The Lets Read Podcast - 44: Episode 042 | 911 Call & Military Stories | 39 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

Welcome to the forty second 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 Scary 911 Calls, & Military Encounters.   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 was a 911 dispatcher for almost 11 years. 11 long years of receiving the calls of everyone from entitled do-gooders to terrified pleading victims of serious violent crimes. I spent a long time compartmentalizing the more harrowing calls, years letting go of the pain and suffering I soaked up like a sponge during the years I spent sat in front of a switchboard computer. I've had numerous sleepless nights, countless visits to state-appointed therapists, but only one emergency call really sticks with me, one that I could never shake off or push to the back of my mind. I have a copy of the transcripts to the call, so I'll be referencing my copy to ensure my recollection of the events are as accurate as possible.

This is the story of the Ashlyn Jane Doe. Working in more than 6,000 call centers nationwide, 911 dispatchers form the vital link between callers in distress and emergency response teams that assist them. Through efficient handling and assessment, we reduce response times and help save lives. That's the idea that got me into the career in the first place, saving lives. I'd never been particularly athletic so a career in law enforcement or the military was never really in the cards for me. That always bothered me. I grew up intensely idealistic and I've always had my heart set on a career where I could help people, help make the world a better place. So when I found out that I could apply to be a 911 dispatcher and help play a part

of such a vital public service, I jumped at the chance. We were told that the job wasn't for everyone, that it could take a serious psychological toll on those that volunteered. I know it sounds crazy, but that only made it more appealing. It was, after all, public service, service being the operative word. It would be rough, frustrating, even depressing sometimes, but I would be providing a much-needed aid to my fellow Americans, often during the darkest, most terrifying moments of their lives. I should also add that it requires specialist training to be a police dispatcher. Being a general call taker or even an emergency medical service dispatcher is a tough gig, but a police dispatcher was a cut above and we all knew it.

Only the most intelligent, strong-willed and decisive candidates are granted roles as police dispatchers. So naturally, I was over the moon when I passed the applicant's exam and was given a place on the training course. I was a pretty experienced member of the police dispatchers when the call from Ashlyn Jane Doe came through. Just a few hours into my shift, I recently returned from the break room with a flash of strong black coffee to fuel me throughout the night. You always seem to say a little prayer whenever a call is patched through, hoping it's nothing too serious, nothing too upsetting. But as soon as I heard the girl's voice, I knew it would be bad. You see, screamers are bad.

You can barely hear them, they're incoherent and basically you have to spend like the first five minutes of the call just getting them to breathe enough to communicate. But the worst by far are the whisperers. The whisperers call when whatever is putting them in danger is close, real close. Whisperers do so because they are in grave imminent danger. Whisperers call because they're being hunted. 911, what is the address of your emergency? I asked. The call had already been picked up by a general call taker, patched through to me once it established that the caller needed the police. Right across from the 4th street laundromat. There was a slight pause before the girl whispered. The fact that she didn't know exactly where she was gave me a terrible sinking feeling.

This is going to be a rough one. What's the problem? I replied, trying to sound as casual as possible. Younger callers seem to respond better that way. I've been abducted. The way she sounded so calm, so matter-of-fact, it was utterly chilling. There was no hope in the girl's voice, even though she was so close now to rescue her. But you're at the laundromat?

I asked, consulting a map of the area. It was right in the middle of Ashland, surrounded by a commercial and residential district. She wasn't held up in some barn in the middle of nowhere despite being thoroughly disturbed. I reassured myself with the thought that this would be an easy rescue. No, I'm in the bedroom with him. Him. The words seemed to rattle around in my skull. She was in the bedroom with him.

Do you know what color the house is? I tried to change the subject slightly to garner more information, sure, but also to try to keep the girl calm, keep her mind occupied. No, was all she said. This was a spanner in the works, a big one. The police can't just go kicking in the door of every apartment or house opposite the fourth street laundromat yet before i could press her for more detail she spoke again please hurry my heart rate began to pick up at this point she was obviously in danger perhaps extreme extreme danger. I had to remain professional and continue my assessment of the situation. Does he have a weapon? I asked, already preparing to send out an APB to muster the officers required for a rescue. Got a taser. She lowered her voice

even further as she spoke, but still she didn't seem overwhelmed by fright. I considered for a moment that whoever was may have drugged the poor girl to keep her sedated. Are you injured? A little. Her whisper was haunting by the point. She sounded like she'd been driven half insane by the ordeal. Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know. Without waking him, I'm scared. She was broken by fear, numb with it. Is there a bathroom in the house? I remember my voice breaking. I was so scared for this poor little thing.

I wanted so, so badly for her to just drop the phone and run. Run for her life. His bedroom is closed and he made it so it would make noise. Will he do something to you? I'd never been so intense. Not during my entire time as a dispatcher. Yeah, he had me tied up. Are you tied up now? No, I kind of freed myself. That's my girl, I remember thinking. She was a fighter, a survivor. She suddenly said,

I think I woke him. I think I woke him up. Just set the phone down. My heart was in my mouth. There was silence, what seemed like minutes of uninterrupted silence as I half expected the screams to commence. Finally, I brought myself to say something, anything down the silent phone line. Are you still there? How much longer? Was all she asked. It broke my heart. I didn't know. I just didn't know. I kept her on the line as I immediately dispatched officers to the laundromat.

Luckily, there were only two houses immediately opposite the place in what was otherwise an industrial complex. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I finally heard the voices of the dispatch officers. They broke into the house of the kidnapper and were in the process of freeing the poor girl from captivity. Show me your hands. Put up your effing hands right now. Do it. I heard one of them bellow. I held back tears knowing that that poor young woman was finally safe. Safe from him.

She was most definitely in danger too. When the police searched the house, they found the bodies of two other young women that had disappeared in the months before the critical 911 call. Jane Doe is called that because her identity cannot be revealed, standard procedure for all victims of assault. Her abductor, Sean Michael Great, was found guilty of murdering Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffithith and was later sentenced to death for his crimes. During the trial, he stated that despite having killed before, he had no intention of killing the kidnapped Jane Doe and was in fact intending to marry her. That's what really gets to me, the thought of the brutal, potentially short life that poor girl would have ended up living as the unwilling bride of such a murderous, unfeeling psychopath.

Where she would be if she hadn't loosened her bindings, found the phone, and called in her own rescue on that fateful spring night. Ask a cop which day of the year they dread working the most. One or two might answer Christmas or Super Bowl Sunday, and I get that. But 9 out of 10 will give you the same tired look before they utter one single word. Halloween. Halloween might just be some light-hearted spooky fun for some, but for law enforcement, it's no joke. The small New England town I serve in has a spike of about six or seven times the number of emergency calls on Halloween night alone. It really does bring out the absolute worst in people. I mean, there's the stuff we anticipate every year.

Ungenerous houses having suffered a barrage of weaponized eggs, trees covered in toilet paper, homeowners complaining of juvenile trespassers. Those calls are manageable, but they bog down our on-duty officers so that when serious crimes happen, we're dangerously under strength. But all of the dumb Halloween mischief I've had to respond to over the years, all of it pales in comparison to what I found at the house on the end of Jefferson Street.

That was a Halloween night I don't think I'll ever forget. I just responded to a call regarding a group of teenagers who had apparently been engaging in some pretty aggressive trick-or-treating, all without costumes. That type of stuff is exactly why I hate Halloween. No, what they were doing wasn't strictly illegal, but I can't exactly have a bunch of knuckle-draggers making trouble on a night like that, especially not with the hundreds of excited children roaming the streets. I lecture them. They roll their eyes, but I join the force to get into car chases with bad guys, not argue semantics with a bunch of stoned brats.

They walk away, muttering stuff that I choose to ignore while I get back in my patrol car. The radio almost immediately buzzes to life. My dispatcher says something over the radio involving this run-down house over on Jefferson Street. I start the car up, listening as he describes a member of the public calling to report that the house has Halloween decorations that were too scary. She then says it's the second call that day and I should go over and check it out if I have a minute to spare. She always did have a sense of humor. She knew well I was off my feet. We had a little laugh about it. Like I said, we get some seriously ridiculous calls on Halloween. It's not just dumb kids. It's bitter

old misers and party poopers who honestly just resent people having a good time. This one good Christian lady calls us every year over trespassing trick-or-treaters on kids who calls the cops on actual children. Anyway I carry about my duties responding to calls and generally keeping an eye out for trouble. A few hours slip by, the sun sets, the smaller kids, led by their parents, disappear back into their homes until it's just a few older groups on their way to parties and whatnot. Then, the dispatcher gets on to me about this house on Jefferson. She says she had three more calls about the decorations, how they're scaring kids and even some parents, and she needs me to roll over there to check it out. Great.

Arguing with some slasher movie obsessed hermit who's probably about to get all sovereign citizen on me. Just what I need to make me feel like a guardian of the innocent. Sometimes I feel like the world's grumpy stepfather honestly. So I take the ride over there to this smaller part of town that's a little more run down, arriving on Jefferson. I see the house immediately. There was absolutely no missing it. The old colonial looking place was covered in Halloween decorations. Cardboard standees of vampires and zombies, a ton of fake cobwebs all over the porch. I think I counted like 20 carved pumpkins dotted all over the lawn.

Pretty intricate designs too. But hanging from a large oak just to the side of the house was the most disturbing Halloween decoration I had ever seen. Not disturbing because it looked real. The limbs of the figure were too rigid. The hair a little too artificial. But the placement of the thing, it really did set me on edge as I stared out of the patrol car at it. The figure hung by a rope from one of the oak tree's long thick branches drifting gently in the fall breeze. Look, I'm a

cop, I've seen some stuff. I don't frighten easily. I'm very logical, very level-headed, but that thing sent a shiver down my spine. I stepped out of the car, keeping my eyes glued to the hanging decoration as I walked towards it. The sound of crunching leaves under my feet with each and every step. Reaching for the flashlight on my belt, I pointed the torch beam over towards the tree. I could see why people had called this in. The texture on the thing's skin, it was very graphic, blotchy and purple, almost like an actual corpse. I only took another few steps before I felt extremely foolish for my previous thought. The smell, the sickly sweet smell of death hung in the air along with what I thought was just a cheeky decoration.

It wasn't. It was an actual corpse that had been hanging there all day. Hundreds of kids must have walked past there, only a few of them actually recognizing that the thing hanging from the tree was a real cadaver. I felt sick. Sprinting back to my patrol car car I radioed into dispatch to get the coroner out to Jefferson Street as soon as possible. My dispatcher was absolutely horrified when she learned what I had, that other people had been staring at a dead body all day, many of them none the wiser. The hanged man was a one Richard Dodd, a retired teacher who was

reported to have been caught up in some vigilante pedo sting. According to investigating officers, Mr. Dodd had been tricked into revealing questionable interest to individuals that were posing as an underage girl. When they threatened to go public with some of the more despicable things he said online, Mr. Dodd had opted for the easy way out. Systematically fashioning a rope and doing the deed, all without a thought for who might happen across his body. People give me a hard time for not being into Halloween as a holiday, for rolling my eyes when grown adults talk about how wasted they're going to get or what costume they have picked out. But if they knew the things that went on around them on that

grisly night, things that are sometimes hiding in plain sight, I don't think they'd be so quick I was an emergency dispatcher for nine years before Katrina hit. The summer before my junior year of high school, I decided to get involved with law enforcement after doing a couple of ride-alongs with the police department. I had half expected them to be full of car chases, wailing sirens, taking down bad guys, but when I saw what they really did during their patrols, they completely changed my opinion of cops in general. It wasn't about being cool with a badge and a gun, it was more about community policing. They knew people by their first names, helped the elderly with their groceries and kept local kids out of trouble. They were making a difference, not just two guys on a power trip gunning people down for no reason. So I started running the radio part-time on the weekends and during the summer when I was out of school, eventually moving into a full-time position after high school when a position opened

up. It's not exactly illegal for someone under the age of 18 to work at a dispatch center, but I wasn't allowed to actually answer 911 calls without an APCO certified operator on the console with me until I was fully employed and fully qualified. And just so you all know, APCO stands for Association of Public Safety Communications Officials and it's standard all over the country for people to get certified by them before they can work in dispatch centers. It was, however, very illegal for me to run the NCIC National Crime Information Center computer without being certified to do so

and there was absolutely no way of that happening until my 18th birthday. So I ran the medical and fire dispatch console for all of Mobile County when I was part-time and got my certifications when I graduated. I was also a volunteer firefighter EMR during this time as well. Also not illegal in quite common rural parts of Alabama but I suppose that's all another story. I was a 911 operator in Mobile, Alabama the same day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. We started getting lots and lots of calls from over in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast for some reason. I guess because they started routing through to us after all the 911 centers to the west started going down. Anyways, I got a call from a woman who said she was trapped in her house on Gordon Street between Florida and Law.

I was confused at first because we have a Florida street here in Mobile and after checking and double checking and not being able to find her address, I asked her what city she was calling from. New Orleans came the reply. My heart sank. Water had completely flooded the ground floor of her home and was slowly gradually rising. I asked her if she could find any way out of the house, if there were any accessible windows on the second floor she could use. She said no, that she lived in a small single-story home that had an attic and that was all i tried to route her to new orleans 911 and new orleans fire department but could not get through dispatch centers up and down the country were experiencing the same ridiculous volume of calls from the nola and gulf coast areas when i finally did break through and reach a department somewhere, the lines were dead, brought down by the sheer ferocity that the hurricane brought.

I tried to keep her calm, talking to her about her friends and family, the life she had before the storm arrived. She seemed like a popular woman. Her concerns were mostly for elderly relatives that were even less capable of protecting themselves than she was. I'll never forget that. The selflessness she displayed even when she was in such dire straits herself. When she said the water was waist high I told her to climb up into her attic with some food and water to keep her going. She joked about emptying the fridge, taking everything up into the attic. Might as well finish off last night's leftovers if the refrigerator would need to be replaced. She was such a strong woman.

It's amazing how the human spirit can bloom even in the worst of situations. Something I found time and time again while working those phones. After a while I heard her voice begin to get panicky. Her breathing becoming short. She began to tell me that the flood water was beginning to leak up into the attic through the floorboards. She didn't expect the water to have risen so much. I was stunned. I hadn't expected that either. In fact it came as such an unwelcome revelation that I began to panic myself.

Other than the roof there was nowhere for the woman to escape to if the water kept rising. I asked her if there were any attic windows she could climb out of. She said no. By that point, I was starting to really worry. She was indeed trapped in an enclosed space with floodwaters rapidly rising. In desperation, I told her to find something heavy, something she could use to bash out the roof tiles or smash through a ventilation unit so she could escape onto the roof. For a painful few minutes, I heard her grunting and cursing as she used some unknown object to try to break her way out. I listened as the strikes grew weaker and less frequent. She soon returned to the phone with terrible news. I can't do it. I can't fit through the vent either. What am I going to do?

She was panicking, shouting now about the amount of water seeping into the attic, how it was ankle height and rising fast. I honestly felt my heart break in my chest when I heard her voice break as tears formed in her eyes. She was crying and she was losing hope. I told her I would stay on the line with her for as long as she wanted me to. I did so, staying on the line and listening as she cried, prayed, cussed and prayed some more. A little while later I could hear her struggling to keep her head and phone above water, and then the phone went dead. To this day,

I don't know if she lived or died. I quit the dispatch center about three months after Katrina. I booked myself into counseling sessions at a therapist's office over in downtown Mobile, hoping it could help me rationalize and compartmentalize some of the more horrific calls I had to handle. But I was surprised to hear that the therapist actually thought I should quit. He specialized in cop and dispatchers, the kinds of people who rub noses with the worst of the worst on a daily basis. He went on to explain that people only have so much of a capacity for trauma how I may have just reached my limit. But I have no regrets.

If I had to burn out the last of my wits staying on the line with that poor, ill-fated woman over in New Orleans it was worth it. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. The scariest thing that ever happened to me as a police officer here in the UK wasn't some horrendous terror attack or overly gory crime scene. The incidents that stick with you are the ones that involve what I like to call human drama. When you get an insight into just how terrifying a person's psyche can be and the things it can lead them to do. I arrived at my duty

station at six o'clock in the morning. I had finished work at around 11 the previous night and ended up running into an assault on an old man on the way home. My journey into work was about an hour so instead of getting home in a reasonable time I get home after midnight. I have a quick bite with my wife and get to bed at around 1am giving me about three to four hours of sleep before I'm back on duty. It's one of the worst things about my job. We're expected to go above and beyond on a daily basis. That, I can tell you, can prove to be completely and utterly exhausting. It frays their nerves, makes the emotions roar, and generally makes the job that little bit more difficult. Anyway, about 15 minutes into my early shift, I'm on station duties

and a bloke comes in to tell us that he thinks his wife is missing. He seemed very reluctant to give us the details and at one point I have to drag information out of him. Essentially, they'd had some kind of domestic argument. She stormed out and didn't come home that night. I check her on the system and she's actually been previously arrested for a couple of domestic violence incidences. I dig a little deeper and I discover that they are actually against her son rather than her husband. Situations like this are rarely black and, but this one was just all kinds of convoluted. Now at this point I am very, very tired and definitely not in the best of moods. I read over the notes I had written down and confirm some details, and then send the fellow home to wait for his wife.

I call around the local hospitals, check our own police databases to make sure she hasn't been arrested. I circulate her details to all units in the area and then type out a digital report on the incident. After that, I'd done all I was obligated to do and technically there isn't actually anything else for me to do other than wait for my superior to provide guidance. I go and get a cup of coffee. All I wanted to do is sleep but something is bothering me. Something about the husband. Despite no indicators of him having committed a crime I was deeply suspicious of him. Whenever someone appears to be withholding information there is always a reason and the sooner we get to the bottom of that the better.

I went down to talk with the most senior officer available, asking him if I could go over to the guy's house, have a look around and maybe talk to the husband again. The senior guy, this grizzled older sergeant, wasn't delighted with the suggestion because it meant that he'd have to cover the desk due to being short-staffed, but he agreed and off I go. I arrived at the house and began to talk to the husband. I ask him if I can have a look around explaining that there might be something that could shed some light on where she might have gone.

I make a preliminary inspection of the house finding several containers of pills with weird names. A quick google search reveals that this woman appears to be on a cocktail of antidepressants, mood stabilizers and the like. I also find an insulin kit, leading me to believe that if she's a diabetic, her life could be in danger without medication. I ask the husband about these and he mentions that his wife has had some quote-unquote emotional problems. I proceed to sit him down, remarking that there is a lot of medication here, then asking him if his wife has more than one insulin kit. He goes pale at this point. She'd left all her medication at home. I ask him where she keeps her handbag and we end up checking her bedside cabinet.

The handbag is missing but I manage to take a look at a framed picture for future reference. I have absolutely no idea what this woman looks like and ask her husband if I can search the room. He's beginning to completely break down at this point and tells me I can do whatever it takes at this point to find his missing wife. Feeling distinctly uneasy at this point with a banging headache from sleep deprivation, I don't find any sign of missing clothes in the wardrobe or any secret stashes of cash or drugs. I don't know what led me to do it but I decided to search the bed. I turned his pillow and there's a note under it. It's a note explaining in no uncertain terms that the man's missing wife has the intention to end her life. The note goes on

to say that she cannot go on, that she's sorry for being a burden. I radio back to the police station and update them on the situation. I'm then forced to return to the living room and tell this woman's husband that he had failed to notice that he had been sleeping on her note overnight. That was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. We found her eventually though it took another eight hours or so to pin her down. We pinged her mobile phone to a nearby cell tower but that just gave us a general locality. I tried to press the husband for information on where she may have gone but he said that she didn't have any friends or family in the area. Later on the husband telephones the police station and explains that they spent a weekend in a nearby seaside town shortly after they got married.

