave you by choice.

She loved you more than anything. Your mama was really into health and she ate well and jogged every day. One morning, she went on a run and never came back. I don't mean she ran off and left you. She just disappeared. The police looked for her for months, but they came up empty-handed. To this day, she's still considered a missing person. Since she nor your biological daddy had any family you got put in the foster system. Your mother and I started off as your foster parents while the whole time working through

the courts to adopt you and after a couple of years we were finally able to. Once you started getting closer to school age we moved here. We wanted to remove you from the ghost of your mama's disappearance and all the questions they may have brung up. Folks in small towns tend to talk a lot and we knew sooner or later you'd be confronted by the past that you had no part in and was not your fault. Basically we just wanted to protect you from the confusion that surely would have come along at some point. We did intend to tell you all this before, but the years just seemed to get away from us. We are truly sorry you had to find this out this way. You being mad at us is

understandable, but please know we never meant for this to happen this way. When I gave you that birth certificate, I knew you'd figure this all out and we'd have to tell you the whole story. So like I said we're deeply sorry you had to find out this way. So this is your turn. Do you have any questions to ask us? We don't want you to be in the dark about any of this. When he finished I felt like I had been hit by a train. All that information at one time was almost too much to handle. I felt like if he said one more word, I'd scream. Questions, he asked. I sure did have questions. So many I didn't know where to start.

My emotions cycled from furious to distraught, from confusion to wonder. I wanted to ask so many things but I feared what would come out of my mouth and what else I'd hear. Despite my misgivings, I began to ask as many questions as I could think of, one by one, for almost two hours. We discussed anything I could think of, not always about what I'd just heard, but mostly. There were a few times I let my emotions overrule me, but for the most part I continued to talk as long as I could. As time went by, the anger that had been propelling me slowly transformed into joy. By the end of the day I felt as though I had been given a precious gift. Perhaps the most precious of my life and any lingering anger faded away into the ether.

At the beginning of this post I asked all of you how you would handle such life-changing news. In the short span of time between the post office and those two-plus hours talking at our family table, I must have asked myself all those questions and more a thousand times. But since that day, my mind has been at the most peace it had ever been. Rather than hating my parents for hiding my past from me, I'm thankful to them. Like I said, I feel as though they have given me an undeniable gift. This entire situation has brought us closer together than we had ever been. And I am eternally grateful for that.

Maybe I'll check on the progress of my mother's case when I get back from Europe. I'll try to keep the folks here up to date on what I find out. That's about all for me. Please never forget to keep your loved ones close. Thank you, and God bless you all. I'm posting this here in hopes of getting some outside perspective on my situation. I've been stuck inside this mess for so long I'm unable to tell fantasy from reality. Therefore, I'm here to get some help from the other posters and readers. For the sake of this post, you all can call me Parker. I'd like to be more forthcoming with my information but for reasons you're soon to read, I'm unable to do anything that would risk people finding out my present location.

Before I can tell you all here my immediate problem, I have to give you some basic facts from my past so this will all make sense in the end. To start, I've been in an abusive marriage for over 10 years. For reasons I'm too embarrassed to tell, here I allowed a man who swore he loved me since way before our marriage to beat me on a regular basis for almost the entirety of the time we were married. The worst part of the entire mess is that he is a police officer and a well-respected one too. The few people I tried to tell about the abuse refused to believe a man of his standing could be doing something so vile. Not until he began leaving

marks and more noticeable areas of my body did people around me finally acknowledge my assertions. I'll admit that I put up with the abuse for far longer than I should have but as long as he kept his hands off our child I could justify it. Unfortunately the last time I became pregnant one of his assaults went too far and caused me to lose the child. Despite the miscarriage obviously being his fault he didn't seem to show any remorse for our loss. This for me was the final straw. After talking to a few of the other women at work, I was put in touch with a group that helped women get away from abusive spouses. The group and I talked back and forth for over a

week and ultimately agreed on a day that I could get away with their assistance. One night when my husband was working the night shift, I grabbed my five-year-old son and slipped out of the house and eventually out of the state. Now perhaps everyone can understand my reluctance to be too free with my identity. The whole first part of this story has been told in order to give readers some insight on the present problem I am experiencing, or not experiencing. Since I was a little girl I'd been a runner. All through middle and high school levels I was part of the track team. Once I went off to college I spent some time on the cross country team and did very well but eventually the time came to rejoin the track team. I found I preferred a nice clean track over a dirty trail and never turned back. When I got married I took a few years off from running to focus on our home.