I called the hotel they stayed in on that occasion but they'd had no one by that name. I went down in person and showed them the picture. The lady at the desk told me that a guest answering that description had just left for a walk on the pier. When I went out to the pier and questioned, there she was. She actually seemed quite calm. There was nothing overly dramatic about her appearance or demeanor. She actually had the cheek to tell me that I looked awful, to which I explained jokingly that it was partially her fault. I asked her to give life a chance for a few more days,

that her husband loved her and that she wasn't a burden. She agreed and we brought her home. A couple of days later she came to the station with a box of chocolates and a thank you card. One of those generic kinds that in no way revealed just what she was thanking me for. It was deeply surreal to receive a card like that for preventing the ending of someone's life. The family sends a similar card every for preventing the ending of someone's life. The family sends a similar card every year around the anniversary of the events, a stark reminder of just how effective good police work can be. I'm a sheriff's deputy in a small rural town of around 2,000. I post on a few different forums and I have my own blog,

but we can be disciplined for posting details of our jobs on social media, so I'm sure you'll understand if I leave out a few intimate details here and there. Like I said, we're way out in the country and only have two or three officers on duty at a time, so I'm pretty much on my own for the most part. Fellow deputies provide a little backup if a serious call goes out or I actually radio for assistance, but said deputies are often out patrolling the opposite ends of the county and are usually 15 to 20 minutes away, even if they floor it and use their sirens, so I have to account for that in any situation I find myself in. When stuff hits the fan, I could be completely on my own for a prolonged period of time. 15 minutes may not sound like much, but when you're dealing with a violent tweaker or a berserk gunman, 15 minutes

becomes a very long time. A few years back on chilly October night I was cruising in my patrol car and getting kind of bored. At about two in the morning a call comes over the radio asking for a welfare check on a house just a few miles out of town. A woman had called dispatch asking us to chuck up on her ex-husband. She was deeply concerned. He hadn't been acting himself lately. He'd been making strange calls to her house, drinking during the day, that sort of thing. Now, she said he wasn't answering her calls and she feared the worst. I radioed back to dispatch that I'd take the call. So, being that this call is outside my assigned area it is technically the responsibility of the sheriff to handle it or at least be on scene when

a deputy made the actual welfare check but since it was only a few miles down the road and there would be no chance of getting the sheriff out until morning exceptions were made. It feels bad to say, I mean someone's life could be in danger, but as I'm driving over, I find I'm actually getting pretty excited. See, the thing about welfare checks is despite them being fairly regular calls, there's a possibility of a little door kicking. I'm not saying I like damaging people's property. I know I wouldn't be too happy if someone kicked my door from its hinges, but to be honest, stuff like that is what I joined the department for. That hardcore police work where you're kicking doors and cuffing bad guys. That, and if it doesn't feel good just smashing that thing open and screaming sheriff's department.

It never gets old. Now I know I sound egotistical, but having said that, welfare checks normally just consist of banging on some elderly person's door until they realize their hearing aids have ran out of battery. They fix them, I call it in, everyone goes home happy. But on the odd occasion you kick a door and the smell hits you and you know, you just know, someone's got to call the coroner. The house in question turns to be in the middle of some deep dense woodland. My patrol car rocking on the bumpy, dirty road as it trundled along for about a quarter of a mile. I can see a single light on in the front bay window, always a good sign. I get out of my patrol vehicle, eyeing the surroundings before walking up to the front door.

Under the beam of my torch I could see why this guy's ex-wife was so concerned about him. He had not been keeping house while she was away and there was all kinds of garbage thrown around. Two beat up pickup trucks that looked like they hadn't run in years. An old pure rogue that'd be more useful as firewood. Slowly I give the guy's front door a few loud knocks. No answer. Doesn't surprise me, no one ever answers on the first knock. I give the thing a few hard knocks, the kind that makes my knuckles hurt. Still no answer. Impatiently I radio dispatch and tell them I'm not getting an answer at the door.

I then ask them to check our system for any contact details for the guy. Maybe they can get him on the phone and ask him to come to the door. He could have a barn out somewhere, maybe a basement, it's always worth a try. The call comes back way quicker than I expect. Dispatch tells me that they already have him on the line. He called into our dispatch center himself. All they tell them, that he had some deputy knocking at his door, and that he had his old Remington 700 aimed squarely at the back of their head. My head. He says if I leave now,

no one will get hurt. I remember turning and looking in the darkness, not daring to shine my torch. I didn't want the guy to think it was the light on my sidearm. I didn't see a thing, just a few trees in the moonlight, but somewhere, hidden in the pitched black night, was a man who was a trigger's pull away from sending my brains all over the peel and paint of his run-down front door. It was absolutely terrifying. At first I was weirdly calm about the whole thing. I think I was forcing myself to be, not wanting to give the man with the rifle a reason to execute me. I kept my cool, at least until the last few steps before reaching my patrol car when I felt that sickening feeling of someone running up behind you. I jumped in my vehicle and revved the engine,

gunning out of that death trap before the guy had a chance to take a few parting shots at me. This would have been nerve-wracking in the day, sure, but at night, I couldn't see a thing. There's literally no way of knowing where that guy was or if he was even rushing at me at all. Several hours later, he gave himself up. He was arrested for threatening a deputy. We all thank God that no one was hurt. Heck, it turned out he was just bluffing the whole rifle in the woods thing. He'd see me roll up and hit in the woods with a cell phone. Well, that's what he said anyway. All I know is that when we searched the house we did actually find an old Remington 700 model with a bullet racked in the chamber. Like I said, visibility was awful so

there was never any real evidence that he actually did have his rifle trained on me that night. But the feeling I got, just as I reached my vehicle that night, I know man, I know. I've been a police officer in central London for nearly four years now. Four years of violence, heartbreak, lies and desperation. Things that have made that time stretch and bend, making four years seem like a lifetime. I can barely remember what kind of person I was before I joined the police, some happy-go-lucky twenty-something who just wanted to make a positive difference in their community. Now, I consider it a win if I go just one day without having to wash someone else's blood off my uniform. Years upon years of squeezing a stabbed

victim's hand, trying to keep them awake before the ambulance arrives comforting acid attack victims as they writhe in pain restraining distraught mothers when their joy-riding sons skid on rain-sodden roads and wrap themselves around a lamppost but I've never seen anything as horrifying as what I saw on a domestic abuse call just last night. This is not a story, I wish it was. This is merely what I saw on a small house in East End of London on a dark freezing February night. Domestic abuse calls can be tricky to say the least. Often the couple put their differences aside and unite against the intruding police presence. I've found nothing drains the human spirit like seeing a bruised and battered woman defending her monster of a husband from the very people trying to save her life.

But this call was different. Horribly different. We were warned that a young woman was being subjected to female genital mutilation. This was the first time I'd ever attended such a call. The homes of West African families tend to be some of the most vibrant, well-decorated and well-kept households a person can ever lay eyes on. This one was not. It was dark and dingy, the walls covered in strange pictograms and symbols. Animal tails had been nailed to the kitchen wall, seemingly stuffed and preserved to keep them from decomposition. Another corner of the kitchen

was decorated with the skulls of what I imagined to be the owners of the severed tails. I was numb with apathy when it occurred to me that some of the missing cat flyers posted on community notice boards would need to be taken down. Once the mother and father were arrested and the child victim taken into care, the search teams began to produce some of the most unsettling things I had ever seen during my time in the police. The first was a pair of cow tongues, tied up with a yarn and frozen so they formed a solid pass of intertwined flesh. In the center was a nail hammered through the both of them while they were still warm and soft. The search team then began to empty the home's refrigerator producing a series of small spherical objects wrapped in tinfoil. They were limes sliced in half and concealing a number of small scribbled notes. An accompanied social

worker assigned to the family by the local council emerged from a bathroom, her face ghostly pale. She held a small glass jar containing a picture of none other than herself. It had been doused and would appear to be ashes. One of the search team was a man of Nigerian descent, naturalized British, but with knowledge of certain shadier Western African practices. With a sigh and sad look in his eyes, he told us what we had found was witchcraft or vodun, the practice of ancestor worship that believes the spirits of the dead live side by side with the world of the

living, each family of spirits having its own female priesthood, sometimes hereditary when it's from mother to blood daughter. We had apparently interrupted the process by which the matriarch of the family was passing on her knowledge to the young daughter. The tongues that were bound and nailed together were a defense against liars, purported to still their lying tongues. The limes containing incantations were a defense against evil spirits, the fruit thought to have a purging influence on the spirits of the dead. But the glass jar containing the photo and the ashes was something altogether more disturbing. The picture was evidently taken

at a distance, the subject unaware that their image was being captured. The eyes had been scratched out, a single tiny cut placed across the figure's throat. It was a representation of a grave, supposed to wield the death of the person inside of it. I couldn't understand why the social worker was so terrified, why she would be nearly brought to tears by what we all considered the unhealthy delusions of abusive parents. Now, nothing has come of this supposed witchcraft, but the extent that people will go for their ritualistic beliefs will forever stick with me. I've been an officer for the Montgomery County Police Department in Wheaton, Maryland for 18 years now. It's essentially a suburb of D.C. as we're only about 10 miles north of the Capitol

building. Sure, it can get pretty crazy at times, but overall it's a good place to be a cop. We get considerably less violent crimes than the neighboring College Park and I'd consider us a community police force. Despite a few notable exceptions, nobody has an axe to grind with cops and we generally get a good response from citizens whenever we respond to dispatches. But even in a fairly quiet place like Wheaton, we still get some pretty insane police calls. Thanksgiving family fistfights, a homeless guy who used a kitchen showroom as a public bathroom, a woman who complained of trespassing squirrels. Yep, squirrels. Apparently they didn't ask permission to raid the oak tree in her backyard.

Yet I think the most disturbing call I ever responded to occurred on a warm summer night back in 2015. People can be cruel to one another, cruel and devious in ways that leave you pretty well desensitized. Sometimes, and I know this may sound callous, but people sort of deserve it. I once arrested a woman who stabbed her husband to death in his sleep and it turned out he'd been beating her and abusing her for years when she finally just snapped. But the one thing you never, ever get used to is when the victim of a violent crime is overwhelmingly innocent. A child, for example, or, in this case, an animal. The night of June 4th seemed like pretty much any other. I was working third shift, so I'd been on duty for about four or five hours, just rolling around the three major streets that make up the core of

Wheaton's community. Wheaton is pretty tranquil, sure, but third shift is when the small cabal of shady types begin to converge on the three streets area. If left unchecked, they can cause quite a bit of mischief, minor thefts, or drunk in public outside of the local liquor store. But I was never, ever expecting the call that came through as my shift crept into the wee small hours of Friday morning. One that made my blood boil as my dispatcher's voice buzzed on my patrol car's radio. It was a call to the intersection of Georgia and Price Avenues. A large African American male was said to be engaging in violent drug-related behavior. Now we get the occasional call about pot-smoking teenagers hanging around parking lots, but violent drug behavior is something we rarely come across.

They also happen to be my least favorite calls. People on drugs aren't rational, they can't communicate properly, and most importantly when they see our blue flashing lights and big shiny badges, they panic. As you can imagine, an intoxicated subject who fears for their own life is extremely difficult to deal with. But as more details came through, I found myself throwing aside my reservations and rushing towards the scene. The man was said to be in possession of two small dogs, both of which he was in the process of strangling. Yes, you read that right. The guy was strangling two puppies in the middle of the sidewalk. I flicked my lights and siren on, putting pedal to the metal as I rushed across town.

I just remember being so angry, so livid at what I'd just heard, grinding my teeth and gripping the steering wheel so hard it had my knuckles turning white. Rolling up on the scene, I saw the guy pretty much straight away. Trust me, it's hard to miss a guy with a pitbull puppy in each hand, especially when they're writhing in pain, fighting against his iron grip on their little throats. It's weird how little details stick with you in these situations while adrenaline seems to muddy everything else into a cloudy kind of memory soup. But I'll never, ever forget how one of the puppies had this almost golden tan fur. It reminded me of my childhood dog, a big Labrador that was, without a doubt, my best friend during my formative years.

I pulled my taser almost instantly, shouting at the suspect to release the animals. He just ignored me, his muscles straining as he continued to choke both puppies. This is about the time my backup arrived, my fellow officers looking just as furious as me when they saw just what was going down. One of them told me not to deploy the taser yet. If the suspect's body's tensed up with the shock we'd never get those poor puppies free from his grip. I kept the device trained on him as other officers grabbed hold of the other guy's arms trying in vain to get him to release the animals. God, the kind of strength he displayed was

absolutely terrifying. I watched the strongest guy in our department, Hernandez, struggle to gain control of just one of this guy's arms. The guy with the puppies just tensed up, bringing the puppies closer to his body and clamping his arms down on their small furry bodies. He'd stopped choking them, but the way he held them meant the poor things were now in danger of being crushed to death in the melee. There were like four or five of us cops on the guy at this point, trying to wrestle the puppies from him without causing any more damage. To my infinite relief, the drug-fueled maniac actually let go of one of the puppies thanks to one of my fellow officers prying his huge fingers away from this thing's body. I watched as a passerby picked up the seemingly lifeless body of the tan puppy, cradling the thing gently as he took it away from the scene.

We were pretty much begging the guy to let go of the black puppy at this point. Anymore and there was no way it would survive such an ordeal. Its small juvenile body was being utterly crushed under the strength of this absolute whack job. I remember thinking, screw it, and decided to deploy my taser. It did nothing. Absolutely nothing. To think that the charge that had other suspects on the ground writhing in pain hadn't provoked even the smallest reaction from this guy. It's moments like this that really get you scared. The last thing I want to do is actually gun down a suspect for any reason but when someone is so high they can resist a taser,

you're just edging closer and closer to the point where someone is going to have to end him. Just the thought makes me feel nauseous as I type this out. Like I said, there were about four or five cops in the sky but we still found it necessary to call for additional backup. Only when two more cops rolled up did we actually manage to gain control and wrestle the black pit bull pup from this maniac's grip before we got the cuffs on him and dragged the scumbag into a patrol car. The two puppies were immediately transferred to an emergency animal clinic located in nearby Rockville, where both dogs were in critical condition. The tan furred puppy's lungs were

severely damaged from the death grip our drugged up maniac had on it. They were filled with blood, causing him to vomit it up, and his chances of survival were slim. But after the best care the center could provide, the outlook for the male puppy was much brighter and he was expected to make a full recovery. The black female pit bull puppy was placed in poor condition but she expected to make a full recovery as well. Both puppies had endured a horrific amount of trauma to their small infant bodies. James Edward Jones, a Wheaton resident, was sentenced to six months in prison for the shocking display of cruelty he displayed that night. In court, Jones explained he

was deeply sorry and his defense was that he did not intentionally try to hurt the puppies that night. His attorneys said he brought and smoked what he thought was just marijuana, but it turned out to be K2, a synthetic narcotic that has effects similar to angel dust, a street name for PCP. However, the presiding judge deemed that those reasons were not strong enough to excuse the violent attack. He was sentenced to the maximum punishment under a plea deal, six months in jail and five years of probation. Now just two years old, the puppies named Mia and Chance have received a rare second chance at a happy, healthy existence. My wife and I actually ended up adopting Chance, the tan puppy, and he now lives with us in our small family home.

He's a good boy, an integral part of our family now, and I thank God every day that we've received such a blessing. I was enlisted when I was 17 back in 2011 for multiple reasons, but I just wanted to serve and fight mostly. Typical 17-year-old jock video gamer, right? Anyways even though I was an O-331 machine gunner in the infantry I never saw combat because the war had died down quite a bit and I got sent all over Asia and the Pacific instead. But stuff got weird in Korea. We were sent to this island just miles off the DMZ of North Korea to train with the Republic of South Korean Marines, ROK Marines. It's a small island, maybe 10 miles across, but it had an insane amount of hills. While on the island, we were camping on this small ridge that nearly surrounded the campsite. Perfect location to set up at. You're concealed, there's only one way in and one way out. Ideal for any military camp. It rained a lot there though so we stored our weapons and ammunition

in a small run-down bunker just up the ridge from our site. We took shifts guarding it overnight and let me tell you, stuff got weird. I'm sleeping in my tent when I wake up to use the restroom. On my way back I see the strobe light from my friend standing watching up on the hill. This is not normal. He was trying to signal someone without waking anyone up from yelling. So I head over to check on him and he's shaking, eyes wide, complete okay? Dude. Something is up here. What do you mean? Like North Koreans?

No, worse. I'm hearing voices. I saw shadows. I can hear rustling in the bunker. But every time I check it out, there's nothing there. Jesus, you sure you're not just sleep deprived? No man, I'm completely fine but I'm freaking out. Could you chill with me till I calm down? Sure dude. It was around 0300 when I stayed with him. Everyone was going to be awake in two hours as it is so it wouldn't be too long. Nothing happened while I was with him. So around 0400 he was back to normal and the sun was on the horizon.

I told him if he needed anything to yell and went back to bed for an hour. The following night it was my shift overnight. From 2200 to 130 it was quiet. It was kind of peaceful but at 145 to 2 I heard footsteps. The bunker was to my back and I was facing the camp seeing as how the only way to reach this bunker is from the camp unless you can climb a 90 degree cliff from the other side of the ridge without anyone noticing. Everyone is asleep and the footsteps were behind me near the bunker. I turned around and saw nothing. Shortly after I could hear faint whispers. Definitely not English. I could almost make out Korean phrases but it was too faint to know for sure.

This is where I start to get nervous. I remember seeing my friend's face when I came up to see him. His fear was genuine. Very real and I was starting to see why. Then a little later I hear something in the bunker. I turn my light on and shine it in the bunker. No one's in there. And at 0300 I hear it again. This time thinking it was nothing, I turn to look without my light and see the shadow of someone standing

over the SMAW's the rocket launchers bending down to pick one up I raised my rifle and shouted at him to get out of here and it turned its head looked at me and vanished

just evaporated like Spiderman in Infinity War panic struck me I was freaking out like my friend. In my head I was thinking, what good is this 556M4 against a ghost? Nothing else happened after that, but I was on edge till sunrise. I kept the story to myself until my unit got back to Japan where we were stationed. One night we were all drinking, shooting the breeze and a different friend asked us if the island seemed creepy to us. My first friend mentioned his experience on watch and everyone, I mean everyone, had some kind of similar story to tell from when they were on watch.

Turns out this island was a hotspot for strategic positioning and planning during the war, and thousands of soldiers and civilians died there. I guess the war isn't Pasadena, California. The unit was in this old home that was in a beautiful historic part of Pasadena. Our unit was on the third level of the house, essentially being this huge converted attic. The apartment was beautiful and had lots of space. It did have an odd energy from the very beginning. However, my partner didn't believe in anything supernatural or paranormal,

so he would always joke around when I made comments about a space feeling heavy or intense. After a few weeks, things started to happen in our apartment. It all started with doors. They would move back and forth or slam shut. I would make comments to my partner but he said it was probably just the wind as we had two balconies with lots of air circulation. I also noticed that our cats were never inside. I have two cats and they are more like dogs. They are always around me and cuddle up. They usually go outside for one to three hours a day. In this apartment they would be gone all day, sometimes not even coming

back at night. I was trying to chill about everything because nothing dramatic had occurred yet. One day I had just left the apartment and my partner was inside alone. He called me and was really scared over the phone. He told me that he had seen a man wearing all black walk through the apartment and into our bedroom. He ran to the bedroom and said he saw the man walk onto the balcony and fade away. He was begging me to come home. When I got back he was trying to rationalize something that wasn't possible to him. I told him some stories of my past and some encounters I had with the paranormal. He calmed me down and we eventually went to sleep. This was the beginning of torture. I started to hear something walk and run up and down the stairs.

It would happen throughout the night and started every night around 2am. I started to lose so much sleep because I would constantly open our bedroom door to check and nothing was there. My partner was a deep sleeper so he didn't hear anything. I did not think I could see apparitions but I could sense someone standing right next to me as I slept. I know this may sound weird but it would talk to me in my sleep. It would tell me to end my life and other awful things. I would often wake up and hear whispers like right in my ear. The rate of the speech was so rapid and intense. My boyfriend was starting to act very detached. He also started drinking daily. We used to have wine night at least once a week and go out with friends occasionally but we didn't drink much. I would see him taking shots and hiding vodka and sodas.

I didn't question him because I thought he was just stressed. One morning we wake up and I noticed that he had scratches all over his back and on his legs. I freaked out and told him to look in the mirror. He was really scared and said he didn't know where they came from. The scratches continued for weeks and bite marks started to form as well. My boyfriend also saw the man in black again one night. After that, he was no longer a skeptic. He believed that something was in our home. I, being stupid, started talking to this energy when I was alone. I would ask it to please leave us alone.

I would sage our home too. Everything just got much worse after that. At night, our living room TV would randomly turn on and the volume would be at max. We would both jump up out of bed panicked and turn the TV off. One day I was watching TV with my cat next to me and I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I thought it was my partner. The steps continued towards me and I couldn't see anyone and I started to feel fear. Suddenly my cat was thrown across the room. My cat screeched and ran off. I felt cornered. I wear black tourmaline crystals and I remember just holding on to it for protection. Through all this

pain I reached out to a local psychic medium that had experience with home cleanses. I met him in person and he told me something was with me. I was like, please don't scare me, I really can't handle more weird stuff. He said, no, there is something with you that isn't human. He told me that he would need to go to our home ASAP. He came a few days later and he said the entity was there again, but he spoke with me in private. He told me that this entity was attaching itself to my partner and that he needed to do this bath cleanse for my partner. I never told him this because he was truly freaked out already. The medium walked around the apartment and said that there were multiple energies in the home. He said that me talking to them and using sage can sometimes

invite other worse things into the home. He used some other type of stuff to cleanse the house. We then made this bath for my partner. He was to sit in the bath with all the lights out for 30 minutes and not to get out. I told him that I would do it another day for myself as I didn't want to alarm him. He did the bath and things were cool for a few weeks. Eventually everything started up again. I remember being at a wedding with my friend and my partner calls me on the phone hysterically talking. He said that some of the

dishes in our kitchen just started falling to the ground and that he was scared. I left the wedding early to be with him. That night we decided to break our lease and get out of there. In two weeks we had a new apartment and paid a lot of money to get out of our lease. The landlord worked with us. She also provided me with information of the previous tenants. I told her the honest truth and she didn't believe me though. I talked to the previous tenants on the phone. They were also a young couple.