But the time came I could no longer stand being so sedentary so I got a new pair of shoes and hit the streets. In the time since I left my husband I've done my best to keep my life as normal as possible and that includes running. Again I'll be a bit vague but I'll say that I was recently running in an area that I've been living in and I noticed a black car with dark tinted windows parked in a cul-de-sac I was passing. At the time I thought nothing of it being there but the next day I left the place I'm staying I noticed the same car parked about 50 yards down the street. At first I stood and watched the car to see if it moved or did anything but it stayed where it was. It was just far enough away

so I couldn't see the driver clearly but I believe it only contained one man sitting in the driver's seat just sitting and doing nothing. Although I was somewhat curious I realized it may have nothing to do with me. I wasn't familiar with the neighborhood after all so I went ahead with my run. My most recent sighting of the car was this morning. While on my run, I was running down a street a few over from my current place and I noticed that the mysterious car was slowly following me or so I think from about 20 yards behind. I kept running and would look back from time to time to see if he was still there. Once I came to the end of the street,

the car sped around me and turned quickly to the right. The car took off and drove out of my sight. I couldn't help myself from watching it disappear from view. A small part of me expected the car to cut me off and the driver would jump out and grab me and pull me into the car. I know this may sound a tad paranoid, but my current situation had me extra nervous of the unfamiliar. Here's the point where I turn this may sound a tad paranoid but my current situation had me extra nervous of the unfamiliar. Here's the point where I turn this all over to you. What do you think about this car and what may be happening? I'm fully aware that hypervigilance may sometimes bleed into overcautiousness and this account may make me sound crazy. However, considering my past and

present positions and my husband's special capabilities at finding those unwilling to be found and his comrade's willingness to assist him in this endeavor, don't I perhaps have a valid reason to be scared? Maybe instead I'm suffering from PTSD and see danger everywhere. I'm really in need of the reader's input on this. The actions I choose to take can be life-altering, so there's no place for humor. Please feel free to put your two cents in because my inability to make the proper decision in the right amount of time could cost me my life. I recently had an experience that many will not believe. Honestly, I'm not sure I actually do myself.

My upbringing wasn't especially religious, per se. We never attended church, but I'm sure if you asked my parents if we were a Christian family, they would have to say yes. It wasn't something I ever discussed with them but I'd be willing to wager their view was similar to mine. My feeling is that a person's connection to the spiritual is personal and individual and I guess my view on the spiritual would be the same. I'd assume you would have to believe in some form of afterlife to believe in ghosts or spirits. I'm not exactly positive of my view towards them but I know what I just saw has made me question their existence in our world

and how and why they may share it with us. The end of last week I went for a run on a paved trail that surrounds a local neighborhood. I believe at one point the trail was part of a park in that area but from what I've been told the city closed the park due to low attendance. I guess the trail contained to be maintained by the city for the use of residents of the neighborhood but it proved to be a popular attraction for everyone because it was lit all night. This feature made it a somewhat safer place for use after dark. I myself had run on it several nights I was unable to sleep. The morning this happened it was about 4.30 and I had decided to knock out a few miles before dawn. Since it was the heart of summer it would be sweltering by 9am and I have never ran

well in the severe heat. Since it's less than a mile away from my house I usually walk to the track. Doing this also gives me an opportunity to warm up before I reach it. I made it there around 4.15 and after a few minutes of stretches set my watch timer at exactly 4.20. My custom is to start off slow so I completed my first mile in roughly 9 or so minutes. As I began the second I noticed a fellow jogger some 60 yards ahead running toward me. This wasn't especially odd on this trail, people were free to run either direction and often do. Once the jogger got closer I could tell it was a man, thin and of average height. I gradually began to increase my pace and I was soon about to pass him. As I did so, I offered a friendly wave and hello but rather than say hi and wave back,

he continued on and appeared to ignore me. My initial reaction was to get huffy and mumble how rude under my breath. He had to have seen and heard me. It was a quiet morning with no one around and we were under a very bright overhead street lamp. Rather than slow down I continued to increase my pace to my usual one and quickly glanced back at the man. I'm not sure why I did but something in the back of my mind told me to do it so I did. When I did he was gone. This caught me by such surprise I've stopped mid-stride and stared at where he should have been. I've never been so befuddled in my life. There was nowhere he could have gone.

We both should have been directly within the light of the lamp and walls surrounding the back of the homes. There was only two or three feet of grass between the wall and the edge of the track and even that area was well illuminated. This was about the time my confusion began to be replaced by fear and other questions started creeping in. Did I just say hi and wave at a ghost? Did I even believe in them in the first place? Goosebumps covered my body and I started to shiver. I wondered then if perhaps this was all a joke and my confidence started to rise again. I called out and asked if he was still there and chuckled, you can come out now. Despite the attempt at bravado, I knew this wasn't a prank. The little confidence I had

regained in that moment quickly fizzled away and I was left alone, trembling in fear once more. This was about the time my brain told me to run away and I listened. I booked it out of there, going the opposite direction he was of course and didn't stop until I made it back home. By the time I made it back my husband was getting up for work. Although I considered telling him what had happened, I didn't. I assumed he wouldn't believe me or he'd just laugh at me. He isn't a mean or uncaring husband, but considering we spend a considerable amount of our time joking around or pranking each other, I thought he would think I was tricking him.

Now you know why I thought someone may have been pranking me. Unfortunately, in this case, no one was laughing. Now I wait until the sun rises before I go running. Hot or not, I never want to run into that guy again. I did return to the park track again a few days later, but with my 15-year-old daughter in tow. The entire time I was there, I was constantly looking around. My daughter asked me if I was having a seizure. Even though it was funny, I couldn't laugh because I had my mind on that man. I still haven't told anyone what I saw. You guys are the

only people who know what I've seen and I imagine you all don't believe me either. Even so, those of you who have had similar experiences in your life, never forget, even if no one else believes you, there will always be one person who will. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When I was 19 I owned a car. I haven't driven since because I never want to go through that ordeal ever again. I was driving at night trying to get home from a friend's place. My friend lived out in the country so I had to take a back country road home. I was never a proficient night driver so when I got lost I wasn't surprised. I had tried bringing up google maps but I didn't have my 3G coverage out there. I decided that I was probably going in the wrong direction, just a gut feeling, so I got out of the car to look around.

At the time it was May but when I got out it was incredibly cold. The weather had been mild all that week, even at night it was brisk at the worst. The second I stepped out of the car though, I knew everything was wrong. Not only was it unimaginably cold for that time of year, but the woods below the hill my car was on was gone. It had been there just moments before I stepped out, but now, there were four large houses where the patch of trees had been. The houses though didn't look like houses I was used to seeing in the area. They had domed roofs with a skylight in the middle and what

looked like elongated entryways at the front, kind of like your classic igloo. I started to panic and called my dad but the call went nowhere. I had forgotten that I lost coverage. I then heard a voice below me. I looked down at the houses and a small floodlight had been turned on in one of the front lawns of the houses. This guy was standing outside with a dog. He was talking to the dog in this language that I had never heard before. I'm no linguist and I couldn't hear him very well but I swear it sounded practically alien. Lots of elongated vowels and chirping, for lack of a better word. I was dumbfounded, freaking out. At this point, I was considering throwing myself off that hill, hoping to hit my head and wake back up in my car. I was fully awake though, freezing and panicked.

I rushed back into my car and drove for another few minutes before passing by another car. The car though was totally not the kind of car we see today. There was a weird symbol in the windshield and lights accenting the chassis. It had no outboard mirrors and didn't make a normal sound as it passed by. I can't even describe the sound it made. Not a whoosh like normal cars. It was almost like it was slithering. I think the driver noticed that my car was super different too because as I instinctively slowed down to get a better look,

so did the stranger's car. That was it for me. I stopped at the side of the road for a few seconds after it had passed and took a lot of deep breaths. I turned off my car and sat for a long time but eventually worked up the nerve to get out of the car again. This time it was barely cool out and I could recognize my surroundings. I was a 20 minutes drive away from home. I walked down the road a ways around a bend and up another small hill and could see a familiar billboard out in the distance.

The problem was that I was way too afraid that I got back in my car, things would change again so I was determined to stay outside. I thought just to be safe I'll open the car door and grab the flashlight I keep in the driver's side door compartment. I walked back down the hill, around the bend and no car. It occurred to me that after I shut the car door I hadn't looked back at all, so maybe I'd just forgotten its position. I kept walking back but nope, no car.

I checked my phone and it had been hours since I left and my parents were surely in bed asleep so I called my friend and he picked me up on the road. I told him some made up story about how the car had died on the road going through the woods on a different longer route back to my house. I was getting scared in the woods so I decided to hoof it home. Gave up by the time my folks had gone to bed so I had to call him. He laughed at my misfortune and apparent stupidity and said he'd help me look for the car the next day. I led my dad and him on a wild goose chase for that car for the majority of the next day before my dad gave up and said it must have been

stolen and reported it. To this day, the car hasn't been found because, as far as I know, it's on the side of the road in what I firmly believe to be an alternate dimension, a parallel universe or what have you. The truth is I have no idea how this sounds. I've only told my wife what happened and she thought I was messing with her and then after I insisted I wasn't she thought I was insulting her intelligence. To smooth things over, I gave in and told her it was just a prank to a very important meeting and missed my turn.

I got in a turning lane to make a u-turn when my GPS corrected itself and told me just to go straight. So here's where I did something stupid that I'm convinced killed me. There's a double turning lane that has a red light while the straight lanes to the right have a green light. I was stopped in the inner turning lane so I had to cross another turning lane to get into the lane that was straight. I signal that I need to get out and a car lets me into the other turning lane. It was a tight squeeze at a weird angle so I had no visibility of oncoming traffic. I'm so panicked that I'm late and angry that I just said forget it and pressed the gas.