The girl shared that she would often hear footsteps, see the door slam, and always felt on edge. However, it didn't escalate for them. They lived there for 16 months, and it was comforting to receive some validation. Crazy side note, the first day in our new apartment, a pipe busted and was shooting water everywhere. It happened at 3am and we were so scared that something had followed us. After the pipe, nothing ever happened again, but we were still haunted by the memories. My partner never questioned my intuition now and he even asked me,

how do you feel in this space, etc. He's like a real believer now. So many other things happened in the Pasadena place like my boyfriend seeing kids in this space, etc. He's like a real believer now. So many other things happened in the Pasadena place like my boyfriend seeing kids in the bathroom, flickering lights, intense cold spots, and the constant feeling that someone is standing right next to you. I am happy to finally share this story. I have told a few friends, all but one does not believe me. One even laughed while I was telling her. I stopped telling the story to people because I felt like it was inviting negative energy back. Thank you all for reading this and I hope this story resonates with at least someone. 2011 was a terrible time for our family.

My uncle, whom I was super close to, and my dad were both fighting cancer. Uncle found out he had it November of 2010. By December, he was told he only had months to live. He lived with me in West Virginia before I moved in 2008 and then when he got this news he moved south to be with his sister so she and I could care for him. January we had a huge going away party for him for New Year's our family does this when we have time to prepare for death it allows us to celebrate and also get in our goodbyes. Now some backstory, when my uncle lived with me in West Virginia, my ex got the three of us phones. My uncle still used the phone even though it was years old and beat to death. We finally got that phone off and

got him a new one and set it up so he could hear clearly when he needed to make calls. The whole family stayed from New Year's until he passed, which was March. During the whole stay, naturally, all of his siblings kept falling apart and having emotional breakdowns. My only words of comfort to them were, It's okay. He's okay. It'll get better. Wanting him to stay like this is selfish and abusive, and the only way to make him better is to let him go. It's okay. He'll be okay.

At one point in the dark morning, he woke up and said he loved everybody and wanted something to drink, then passed holding my hand about 15 minutes later. When he passed, he did this weird thing where his entire body straightened out stiff and kind of hovered over the recliner before he flopped back down into it and made his last exhale. I was next to him holding his hand and it kind of freaked me out at first. Thought maybe he was having a nightmare or something. We have a huge family and everyone was in there talking. I tried to get someone's attention since all of my aunts are nurses and nobody heard me. Finally one did and checked him and he was gone. The coroner picked him up a

couple of hours later just as the sun came up. I lived about five miles away so I drove home to pack my clothes since I knew I would be going to West Virginia for about a week for the funeral. I was home for about 30 to 45 minutes and my phone rang. I answered it and it was mere static as if though someone butt dialed you with the phone in their pocket. I looked to see who it was and it was him. I paused for a second and thought maybe that the family had been checking his phone and accidentally called me so I didn't think much and just went about my business. The following day my aunt gave me some of his belongings like the bandanas he wore when he rode his motorcycle and different things and among them was his old broken phone that my ex and I had gotten him. I kept them all together in a freezer bag so I wouldn't lose anything ever.

There was one more time I got a static call and thought it was my aunt again but I can't remember where it falls into the timeline. Fast forward a week I've already gone to West Virginia for the funeral and I'm back home. My phone rings. It's my uncle again. I answer it, going to try to tell my aunt to quit calling me and through the static, I hear, Don, Don. Being yelled as if though someone were seriously trying to talk over the static you get when your phone signal is breaking up. It threw me for a loop because only a few people in my family called me the double Don nickname and it's only aunts and uncles. This particular uncle's voice is unmistakable. I sat confused trying to figure out who would have his phone who sounded like him. My aunt certainly wouldn't. I said hey can you hear me? He yelled my name again, as if he hadn't heard a thing.

Don! Don! Then I heard what sounded like another part of a sentence that was so broken up I couldn't make it out. I'm a believer in the paranormal, but I'm also very locally and scientifically based as well, so if things can have a worldly explanation, I always take that route first. I said, Who is this? Can you hear me? Static for a few seconds, then just a single, Don. Unmistakably, that's my uncle's voice. So now I'm on the paranormal train, but no worries because if you've read any of my blogs or heard any of my other stories, you know paranormal is normal for me. It doesn't scare me in the slightest so I respond,

Norman, can you hear me? What's wrong? Static. I yell Norman again, only to hear more static. I sat there listening for about ten more seconds seconds then it hung up. I looked down at the phone and realized that the call had come from his old phone, the one that didn't have service on it, the one on my mantle in a bag. I was stunned but impressed. It meant a lot to me that he would go out of his way to make contact like that. I waited a while before I said anything to my family about it. Some can talk openly about paranormal stuff and some believe that Satan's sending demons to mess with you. But I told a few and they were just like, hmm, interesting.

Didn't express belief nor disbelief. They were just like, that must have been cool. It was strange. But fast forward to Christmas, my dad dies lying next to me in the bed. My cousin comes in to check his vitals just in time to see him die on me. She starts to panic but I manage to get her to pull her stuff together because we had to wake up my mom, sister, her mom, the grandkids and everybody else with the news. I couldn't be the only sane person in the house dealing with a bunch of crazies falling apart. I needed a support system. I didn't realize it at the time, despite the fact that my cousin was a nurse too.

Watching him die traumatized her. I was too preoccupied to notice that she had gone silent and couldn't speak. The poor girl couldn't utter a single word for a whole month. So I get my dad bathed and changed and ready for his road trip with the funeral director and while my brother-in-law and I are in there doing that I hear a commotion coming through the house. It's my aunt and mother who are in the dining room with my cousin. I assume they are just having their emotional outbursts as normally expected and I leave them alone. After dad leaves and we are sitting around talking my mom says

Didn't Norman call you after he left the house that morning? My aunt and cousin are sitting there staring at me so I wasn't sure where this conversation was going to go. I said Yeah, he called me a few times after he left. Actually, he only got to talk to me once, that last time. What'd he say? Nothing, just yelled my nickname a couple of times, tried to say something else but I couldn't make it out. Guess what? My mom said, wiggling her fingers for my cousin to give me her cell phone. He just texted Tiff. She handed me the phone and a text from Norman said, It's okay. I smiled and said, It is okay. I looked up at the number and you know what I said handing Tiff her phone

I have that phone that texted you it's cut off Tiff was traumatized for a month and I thought it was beautiful that Norman went out of his way again to comfort her using my own words of comfort. It's okay. No pain. No cancer. No problems. It's okay. A little earlier my daughter was complaining about a headache. I had her drink a big glass of water and took her down the hall to lay on my bed. As I got her settled, I left to grab a cold rag and an ice pack to lay on her forehead. When I got back and put the rag on her head, she told me that she had saw something weird. I'll write out the conversation. When you walked out the bedroom, I saw something weird.

Well, what did you see? I was just laying right here with my hand on my head looking at the wall, toward the foot of the bed, and then I saw something pop up and go back down. Oh, what did it look like? It was white. It just jumped up looking at me and fell back down. That's interesting.

Yeah, it had long pointy ears on the top of its head. I don't know what that was. Well, thank you for telling me that, sister. How does it make you feel? Are you okay? I'm okay, but it scared scared me i didn't know it was there then i saw its pointy ears and big eyes and then it fell back down and i don't know where it went i love you girl i don't see it anywhere anymore make sure to tell me if you see anything again okay she nodded her head.

I left shortly after and told my husband what my daughter told me. He seemed concerned and then said, Maybe it was the Easter Bunny. Then the light bulb lit up on that thought. I went back to the bedroom and told her, I talked to Daddy about what you told me. He said he thinks it might be the Easter Bunny. I said that in an attempt to make her feel okay about the encounter and I don't ever want to discredit my

children coming to me over something I may not understand. I never wanted to be the parent who says, oh you're imagining it or oh you were dreaming or no that's not a thing etc. But I also didn't want her to be afraid, so I was hoping she would equate it to being an Easter Bunny and feel somewhat relieved. When I told her Daddy thought it might be the Easter Bunny, she clutched the blanket up to her nose and said, I hope that's not what the Easter Bunny is. It doesn't look like a bunny at all.

It looks like a creature with no fur. I said, Okay, maybe not. We just thought that's what it might have been. I will say when she first started complaining about her headache, I had her walk heel to toe in a straight line to see if her balance was off after seeing that threat earlier about a guy whose young son died of brain cancer. My mom anxiety came out full as soon as I read that. I more or less wanted to document what she experienced in this post and wanted to be open to anything someone might have to say about this. I am also thinking her headache may have something to do with her experience. She might have had some sort of hallucination as a result

of her headache. I'm not sure either way and am not ruling it out. Thank you to everyone who might be reading this and might have something to say. Now, just to edit and add a few things, she didn't have a fever is one of the first things I checked. She very rarely gets headaches although my eldest gets them frequently. A couple of responses mentioned about previous and future experiences. There have been other things and I'll go ahead and mention them down here. My eldest son had experiences when he was younger. He was adamant that he had an older brother. His name was something like Molt or Mort, but my son had a speech impediment and I couldn't

figure out what exactly he was trying to say his name was. It sounded like he was saying either of those two and when repeated both the names back to him he kept shaking his head saying no it's Molt. I still don't know what he was trying to say. Apparently Molt lived far away across the water by shore. He talked about him a lot randomly. I assumed it was an act of imagination and being the oldest he wanted something he couldn't have. A big brother but I'd let him talk about it. I would respond saying I've never met him and so I didn't know who he was. My daughter when she was four told me her blankets kept moving around at night. I asked her what she meant. She proceeded to jumble up her blankets,

raise her bed skirt up and the curtain way out. She said she couldn't reach high enough to make it as high as it was going. I said something along the lines of the wind coming through the cracks in the window. The window is sealed tightly, no drafts when it's windy. This happened on and off for quite some time. Then she said she could hear things moving in her closet at night and she couldn't sleep. She said it was too loud. I told her that there might be a toy with a battery dying and it's making the toy glitch sound. My youngest son is four. He currently sleeps in our bed. Our bedroom has a bathroom attached to it at the side of the room. The foot of the bed is pointing. Usually the door is open to the bathroom but all the lights are off.

That night he whispered to me, mommy do you see those shapes? I said what shapes? Where? He said in front of the bathroom. He said they were white and kept changing shapes. He said it was scary and put his head under the covers. I said that everything was okay and shut the bathroom door. It was likely his eyes were trying to adjust to the darkness and made him scared, but I thought it was worth mentioning. To be honest, there have been several more things that I could talk about with this, and I know it seems like like a lot but it's just things spread out over considerable time. It's not like we were constantly talking about ghosts and spooky things. This type of topic doesn't come up in conversation and I like to think we're a normal family living normally. Not eccentric and bizarre if that makes sense. I just wanted to add the other couple things in here for those wondering. I think all of it could be explained away

but it's concerning thinking in one sitting all the things that happened to me over time in these years thanks again for everyone responding to me when I was a little boy, three years old my folks had rented a house off of a lady. I had the bedroom directly off the living room with the TV kitty corner to the left of my door. They told me they kept the TV low so as not to wake me when they watched it and that my door was always left open a few inches. They told me after a few months in the house I started to talk in my sleep which I had never done previously. The first few times they brushed it off but it had become a nightly habit so they began to listen to me sleep talking.

My folks said it always occurred between 9 to 10 p.m. each night and they had repeatedly overheard me saying things like, Chocolate man I'm sleepy, I'll talk to you tomorrow. I'm tired chocolate man, please let me sleep. My parents told me this went on for several months straight and whenever they came into my room I would automatically stop talking so they would wake me and see if I was okay. I recall waking up one morning, if I remember it was about 5.38am and the sun was starting to rise. I remember automatically opening my eyes and staring at my closet which had no door to it. There was a curtain instead which was opened. I still recall the terror I felt at that moment and I couldn't take my eyes off the closet. I had sat up and was sweating

profusely. I was telling myself to run to mommy and daddy's bed but couldn't do it. I started counting the three and attempted to run out of there several times. By the time I had the courage to run I was soaked in sweat and almost hysterical and was crying out but I had no voice. I finally jumped in between my folks and was silently crying. My dad woke and asked if I was okay and I recall saying yes. The next day I asked, what are ghosts dad? He said they're the boogeyman but laughed and said there's no such thing. They also told me that I didn't want to sleep in my room at night anymore but I don't remember that.

Finally my parents said the landlady came to visit one day and they had brought the subject up to her about my nightly conversations with the chocolate man. Both my folks said that she started to cry and she told them that she had to go but would be back later if it was okay. When asked if she could see me and my folks said yes the landlady had come back later that day and my parents said that she had picked me up and began sobbing and was hugging me and giving me kisses. They didn't know what was going on and asked her. The landlady then gave me a set of rosary beads and asked if they could let her take me to my room with her. They did and my folks said she put the rosary beads and asked if they could let her take me to my room with her. They did and my folks said she put the rosary beads on me and began silent prayers. After that was done they all went outside and she explained to them that she used to live in that house with her husband and

son. The husband passed away from a heart attack and the room I had slept in used to be her son's. She told them she had went to church that day to pray for me. My parents told me that she said her son was 21 when he passed away. He had hung himself in the closet in my room. At that time I had no concept of color or ghosts and really meant no harm as I later found out that the landlady was an African Canadian. I have several stories of Mexico. It's a place of many myths and legends. This one is a tale a friend of mine recounted to me about his uncle and his friend stuck in a

horrifying circumstance my buddy's uncle and his friend were headed home on a highway one night years ago in the state of Oaxaca you see they rode in one of those old flatbed trucks that were used to put whatever vegetables or fruits that might have been picked that day they were farmers most were as Oaxaca was very rural at the time and had only just had a highway installed of actual concrete. And as they were returning home the uncle noticed something in the rear view mirror and made out what seemed to be a horse about I'll say maybe 150 feet away. He couldn't really make out its features and didn't think anything of it till he drifted off to sleep in the passenger seat.

As he slept, the uncle had a small nightmare of a horse with large black eyes running up to his passenger side that startled him awake. He gathered his bearings when he looked over to his buddy that was driving with a terrified look on his face and going about 50 miles an hour which at the time was pretty fast for a truck that size. He asked, why are you driving so fast? And the friend responded by saying that they were being followed. He said for the past couple miles that horse in the rear view was slowly inching its way closer and closer to the vehicle. That's when the panic began to settle in and they both felt immense fear wash over them. They sped up to about 65 to try to get away but the clanking of the hooves of this horse slowly kept getting louder and louder behind them. The one driving said not to turn around and look anymore to just look ahead and not look at the horse because it seemed to

gain on them whenever they glanced back at it. The uncle closed his eyes in fear only listening and when the hooves inched closer and closer he glanced to the side of the window and saw the large black eyes of the horse looking directly at his friend from the passenger side as it had caught up now. The uncle screamed for his friend not to look and to just look straight because the horse had a fixated gaze on him. They sped up all they could and still the horse kept a swift pace still staring at the driver. When he finally glanced he began to cry overwhelmed with emotion and panic when the horse suddenly began to slow down. And as it did, the uncle saw it in the rear view once more except this time it had no legs.

It was just standing in the road floating, staring at them with its huge black eyes. They told the grandfather of the man driving when they arrived home what they had witnessed and he told them that the road that was built there had gone straight through sacred Nahuatl territory and they had been lucky to drive past the area at this time of night because everyone had felt that the ground was salado or salted meaning washed with bad energy. While visiting my family in the island of Lombok, Indonesia, I heard what I believe to be a witch, known as a leok, fall from the sky onto our roof. I had lived in Australia my whole life, but my dad who was from Indonesia has family over there. Three years ago when I, along with my mom, dad and sister were staying with my dad's family, something creepy happened. We were sleeping in a back room of my uncle's deli under a corrugated

iron ceiling. The room was small and only had one small window which was just a square cutout with four or five metal rods in it, kind of like you would imagine a jail cell would have. The window had a small curtain over it. In the middle of the night, my whole family, mom, dad, sister, and I woke up to an extremely loud bang on our roof, followed by scratching. The sound was too loud to be created by something as large as a cat or a dog. There was no trees for an animal to jump or fall from anyway. My mom who had never experienced anything paranormal living in Australia her whole life became a little worried. Even she was suspecting something paranormal. My dad wasn't surprised though. He has told me many stories about things like this when

he lived in Indonesia. The next morning my dad told his brothers and sisters about what happened and they weren't surprised either. They told him that recently almost every night layaks have been running around on people's roofs. They described them as humans with crow-like wings running flying and screaming pretty much next to my uncle's deli in our land there is a village which has their own culture and beliefs my other uncle married a woman from that village so our family are quite close with the people in that village there is like a shaman and a woman called a dukun. They are an old couple who the villagers always come to when there is a problem with spirits and stuff. The wife is just a small old lady whose teeth are stained reddish black due to chewing on betel nuts all day long. The husband and I don't remember what he looked like.

My family visited them once because they wanted to perform some type of ritual with us. Maybe to cleanse us or something. Anyway, my dad told me that the Dukun suspected that there were a few layaks in the area. A lady and her mother lived in the house next door to my uncle's deli and they were the ones who suspected this. They thought it was best that they just keep it to themselves and not accuse the ladies of something like this. The creepy thing is, the neighbor's house was next to our room, right where the small window was. In the few nights that I stayed there, I, who was sleeping next to the window, had a terrible night's sleep. I woke up with a really bad heat rash and just sheer uncomfort. My dad told me that several times in the night he noticed that the curtain on the window was opened even after he kept closing it.

He also had a strange feeling that someone was looking in. A little bit of information about layox. They are human beings who practice black magic causing them to turn into supernatural beings. In each region of Indonesia, there are different types of creatures like this, with different names and appearances, but in Bali and Lombok, it is known as Layak. During the day, they appear as normal humans, but at night, they leave the house and do whatever they do. You can learn more about them online, just search Layak Witch. I have many stories from my dad but I decided to tell this one since I experienced it myself.

I will be posting another short story later about weird sightings after tragic earthquakes hit Lombok last year in 2018. But feel free to ask me questions in the comments and hopefully I can answer some of them. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, I lived in a very weird house. It had some serious history with what it had been and how it was built. The house itself was built in 1910 and sometime around 1940 the front of the house was expanded with a large storefront style front end added that was turned into a repair shop of some kind. When the expansion to the house happened they extended the basement. The basement was one long corridor about 60 feet long but this is where it got weird. In the early 60s it went from being a repair shop to an underground brothel and the basement had a whole line of rooms on the left side that were big enough for a twin bed and a night table. There were seven rooms like this,

each the same as before in design. At the very end of the basement was one larger room which was about the size of the king-sized beds to give a visual image. Along the main corridor were pillars in the middle of the walkway outside of each room, and they all had large loops like you would find for tying up horses or cattle. But the house had no history of being a farm-based house. In the early 70s, there was a man who killed seven of the working ladies at the brothel, then ended his own life. The city obviously shut it down at this point, and it was sold later to be turned into a concert hall in the front storefront style area. So needless to say, the house was interesting at best, but for a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds, it was the most lit place to rent.

It was a constant party house, but it was the most lit place to rent. It was a constant party house but it was ours. The front area we turned into a lounge with a ton of couches and tables for doing what teens in their first place do best. In the end the house was paid for by me and three other friends. Before living here I didn't believe in ghosts or any of that but after living in that house even to this day I don't fully know how to explain the events that occurred but it started out where the unexplained things we just thought were someone else in the house. One day my friends and I were all sitting in the back room of the house when we heard a loud crash. We looked out to see the light in the kitchen strobing and our ferret was screaming who we kept in a cage in the kitchen dining area. We heard another slam and can see his cage and the light slide past the doorway.

We obviously run to find out what was going on but when we entered the kitchen there was nothing there. Just our little dude freaking out. We could never figure out what was going on but when this happened it got us all talking about our own events. Over the course of the next few months we started to gain a feeling for each one of the spirits that shared the house with us. I don't know how to put it but we felt that there were at least two good warm spirits and one very angry and violent one. We started having physical interactions with them which to this day I can't fully explain other than what felt like a warm hand on my shoulder kind of experience. And then the other which resulted in what looked like burns and scratches.

When we lived here we had a set of three paintings that made up one painting. When we put them on the wall in correct order they would get ripped off the wall. Sometimes we would come home to them on the other side of the room and other times it would happen with us watching like we were sitting around drinking or whatever else. Now if we put them up in the wrong order nothing ever happened to them. In the end they lived in the wrong order for this reason. We had a number of stereos in the house and they would all go to white noise after listening to them. These were the old style with knobs to change the stations around so we ended up taping

them in place but they still would sometimes go to white noise anyways. After living here for two years we gave names to them. We named Rose and Jill for what we can only assume were the two working girls, and Henry, the killer we think, we dubbed the mean one that would inflict pain and anger to the rooms. Henry would also slam doors and cupboards, sometimes would throw plates or glasses. When we would take showers, the mirrors would show handprints in the condensation and we would hear what sounded like faint woman talking when no one else was home. One night my friend and I were throwing a Nerf football back and forth. The ball bounced and

hit a large white vase that was in the house when we moved in. It fell over and crashed on the floor into pieces. We felt like this must have made Henry angry because both of us felt burns and had scratches on our backs, the raised welt kind of scratches, and his activity levels skyrocketed for the next week or so. I don't know what really brought me to type this all out but in the end it felt therapeutic to tell someone for the first time outside of my friend circle about these events. My friend and I, who I would just call Allie, decided to mess around with a Ouija board for fun. Neither of us actually owned one, so we made it out of paper.

As you can imagine it didn't look so good but it wasn't terrible. We also somehow crumpled it up but I don't remember how. At first nothing was happening because both of us were laughing and spelling out fake stuff from the board. After laughing a bit more we actually got serious. It took a few tries but something actually started talking to us. It was moving a bit more, we actually got serious. It took a few tries, but something actually started talking to us. It was moving a bit slow at first, but got faster and faster. We both thought either one were moving it. We asked if it could give us a name, and it went to yes, but didn't actually spell anything out. We asked if it was human, and it said yes.

We asked when they were born born and they went to four. My friend asked BC or AD and it said BC. We both thought that this was weird and moved on. We asked if it knew who Castiel was. I watched Supernatural so it was kind of a joke and they said yes. I asked if they knew other angels and they said yes. We then asked what they were again and they spelled out angel. We asked what their name was again and they spelled out A-N-O-A, a Noah. I asked if it watched me and it said yes so I asked if it was a guardian angel and it said no. By the way it didn't want to go to the no all the way across the board so we just said use the blank space as no. My mom walked in at some point so we had to hide the board because I don't think she would have liked us playing with it. She probably

knew something was up because we were acting super suspicious but decided to ignore it. She then said she was leaving so we were going to be alone. We got the board back out again and asked if it was still there and immediately went to yes. At this point we both knew it was a demon so we asked and it started to spell out Zozo so we said goodbye. But since we're both dumb and desperate we went back on we said it was okay it was a demon and continued talking we asked if it was actually zozo or not and to go to d for a different demon and it went to d we asked if zozo was even real and they basically said they couldn't say we asked if demons have genders and they said yes and that they were a boy. After this we started asking

questions the others didn't know like what our grandma's name was. Asked if either of us had connections to dead people and my friend said yes and asked the demon which one he wanted to talk about and they spelled out M which was the first letter of her mom's best friend's name who died. Allie then asked how she died. The police didn't know if it was a murder or she ended her own life and it spelled out man. At the time I didn't know the story so she explained it to me. She then asked who it was and it spelled out the girl's boyfriend. After that my friend wanted to get off the topic so we did. I asked if it knew my uncle's name which I forgot because he's been dead for a while. It was one of those things I'd see and know. It

spelled out C and I remembered his name which did start with a C. I asked if he knew what my grandpa's name was and it gave a T which was the first letter of his name. I asked if he could tell me how he died and he spelled out cancer. I then asked if it could give me the first letter of the type and he said L. He died of lung cancer. I asked if it was going to kill someone in the future and he said yes. I asked for a name and he spelled out my friend's name. I asked if he was joking and he said yes. We kept joking around with him like I asked if he was Satan and he said yes. I said are you sure about that and he said no. I asked if Satan had better things to do and if he was a busy man and he said yes. We also got him to spell out gay. When we asked why he watched me, he spelled out why not.

He also said he didn't know what the internet or school was. He couldn't give us any actual details of our future and was mostly just messing with us. We asked if he liked us and liked talking to us and he said yes. At some point we asked if Satan created demons and he said yes. We asked him about other demons and he said he didn't like them and didn't talk to them. We asked if he was lonely and it like literally flew across the board. It seemed like a sensitive topic. It also seemed to be predicting questions before we asked. My dad rung the doorbell so we said bye and my friend had to go. That was the end. We were talking to him for two

hours. Was it dumb for us to continue to talking to him even after he admitted he was a demon? Also the only time I really felt weird was when he spelled out man. Was it even a demon at all? He was actually really chill and was going along with whatever we said even if he didn't know what it meant. Back in the early 80s, when I was only about 5 years old, my parents were attending a weekend convention in the city of Huntington, West Virginia. Several of our friends and family were doing the same. We were about two hours away from our hometown so the adults had grabbed some hotel rooms and we split up. The women went shopping while the dads took us kids to see

a movie that was showing in town. Fire in the Sky, I'll Never Forget. As we walked down the street I looked up and saw something big and red floating in the sky. I could see people's arms waving from it. Confused I asked my dad what it was and as it turned out I was seeing a hot air balloon for the first time. I was mesmerized and pondered on how a simple balloon could hold people in the sky when I had tried so hard to fly and my balloons never seemed to get me off the ground, let alone take me there. I noticed that people were so happy and not afraid, considering I had often wondered what I'd do to stop or come back to the ground if I ever succeeded in going

up. I thought about that balloon for a very long time, even after we were seated in our seats inside the theater. It's showtime. The movie we were seeing was Fletch starring Chevy Chase. I was only about five so I wasn't interested in that movie at all. It didn't take too long for me to start getting angsty and wanting to move. I pulled out every young kid's go-to card when they're not wanting to sit still. I've gotta pee. I didn't want to sit there any longer and

I didn't want to ask my dad to take me. He was a grumpy man at times who disliked being interrupted. Decisions, decisions. Finally I whispered over to my older cousin and asked if she would go with me. I told dad that Dana was going to walk me to the bathroom and to our surprise our dad told us to get all of the girls to go since we had been cooped up inside or in a car for such a long trip. So my cousin and I along with my two female friends headed out to find the lavatory. We had never been to this place before. It was an enormous place, very old with many doorways, so we stopped to ask some men at the concession stand where the restrooms were. One of them looked at us, pointed to an arched doorway across from him and said,

just follow those stairs they'll lead you right to it. As the four of us shuffled down the winding staircase we noticed we could hear what sounded very much like a party coming from downstairs. There was music playing and the sound of laughter in the distance that for some reason made us slow our pace and start asking questions. One of the older girls dismissed advice saying it might be a scene in the movie coming from above us that sounded like it was coming from below. We tiptoed down the stairs but stopped when we reached the bottom. We found ourselves standing in the middle of a lavish room that looked as if it were plucked right out of an old movie. There was a huge fireplace with a crackling fire inside, a four post bed with curtains with fancy gowns tossed upon it and a pair of fuzzy slippers next to it in the floor. The music was

still playing and the voices still laughing and having a ball but now I could hear dishes clanking. Whoever they were, they were having a jolly old time. The chatter seemed to be coming from the room around us but there was no sign of anyone present. Are we in somebody's house? I remember whispering, alarmed we would have been seen and get in trouble. Dana mumbled, I don't know. He said go straight down these steps and well, we did and this is where we are. I was so tiny that it seemed to take me forever to walk across the floor. Our whispers of curiosity echoed off the walls. Straight across the room from the staircase was a door that we assumed housed the toilets. What are we going to do if they catch us? I asked. My older friend

shrugged and said, tell them that we were sent here to pee and ask them where the bathroom is, I guess, and laughed. We found the bathroom. It was equally elaborate, but only one sink and toilet and on the sink was a hairbrush. Blonde hair twirled around the bristles. We looked at each other but said nothing. We all were in agreement with how strange this all was. We did our business as quickly as possible then rushed out of there. As we made our way back across the room one of us spotted a lit half cigarette burning inside a pedestal ashtray. Somebody lives here, I said, looking up at Dana for agreement. With that, the four of us ran back up the stairs as fast as we could. Little and fat, I was always the last in line at everything.

Back in the house, we hurriedly tucked ourselves back into our seats and didn't as much as look at each other for a very long time. I'd forgotten all about the balloon. Now I couldn't get that bed out of my mind or those shoes. Why was a bed in a movie theater? Why clothes? Why was everything so fancy? And where on earth were the people that those voices were coming from? There was only one of the door in the room which was the pee room so where on earth were they hiding? About 30 minutes later I felt a nudge from my right. Don, Dana whispered. Bub and Shane just came back from the guys room. They told me they saw pants and a belt in there and that they heard a man talking.

We exchanged a look of wide eyes. I know I saw those things and I know that they were physically there, but something was telling me this was different in some way. Did we really see that? I asked. Were they really there? She looked at me bewildered. We all saw them, so, yeah. I simply nodded and turned back in my seat. Keep in mind that this was happening to me around the same time my own home was being exercised by every church and person of faith coming and going into my home. I was having a hard time knowing what was normal and real and what was otherworldly and unseen. I'm 11 now, the old house had been destroyed by the boulder and we were now living in the double wide trailer. The year is 1989 and my gifted class is attending a production of Babes in Toyland.

I have no idea where the show was being held at but I am not feeling good and not really wanting to go on the trip. My mom insists that I should go. I rarely went on school trips but she thought since I showed an interest in the arts that I might enjoy it more than I expected. I was menstruating and cramping and in quite a crabby mood but I agreed to go. I remember sitting on the bus looking out the window headphones over my ears with New Kids on the Block first album playing in my Walkman cassette player. Despite being in nearly every club and academic challenge team known in my county, I wasn't a very sociable kid. Socially awkward at bus with a sense of humor that could sometimes mask it all. I tried to appear unapproachable but failed. Adrienne,

a girl from my class sat next to me. She was pretty and always upbeat and chipper. I liked her, but at a time like this, her sweetness could give me a toothache. She chatted away. To make it stop, I remember handing her my Walkman and telling her she could listen for a while. I didn't intend on what being a tie that binds, but apparently that was BFF material and we bonded together from that moment on. I would later be glad for that. As we lined up outside the theater to get our tickets, I looked up at the marquee, all outlined with big clear bulbs. I smiled at the old look it had to it. Over the years, I had grown an appreciation of antiques and things that keep their story but age well.

The lobby was so packed with kids, all from different schools around the state so it was hard for me to take in any of what might have been there. Adrienne and I found our gifted teacher and scooted down the row our class had reserved. I picked a seat and sat there scanning the whole place watching different kids find their seats, spill their snacks and all of that. I didn't think much about me watching people until I started feeling watched. I glanced around expecting to see the person whose weighted stare I felt creeping upon me standing nearby. There was no one. I scanned the crowd thinking maybe I would catch them watching from afar as I had been. Nobody near or far seemed to be paying me any mind.

The lights were low and it was hard to see but I made eye contact with not a single person. I still felt watched though so I looked up to see if perhaps there were any balconies. There were and they were beautiful. Finally scrolled like those in an opera house. Just as my eyes settled on the one above me to my far right, I noticed a shadow. I waited for my eyes to adjust but the shadow never solidified into a person blocking light. It went from transparent to non-existent in a matter of seconds. I paused for a moment to rationalize then chose to distract myself from the uneasiness by taking in the rest of the architecture and the magnificently painted walls and ceiling. This place was just beautiful. Before too long the lights in the house went back and the show started.

I couldn't shake the Phantom of the Opera vibe that being watched in a theater by an unseen man from the shadows had. I laughed, but it wasn't enough to calm my nerves. I pulled the go-to card and told my teacher, I gotta pee. I made my way past her with Adrienne following behind. When we got to the lobby, it was empty save for the concessions workers, and I could actually see the carpeted floor and the gorgeous arched doorways, dawn, and ornate curtains. It was as beautiful as I had expected. I'm looking for the restroom, where do I find it? I asked, interrupting the worker's personal chat. Through that doorway, he said, pointing with his head to

the arch to the right. Just follow the steps and it'll lead you right to it. I nodded and off I went, thinking slowly in my mind, where have I heard that before? There were girls coming up the steps so I slowed my stride while I thought to allow time and space for them to pass. Follow those stairs, why do those words seem to have a bad feeling attached to them? My stomach felt queasy and my breath grew quick. I felt as if though I was in trouble but I didn't know why. Adrienne could see that something wasn't right and asked me what was up. I told her I didn't really know, that I just felt ominous, like something was going to happen to me that I wasn't ready for. I explained the panic attack seemed to have something to do with what that guy had said but I understand the connection.

Each step I took down those carpeted steps made me weaker and weaker in the knees. The carpet, the red scrolled carpet that looked so familiar. I wanted to vomit, or faint, or vomit and faint. I didn't know which so I just slid down the wall and sat right where I was. By this point I was starting to cry, still not knowing why I was hesitant. I looked up at the walls. There were gold scones elegantly placed. I looked at the walls. They were curved to the right just as the stairs were.

Suddenly I started having flashes of walking down these winding stairs on the red carpet before. But why? Why was I there? I calmed my breath and closed my eyes as I tried to remember. A couple of girls passing by noticed me on the floor crying and stopped to check on me. Adrienne told them I was fine, to go on, but as they left she asked, Are you okay? I nodded. I had no clue what was going on, but I knew I couldn't sit in the floor forever. I got up and we stared down the stairs one step at a time. I don't know, I told her. I just have the craziest feeling like

I've been here before and something bad happened. I don't remember being here but I don't know, I just don't feel right. I stopped just before turning the full curve of the wall. I can't go down there. Let's go back upstairs. I can't do it. We turned to our seats and tried as we may to watch the show. I love theater and I tried hard to immerse myself in the performance but I couldn't let go of the uneasy feeling nor the flashbacks. And I still had that strange feeling of being watched when I sat in the house. All of my thoughts must have read on my face because Adrienne leaned in and whispered,

what's going on? Why are you afraid? I don't know, I answered shaking my head. I have no idea, it's almost like I've locked out whatever scared me. Ade sat quietly for a moment then whispered, Want to go back? It might come to you. I shook my head no but sat there reflecting on my mother. I thought about how scared she was of what she couldn't see at her old home, how she always felt watched and how the things she said always proved to be true, even when she nor the rest of us could see them at the time. I thought about how the fear of what she couldn't see had changed her and controlled how she went about her life. I didn't want to be controlled by something that didn't make sense.

I needed to see what was wrong. Yeah, I eventually whispered back, let's go. As we shuffled past the other students again, a memory flashed before my eyes. Fireplace. I didn't know the meaning of the fireplace, but I was certain in my gut a fireplace was a key element in the sphere. We explained to our teacher that I was sick and needed to go back to the restroom again, and that we may take longer than expected. She nodded in understanding as she could tell that I clearly wasn't well. There was a fireplace, I told her as we entered the lobby for a second time and headed through the arched doorway that presented the staircase. I'll know if it's real or not if we get to the

bottom of these stairs and there's a fireplace. With that, I trotted to the bottom and stopped, aid bumping into me. The fireplace. There it was. I said nothing. I was in shock. Just as I remembered seeing it. White, mantle with posts, the mirror. Suddenly everything came flooding back and I remembered everything the clothes, the bed the disembodied voices that surrounded me the dread of being watched by people I couldn't see she and I

hadn't stood at the base of those stairs but a couple of moments before beautiful isn't it a voice came from over our shoulders we both looked to see a woman standing there with us looking around. We were startled by this simply because she had come from nowhere. She hadn't come down the stairs with us.

We would have heard her, saw her with as close as she would have had to have been in order to get there around the same time. She wasn't in the room in front of us when we had entered either. She just simply wasn't there, then simply was. I don't think I can describe in words the elegance this lady carried herself with. She too looked plucked straight out of a Hollywood classic on A&E. She had pale white skin, blonde hair that probably would have come to her bra strap had she not worn it smooth into those waves and curls you could see on most vintage pinup models. She had sweet blue eyes and wore a very well fitted green dress suit with the long shirt and jacket that tapers at the waist but flares out just below the hips and simple heels. On her left, just over her heart, she wore a golden

rose brooch pin. I knew of stranger danger but I didn't find this lady frightening as she smiled at me. Hi Don, she grinned down at me. Now that put a lump in my throat that Adrienne didn't notice. Nobody but my family called me by my middle name at this time. Most people didn't even know my middle name and school staff certainly didn't call me by it. If she were here with the school system, she'd have called me by my first name, I thought. She's not fi- Ade had just started to tell her our excuse for being in the restroom when the lady cut her off. I know, she said. She's scared because of what she saw years ago. Is that right, Dawn? You're

remembering when you and the girls were here and how scared you were. That was it. How did she know? Yes, when the girls and I were here years ago, there was everything, everywhere. And how did she know? My eyes grew large, but I simply nodded, speechless and afraid. Why were you so scared? The lady laughed. Because we weren't supposed to be here, I told her. You saw things that didn't make sense, didn't you? Adrienne looked at me, wanting to clarify what this lady was talking about because I hadn't told her the story. I nodded. You don't know what you were seeing, do you? I shook my head, and she smiled and then continued. When you came here with your family you saw a motion picture

but during the Great Depression this was home of vaudeville. This was the first time I had heard of vaudeville but I nodded to show I was listening. Now acting back then was actually frowned upon and considered immoral so a lot of actors and dancers lost their family when they found their talent and calling. There was a soft fondness in her voice, like what was found when one is reminiscing of their own days gone by. Many people came to the theater on a dream with no money. They came to make money, but it was the Great Depression. There was no money. She shrugged with a thoughtful pause. A lot of actors live down here. This room, the main sleeping quarters, and here, she said, wiggling a finger for us to follow her as she crossed the room towards the fireplace,

giving the wall a little push. A door that was unnoticeable to us before gave from the wall and opened. I was honestly afraid to follow her inside. What if she locked us in? I didn't know this lady. I poked my head in and looked around. Here was the kitchen, she said pointing to the left, and sometimes if you had money or family you could call them. She gestured to what remained of an old telephone booth. It was aged, rusty and looked to be the playhouse for mice for quite some time. Adrienne was seeing the tour through a totally different set of eyes than I was of course but she found it interesting nevertheless. I, however, had more questions than answers creeping in. The last to be buried was an actress before the street was paved over their graves.

The bed? I asked. Where people sleep? She replied in a matter-of-fact tone. The clothes? Their clothes and costumes. The party and the cigarettes? They lived here, she chuckled as if to say I just told you. What she told me explained everything, except I hadn't been there during the Great Depression, and except how she knew who I was

and what I had even seen. Was she in the building when I was last there and if so, how did she recognize me now that I was much older? Was she a... how do you ask someone if they are a ghost, politely? Is there a politically correct term for that? The best thing I could muster was, did they die here? Yes, plenty did, she confirmed. Pointing to the wall behind the phone booth in front of us,' she said. "'As I said, some of them didn't have families to bury them, "'and churches wouldn't always do it because you were seen tainted. "'Not really someone they'd want to have in the church ground, "'so a few of them were buried back there.

"'The last was an actress. "'There wasn't a street back there in those days. The city has since paved them over. So her family couldn't come visit her even if they wanted to? Adrienne pointed out. The lady shook her head. That's so sad. I sighed.

It is sad. The woman agreed. Do you understand now? It wasn't here, was it? What we saw and heard. It was here, she nodded firmly. Not as you experienced it exactly, but it was most definitely here at one time and you just so happened to experience it. Does that make you feel better?

To understand what you were seeing when you and Dana were so young. To know they couldn't hurt you. No, lady, I wanted to say. You just called my cousin by name and nobody here even knows her. You can't know that. How did you know the person with me then was Dana? And you just informed me that I had crashed the great Gatsby of all ghost parties. I'm more frightened now than I was at six. I didn't say that though. I merely nodded with a sigh. I was ready just to be back upstairs in my seat watching the Frankie

and Annette wannabes like the rest of my class. I said nothing and looked silently about the room with the fireplace, taking it all in. Adrienne drew closer to me and asked, Do you feel better? Are you okay now? I nodded then thought of something I wanted to ask the lady. I couldn't. She was gone. She remains a mystery. Adrienne and I both froze, looking at each other. I poked my head back into the room hidden by the secret door, but she wasn't inside. Ade looked inside the room with all the

toilets. She wasn't there either. The two of us were standing at the base of the stairs and she certainly didn't come past us. Needless to say, we sprinted faster than we had the first time. When we got back to our seats, neither of us could wrap our heads around what had just happened. How'd she do that? Adrienne asked. She just popped up and just disappeared. How'd she do that? I shook my head in silence. Do you think she was a ghost? I don't know. I didn't know what to think. She was one of them, wasn't she? That's how she knew everything. She was in that room with you guys when it happened and that's how she knew. She had to. Why didn't you just tell me the story? I didn't remember it. I snapped.

Was this what my mom had been experiencing all those times with Ronald? Did he appear that vividly to her and make so much sense? What was happening to me? Would I be okay when I got home? Should I even tell my mom about this or would it scare her? There was too much of this for me to wrap my head around. I told Adrienne not to talk to me about it and to never bring it up. It's 2019 now and all of those years she only mentioned it twice. When last asked about it she told me she couldn't remember. In about 1995 when we were teenagers I decided to tell Dana about my encounter with that lady. I got as far as, do you remember when we saw that stuff in that bathroom that time? And she shut me down telling me yes but she didn't want to talk about it. I tried to explain

that I had more to add to it, but she didn't want to hear it. From my twenties on, since the internet became available and information a lot easier to come by, I have researched my tale off, digging through the history of the old theater. I have watched documentaries. I have read old newspaper articles. Every single thing that the lady told me was true. Many people had died in that theatre, not just performers. Two electricians had met their demise while working on wiring. A maintenance man met his death in the projection room, and the man my cousin heard in the downstairs bathroom very easily could have been the spirit of the homeless man who had taken up shelter there and froze to death. Shadow people have been reported in the balcony, just as I had seen that day.