In that moment I had a prolonged blink accompanied by a sudden shift in pressure. I felt a pop in my head like you get when you're on an airplane. Suddenly my foot's not on the gas and I'm back in the turning lane. I look at the lane I was supposed to be turning into and as I do, a vehicle going at least 60 miles per hour speeds past me trying to beat the yellow light. Had I driven forward, I would have been dust. Unlike a lot of these stories, I didn't experience my own death, but I know for a fact I drove forward. I actually remember driving forward, yet here I was, safely back in my lane, alive. I don't remember the name of the theory, but a while back I read about an abstract idea

that our souls will never let us die, and that it will choose the path of least resistance even if that means jumping to an alternate timeline. I wonder if I was glitched into a timeline where I had acted more cautiously. I think about my glitch from time to time and get a little down thinking about an alternate timeline where my wife had to move on from a life she built around me and how devastated my parents must have been when they got the news. I hug them a little tighter nowadays. In 1993, I was 17 and attended Lollapalooza in Orlando, Florida. I wore black jeans, black military surplus jump boots,

and a black ministry t-shirt from their Psalm 69 tour the year prior, which I also saw in Orlando. Not the most unique outfit at the festival, but this part will become more important later in the story. Primus was the headliner that year. During their set, while I was having a blast circle moshing around in the story. Primus was the headliner that year. During their set, while I was having a blast circle moshing around in the pit, I accidentally shoulder checked this guy fairly hard. Back then, mosh pits seemed much friendlier than today. Impacting with others, while expected and unavoidable, was never meant to harm anyone. Whenever you did accidentally run into someone hard or someone got knocked down, it was common courtesy to help anyone. Whenever you did accidentally run into someone hard or someone got

knocked down, it was common courtesy to help them up and check on them. So I accidentally shoulder checked this guy and immediately spun around to make sure he was okay. And in that instant it felt like time started to slow down. As I spun around to see him, he too spun around to see me. And when we made eye contact it felt like everything stopped for a moment. I was looking at myself. Not only did we look the same, we were wearing the exact same clothing that even appeared to be in the same condition. Our shirts seemed to be equally faded, not new. The only detail that struck me as being any different was it seemed as if my hair was slightly longer than his, maybe by an inch or two at most,

as if mine had been growing for a few months longer than his. The frozen moment lasted for what seemed like a second or two. Then time seemed to abruptly return and the crowd swallowed us back up. I didn't see him again. I remember thinking that it felt odd in the moment, but I must have wrote it off. I was likely easily distracted by the music, lights, people, and everything else happening around me. In hindsight, this is always the hardest part of the memory for me to reconcile with. It feels like if something like that happened today, I would have stopped everything and investigated. The best I can

figure is that I just rationalized it away as a dumb, distracted teen. After all, it could have just been some other guy wearing the same clothes, right? After Primus was over, I was leaving the concert fairgrounds to head back to my car with my friend whom I had driven there. Someone laying on a blanket nearby started yelling at us as we walked by. The guy got up, ran over and started walking alongside us asking stuff about where we were going, when we were going to meet, so and so, etc. My friend and I had no idea who this dude was and had dealt with our fair share of stoned weirdos so we just ignored him. When he realized we weren't stopping, he sprinted ahead of me and placed both of his hands on my shoulders to physically stop me from

moving. He started addressing me by the wrong name and was confused as to why I was acting this way. I knocked his hands off me, told him to back off and my friend and I kept walking to my car, leaving him standing there staring at me with a shocked expression. At the time we laughed it off like, man what was wrong with that guy? But the next day, everything started to make sense once I chatted online with another friend who attended the same festival. This other friend was someone I knew for years but wasn't close with. He was the level of friend where I knew he was at the same show but I didn't expend any energy looking for him or making plans to meet up or whatever. He initiated the chat and asked if he had done something to anger me.

I had no idea what he meant, so he told me this anecdote. He was watching some band at the festival when this crowd surfing guy got past his way and fell down in front of him. He helped him up and realized it was me. He greeted me and tried to give me a hug, but I shoved him away, cursed at him, and then stormed off. He was left completely baffled why I would have acted that way when he thought we were cool. There were two huge problems with this anecdote. 1. I never crowd surfed.

Ever. 2. At the time this happened, I was with my friend watching a different band at a different stage. What's fascinating is that both my friend during the crowd surfing incident and my doppelganger's friend from the blanket incident were both close enough to each of us to make physical contact and look us squarely in the eyes, yet they both mistook this for the past hour. I work in a software house with about 15 other people.

The timeline is this. Friday, December 21st. We're told we can choose to come to work on Saturday and take 24th and 25th off. Most people choose to do this, except one girl whose birthday is on Saturday. Saturday, December 22nd, we go to work. December 23rd, 24th, and 25th are days off. Wednesday, December 26th, we come back to work. Girl whose birthday was on Saturday brings cake, soda, and

some snacks. We celebrate her birthday in the meeting room. Now something that's off about this birthday party is that a girl that's usually extremely friendly says she absolutely couldn't bear to see us all of a sudden. Like a switch just flicked inside her and she felt like she couldn't be there. Like she can't stand any of us and she has to be alone. A bunch of us are very close outside of work. This was just something out of the ordinary. Anyway, we eat the cake and there are two pieces of strawberry left. The birthday girl eats one and our accountant, Z, wants the last piece.