The ladies' powder room on the mezzanine is said to be inhabited by a beautiful lady in fancy red clothing, much like my bathroom beauty, but it seems nobody has ever seen the lovely lady in green down below. There have been numerous reports of people hearing a lady in the downstairs woman's bathroom and experiencing the same poltergeist activity my quartet did as a child, but no visions. I keep searching and searching for a story where someone says they have actually seen her or spoken with her. To this date it seems Adrienne and I are the only people who have a face to put with the action. Why materialize for me and nobody else I don't know. Who is the ghost lady thought to be? Is she an actress? Perhaps the one she singled out in her story? Is she the same lady seen upstairs in red doing costume changes on the other side? Did she work for the company in some other area, such as finance or tickets?

Who is this lady? Nobody seems to know. I've not come across her face in any paintings or newspaper clippings in all my years searching. I will probably never stop looking for her face, her story. This happened while in high school over 15 years ago. 14 to 15 year old male at the time. I have only had one experience like this and believe it was random. I grew up in an older two-story modest home with my mom in a small town in mid-Missouri.

My bedroom was upstairs and rectangular in shape. It was long spanning most of the length of the house. On one end was a window facing the street and on the other end was the bedroom door. My bed was near the window side of the room. That particular evening I was up late watching some random shows in my room. I remember feeling uneasy. Something didn't feel right but I couldn't pinpoint what. It had been an uneventful day. Eventually I got bored with the TV, crawled into bed and somehow fell asleep.

Instantly I awoke and shut straight up in bed. A crippling sense of dread consumed me. I was terrified and couldn't explain why and what really worried me was feeling that way in my own room. A familiar place where I had always felt very safe. Not that night, I felt like I wasn't alone. I must have been sitting upright for 15 to 20 seconds before swinging my legs over toward the right side of the bed. I purposely kept my eyes low on my legs and the floor. Then after several long seconds which felt like an eternity, I slowly glance upward toward the other end of the long room. It was mostly dark except for a small amount of light from the dim street lamp outside that penetrated the closed blinds behind me. This light provided just enough illumination to barely make

out the layout of the room. In front of me, halfway between my bed and the door stood a dark, featureless, human-like shape silhouette. When my eyes glimpsed it, I felt petrified and my first thought was to curl up fetus style underneath the blankets and hope that whatever it was would go away. That is paralyzing fear. I quickly rationalized that hiding under the blankets wouldn't get me away from this presence. I needed to get out of the room and directly through it was the only way. I mustered up whatever courage I had, shakily stood up on both feet and bolted toward the door to escape. While passing through it, I felt the coldest sensation shoot throughout my entire body. Every hair stood straight up, which made me speed up even faster. I got to the door, swung it open, and flew down the stairs.

I stayed down there for some time while trying to process what had just happened. I then went to the living room where our family dog, Trixie, a Rottweiler pit bull mix, was sleeping in the kennel. I got her out, leashed her and cautiously walked to the base of the stairs that led up to my room. I don't recall her acting weird or noticing anything but I still felt something was up there so we slept on the living room couch the rest of the night. That's my only possible paranormal experience. I didn't feel physically threatened by it, like my life was in danger but definitely got the feeling that I was unwanted. As if I had trespassed onto someone else's property

and needed to get out now. A couple of things. My dog slept in my room often at night but for whatever reason she was in the kennel that evening. I often wondered if she would have alerted me if she had been in the room. Also, when I initially woke, it felt like only minutes had passed since going to bed, but I had actually been asleep for two to three hours. The home is located at 702 North Clark in Mexico, Missouri. Google map it if you want. It is the home with the gray roof and very light green, almost white colored siding, has cement stairs along the right side. The house used to have a large tree in the front yard that made it look a little creepy at night.

The window to my old room is the upper left one. The other upstairs windows are part of another bedroom. This story is a two-parter. Whether or not they are connected, I'm not sure. However, both happened in the same area and both were extremely unnerving. Let me start with a little bit of info about myself. I served as a soldier in the U.S. Army for the better part of nine years and spent some time with a mountain warfare infantry unit. I'm 31 years old, 6 foot1", and approximately 195 pounds.

I'd like to consider myself a fairly competent woodsman, and have always felt at home in the mountains and forests where I call home in upstate New York. These stories take place in the Adirondack Mountains. Now, I've always had pretty good understandings of the wildlife in my region, the various species of larger game that one could expect to possibly encounter on deep wood excursions, animals that may give you trouble if you aren't cautious, animals such as black bear, moose, coyote, fisher cats, bobcats, etc. There is one creature I never bothered with, and that's simply because

up until now I was positive it didn't exist. The creature I'm speaking of, of course, is the Sasquatch. I have a couple of friends who are self-proclaimed Squatchers, as they're apparently called, and they constantly are doing research and telling me all about them. This information will become relevant later in this story. So it's August 12th, deep in the southwestern edge of Adirondack Park. I and a good friend from work, Carrie, had set up camp late that night. We only unpacked what we'd need for sleep and figured we'd finish unpacking and setting up the following day when we had some ample light and time to do so. The first night

went off without a hitch. The following day, we unpacked the rest of our gear, got set up for what was to be another three days of pure relaxation, or so we thought. This trip, however, was about to get really weird. As the sun began to set, I got to chopping some wood, building a nice fire, cracked open a beer, and got ready to start cooking dinner. It was a beautiful night, 70 something degrees in clear skies. The fire was roaring and I was already a few beers deep in by the time the sun had set completely. We sat by the fire, listening to some music and laughing, when all of a sudden, we were blindsided by this overwhelmingly rancid stench. It was unlike anything either of us had ever smelled before.

Almost like a sour, wet dog, stinky foot, musky smell that literally made us both look at each other with like, whoa, what in the hell? This smell lingered for about ten minutes or so, and then was gone. We didn't think much of it, and decided to head down to a creek nearby, sit on some rocks, and stare up at the night sky, admiring the abundance of stars. We sat there and marveled at how many we could see. After about thirty minutes, we decided to head back up to camp.

Just as we had gotten up, there it was again. The god-awful smell. We paused for just a moment to confirm that we both smelled it. Before we took another step, we heard a huge splash just behind us in the water. We both froze and looked at one another. What the heck was that? I said. I don't know, she said.

Can we go back to camp now? We double-timed it back up to our camp and sat there for the rest of the night on high alert. For the rest of the night, nothing happened, but that stench would come and go randomly as the wind shifted. The following morning, we went back down to the creek and I grabbed a rock, probably the size of a softball. I thought to myself, and I threw the rock into a random section of the creek, around the area we were sitting. Sure enough, it made the same exact splashing sound like the one we heard the night before. Now this is significant according to my squatcher friends.

Sasquatch allegedly has a very unique rancid smell. Also, they have been known to throw rocks directly at or towards people. I'm not sure if what we encountered was a Sasquatch, but I know for a fact that no known animals from that Adirondack mountain area enjoy throwing rocks. Anyway, fast forward to October 12th, exactly two months later in the same area. The weather was less agreeable this time, but we weren't going to let that stop us. It wasn't too terribly cold during the day, but it was constantly raining, and at night it did get really chilly. This time around, we were going to get much closer to something that quite frankly scared us both shitless. Our second night at the camp, we had to turn in early because the rain had become quite heavy and the temperature dropped to about 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

We got cozied up in our sleeping bags and shut our eyes, listening to the sound of rain hitting our tent and the nearby creek which was now raging from all of the rain. Just as I felt myself starting to drift off, I heard it. A loud sniffing sound coming from my right side, where Carrie was currently bundled up in her sleeping bag. Unsure if she was still awake, I whispered, Was that you? A brief pause, and she replied,

I was about to ask you the same thing. Then again, we hear this loud sniffing sound, loud and long, not like the typical sniffing you would associate with a curious animal that was being inquisitive. Right after that, a second sniff. I heard slow, deliberate footsteps moving closer to the tent just behind us. They were heavy. They sounded sneaky, but most importantly, they sounded bipedal.

Another sniffing sound came. sneaky, but most importantly, they sounded bipedal. Another sniffing sound came. I thought I was going to get killed or I don't know, I just had this primal feeling. So I grabbed a hold of my machete. What I know about the vast majority of wild animals, even bears, is that they are very skittish. Loud noises tend to scare them off pretty easily. After a couple more steps, I began to unsheathe my machete.

Hey! I yelled. Silence. For a good thirty seconds. There was nothing but silence. We didn't hear the pitter-patter of quadruped fling and fright from the sudden loud scary man. There was nothing. Then suddenly, another loud sniff, and I heard the footsteps change course and begin to circle around my tent, to my side.

Oh crap, I thought to myself, as I could hear this thing literally stop about three feet away from my side of the tent and sniff again. It takes a lot to rattle my cage, but at that moment my heart was pounding. Now the presence of whatever the hell this thing was was bad enough, but the strangest part of the ordeal. All the sound suddenly stopped, the footsteps, the sniffing, it all just went silent, and we didn't hear it leave. As this damn thing just kind of vanished somehow. Maybe it climbed a tree, I don't know. But for the next couple of hours, I was awake, clutching my machete.

I heard nothing but the rain and the creek. Just thinking about the whole ordeal still gives me goosebumps. And going back next month, hopefully, whatever it was, doesn't. For an entire year, I was plagued with a reoccurring dream that came monthly. In this dream, Tyndall Air Force Base and Mexico Beach were destroyed by a massive storm. These two locations are next to my town and are connected by a highway surrounded by pine forest. The part of the dream with Tyndall always had buildings wash away and disappear with the rain.

I remember in the dream, the shoreline would no longer look the same after the storm passed. It looked and felt so real. The part of the dream that got me was not Tyndall, but Mexico Beach. In the dream, I drove from the destroyed military base down the familiar highway to Mexico Beach. The houses were gone and the sun was setting, only a silhouette of the forest remained. Then, suddenly, a faint glow would illuminate a makeshift town of sorts inhabited by ghosts. It was as if these ghosts assembled a new little village out of their wrecked houses and boardwalks. I remember entering this village and interacting with the people.

They either didn't know they had died or simply ceased to care. They were faded, washed out, and slightly transparent. The thing that stood out the most was the oil lamps hanging over their doors. Their soft glow was not warm like a normal lantern should be. It was as if there was a memory of a flame. The people acknowledged and interacted with me. At one point, they brought me a small bag of sweets because I had no money on me. Their gift to me touched my heart. At the end of the dream when I left the village, I turned around to see a silent, dark forest

once more under the evening sky. No village, no people, no glowing lanterns. There was an emptiness and a sorrow in my heart. These dreams weighed heavy on me because I kept having them often. Thus begins the weird events that I feel are connected to my dreams. Let's begin with a fishing trip I took a few months back after I retired from the military. Mexico Beach was a place my husband and I would go fishing regularly. One night while there, we were alone under a sky full of stars.

Behind us was the forest and in front of us was the beach. No one lived on that side because it is owned by the base. There are no houses on that side of Mexico Beach for miles. I remember that my husband went to grab his cell phone that he had left in the car. I told him to go get it and that I would stay here so he could find me. While I was alone and waiting for him, I would see white figures out of the corners of my eyes. I looked further down on the beach and saw the soft glow of an oil lamp moving as if someone were carrying it. The light grew dim and then was gone. My husband returned to me very shaken up and told me that on his way back to me, he thought he had spotted me when he walked up to

the person that he thought was me, he realized that they were wearing a white gown and that it was not me. The person vanished into thin air, and we left soon after. Fast forward to October 10th of 2018. The great and merciless Hurricane Michael came to shore. Me, my husband, my father, and three dogs hid in the laundry room while we listened to the wind roar and rattle our home. When we emerged, we saw our town ripped up. This storm was angry and felt as though it were sniffing at its victims. Every single tree around us was either broken in half or torn from the root. Roots were peeled like oranges, personal objects scattered like confetti. Our world was turned upside down. There was no power or water for weeks.

We would soon come to learn that Tyndall and Mexico Beach were completely destroyed, just like in my dream. I remember feeling sick to my stomach with the realization that it wasn't just a dream, I had seen events that would come to pass. The nights that followed the storm were dark and quiet. Something invisible would trigger the motion lights we set up. The lights flashed wildly, but there wasn't anything triggering the lights. Yet, they kept coming on. My dad decided to sleep outside to make sure it wasn't a looter.

My husband and I were in our bedroom with the window open hoping for a breeze. About 1am, we hear an otherworldly scream. I know the sounds of all the wildlife around me because I have lived in front of some woods for many years. This was neither an animal or a human. It was a scream full of rage, devastation, and anger. I shot up from the bed and told my husband to get his gun. I grabbed a broom and marched outside to retrieve my thoroughly spooked father. We had trouble getting back to sleep. The night after, I had a very strange dream. In my dream,

the ghosts of people who died in a storm came to me one by one. Each of them would hand me a coin and walk off only to disappear. I remember looking into my hand at all the muddy coins. I haven't dreamt of the storm anymore, but the motion lights flash wildly from time to time like that, and sometimes we hear that scream in the wind. This is a true story that I've only told four people. This happened while I was serving as a reservist in the military back in 2010.

It was that time of year where we were summoned to do annual training, which was two weeks long. We convoyed up to Camp Roberts with about 10 HMMVs and reached our destination in about six or seven hours. The max speed limit was 55, no more or no less. We arrived and unpacked and had lunch and then began our training. Skipped to day 5 of training. We had been doing a lot of training which mostly amounted to power points on the screen. I was excited because the next day we would be at the range for weapons qualification and other hands on weapons. We got up the next morning at 5am after just doing fire guard from 2 to 3.30 a.m.

Physical training was from 5.30 to 7 a.m., after which we had breakfast and went to the armory to retrieve our weapons. I was excited. I was next and I handed over my CAC card, and a few minutes later, I was handed a super clean M4A2. I cleared it and off I went. We began the long but nice trip towards live fire training, a good 5 miles from our barracks. You drive by and see cool training areas like the bayonet training, tank driving classes, 300 meter ranges, etc.

We get to our range and begin to see the long process of weapon zero and weapons qualifications. I ended up with a 36 out of 40, the best at the boot camp which was 38 out of 40, so I think I did pretty good. It was around 5pm and we began cleaning up to head back for dinner. After we did a little class on buddy carries, we began to get ready for bed, after the last formation to do a headcount. My NCO then came up to me and said that I have night guard tonight at the range to watch Yammo. I reluctantly said Roger Sergeant and began packing for the night. Water, food, and smokes.

I threw on my cold weather Army issued thermals and began heading for our HMMV. I and my battle buddy then began the 30-40 minute drive past the gate we just left a few hours ago. The drive was very nice but bumpy. I sat shotgun with my M9 holstered enjoying a nice dark and starry night. I still remember the huge hills after every bend and turn on the road. We arrived at our range and they were happy to see us. We shook hands and exchanged some info before we said goodnight and they were off to the warm barracks. I was content though.

I get to be up all night with a pistol on my side and my buddy's M16 was more than comforting. We knew people weren't stupid enough to come and steal ammo on government property, so it would be a chill night with one up for one hour while the other slept and switching every hour. The ammo was sitting in a 20-foot metal trailer you see on 18-wheelers. Doors facing our little cabin in front was the long deserted range with the HMMV facing perfectly for a good view of everything. I was asleep, but still half awake. I felt my buddy kick my boots and I opened my eyes. He had that face on and I knew something was up without asking because we had loaded guns, so it was no time for jokes. We exited the HMMV, guns pointed, and I

was behind him and asked, What's happening? He said, I don't know. I saw something. We marched forward toward the metal container and swept around. I saw a super quick bright dash of blue and baby blue light. With that, my buddy dropped to the ground, slumped like he had no backbone. I pulled him to the side and slapped him a few times. He was slurring like he was drunk. I shouldered his weapon, looked up towards the HMMV, and began to drag him. I was tugging and tugging, and he felt like he weighed like 300 pounds. I looked

back and noticed a human silhouette a good 15 feet away. I jumped back and fell on my ass. I was so shocked to see another being, I yelled in a hysterical voice, Stop! Identify yourself! I will open fire if you approach me! I slowly got to my knees, pulled out my flashlight and flashed the mysterious figure. My heart stopped at the sight of this thing. It was… I can't explain. I was shitting bricks. It's hard to explain. The sight was unbelievable. Half of its body was showing, with the other covered by a thick wooden pole. It stood there like a shy child at a new elementary school, shy but curious about these new faces. It stood there, six to seven feet tall and super skinny. Its skin scaly and grayish purple.

Eyes small and beady, small nose with a big long mouth. It edged out more, exposing its male genitals. Its long, creepy arms stretched out and tugged on my buddy's ACU bottoms. I pointed the weapon at it and yelled, No! It let go and just looked at me like it was puzzled. I pointed my handgun and pulled the trigger, but nothing seemed to happen. My gun was jammed. I racked it back and started to pull the trigger, and nothing. But it didn't matter though, this thing was just gone out of thin air.

I thought I was going crazy. I sat in the HMMV with my buddy passed out in the back. I chain smoked my pack with his rifle in reach. I was scared, but at the same time lost. I stayed up all night till the morning. My battle buddy finally woke up not knowing a thing. I told him what happened, but he didn't believe me, so I kept it to myself and only told a few others. When I was 19, already being in the military for just under a year, this is relevant to a point I want to make later, I was home visiting in the military for just under a year this is relevant to a point I want to make later I was home visiting in the summer a friend and I were camping out in the branch of the Canadian River where all the locals go mudding and rock

crawling my friend I'll call him n for this story was smoking trees and I had just opened my second beer and we were waiting on two more of our friends to come on out it was an incredibly pleasant night for camping. Perfect weather, clear sky. It was about an hour after sundown and we had just got to our camp, set up and were chilling and listening to music. Procrastination at its best. Our campsite was literally our campsite.

It was far back in the most difficult to reach area where you either need to hike for miles or have a serious off-road capable vehicle. It's at the base of a train bridge that spans about 500 feet with the bridge being about 100 feet above the river bottom and sheer cliffs on either side. Many times we would be camping and trains would go across at night. The conductors would have flashlights out as a little hello when they see our fire, and we would wave back. Because of the age of the bridge, or just their SOP I'm not sure, they would always slow down before traversing, so it's usually a crawl. This night, we happened to look up and see bright lights over the rim of the cliff. Thinking it was just a train, we waited and watched until the train crested over the rim. That was when I noticed that the bright lights over the rim didn't progress along with

the front engine when we actually saw the train. The front car had its own lights, but the night sky was still lit up like there was a train coming. Like I said, normally the conductors would wave and honk their horns, but this one was silent, even when we shined our lights up at them. Then I saw it, hovering above the train, and moving at a slower pace was something that took my breath away. If I had to guess it was about 15 feet above the train and had all kinds of lights on board. We both stood there and stared at it until it was perpendicular to us. Then it stopped. M started walking towards it with a look

on his face that could only be described as wonder, kind of like the look on Abu's face in Aladdin when they first go into the Cave of Wonder. When he got closer to the bridge, it slid to the opposite side until he got under the bridge, then it slipped back towards me. When M saw that he couldn't see anything, he started to come back, and it slid back over the train. Which was still moving, by the way. After he got back to where I was standing, a spotlight came down from the craft onto us. The light was so intense, I could feel the heat from it. This thing was at least 100 feet away from us. I remember falling to my knees and being unable to look away. I also couldn't breathe properly as soon as the light turned on us. Like that feeling you get when you're about to pass out from oxygen deprivation. But I didn't pass out.

I don't remember if M had the same experience, because all I was seeing was the light. Then, the spotlight turned off and the craft started moving along with the train again. About three-fourths of the way across the bridge, the craft veered off and climbed at a crazy speed until we couldn't see it anymore. After the thing disappeared, it took quite a few minutes for me to get my mind right again. The phrase we've chosen to tell everyone then we kept repeating in our head for some reason. Naturally one doesn't go and plan on telling people anything along those lines unless you want to be

branded crazy. Em and I had no explanation for what happened, so the following conversation didn't progress past, did you see that dude? I told him what I was thinking about the whole situation and the whole tell everyone part, and he would only shake his head. We both knew it was a bad idea, so until tonight I haven't mentioned it to anyone. Another thing we noticed was that the portable stereo we were listening to somehow lost all power sometime during the event. The batteries in it were dead along with the extras we brought with us. The clock in his truck also reset and the battery had to be jumped the next morning. It didn't have enough power to

turn over, only to barely run the electronics. The size of it would have only been similar to a Chinook, except that there was no sound. I've been around and in shithooks, and they are so ridiculously loud they need hearing protection or you'll get permanent hearing loss. Its acceleration was also greater than that of any helicopter I'm aware of, especially one that size. It was all quite strange, and John had closed up the shop for the week to take a break and go up camping with his friends to a regular spot they did yearly. They were going camping in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, which are a beautiful place to go and be.

He took with him two co-workers from the shop at the time, and two other close family friends. They packed some beers and of course their guns and tents. They all set out on a four hour drive north and arrived later that day around noon or one o'clock, at which point they drove their trucks down some forestry roads for a good thirty kilometers into the backwoods. This was because despite machine guns being legal, police and conservation officers of the time would often still bother you if you were using them. Going in, they began to pitch their tents,

which mainly consisted of old World War II and Korean War military tents, and stored their firearms in the tents with them in a large box. Their day was spent doing some shooting at just about whatever they wanted, with the exception of live animals. A few beers later and a cooked dinner, they decided to pack it in for the night, at around 11pm. The first night, none of the men woke up. However, when they awoke at around 7am, they found a huge bog in the middle of the trail which had not been there the year before. In the mud, they noticed very large footprints, just shy of being two feet long, imprinted in the mud at the edge of the bog. Upon further inspection of the area,

they could see the faint outline of some same-sized footprints almost five feet behind it in the dry ground. The footprints continued straight into the bog and out on the other side. John and his friends were packing serious firepower at the time. John was carrying a Belgian-made FNFAL battle rifle. All the men carried automatic weapons except for one, so they seemed very confident in dealing with an angry animal if attacked. Continuing on and into the valley about one kilometer away, they caught a glimpse of something peeking down from above the ridge. About three minutes of walking later, a large boulder about the size of a pizza box, but round, came flying down at them with great speed which was followed by a noise John said he would never forget. The noise was a blood-curdling scream and growl.

Further down the valley floor was another scream which replied to the first. The men quickly turned back realizing that there was two of them, as all of them loaded their magazines and ammunition into their weapons. They made it back to their clearing by sundown, only to find their tents had been torn to shreds and everything was scattered about their camp and torn open. One of the trucks also had a smashed back window and huge dent in the side door, which rendered it useless and unopenable. The men quickly pieced together what was happening. John had always been a believer in Bigfoot and was now positive that they were dealing

with one. About a minute later, a friend of John's raised his AKM assault rifle and fired a few shots to the other side of the clearing, saying he saw something huge and black run in behind a fallen tree over the top of a ditch. The men then fired a huge volley of gunfire into the tree and suppressed the ditch and tree. As the fire stopped, that same kind of scream was heard from behind the fallen tree. It was at that moment, from the east of the clearing, a huge creature stepped in.

At least, allegedly anyway. John described it as being seven to eight feet tall, and was covered in pitch black hair, not fur, which was heavily matted. Its face was ape-like, according to him. He estimated that the creature weighed easily 600 pounds or more. Without hesitation, John fired his FAL at it. Now, anyone who has a lot of knowledge of firearms knows that the FAL fires a very large 7.62x51mm bullet. On full auto, the weapon was hard to control, but John estimates that at least five of his shots connected, not to mention the barrage of bullets from other men, four of whom had machine guns, quickly cut this creature down.

He swears he had killed it. The sight was something to see, he said, as the creature had been hit over 45 times by various calibers of bullets that were designed to kill humans and nothing else, as they were made for military weapons. All the men immediately jumped into their trucks and sped off to get a forest ranger from the near station. Upon returning, the next morning the body was gone, however the ruins of their camp

were still there along with an incredible amount of blood left on the creature. The blood was even on the trees and which indicated that several rounds had passed straight through. The ranger took some photos and said that they would close off the service road and investigate. John and his friends returned to their hometown and have never talked about it Now, my dad was a former U.S. Army, Navy, and later became a biker once he was back stateside for good. He had seen a lot and shared as many of his experience with me as he was able before he passed in 2011. If you don't mind, I'd like to share a few more of them with you. This is a story from my dad back when he was in the Navy. It was close to the end of the Vietnam War and the ship they had just boarded had seen a lot of combat missions. I will try to tell this story from his perspective

as best as I can remember. One evening, I had just finished PT and my buddy and I were headed to the mess hall by ourselves. We had been walking through the ship and minus the sounds of the engines far away and the sounds of waves sloshing the side of our ship, all was quiet, since most of our crew was either in the mess, in their quarters, or at their stations on deck. At one point during the walk we arrived at a multi-level crosswalk with one below and another above the one that we were currently walking on. You can definitely tell when anyone is on or near another. The sounds echo in space. Though tight, it was open.

Our crosswalk was a straight shot to the mess hall. As we were walking and laughing, we heard the door behind us open and close. Now this is a heavy metal door, not one that you can just open without a lot of purpose. We turned and stopped, thinking another one of our squad decided to join us, but there was no one there. Confused, I looked at my buddy and he just shrugged. He turned around to continue on, but before we could take a step, we heard very loud footfalls again. We turned back around and all the sound of the steps, but again, there was no one. The footsteps grew louder and we began looking at the other crosswalks to see if anyone is there.

Nothing. It's such an open space, you would see someone no matter what. When the sounds were about halfway to us, we began to feel the vibrations from those steps on the metal railing and floor. My hair stood up on end. A cold feeling began on the back of my neck. Mind you, I saw combat already in Vietnam as a Staff Sergeant when I was previously with the US Army.

I'd seen some of the worst of humanity out there. There wasn't much that could really frighten me anymore. This was bizarre. Slowly, my buddy and I turned to each other, and in mutual agreement, we both decided we were going to back away from this situation. So, we began backing away. I think once we heard our footsteps out of sync with the others,

it became real to us. Like, this is really happening. We took off like a shot. We ran all the way to the end of the crosswalk and burst through the doors into the mess hall with panic looks directed back at the way we came. One of the naval officers closest to the door started asking us what the heck we were doing causing such a ruckus. Truthfully, we didn't want to say that two seasoned navy men were running balls to the wall into the mess of fear of being called cowardly. I think the freaked out looks on our faces gave us away since the officer developed a look of understanding. His eyes landed on the doors and we hurried through as he nodded almost solemnly. We knew then that this was not the first time it had happened to someone. Between constant career changes, extensive travel, and unusual upbringings,

I can safely say I led an exceptionally rich life. This being said, I have lots of stories, albeit few are probably appropriate for the horror theme of this channel. Still, I figured I'd share one of the things that happened to me, and maybe we'll see if there's desire for more. They say everyone's army experience is different. Some people gauge the enemy in close combat, others never even deploy. People have different jobs, and really there's no way to sum it up in a single sentence or

phrase to people who haven't experienced it. Oddly enough, I feel like the story is the best illustration of my life as how real the phrase really is. During my enlistment, I was stationed in a base in the Chihuahuan desert. It was a pretty boring place with not much besides sand dunes, long stretches of sun-shattered highway, scalding heat, and a plethora of impoverished people surrounding the base. That being said, there wasn't much to do unless you go off post. It was at this duty station where I met my friend Forrest. Forrest was a really great guy. Like myself, he signed up for the army because he legitimately wanted to serve his country. While he was very, very intelligent, he wound up being in the infantry out of dedication.

Anyway, being such a nice dude, Forrest was inclined to give those of us who didn't have a vehicle at the time rides in the town. It was always nice driving in his sports car, so on boring weekends, I'd ride along whenever he felt like driving somewhere. On this particular day, I don't remember where we were going, but we were going down an open highway. Since we're off post cruising through a little Latino area, Forrest was going a lot faster than he normally might under the circumstances. You see, on the post they pull you over for going even one mile over the speed limit. That means guys would really book it when they got off the post. Anyway, we were bolting down this desert freeway when we noticed a box in the distance.

Looking back, the conversation as I remember, it was only a few seconds. Through the piercing of the wind, I heard his voice as he began steering the car towards the box. Hey, see that box in the road? I'm gonna hit it. Laughing, I responded how that would be funny, but whoever was inside might mess up his car, so he shouldn't. With a defeated smile, he swiftly steered away and said I was probably right. The desert was littered with junk, and hitting it at the speed might not be as much fun as it would seem to, you know, two bored privates. As I said, the conversation took all maybe of six seconds. As force passed by and nearly hit the box, we immediately saw movement in the rearview

mirror. We weren't really prepared for what happened next. No, it wasn't an alien or a cryptid species. Instead, a child crawled out of the cardboard box, stood up, and ran away. I turned to Forrest and he was literally in shock. He didn't seem to have any idea of how he was supposed to react. It was like he didn't even believe what he just saw. What, was that a kid? He asked, completely mortified. Yeah, that was definitely a kid, I said laughing. Good thing you didn't hit that box. We spent the rest of the ride asking rhetorical questions, like why a kid was in the box in the middle of the desert. There wasn't a nearby town for quite some time.

Eventually, reasoning the kid might have been a developmental disability kid or something, we turned back to check on the situation. There was a box but no sign of the kid. So when I think back to that phrase about how everyone's military experience is different, I can't help but try to figure out where this story fits in the narrative of my life. I am a six-foot female who is now 25. Back in 2013, I decided to enlist in the Navy in order to pay for my college education. I was placed into the job of an aviation ordnance man and was sent to serve on the USS Palilu. I'll do my best to explain all of this and to those with no military background.

The USS Palilu was an LHA or Amphibious Assault Ship. This is basically one size down from an aircraft carrier, so pretty large, housing about 3,000 people when it's at full capacity. Just a big metal floating city. The top is a flight deck like you see in the movies like Top Gun, but isn't quite big enough for an aircraft that require a runway like jets. These ships launch different types of helicopters and harriers,

fixed-wings aircraft that can take off and land vertically. The amphibious part refers to the fact that the back of the ship opens and floods to launch small boats, typically full of marines and small trucks. As an aviation ordnance man assigned to the G3 division on the ship, I worked in the spaces down in the deep parts of the ship below the waterline where all the weapons these aircraft would carry were stored. Large elevators carry the weapons up to the flight deck to all the weapons these aircraft would carry were stored. Large elevators carry the weapons up to the flight deck to be loaded onto the aircraft. This story took place in 2014 when the ship was out on deployment.

We were in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles away from U.S. soil. I worked the night shift from 7pm to 7am. This meant that most of my ship took place during the darkening on the ship when all the lights that could be seen from the outside of the ship were turned off and switched over to red lights, as to not give away our position. So, as I said, I am a female. At the time, I was 21. Also on my shift, there were three males around my age and maybe a little slightly older. One other man worked in the office space to floor up from our shop, manning the phone and the desk in the case of an emergency. This was the Polilu's last deployment as the ship was about 35 years old.

There were several ghost stories that would go around and certain spaces really freaked me out at night. As an example, the small dumb waiter that carried food from the lower storage spaces up to the crew's kitchen had been out of commission for some time, supposedly because years prior it had malfunctioned and a marine looked into the shaft to try to see if it was gone. As the story goes, while he was looking, the dumb waiter fell and took his head straight off. There were lots of stories like that. So, on this particular night, we did our turnover with the day shift. We didn't have much to do that night, but we didn't want the day shift guys to know this,

or else they would give us their busy work. So while we were waiting for them to finish writing emails home and clear out of our shop, my supervisor said we should all go down to one of the magazines and wait there. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. So we went down to the magazine, magazine 10 to be exact. Trying to describe where this is located in full detail would be very difficult for someone who's never been on a ship, so I'll stick with the spark notes. He had to climb down to a fairly out-of-the-way part of the ship that was known as Shaft Alley. It was called this because it was a small room with four scuttles on the floor.

If you opened any one of them, you would see a ladder that went straight down about three stories. If the scuttle was open, you could step right into the hole and fall. It was fairly terrifying. Once you made it down one of these ladders, you would find yourself facing a large door with a high security lock on it. Only the people in my division were authorized to have the key, once they were put on the access list that is. We had to check out the key from the armory. It was not a space that was just allowed to be walked into, or that anyone who I didn't

work directly with would even have the reason to know where it was. Once you opened the door, there were two large rooms filling the inventory, and in one of the rooms, there was another scuttle that leads down one deck into another room. Each room had a thermometer in it, and the night shift was responsible for recording the room temperature from each of them every night to make sure space never got too hot for the hazardous material stored down there. So, anyway, we go down to the magazine and close the door behind us. The guys all make themselves comfortable and make casual chit-chat

while I put down my backpack in the corner and take down all of the temperatures, so we wouldn't have to come back down later. Once I was done, I sat on the floor, opened up my backpack and started doing homework for a distance college course that I was taking at the time. Somewhere, while I was doing my homework, I fell asleep. I woke up in a panic, with drool all over my assignment. Great.

I walked between the rooms of the magazine and called out to see if anyone was still there with me, but I was alone. I went back over to my books and started loading up my backpack to leave when I noticed a pair of dark eyes looking directly at me from behind some pallets. For some reason, unpanicked, I said, hello, in a friendly voice. The eyes and the dark figure, they seemed to be attached and darted to another palette beyond my view. Just when we hear someone enter the room, the main door to the magazine in the other room, I go over to check it out and see Johnson, the kid who works in the office space

upstairs during the night shift. Confused, I ask, what are you doing down here? He explains that our boss had asked him to take an inventory. As I'm offering to help him, we both hear a crash on the other side of the room, where my backpack is and look at each other, totally freaked out. He says, who else is down here? To which I reply, no one. Just as I say this, out of the other room darts a little girl. She looked about nine years old and completely

unkept and was wearing a pair of children's pajamas that were about two sizes too small. She darts across the room and down the scuttle into the lower space. Just then, I wake up. I'm still in the magazine on my homework, just like before, drool and all. Pretty spooked, I sit up and look around. I'm still alone. While I'm still trying to gain my bearings and shake off the nightmare, I hear someone entering through the main door of the room. I walk over, and wouldn't you know it, it's Johnson. I say, what are you doing here again? But this time I'm shaking. He says, I just told you, chief wants an inventory. I stare at him for a second and say, you just told me like a minute ago I just talked

to you? That actually happened? He looked at me like I was crazy and he was like, yeah. To this I respond, then there's a little girl in the lower and just then we hear a blood-scrattling scream coming from the lower space. I'm getting goosebumps now just typing it. The scream scares the hell out of me and jolts me awake, alone in the magazine, face drool covered in the assignment again. This time I'm terrified out of my mind, and I've started crying. I run immediately over to the phone on the wall and call upstairs to my shop. My supervisor answers, Firebomb, Petty Officer Lutton speaking. How may I help you, sir, ma'am, or chief? I sputter out shakily, Hey, this is Glover, I'm in 10, you guys left me down here.

He chuckles and says, Yeah, man, you passed out. I reply, If I'm not in the shop in 10 minutes, please, please send someone down to get me. He hesitates, clearly a little annoyed, but he can hear I'm really scared and says, Uh, okay. I pack my backpack, lock the space, and fly up the ladder like a bat out of hell.

When I got to my shop, I told the guys what happened, and they spend the next several days mocking me mercifully over it, joking that I'm a medium and I talk to dead kids in my dreams. I now go to a different space to record those temperatures at night, and Davis goes down to 10. About two weeks later, we're all in the shop, and Davis goes down to 10. About two weeks later, we're all in the shop and Davis goes down to record his temperatures for the night. He had been the worst about making fun of me, so he didn't mind going down to that haunted magazine. This night he comes back to the shop white as a sheet saying nope, nope, screw that, screw that, to himself over and over. Whenever we asked him what happened, he says that while he was climbing down the ladder,

he could hear a little girl singing, clear as day. He was so scared he came straight back up and didn't even get the temperatures. He wouldn't go down there alone after that either. This stayed a joke in my division for some time. Then, several months later in the deployment, one of the new guys that had been sent upstairs to work in the office's kitchen for a few weeks comes back. We ask him how his time up there was and he tells us he met the captain of the ship. From the way he told the story, the captain said hello and asked the new guy what his job normally was. To which the kid answered that he was an ordnance man. The captain said, oh, so you work down in the magazines. Have you met the shaft alley Sally yet?

The new guy said no and asked the captain who Shaft Alley Sally was. The captain tells him that 20 years earlier the ship had what's known as a tiger cruise. This is when family members of sailors got to go out to sea with the ship for a day or two to see what ship life is like. Supposedly on this cruise, there was a young girl, the daughter of one of the officers. The scuttle in the shaft alley had been left open and the girl stepped into the hole and fell to her death. The ship was decommissioned in 2015 and sits inactive in Pearl Harbor now. I have no idea what any of this means, but it was definitely one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to

me. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this while they were in the Navy or just in general? Back when I was in the Navy, I was doing my time as a mess crank. Everyone who enlists has to take their time and bust up their bones as a mess crank. This entails working for the cooks for a couple of months doing things like cleaning, vegetable prep, serving the chiefs and officers, and my favorite, the scullery. I loved the scullery because all I had to do was scrub the dishes, clean the absolute crap out of the dishroom, and go sleep in my rack, while everybody else was still saving away. While I was cranking, there was another guy cranking too. His name was Leslie.

I say was because he has since been sentenced to death, but we'll get to that later. Leslie was a stocky guy of Haitian descent, and the cooks were the white, nerdy type and were intimidated by Leslie, so whatever he refused to do fell upon me, as at the time, I was working in the dining room. Time went on and I got sick and tired of into his trash and ask him to help me with my trash, knowing he would say no. Then I'd watch him struggle to take out his trash and mine, not even knowing. Anyway, more days passed and I had enough of the cooks. They were too scared to ask him to do anything, so I confronted him and told him that he needs to do more, as I was tired of doing all the extra stuff. I told him that I liked him, but I was prepared to fight him. He declined, and we eventually became friends, and I got to know him as a nice guy with incredible intelligence. Fast forward some months

and we are no longer cranking, but doing our regular jobs. One morning, I arrived at work and learned that Leslie had killed his wife, bludgeoned her sister, and stabbed himself several times in the throat. I also learned that he had a history of violence, and my mind immediately went back to the times that I played pranks on him and called him out for a fistfight. He was a tough looking guy, but I had no idea that he was a killer. I look at his declining my invitation to a fight as him sparing my life. I'm not sure how creepy this is, but it definitely involves someone I would never want to meet again. Let's put it that way.

After offering my account to the tribunal for the deaths of four soldiers, they didn't want to know anything about it. So, maybe you would like to read about it from someone who was actually there. This is a long read, but if you ever wanted to know about the brutality that actually occurred, then this is definitely worth reading. March 1996, I am the age of 16 and joined the British Army. When you join the armed forces in the UK, you start with 10 weeks of basic training, as I was just going to be an army chef. I attended the Purr Bright training camp for what I thought would be the worst part of army training. I couldn't be more wrong.

Now back then I was super fit and very happy-go-lucky. I took the training even though I was incredibly tough. There was horrible accommodation, bad food and you ran rugged from 4am to 9pm every single day. I got through and passed, but I still remember my passing out parade and how proud my mom was watching me in my uniform marching around. After you finish the hell out of boot camp, you go on to phase two, which is your trade training, which depending on what you chose you wanted to be or where you went, would be different. For me, as a chef, I was assigned to State Omer Barracks in Aldershot. However, until your Phase 2 training started, everyone, no matter the trade, went to the Deep Cup Barracks. It was a delightful camp about one mile from Perbright, so only down the road. Initially, I was very excited to be leaving basic training. After all, the food was better,

you could have duvets on your bed, and the regime was nowhere near as strict as Perbright. When you first arrived you were all put into a new arrivals building, sharing a room with ten others until they decided at what platoon you went to. I assumed on the length of time you would be there. So I settled in for the first night. I knew a few of my roommates from my training platoon. My very first night on the camp, I got a glimpse into the realities of what Deep Cut was. I woke up at around 1am because I needed to go to the bathroom. Upon getting to the door, before I could open it, two guys in gas masks carrying pillowcases barged into the room.

They ran straight to the far bed and proceeded to batter a lad sleeping in the bed with what looked like an outline of helmets and pillowcases. After watching this stunned, I thought I should get help when I noticed the corporal who was in charge of us that night was holding the door open for the two guys. He looked hammered and was in hysterics that was unfolding. The assault lasted for probably 30 seconds before they ran out followed by the corporal at the door, and I could hear them pissing themselves with laughter as they ran down the stairs. After helping the battered lad to the bathrooms, I watched him clean up himself. Neither of us said anything at all. He looked about my age, was probably about 16. What could we do if one of the people in charge was involved and behind this?

In the next few days, I came to realize this camp was basically where sergeants, corporals, and officers went if they had failed in their career for punishment. What better people to look after 200 to 300 young impressionable soldiers all between the ages of 16 to very early 20s. They got drunk and did things to us for their own amusement. I had the hope and knowledge it would be okay. You normally spend one night at most two weeks there. I would be out of here soon.

Day three, I got called into the sergeant's office. He explained due to the fact that they were short on army chefs, no one wanted to be in heroic army chefs, so they were critically short, I had to wait a deep cut for enough chefs to pass basic training before going on to my next phase. After asking how long, three months was the reply. Three months at this hellhole. I thought I couldn't get any worse. I was very, very wrong. At this stage I got introduced to my platoon while I was at deep cut. By my brand new platoon sergeant I will refer to as Sergeant G. He initially sounded very friendly

and spoke with a soft Sunderland accent. He started by laying down ground rules, cleaning, etc. It was at this point he warned us about the evil twin. We all laughed, but he wasn't joking. He said if we came across his twin, it wouldn't end well and left

us at that. After speaking to a few of the lads that had been there for a week or so, they reiterated the warning along with, do not get on Sergeant G's radar, just keep your head down. It was at this point I began hearing rumors of the suicide of a soldier in the involvement of Sergeant G. Apparently, he had made this soldier the target of his evil twin and made his life an utter misery, tormenting him whenever he could. It was a few days after that I personally witnessed the evil twin in action. I and a few lads were in our room when a pigeon flew in through the open window. After several hilarious attempts to shoo the bird out, we failed and the pigeon carried on

flying around and landing on lockers. This is when Sergeant G enters the room and asks what's going on. After explaining about the pigeon, he says, I will show you how to catch him. He then proceeded to jump from the beds in the air to catch the bird. At first this was hilarious and we were all laughing, as was Sergeant G. That is until this went on for at least 30 minutes, maybe more. He just didn't stop, he was relentless.