Basically the girl who felt like she couldn't stand us and Z fight over that piece of strawberry for a while. Afterwards Z says it's not fair we leave the last and biggest piece of cake to our boss. We all laugh at this because fighting over a piece of strawberry and complaining that the boss gets the bigger piece is a typical thing Z does. I specifically remember Z wearing a tight black dress that day. It all seemed normal until we mentioned this story to Z today. We were talking about how it was weird that the friendly girl felt so disconnected all of a sudden, and Z says there is no way she was at that birthday party because A. she doesn't remember any of this, and B. because she was in a different city for a funeral that day.

She had a picture taken on the car ride there on December 26th to prove it. Five people from the office specifically remembered Z being there, and they remember the strawberry incident. Three people say they're not sure or can't recall exactly, and we haven't asked the rest yet. I personally remember her being there vividly. And there is only one birthday from October to March in our office and that's the one on December 22nd. We're absolutely sure the event happened on the 26th and even the birthday girl remembers bringing the cake on the 26th.

It wasn't the office Christmas party because we celebrated it on the 28th and it didn't happen inside the office at all. We've basically been going over this for hours. There's no way Z could have been there, but I think about it a lot. I was on Reddit after school around 8pm. My cell phone started ringing and I saw the caller ID was from my friend Carrie. I answered it, but all I heard on the other line was static. I was planning on texting her, but as soon as I ended the call, my phone crashed. It was very strange, seeing as my phone was at 70% before the call.

I kind of shrugged it off and put my phone on the charger. It took a long time to charge. It was still on the black no battery screen when I went to bed. The next morning, I woke up late. It makes sense because I use my phone as an alarm. My phone was at 90% which was good enough for a day of school. I tried texting Carrie on the bus but I wasn't getting any reception. I decided to just wait to talk to her in person. I met up with her at lunch and she proceeded to ask me, did you bring it? I had no idea what she was talking

about. She told me that I had called her last night at 8 and told her about a red shiny rock I found on my front porch. Apparently I promised her I'd bring it to her. I told her about how she called me and my phone being weird and she had no memory of that. Carrie's phone had record of the call. Mine didn't until I checked back in my phone bill history. After that, my messages with Carrie started working again. I texted her on the bus where I previously didn't get service. Something still feels odd though, and every morning I check my porch for that rock she told me about.

I feel like it will turn up, someday. In 1935, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard of the British Royal Air Force had a harrowing experience in his Hawker Hart biplane. Goddard was a wing commander at the time and while on a flight from Edinburgh, Scotland to his home base in Andover, England, he decided to fly over an abandoned airfield at Drem, not far from Edinburgh. The useless airfield was overgrown with foliage, the hangars were falling apart and cows grazed where planes were once parked. Goddard then continued his flight to Andover, but encountered a bizarre storm. In the high winds of the storm's strange brown-yellow clouds, he lost control of his plane, which began to spiral toward the ground. Narrowly averting a crash, Goddard found that his plane was heading back towards

Drem. As he approached the old airfield, the storm suddenly vanished and Goddard's plane was now flying in brilliant sunshine. This time, as he flew over the Drem airfield, it looked completely different. The hangars looked like new. There were four airplanes on the ground, three were familiar biplanes but painted in an unfamiliar yellow. The fourth was a monoplane which the RAF had none of in 1935. The mechanics were dressed in blue overalls which Goddard thought odd since all RAF mechanics dressed in brown overalls. Strange too that none of the mechanics seemed to notice him fly over. Leaving the area, he again encountered the storm but managed to make

his way back to Andover. It wasn't until 1939 that the RAF began to paint their planes yellow, enlisted a monoplane of the type that Goddard saw, and the mechanic's uniforms were switched to blue. Had Goddard somehow flown four years into the future, then returned to his own time? I found this sub and thought you guys might enjoy this weird occurrence courtesy of my grandpa. This is the only story he has ever told me that A. wasn't funny and B. wasn't about the Red Baron and C. showed him being vulnerable. I think about it every now and then because it honestly is just scary. I was about 16 at the time in 2006, hanging out at his apartment one day inspecting a framed picture of huge snowy mountains with a couple of people in

the foreground. He told me it was taken on a trip he was on in the 70s as a young geologist. He and a group of four others were flown somewhere in the Arctic, middle of nowhere, middle of the mountains. They had a camp set up far below the mountain range. This place was only accessible by plane or helicopter, it was not regularly visited by other scientists. It was a place where you would have to be documented as having gone there if that makes sense. One day he and two other guys left early in the morning to ascend one of the mountains to start their research. Cryptic, but it had something to do with rock formations. The other two were stationed at the base camp. He said that on the journey back, they were trekking through a long corridor when