The poor pigeon was probably scared to death at this point and got himself caught by Sergeant G. Now what happened next I will always remember. Sergeant G put the pigeon's head in his mouth and bit it clean off. He then spat the head out onto one of the beds and threw the body out of the window. Stunned by this, we just stood there, while the demented Sergeant G kept saying evil Eds had his dinner. He was just laughing.

While this was probably the most psychotic event I witnessed, the sheer cruelty of Sergeant G was legendary. One day in the height of summer, he made us push a huge temporary road around a field bare-handed. If you have ever seen a temporary road, it's basically a gigantic roll of rubber and steel. Being jet black and being in the sun all day, this thing was incredibly hot. It was so fat, in fact, all of our palms and fingers turned into huge blisters on each hand. After inspecting the damage to our ravaged hands, he shouted at us for not having men's hands, even to the woman.

Not satisfied with this, he ordered us to grab a huge rope from the back of the Land Rover and ordered us to tug of war with it as this rough strip of rope until the blisters all tore our hands to shreds. The pain of the raw flesh of our hands was incredibly hard to deal with, especially when he then ordered us to do press-ups on the hot concrete afterward. There was almost no time to even, like, recover. The booster injections they give everyone became infected in a few of us. Sergeant G's even twin made it his mission to find who had an infected booster shot and would punch them in the spy as hard as he could.

To this day, I still carry the scar after he exploded my infected injection. Of course, he made me do press-ups while the blood and pus poured down my arm. He would do things like that, hiding under beds like a real-life boogeyman, waiting to see everyone and see who would dare to talk about him or anything like that. It was boring, honestly. The man was a lunatic for sure. While at Deep Cut, time went slowly. All we had to do was whatever the delightful training staff had come up for us. One day, the LT in charge announced that we were going for an exercise for two nights and three days in the woods around Saundhurst.

On the morning of the exercise, Sergeant G gathered everyone on the parade to get everyone organized and announced on the exercise some of his SAS mates might make an appearance and interrogate people during the exercise. I didn't think much on this as he always was giving us unveiled threats. This exercise didn't actually start off that badly. The weather during the first day was gorgeous. It was very sunny and for some reason they didn't take this opportunity to do some running with the kit in the sun. The night settled into guard duty. To explain, you and your Basha mate, Basha is a hole dug in the ground for where you slept in, will take a stag duty, which lasts about an hour. The guard duty itself involves you lying down in a camouflaged hole dug especially for the guard duty. Then, one of you will go to the next basha

and tell them it's their turn, so on, so forth. At the end of our turn, I went to the next basha and whispered it's their turn to stay on. A low voice that sounded like a Scottish accent came from the shelter, aggressively telling me to go away. I didn't recognize it at first, and thought to myself, maybe the SAS thing is true. Maybe I can be a hero and capture Sergeant G's mates. Imagining what Sergeant G's face would be in the morning if I reported that I single-handedly repelled the SAS attack. I cocked my SA-80 with a blank round and demanded whoever it was show themselves. Silence. Angrily, I pulled back the poncho covering the basha to be greeted with what could only be seen as Sergeant G's naked body. He was in the basha, shagging one of the female recruits

and must have put on a weird fake voice to throw me off. I stood stunned as a furious naked Sergeant G leaped to his feet telling me not to say a word about this and to get back on guard duty. I couldn't quite see how angry he was because it was dark, but I could hear the fury in his voice. I now was on his radar. He was married, and I was now witnessing him having sex with some woman whilst on exercise. I knew he would have to do something about this. The next morning, things seemed okay. Sergeant G didn't even acknowledge me, which suited me. The exercise carried on into the night, and the weather this night wasn't really like the night before. It was a torrential downpour, and I was assigned to the third stag duty, which is round

one. I seem to recall. Weirdly, I was told that I had to stay on with the girl that Sergeant G was shagging, which was odd as it meant my Basha mate didn't have to do guard duty. I'm not sure why, but I wasn't suspicious about this sudden material above. We carried on with the guard duty chatting in low voices, bored out of our minds as the rain hampered the waterproof material above. All of a sudden, I felt a tremendous weight crash through our canopy and right onto my back. Someone from behind grabbed me from my helmet and then I could feel this knife against my throat. Pulling my helmet tighter, backward, it felt like someone was headbutting or hitting the back of my

helmet with something. He demanded I drop my rifle in the same Scottish action I heard the night before. Pulling me to my feet, he ushered me toward the dark forest, glancing down, and I thought I was going to die as I caught a glimpse of the girl. I was on guard duty with and to see how terrified she was when she locked eyes for a moment. Then she carried on laying down with her hands behind her helmet. I remember stumbling through the woods for probably 10 minutes in the pitch black when the voice ordered me to lie face down on the ground. Dropping down in what was a huge muddy puddle, I tried to keep my head and face above from the water so I didn't die from, you know, suffocation, drowning, etc. The voice then demanded my name, rank, and number, which I gave him. He didn't believe me and said he would shove my head

into the puddle when I assumed was his foot. Daring to look back up slightly, I could see two pairs of boots, which I know must be Sergeant G and probably one of the corporals. The other one didn't speak at all. They then started asking about how many people were in our platoon, and who was in charge, etc., which obviously gave them all they wanted to know. Being 16 and terrified, being alone in the woods, what was I supposed to do? I knew it was Sergeant G, but I didn't want to make him angry. This, of course, had the opposite effect. He gave me what felt like a right kick in the freaking testicles, as hard as he could. The pain from this was excruciating. I felt like I wanted to throw up.

Every instinct was to curl up in the fetal position, but they wouldn't allow me to. This carried on further for 20-25 minutes with them asking things of how great Sgt. G was and other corpels in the platoon, to whom was the biggest slag in the platoon. No matter what I answered, it was met with violence like kicks to the ribs. My fingers trod onto the point where I felt thin stick whipping the back of my thighs, and thankfully they got bored and realized they couldn't carry on doing this without actually killing me. I was ordered to my feet and led back to the area of our platoon, and camped out and told to go ahead alone when fairly close. After retrieving my rifle from the

girl who was still on stag duty alone, she asked what happened. I always remember this as I didn't want to seem like a coward, and I told her nothing had happened and they had just asked me questions. However, I was crying inside. All I wanted to do was go home to my mom, as pathetic as that sounds, but I just felt violated. The next morning was the end of the exercises Sergeant G gathered everyone, after some debriefing mainly about how bad we had done before, he then announced that his mates from the SAS reported that they had interrogated a few people while staring at the whole time. The whole march back, all I could think was how he was going to get me now.

Everyone knew what he was like, and without doubt, I would be targeted by him now. The misery was unbearable. I wanted the march to last longer because at least everyone was present so he couldn't single me out. We got back to the camp and everyone set about cleaning gear when I was told the officer wanted to see me. My heart leaped thinking the girl may have reported what happened, would this be my savior in a way as it was? The officer informed me that there were enough people to form a training troop at Estate Omar, passing out to Perbite, so I would be leaving that week. Thankfully, I managed to avoid Sergeant G for the whole week, and I volunteered to set up the field for RLC day, and was under the supervision of a different sergeant, thank god.

So that's it, my epic tale of-cut barracks as mentioned at the start. I tried to let the tribunal know what occurred there, but they don't want to know. This man affected me in such a way that I still have reoccurring nightmares. I rejoin the army and he is going to get his revenge. As for Sergeant G, don't worry about him. Boys and girls, he got his just desserts for all the years of torment he doled out to vulnerable young soldiers. The army recognized this and promoted him.

He is now the officer in charge of recruit welfare in the British Army. This I wish was a lie, but it is not. So I'm not sure if this is scary, and it isn't my story but my dad's who had shared this with me. Now, I'm a Navy brat and now an Army wife. I have a few crazy stories, but this one has always stuck in my mind. Here's a bit of backstory. My dad was an E3. For people who are unfamiliar with the rank, he was a seaman.

His job was a stoker, in the engine maintenance. He was roughly 115 pounds. Now being so small he could fit into places others couldn't, so he would frequently have been lowered into certain areas that require you to have complete trust with your team. So my dad had been aboard his ship for about seven months, and he had complete trust with his family. That's what he would call his team. Now, this particular day started out like normal. He was doing his checks when his friends started acting weird. Now, this guy was straight-laced when it came to his job, as it's dangerous, so he usually was not on some foolish stuff.

My dad had to do a weekly clean in an area, and he had to be lowered by his friend who was the partner for the day. So my dad was rigged and ready to roll when his friend started talking seemingly to no one. The more he spoke, the more he became aggressive. My dad said the guy kept repeating, no, and that's not how it works. So not sure on what to do, my dad calls his boss over. That's when stuff went south real quick. His friend picked up the wrench and started attacking the main panel in the control box,

the controls of the part of the engine and the filters, and yelling for the woman to leave the ship and he wasn't going to give my dad to her. Now, you're probably thinking a mental breakdown of some sort, but no. Anyway, the rest of the crew came rushing over to help stop him, and that's when he started attacking others, saying someone had to leave or they would die. Finally, they subdued him, and everyone went up to find out what was happening and checked for any injuries. This was lucky for my dad, as he had been hit on the head and needed to be attended to.

Within five minutes of being with the doctor, the place that he was in caught on fire. You're probably thinking it was because it hadn't been cleaned. Wrong, as this was an area that just needed the sludge to be flushed out, so there wasn't any electrical wires or flammable substances. So it wasn't a normal explainable thing, and no one knew what caused it or how it started, as the hatch was still locked and air tight. So, once everything calmed down, my dad pulled his friend to one side and asked what the hell happened. His friend kept saying that the woman wanted to kill my dad and the others, and he wasn't going to let that happen. He said it was because they had been promised something. My dad was like,

what the heck? Now, my dad had been docked off at the coast of Africa, and a lot of them went ashore, but my dad had duty, so he didn't bother. While my dad didn't go ashore, his friend did, and they went to this town that had voodoo and crap, and one of them got into an argument with the local. Long story short, the guy said he put a curse on them, and one by one they would die. My dad was not a believer in it and just laughed, but his friend was serious about it. Before my dad could say anything else, his friend has taken off. His friend had a full mental health check and was found to be sane. Obviously there were repercussions, but my dad didn't know what happened after that.

So a week after, another one of his friends died in a car accident. Then another had a fall and broke his back. The final thing was his boss had committed suicide not long after my dad was transferred to his new post. He later found out that his boss had taken a liking to the local's daughter and was for better word found in a compromising position. The guy was married and the father of the girl wanted him to marry his daughter in payment. He said there were a few odd things that happened, but didn't go into detail. Now that that happened over 40 years ago, it seems like it was yesterday. I'm not sure what to make of it and my dad isn't someone who believes in that paranormal

stuff, but we still can't come up with a logical explanation. I'm just grateful my dad got hit in the head, or I wouldn't be here today. At the time, I was serving in the military overseas in Yokosuka, Japan from 2012 to 2014. Since my time there, I was settled and been there for two years and seeing a very lovely girl named May. May had told me she was pregnant with my child while I was on my deployment. I took responsibility for my actions, so we started to plan. During the second year of my service during the winter, six months since May gave me the news, my ship had been in a dry dock for a year and each ship, depending on how large the ship's crew is,

had a handful of duty sections. This was a group of crew members who watched the ship and took care of it while the rest of the crew was off. So my section was on duty this night, then during our evening meal, one of my shipmates asked me if I could switch watches with him. Being that my current watch was standing and freezing cold for five hours, he thought giving me his barracks watch would lift my spirits up. It did. I took the proposal in a heartbeat. We both let our section leader know of the change. At 2345, I was on my way to the barracks to start my watch from 2400 to 0600.

The barracks watch was there for safety and to see that the right people were in their respective rooms. I arrived with five minutes to spare. I bought myself a person. I was relieving a coffee, thinking it would help them on their cold walk home. As the night progressed, I made my rounds every half an hour, and when the wee hours of the morning came around, I started to doze off. I was awoken by a resident who couldn't sleep due to their neighbor's crying. If you can't get the girl back in her room and keep her quiet, I won't tell the supervisor that you were sleeping, he muttered, as if I didn't have a choice. The barracks were three floors high full of people, but at this hour,

the silence had a certain eeriness to it, like you could hear your own heartbeat. My footsteps echoed as if on some sort of catacomb. As I made my way upstairs, I began to hear sobbing. I shook my head in disappointment. This should be fun, I said to myself. I reached the third floor and I made my way down the hallway. The sobbing sounded like it was coming from the laundry room. Maybe the poor girl didn't want to wake up her roommates, I thought to myself. As I made my way into the laundry room, Maybe the poor girl didn't want to wake up her roommates, I thought to myself. As I made my way into the laundry room, the sobbing was low, like she tried to hide it. I stepped forward and asked, Miss, are you okay? I turned the light on and I saw a young girl

sitting on the floor facing the wall, leaning on the washer machine. I asked again, Miss, are you alright? I put some strain on it so she may hear me, past the sobbing. I still waited for a response, but still got nothing. It was late and I was tired and getting impatient. I got closer to her. Hey lady, are you alright? I think you should call it a night. I yelled as I walked closer. Just as I did, the girl sprung up quickly. She looked sick. She had dark eyes, greasy hair, and she didn't look happy. It was almost as if I ruined her crying game. Before I could open my mouth, she let out an ear-shattering scream and it just kept climbing in pitch. I got closer to shut her up, but the noise was too much and I collapsed.

The last thing I saw was the sickly girl with her menacing face staring straight at me and screaming. All of a sudden, I woke up in the office where I watched the cameras. I would write it off as a bad dream from eating galley food, but I felt different. I felt cold. I have never left the office for the rest of my watch. A week later, I got news from Mae. She told me that there were complications with the baby and she had a miscarriage. I couldn't help feeling that the young girl in my night terror and the miscarriage could be linked. I'm back stateside now, and the experience has left a major impression on me.

For pretext, my story begins after my first tour in Iraq. I view myself as a very tough person, but it wasn't hard to find someone tougher than me. I grew up in an area where the high desert begins to turn into the forest. This is as close as you can get to being in the woods, without actually being in the woods. There are lots of trees, but very little running over standing water. I spent much of my youth exploring this area. So much so, most people would see it as walking into their living room. As one can expect, there were two, no, three things that I wanted to do when I got home

on leave. Pop my girl, drink some booze with some old friends, and go back into those woods. There was always something new to find, like where Native Americans had chiseled out some of their arrows and cool stuff like that. Just random things. Well, one night on leave, my best friend and I went out to hunt down some coyotes that had been terrorizing local ranches. Something he and I were well known for. I forgot to mention my friend was also a Marine. I called him a boot at the time because he had just gotten out of boot camp. We already determined where this pack liked to hunt at night.

Coyotes are nocturnal and like to make lots of yipping noises so they're easier to hunt at night. Well, kinda. They run around a lot. I won't get into too many details for hunting coyotes for protection reasons. So we are getting close to their den, and we can tell because they are starting this old trick that any predator makes, the whole pretend I'm a cub or injured rabbit trick. We start our typical closing in tactic, however, while we are doing so we are having a convo that is something along the lines of, this is different. I make the assumption that it's because we haven't done it in a while,

and they have changed some of their tactics from our last hunt, so we continue on. Nothing changes as we get closer. We get in about 25 yards of it, the den, and then we realize this is clearly not what it seems. So we make a decision to go communication silent. We move back out of the grove of trees that makes up this den, and we wait for movement. We set up defensive positions, and wait for the bait to give up.

I can't remember the amount of time that passed, but it was under an hour. It seems foggy to remember, but the first thing I remember is my friend calling me by my last name Something I was used to being in the military But it was weird coming from someone I grew up with I did nothing, for whatever reason A couple of minutes later we see movement We call out to each other Then something emerges from the trees What I saw was a man

But he was as tall as the trees. What I saw was a man, but he was as tall as the trees, and the trees in this area are easily 7 to 10 feet tall at the very least. I'm terrified at this point, and I don't know if it was PTSD or just plain old fear, but I aimed in and shot at it. I know I shot it, because I'm used to shooting something much smaller in the dark. I wait for it to take a few steps and fall down. But it doesn't fall down. It just keeps walking. My friend fires, and the same thing happens.

I know he did it too, as we have very similar shooting skills. At this point, we go to battle mode and keep firing, intent on killing it. Our thought that it was trying to lure us or something, because it just kept going and going. Suddenly it just stops and turns perpendicular to our positions and walks off. Now, I was using a.308 and my friend was using a.30-06. This thing would have dropped after the first five rounds, but it didn't. We considered chasing it, but then realized that whatever it was, we couldn't kill it. We do a tactical retreat for a quarter mile, then just book it home. We found the den a week later, and ten miles on the opposite side of the tiny town we lived in. Whatever this thing was, it had been

hunting us for a very long time and planned accordingly. It even knew how to leave a scant, feces and urine, from different members of a pack. My friends and I still hunt if needed, but we always talk about what time that we're going to go out and plan it together. We always talk about that one time though, that we were the ones that were hunted. During my time in the Marines, I never really had any odd or terrifying experiences, until my last deployment that is. During this deployment, I was sent to the Middle East and kind of tossed aside by my command because they already had one sergeant in control of the section I was supposed to be in charge of. I was then sent to security forces for the base I was on. While on security forces, SEC-4, as us in the business call it, I was assigned to be on the NCOIC, Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge, for a post on the night shift.

Funnily enough, ghost stories about old military bases stretch very far in the community, and, as most of them are, not very believable. While on this post, I was in charge of four other guys, two of them who were originally from the section I was recently whored out from. Every night we spent watching as cars drive in and out of our gates, with several paranormal encounters involving that post that I won't go into because I don't have the time. Fast forward a few months of standing this post every night, Marine Corps deployment living, me and my unit returned to the United States to our home base. That's when everything started.

Originally I thought it was just me. About once or twice a week I had the same nightmare over and over, where I was strangled by a faceless shadow who was very tall and had long arms. The dream originally started as just another nightmare, possibly due to the side effect of vaccinations, change in time zones, flight exhaustion, alcohol, etc. This went on for about two weeks. When I went home on leave to my home in another state, the nightmare seemed to stop for a week or two, until my last night at home. I was going to sleep as usual, in my family's spare room.

I had been moved out for several years already, but it's easier to stay with them. I was sleeping with my trusty dogs. He was sleeping right next to me, keeping me company. That's when the nightmare got worse. This time, it was very vivid and surreal, where I didn't wake up at the first sign of being startled. During those dreams, everything started very boringly and normal-like. In the one I remember the most, I was going out about my daily routine on deployment. I was off shift and walking to the chow hall when I stopped to have a smoke with my guys where I would hear them say,

Hey sergeant, did you hear about something something? And I would sit there and continue to make conversation for a few minutes as I took drags off my Marlboro Red, occasionally cracking jokes before giving younger Marines life advice. When walking into the front door of the chow hall, I would clear out my rifle. We had one on us at all times, and when opening the doors, everything went black, like the doors opened to black as I stepped inside the hall to look around. I would then stop and turn around and head back to the doors when everything behind me

disappears as well. I'm alone, still in my gear from standing post. All of a sudden, I see out of the corner of my eye an even darker shadow moving towards me when I look straight at it, and then I was paralyzed. The shadowy figure stood around eight feet tall and had long arms, where once it was close to me, it wrapped its hands around my neck, and I could feel myself grasping for air, slowly losing consciousness. After what felt like forever, and just screaming for what felt like days, I woke up in my head, back in my bed, at home, with my dog freaking out because I was screaming.

I woke the entire house up that night. About a week after that, I'd already driven back to my home base, and it was back to work. While I was losing sleep, the frequency of those dreams was reaching about three times a week at this point. It was the end of the week, and I was about to start a weekend. I was then assigned to barracks duty. Barracks duty is a mindless job. You tour the barracks, stop a drunk guy here or there, tell people to turn down their music,

and occasionally have to walk to someone important who wants to check up on his Marines. So yeah, the post was 24 hours long. When one night, about 3am, I was touring the smoke pit of the barracks, where I run into two guys who I stood post with. Me looking at the clock, I walked up, lit up a cigarette, and decided to talk with them for a few minutes before I returned to my duty huts. I asked them what they were doing up so late. Although it wasn't uncommon to see Marine up and in the smoke pit at 3am, I wanted to make some friendly conversation. My two friends started talking about nightmares and not sleeping. I was prying into it for a few minutes

out of curiosity when one of them pulled out his sketchbook for tattoo ideas. He then said, this is what I see in my nightmares recently. Both myself and my buddy went very silent and cold. The creature was the same thing from both of our dreams. We then went into detail and saw all of our nightmares were the same thing. Doing normal things, fades to black, shadow figures strangling us. Everything was the same, right down to the figure itself. None of us were able to sleep at night. That was over a year ago.