he distinctly felt like they were being followed or watched. This went on for a couple of hours. They heard noises that sounded like a person whistling loudly as if to get their attention, but they couldn't see anyone or anything and were unable to pinpoint the direction of the sounds. Apparently the guys did not get the same eerie feeling, but all three of them did hear the whistling. At one point, my grandpa looked up to the top of the mountainside that made up one part of the corridor and saw a man, seemingly standing atop a ledge, watching. The ledge must have been several hundred feet high. The man, as he called it, was far away enough that no distinct features could be seen, but it was very clearly a human body

standing upright, with hands, legs, and a head. Not naked, but definitely not wearing any kind of gear, and the shadow of the rest of the mountain. Grandpa said that they all started waving and calling out to the man, but got no response or movement. After a while, they gave up and kept moving forward. He said that he felt very tight in his chest and very uneasy. He looked back and saw the figure in the same place, but it was floating a foot or so in the air. He confirmed that the other guy also saw this happen. He said that his body was flooded with fear, like a panic, and the other guys were wanting to move away quickly. After a few minutes at most he looked back and the man was gone. They waited and saw

nothing return. There were no more noises the rest of the way. He said that he had never been more terrified in his life and he couldn't make any logical sense of it. When they got back to camp the other two guys were still doing their thing. They were all so rattled that no one spoke about it again. They finished the research and were transported off the mountain a few days later. I wish I was better at recapturing how affected he was even just remembering it. I brought it up to him in more recent times. He still gets really quiet and uneasy. I don't know if it's a glitch, an anomaly, maybe an encounter with another sentient species. It freaks me out and clearly still freaks him out some 45 years later. This happened about two years ago.

I was in my senior year of high school and we had a snow day and school was cancelled. So after sleeping in, I woke up and chilled in bed for a little bit before embarking downstairs for some coffee. I came downstairs and walked past my mom and dad on the couch. She was reading something on her phone and my dad was reading a newspaper. She greeted me good morning. I answered and I thought it was strange because my dad didn't even look up at me or say anything when I came downstairs. I grabbed some coffee and wandered back into the front room, the living room, and made some small talk that I can't remember with my mom. Still, my dad hadn't even looked up at me.

He was just reading the paper. I didn't try to talk to him because he clearly seemed like he didn't want to talk, but it was the weirdest thing ever. My cats were suddenly at the front door. Since there was snow everywhere, my mom rushed to go let them inside, and I followed her, still talking about something unimportant. But out of the corner of my eye I could see my dad get up with his newspaper and silently wander out of the room, through the kitchen and into the dining room that leads out to the back porch.

I was finally annoyed at him straight up ignoring me for no reason so I went into the dining room to talk to him and he wasn't there. I hadn't heard the back door open or close, it's pretty loud, but I figured that maybe I was distracted and missed the sound. Even so, I couldn't see him anywhere near the porch or in the backyard. So I went up to my mom and asked her, so what's wrong with dad? She kind of looked at me funny and just replied, huh? It weirded me out that she didn't seem to think anything was wrong with him so I said, dad, what's up with him this morning? He just like completely ignored me and left out the back door I guess. What's up with that? Is he mad at me for something? Then my mom says

something confusing as ever. What are you talking about? Dad's sleeping upstairs. I was getting frustrated at this point and said, mom, he was right next to you reading the paper. He completely ignored me and just walked away. So what are you talking about? Mom goes, He worked the graveyard shift last night. He's upstairs in bed sleeping. He hasn't even gotten up yet. Are you feeling okay?

I absolutely didn't even believe her. I ran upstairs and looked in their room. And sure enough, he was right there, sound asleep. Something weird happened, whether it was a glitch, doppelganger, or he somehow astral projected and I saw him, but it's the creepiest thing ever. Saw my dad sitting right there, plain as day, could hear the paper rustling as he turned the newspaper pages and could hear his footsteps and yet he was asleep the whole time and my mom never saw him. This is a personal story of mine. It happened around my freshman year of high school in 2011. I was around 13 or 14 years old and my sister was four school grades younger than me.

Every day I would come home on the bus, arriving at my house around 2.20pm. About a 10, maybe 50 minute ride from the high school to my house. I lived in the countryside, so my stop was ways away from the other neighborhoods the other kids lived in. My house was directly next to a farm, and we only had a few neighbors, all older folk who stuck to themselves. Due to living in a rural area and having an extremely long dirt driveway, when I got home from school I had to walk for a few minutes down the driveway before I got to the back slide door. I would enter my house, lock the door behind me and put my things down. Every day the same routine when I got home. I would check on my dog's food and water,

watch TV in the living room for a little while. My living room window has a perfect view of the front yard of my house as well as the driveway and where the bus would stop at the end of our driveway. Here's where things started getting interesting. While I was watching TV in the living room, I would keep an eye out of the window to watch for my sister to arrive home from middle school and make sure she got off the bus and off the driveway safely. She would get out of school around 2.30 and arrive at my house closer to 3pm. I would keep the door locked until I knew she would be home in a few minutes and then

I would unlock it so she could get in the house when she gets to the back door. I did that same thing this day just like every other day. While in the living room I saw my sister's bus pull up the end of the driveway, stop, and I watched her get off the bus. I remember she was wearing a north face jacket, a scarf, and she had her fairly large teal backpack on, jeans and boots. She was walking up the driveway and went out of my view and I heard the backslider door open, close, and lock as she came into the house. From where I was sitting in the living room, I could see her walk past a doorway down the hall to her room. I yelled out her name and asked her how school was, but got no answer.