I have since left the marines, I had decided not to re-enlist and go to college, and those nightmares have seemed to have gone away. Still every few months I do have a nightmare similar to the ones I had. Not the same in intensity, though. I wonder if my guys are having them, in California, and they still have some of the old Prisoner of War cell blocks standing as a historical monument. I still don't know why, but I decided to go out there at night to see what it was like since I had never been out there before and it was open to whoever was on base. As I walked closer to the cell blocks, it's like the air got heavier.

Once I reached the cell area and stood at the doorway looking down the hall, the silence was incredible and felt as if I was just being stared down the longer I just stood there. It felt that more and more people were staring at me over time. The base is majorly haunted, at least in my opinion. I worked in comm, and sometimes we had to work overnight. The two biggest things that stood out to me from when I would be in the building after dark was that the IT area was right next to the data center. During the day, you wouldn't hear anything, but as soon as night fell you could hear what sounded like someone stomping around and even at times, like someone or something was hitting the walls.

Another night my wife came and visited me and dropped off some food while I was doing network updates. While she was there, I went to use the restroom. As soon as I got back she was super angry with me and kept telling me it wasn't funny and I was an a-hole. After some poking and prodding, she told me that as soon as I left the room, it felt that someone was standing behind her and she could feel their warm breath on the back of her neck. It's also important that the doorway to leave my office had to make a left to go to the restroom and that she swore that not a second later after I made that left down the hall someone kept sprinting back and forth from the left to the right but would only do when she wasn't directly

looking at the hallway. And here's the last one. We lived on base in the newer house. It was a nice new townhouse. Our family and stuff got to live there as well. Our child had the room right at the top of the stairs. This is important because I moved in first while waiting for my family and stuff to get there. During this time, I had our dog and cat with me at night, and they would both sit at the bottom of the stairs and just look up at the top of the stairs like someone was standing there. Then, the first night my wife and kids were moved in, there was this weird feeling that when you were coming back from the kitchen area, they would stare at you, just like there was

a man. Another weird thing that happened that same night is that my wife came around that same corner and swear she saw a man at the top of the stairs and asked me who that man was. This moved on to her hating to be alone in her room and she would always get up in the middle of the night and come sleep with us. She would always say that there was a man in her room watching her sleep. Even during the day when she would be in her room she would hear that there was like a full conversation going on. Sometimes my wife would pass by her room, and it would sound like she was having a conversation with a full-blown person. There was nothing even playing on TV or anything.

The final thing I'd like to mention is that a lot of things would randomly go missing and show up in the strangest places after we would spend days looking for them. We still don't have an explanation for any of this. It still happens to this day. Let me know if you guys know anything. But I definitely do think this Air Force base is haunted. I haven't told this story to many people except for my wife and a few other of my close friends. It happened while I was stationed in the Army as a radio operator during the Vietnam War, and I haven't forgot it to this day. I was a young recruit, freshly drafted out of high school and didn't know much about the war.

I had no idea what I was getting into or what it was all for, but I did know that I was going to serve my country. We arrived there on a Friday evening and got loaded onto many buses to be taken to our barracks. The air was very humid and the soil was soaking wet due to the storm passing overhead. I vividly remember the drive and how it stunk like a sewer. My first night was uneventful and quiet, but we all felt the tense atmosphere as our drill surgeons taunted us with stories during basic training. I remember the half moon right over my head, which kept peeking out from over the clouds,

and all of us were just sitting around telling jokes. I was more of a technical guy and didn't have much aptitude for comedy, so I just listened in. My duty was to manage communications between my unit and all of our other guys so that everyone knew what was going on everywhere else. I carried a box on my back, which was the size of a radio device back then, and was a ton more equipment and supplies than we would carry now. I was quickly assigned to a tight-knit unit who had just lost their communications operator to a landmine, and I remember the first time we made contact with the enemy. It was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

We were in a dense part of the jungle and couldn't see the enemy at all, but we ducked for cover as soon as they began firing at us, and we opened up in their general direction in return. The chaos felt like it lasted forever, but we probably ceased fire after a couple of minutes. We advanced forward to close in on the enemy position and secure the area, and it was the first time I ever saw the enemy up close. There they were. A couple of dead Viet Cong soldiers laying in a pool of their own blood.

I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Three human beings that were alive just moments ago, now gone. Young guys who maybe had sisters and brothers and parents. They were probably just chilling around moments before we arrived, and here we are moments later looking at their motionless, dead bodies. I must say that I felt justified just because the enemy would have probably done the same thing to me instead. A few days later we got assigned to a different location, which saw heavier casualties and needed

more support. I grew accustomed to the violence and saw many of our young men die painfully. One day I was told by my NCO that someone wanted to speak with me. I was greeted by a soldier who was in his late 50s who looked totally out of place. His demeanor was calculated and predictive, and even my commanding officer seemed to have turned into a yes-man in front of him. He introduced himself as Frederick Douglas, an intelligent officer stationed nearby that was going to be assigned to him as an RTO for his unit. The guys in my unit were like family to me, but orders are orders and I had no choice, so I got on the Huey and went with him. We landed in a heavily wooded area next to a few Viacong huts.

It was heavily built up by the enemy, and I could definitely imagine the fight must have taken place here. There were some guys who had gas masks on and other soldiers standing nearby, but they didn't seem to notice me or even care that I was there. It was a very strange atmosphere that didn't feel quite right. These guys didn't act like normal soldiers and definitely didn't have the look or fear or anything like that. I even tried talking to some of them, but all I got was strange, emotionless glares like they were infected with something. Whatever it was, they all had it, and it made me feel very uneasy. Officer Douglas and I entered one of the smaller huts,

and I was told to stay put until someone would come and get me. I really should have stayed there and waited, but I was too curious and apprehensive to relax. So, I just made my way out towards the main hut and took a sneak peek inside. What I saw made my stomach drop like never before. On a makeshift table lay six murky containers. Each one of them had severed heads of a guerrilla fighter inside, with several tubes and wires protruding from them. A green liquid seemed to be reaching with the heads as their mouths and eyes were quivering like they were kind of still alive.

I suddenly felt a hand grab onto my shoulder an intelligent officer Douglas, and he looked very upset. I meekly asked what they were doing inside here, and he angrily said that I should not have gone in there and sent me back to my hut. We must have been attacked or something, because I woke up a day later in a triage, and several broken ribs and fractured collarbone, and no memory of anything that happened after that. I never saw Officer Frederick Douglas or those officers ever again. If that was even his real name. I often wondered what those guys were doing back then. Maybe they were trying to gather intelligence from the dead enemy soldiers or something.

Either way, it was a strange experience that I will never forget. I'm Nightmare Files, and this is my personal scary story. I will not use any names in this, at least not the real names. We had already been in Afghanistan for two weeks at this point, and our FOB had been attacked at least six times already. If you don't know what a FOb is it's a ford operating base it was a very small blackout fob and we call it blackout because at night we couldn't have any lights on outside due to indirect fire or sniper fire anyways a week goes by and nothing happens so our company is being told that we're doing a mission together, a

company mission. Usually we had gone on missions at the platoon level, which is one level under company. By this time of deployment, we had been on a few key leader engagements and nothing much happened. The only contact we received was at the FOB. But a lot of us had a bad feeling about this one. To make a long story short, then we ended up going on mission. And we moved on foot about two kilometers to the east at around 1 a.m. And we set up our patrol base at around 3 a.m. And then sent out each platoon to their own sector. Each platoon moved a few kilometers away

while headquarters stayed at our patrol base. I'm on the radio talking with our forward observers from each platoon and they're reporting up that they can hear the enemy but they can't see them. At this point, it's still dark and we are basically in the backyard of the enemy and this area is known for the taliban these guys are freaking out on the radio as they keep saying the taliban is out there but we can't see them then at our patrol base some local man walks up and our interpreter ends up

talking to him as he's speaking to the interpreter the interpreter is telling us everything he's speaking to the interpreter, the interpreter is telling us everything he's saying. At this point, I'm holding my weapon pointed down to the ground and I slip my finger to the trigger and I look at the interpreter with him not knowing that I understand everything he's saying. I tell him, that's not what he's saying while looking him straight in the eyes. My commander looked at me and said what i repeated that's not what he's saying the interpreter is lying the interpreter was telling us that this guy wanted food and water what he was really saying is that there's taliban all around us

and they outnumber us and they knew about everything we were doing before we even came out here and that they're going to attack us in our fob at this point the interpreter looks at me with wide eyes and starts to run toward his bag as the interpreter is running towards his bag he screams Allah Akbar when he reached in his bag he grabbed a detonator and he squeezed it and then boom he had a bomb in the middle of our patrol base but it only injured a few of us he was immediately shot and all hell broke loose shots are coming from everywhere but we can't pinpoint where immediately seven people were shot i got down next to my commander and i'm on my radio talking to my forward observers who are trying to call in artillery and mortars. I'm trying to aim my weapon but can't tell who is who because it's so dark.

We have on night vision but they suck. Guys are screaming that they are hit and some guys are cowering behind boulders. Then over the radio I hear, I'm not going to use his real name, Sergeant Smith is down. Luckily at this point the sun is starting to come up and a few of us run over to where Sergeant Smith was and I saw him. I saw Sergeant Smith, face down and not moving. The medic and I grab and drag him. My buddy was right next to him and he saw Sergeant Smith's face when we turned him over. And he started crying and freaking out because his face looked like he was screaming, but it was just stuck there.

I stopped for a second when I saw his face, but I snapped right out of it. This wasn't my first deployment. This wasn't my first dead body. Sergeant Smith was one of those guys that was really untouchable, an alpha male, very in shape and had everything going for him. When the guys saw that he was killed, they definitely thought that they were next because he was like a super soldier to these guys.

I asked my buddy, where did he see the enemy? Where's the Taliban? And he pointed and said said 10 meters that way. I thought to myself, 10 meters. That means that they're inside our patrol base now. I pause and I look around. I never seen so many self-proclaimed tough guys turn into little girls so quick. And so many guys that didn't believe in God start praying for God. I will not go into everything else because it's pretty hard for me. Just know that some of us had to fight with our hands because the enemy was so close to us. We only lost one guy that day. But we had 18 people wounded. 13 of those people were shot.

But everyone was mentally wounded and still are we all thought that we were untouchable because we jumped out of planes knew how to fight and lifted weights everyone is a tough guy until they have to do tough guy shit. So my dad was in the Navy for 20 years, and I was alive for the last 13 of those years. Normally, military families,

at least for the U.S. military, travel around a lot and it's not unusual for a family to be uprooted every two or three years. I was lucky in that after my parents got married, my dad was stationed in Virginia somewhere in 1993, where both my younger sister and I were born. Shortly after my sister's birth in 1996, we moved to North Florida and have been there ever since. We even lived in the same on-base house for about a decade, from 1997 to 2007, when my dad retired. Needless to say, we grew up used to friends coming and going, depending on their parents' duty station, while we oddly didn't go anywhere. The way the base was set up was that the two houses were connected

and went to 123 Street name A and 123 Street name B. The house my family lived in was B, and in the early 2000s, a family of four moved into A. I was in kindergarten and first grade at that time, so I was at the age where I'm not quite understanding the ideas of divorce and remarriage. The family that moved next door was a blended family in several ways. The husband was black, the wife was white, and the daughter and stepdaughter was white, and the three-year-old was mixed. I remember this was super confusing for me because I didn't, and the daughter and stepdaughter was white. And the three-year-old was mixed. I remember this was super confusing for me because I didn't understand how the daughter was white,

not realizing she had a different father. He had a brother in the area, so his niece would come over, and she was over so often I thought she lived there, which only added to the confusion. Anyway, apparently they weren't very good neighbors. They'd have house parties at all hours and pound on the walls, which my mom reported to housing. She told me and my sister never to go into their house and I had no ideas as to why. I did, however, go into the house once for some reason.

It's stuck in my memory. I had been playing a weird kind of catch with the two-year-old who wasn't allowed outside and I wasn't allowed inside. So he stood in the doorway and I stood in their covered driveway, throwing a ball back and forth. Eventually, the ball went somewhere the two-year-old wasn't able to reach, so I went outside to retrieve the ball, justifying it as I had only been there for a few minutes after that. The way the house was set up was that the door at the side of the house leads directly into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a half wall to the left.

I remember going in and looking into the living room, and it was just a complete mess. I couldn't believe how dirty it was. Then out of the blue, the family moved. Usually there was some sort of warning when a family left, but this one, there wasn't.

I eventually forgot about them for the most part and continued with my life. Fast forward to 2006 or 2007 and I'm in the 6th or 7th grade. I notice Denise at my school, but she doesn't remember me. Fast forward again to September of 2008 and it's the orientation for my freshman year of high school. She's in one of my classes so our parents end up meeting and talking. That weekend my mom sits me down and finally explains what happened. Apparently the husband had gotten into trouble with housing so his family was kicked out. Well they left the place in absolute pigsty. The policy for that is the housing sends a cleaning crew and it comes out of the person's

paycheck. Well, a cleaning lady reached up to see if anything was left on the shelf in the master closet and found something, a stack of pictures. When she looked at the pictures, they were of the girls in my neighborhood and they were incredibly inappropriate. Keep in mind these girls ranged from the ages of 5 to 10. Immediately, the base's police were called and he was arrested. NCIS ended up investigating it

and because my house was connected to theirs, my dad was interviewed about what he knew. He was shown the pictures and asked to identify the girls and if my sister and I had ever gone into the house. My mom told me that my father told her that the pictures were the most dep my sister and I had ever gone into the house. My mom told me that my father told her that the pictures were the most depraved things he had ever seen, and they were burned into his memory for the rest of his life. It turned out all of my friends were his victims, including his own stepdaughter, and that he had been bribing them with toys and candy.

My family, and another one, were the only two spared because my mom didn't allow me or my sister in their house and the other family's daughter didn't fit into his age range. My mom explained that she had gotten an uneasy feeling from him and couldn't explain why. She even tried ignoring it because he was in the Navy. In the end, the couple got a divorce. The husband went to a military prison, he has since been released, and the wife moved back to Canada with her daughter and left her son with her former brother-in-law to raise. I'm in the Navy. I was stationed with a squadron in Washington State. One night I was standing watch, and as the night shift was leaving my friend,

stayed back and talked for a few minutes. I don't know how it got to the subjects of Ghost, but my friend told me one of the civilians who worked the supply department said their supply area was haunted by a gray woman, and that they had been hearing voices. I kept an open mind, although the description was just way too generic. Flash forward to the next time I was on watch. We had to move a new hangar across the street. The hangar where my friend told me the ghost still belonged, I decided I needed to check it out that night, even though it was abandoned and empty.

The night of my watch, I decided that I was going to try to summon whatever that civilian had seen. So what do you think I did? I decided I was going to use the woman's bathroom on the second floor. I walked into the bathroom, go into a stall, lock it behind me, and sit down on the toilet to let nature do its thing. After I was done, I decided to just sit there and see if anything would happen. And I swear to God this next part is real.

All of a sudden, the stall unlocks, and I could see the bolt turn on its own. The door swung slowly and creepily inward. There was nothing or anyone on the other side of the door. I knew that whatever it is, it did not like me being there. I finished up my business and pretty much ran out of that hangar. I don't know what's out there, but there's definitely more after death, I think. I am 24 now. I am a female and have moved around a lot with my family as my dad was in the military. At the time, my family and I were living in Virginia, near the historic Triangle area.

We lived on a military base that had a lot of wooded land with a few roads through it for people to bike on, and it's standard for military stuff. My family, some friends, and I would bike on these roads often. It was very relaxing, and as we traveled in a group, we weren't worried about coyotes or bears or anything of the like. However, we kids were told to be very careful to never go back on those roads without a parent or ever split from the group when hiking or biking. My best friend at the time and I chalked it up to them being afraid of us being hurt by hunters. The base often allowed hunters in to help take care of any crazy deer populations, or to keep us away in case the military were doing some crazy stuff back there. As you can imagine, since I'm posting here, we were wrong.

Though, she didn't get hunted. We were on our bike rides. About three families all in our group. My best friends and I started lagging behind and eventually, we were at the back of the group. As we rounded a corner, I kid you not, a snake fell from the tree branches above onto my handlebars. I naturally wrecked and freaked out, refusing to get back on my bike. I know, temper tantrum of the century.

My friend laughed and just rode off, and I called her a traitor for that. I stood there staring at my bike and then down the road and back to my bike. I wasn't getting back on that thing and basically said screw it. I'm walking back as we weren't too far in. I knew the roads very well, even the gravel ones because my dad would drive me around back there in his jeep. So I was confident as I walked down the road and turned down a dirt road. As I'm walking down this road I start hearing rustling behind me. I shrug it off as I'm thinking it's a rabbit since

we had quite a few of those and we've already seen tons of them today. The rustling grew closer and then was past me and in front of me. Then it stopped. I stopped and decided to bark at it to scare it off. Branch had snapped in response. I screamed and took off running. Classically, I ran in the direction of home, which was right by this thing. As I'm running, I hear a growl, but it doesn't sound like a dog growl. It was deeper. I'm not sure

how to describe this. It was like there was more than one growl, if that makes any sense. Multiple pitches all rolled into one, and it was chilling. I ran like my life depended on it, and this thing kept pace with me the entire time. Branches snapping and leaves rustling, but still deep enough in the woods that I couldn't make out exactly what it was. The road curved sharply to the left, and my feet slid out from under me

as I tried to make the turn. I ended up sliding off the road and into a little ditch before the woods began. I'd say it was a three-foot grassy area off the road and into a little ditch before the woods began. I'd say it was a three foot grassy area off the road. As I scrambled to my feet, I'm pretty sure I was crying. The things growling, and growling got louder. It seemed like the growl honestly turned into a laugh. I bolted, and I ran and ran, but didn't feel like I was getting any closer to home.

After the curve, I should have seen the main road, but I didn't see it. Off to the left before the main road, there would be a little ruin of sorts. My frantic mind thought if maybe I could get to the ruin, I would be safe. The thing was crashing through the woods on my right, and I saw my life flash before my eyes. I saw the ruins, and I could have laughed in relief had the thing not been chuckling at me behind me. I could hear it starting to move, and I jumped and dived and fell into the foundation of the ruin. It was four walls with an open doorway that I ran into. I don't know why I thought I would be safe there, but I think to this day that I did that

I would have never made a home the thing was just toying with me and would have soon moved in as it was, as I turned around in the dirt and looked back to the doorway I saw fur, not the brown and red of coyotes it was black and it was wiry looking I didn't see a face, just the fur and red of coyotes. It was black and it was wiry looking. I didn't see a face, just the fur.

And these mangled legs. The joints didn't look right. They were like the normal dog legs, but the joints were backward. I would have thought it was going the other direction, but it was clearly moving to the right when the legs were bent. It growled. It sounded meaner than the earlier growls. I expected it to turn around and charge through the doorway at any minute,

but I just watched it circle the ruin before going back off to the woods. I didn't leave the ruin until a base officer came and found me. She looked terrified too. My dad recently told me that he had seen hoof prints that had paw pad prints mixed in with it, like some weird goat-wolf hybrid.

He also heard laughter behind him as he grabbed stuff from his truck in the morning. The girl who saved me that day says she saw the same footprints. We didn't speak until we reached my house when my parents were waiting to hug me and yell at me. I didn't tell them what chased me. But when my dad told me years later what he saw and the officer saw, I don't know what it was, but it still freaks me out. The deformed legs makes me think it's a skinwalker. Every time we went riding after that I would hear growling and catch glimpses of black fur in the woods.

I don't know what it was, but I do know for sure it was hunting me. One thing I still don't know is why didn't it come into the ruin after me? Why did the military base have these weird Native American ruins anyway? I guess I can explain that by it just being there when the military base was made. But it's just weird. Thanks for listening to these allegedly true military stories. These were some really creepy events. The military holds all kinds of horror,

from witnessing your friends die to allegedly paranormal happenings tormenting whole squadrons. You never know what you will hear coming out of war and from military bases. Once again, much love and appreciation to my friend Nightmare Files who read story number two. That story was actually his own personal story from his time in the military. Be sure to subscribe to him and check out his videos. He does them on all kinds of spooky things and I know you will love them. Much thanks to everyone who is a veteran and is currently serving in our military. It is much appreciated that you keep our freedoms safe. If you have a

story you would like to share in a future video, be sure to submit it at swampdweller.net or the email you can find in the description down below. I am always looking for new stories to share. I would love to share your story with everyone here in the swamp, and I'm sure they'd love to hear it. It's stories like yours that keep this channel going, and I truly appreciate everybody who sends in their stories.

Also, if you guys want to take Swamp Dweller Scary Stories on the go, no matter where you are, go to anchor.fm slash swampdweller. You can find that link in the description or pinned comment as well. It's a great place to download stories, hear them on the go, and it supports the channel. I'll see you guys soon with another creepy video. sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at Rakuten.ca or download the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N, Rakuten.ca. 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 Lifts, make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today.

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