I got up to follow her and repeat my question. As I walked into the hallway, the very same hallway I had just seen her walk down, I noticed that there were no lights on. The hallway was dark and her room at the end of the hallway was also dark. I said her name again and heard nothing. I turned on the lights and went into her room and she wasn't there. I figured maybe she went into another room in the house but I could not find her anywhere. I went back out to check the back door and to my surprise it was still unlocked and slightly open,

which didn't make any sense because I had just heard my sister close and lock the door when she got home. Confused, I closed the door and locked it and went back to the living room to grab my phone. As I entered the room, the strangest thing happened. Out of the window I saw my sister's bus pull up, stop, and I watched her get up the bus and walk up my driveway again. When she came in the house I told her, the weirdest thing just happened. I saw you get off your bus and come inside and lock the door but you weren't anywhere near the house. Then I looked outside and saw you get off your bus again and when I checked the door it was unlocked and open. She responded by saying, that's really weird because the door was locked when I came inside and you usually leave it open for me. I explain how I locked it because I thought she was in the house and thought it was really strange that the door was open and unlocked without either of us manipulating it.

Might I add my sister was wearing a t-shirt, a scarf, leggings and boots, a totally different outfit than I saw the first time. I didn't know what I was seeing or what just happened. I had paranormal experiences in the past, stories that I would be happy to share, but this one really took the cake. I didn't know if this was some kind of entity mimicking my sister and trying to get my attention, or if this was some kind of glitch in reality, but I would love to hear some theories and stories that are similar to mine. The first happening was when I was 18 and working at a credit union in the drive-thru, the ones where we send the tubes out to cars.

On slow days my manager would let us read books or read up on the news when there was no one to help. On this day it was just me and one girl who was in her early twenties. We didn't have a lot in common since she was really into such things as Grey's Anatomy or gushy romance novels. Today she had the latter with her that she had just bought at the store on her lunch break. I don't remember the title of it but I know it was predominantly pink. As I sat reading the news on my computer she kept laughing out loud as she read her new book. Finally she can't keep it to herself and starts telling me how funny and clever this book is. Now I have never seen or heard of this book in my life and as she talks about it my mind starts to wonder and I wasn't really listening. However she gets to the point where she says listen to this

part and starts reading directly from it. Then the oddest thing happened. As she's reading the words I start to hear them in my own head just a couple of seconds ahead of her. After about 15 seconds or so of this, without thinking, I cut her off and finished the next several sentences for her. The words came out of my mouth as if I had the whole thing memorized. I don't remember at all, it was over 12 years ago, but I know part of it was, I lost my virginity upstairs while my parents were downstairs watching TV. Weird quote to remember from the experience but it is what it was.

After I did that we both just stared at each other in stunned silence. She knew I hated those kinds of books and had no reason to know anything from that book whatsoever. Finally she asks how did you know that? I just sat there. I didn't know what to say. Scared out of my mind, she dismissed it eventually, but I've never forgotten the experience. I'm an atheist and don't believe in the supernatural at all. I don't think I'm psychic, but how would I know what was in that book? Now two years later I had another very different yet eerie experience that I will never forget, and as I revisit it now, it still creeps me out.

I was raised Mormon, and yes, I was one of the missionaries that goes door to door selling religion. I happened to be sent to England on my mission and at the time was in an area called King's Norton, south of Birmingham. We weren't having a lot of luck and were looking at a map of the area and saw a small village a bit of a distance outside of the main city. We checked our area book to see if anyone had been taught down there and saw no record. The next day we took a lengthy bike ride that had a long stretch of just countryside until we finally started to see it. Now I had been in the country for over a year and had a pretty good idea of what British architecture looks like.

This village looked nothing like it. I remember the buildings looked really modern and spaced out, which, if you know England, that's not usually how things look. There was this wide brown building near the center with a lot of windows. Out front was many small round tables, each with three or four people sitting at them, all drinking tea. As missionaries, we were used to stairs, but the way they looked at us was different. It wasn't curiosity or annoyance as we usually see, but instead it was just flat, emotional, long stares. It was also dead quiet, as if someone pressed the mute button for the area. Stares and silence.

Creeped me out. Odd thing was, the other missionary I was with didn't seem to care or seem bothered at all by the very strange place and situation we found ourselves in. I on the other hand couldn't shake it. Something was seriously wrong about where we were at. To me it felt like I had walked onto a movie set. Everything had a slightly unrealistic quality to it. Too perfect. The people might as well have been robots. Everyone just stared. We eventually made our way to a small neighborhood which was surprisingly void of people. It was as if the sole residents of the village were at that building in the center. We knocked at a door and no one answered. Second door, nothing. At this point I am nearly shaking from freaking out so

bad. I tell my companion that I think we should leave. I didn't feel like we were in danger but just the strongest feeling of being out of place. He gets annoyed and says we should stay. I keep pressing the issue and the more I talk about it and point things out, he says I'm just seeing things and need to stop being so dramatic. After about ten minutes of back and forth, I finally made up that the Holy Ghost was telling me that we should leave. He gave up and we left immediately. He was angry and muttering the whole way out, but once we made it back to the main city, he acted like nothing had happened. I brought it up later that day and only got a, yeah that was weird, from him. We never went back and he never brought it up again, but I've never forgotten.

Fast forward 12 years later to today as I was thinking this over at work and about to prepare to post it here. On a whim I pull up Google Maps to find the village. I can still see exactly where it should be on the map. I went to that point and there's nothing. Just a road. I spent nearly half an hour scouring Google Maps all around the southern Birmingham area trying to find it, but nothing.

Where were we? Did we glitch into a future part of England that wasn't meant to be there yet? Who were the people, and why did they look at us so strangely? I hope all of this makes sense. I would be very interested in your thoughts on these. I've never talked with people about them before,

but never forgot how they felt. This happened in 2015. I discovered a long time ago that certain actions can induce strange consequences or bizarre glitches in everyday things. Often these bizarre events or occurrences are on the very edge of being glitches. Something about them strikes one as peculiar or unsettling, as if reality, but for a moment, has been overturned and the myriad sinews of it have been exposed. This story is about one such occasion. I had gotten into a habit

of doing erratic, habit-breaking actions, producing a pattern of behavior and then abruptly altering it. My thesis was simple. If reality was artificial, the appearance of ordinary life, being a facade, could be displaced by the puncturing of normality in a particular way. So I quit my job as a lawyer, quit the profession entirely. I told people when they asked me what I was going to do now, something else, and I joined the ranks of the unemployed. I left a religion that I had been raised in and was devout for many years and joined one

antithetical to my upbringing. I would go to grocery stores and collect random items and place them in other locations in the store just to see what would happen. I would purchase odd things like playing cards and perform magic tricks for strangers that wouldn't pan out. Over time, I began to notice strange things happening. For example, I tossed my phone into a park near my home, a large wooded park near the airport, and subsequently my mother was contacted by a member of the military who claims they found my phone while walking in a frigid wet park in the middle of nowhere, returning it a few days later untouched. I took a completely unplanned flight to Toronto from a smaller city. When I arrived, Toronto was unrecognizable from

the air. It was 90% wilderness. When I arrived, a Chinese woman walked right through me at the airport and continued as nothing had happened. Once on the ground, I went about my ordinary business and noticed cashiers in a McDonald's in downtown Toronto speaking Russian to customers. Walking about downtown Toronto, whenever I would ask any stranger a question, they would respond, I'm going home. After one of my convenience store's outings, I was followed by about a dozen men in military uniforms acting like robots out of the store.

I later saw a military uniformed serviceman at my place of worship. After another one of my seemingly erratic outings, purchasing objects like dirty magazines and other tidbits for the purposes of placing said objects in random locations, such as my place of worship, I was confronted by the religious authority at the place of worship. He then proceeded to tell me everything I had done that day in complete detail as if he was omniscient or was observing me, despite that being impossible. He later, at a religious ceremony, abruptly told everyone that they didn't have to be there, even though participation

in such services is mandatory in this religion, and promptly walked out. Out of curiosity I tried to leave the country on an unplanned flight. I purchased a ticket and planned to drive three hours to Ottawa to attend a passport office to renew my passport. Halfway there I decided to have a nap in my car, exhausted. I pulled up the highway and parked my car on the side of the road. I fell asleep. I woke up three hours later with my head under the car behind the rear tire, five random people standing around me. This was in the middle of nowhere in rural Ontario. These people claimed that they had found me that way,

which was impossible as the door to my car was locked and they had to call the police. They refused to let me leave. The police arrived, they forced me to go with them to a nearby station. I was told that I could not leave until I had family pick me up. They brought me a subway sandwich for lunch and put me in a jail cell without explanation and held me there until I had family pick me up. They brought me a Subway sandwich for lunch and put me in a jail cell without explanation and held me there until I missed my flight. Suffice to say, I believe that the system resists us acting out of character. It compels us to follow the plan, sometimes even with force. I've since rehabilitated myself and played the role I've been assigned, if only so that I can live in the relative peace and quiet complacency offers, convinced of the inherent oddness,

perhaps even odiousness, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, our Let's Read official and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And join my Discord to interact with me and other listeners directly. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon.