The Lets Read Podcast - 45: Episode 043 | Spring Break & Urban Exploration Stories | 38 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Welcome to the forty third 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 Spring Break, UFO Encounters and Urban Exploration.  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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or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When reflecting on the events of this night, to share this story with you, I realize how truly lucky I am. This event took place a few years ago when I was taking my family on a road trip for spring break. I'm a father of two beautiful girls and married to an amazing wife. At the time of the story my daughters were

ages six and eight. My wife and I decided it would be best to just drive throughout the night rather than stay somewhere for the first night of driving. In the middle of the night I was starting to get a bit tired so I decided to stop at the rest stop and grab some coffee and use the restroom. I figured the fresh air and stretching of the legs would be just what I needed to proceed onward. When we got to the rest stop there was almost nobody there, which I guess wouldn't be super uncommon for the middle of the night. There was however an extremely old woman sitting at the counter of this 24-hour market as well as a black car on the far side of the parking lot. I told my wife to remain in the car with the sleeping girls and I would be right back. I walked inside and greeted the older woman with a hello and she still

continued to keep her back to me and ignore me. Weird but I honestly didn't care. I was in the bathroom for several minutes. After I went to the bathroom I washed my face and tried to wake myself up a little bit. When I walked out of the bathroom my real nightmare began. There were two men holding up the convenience store. One of them was dressed in all black and holding some kind of blunt object and the other was wearing a t-shirt and was covered in tattoos and what looked like blood all over the aforementioned t-shirt.

He was waving a knife around gesturing and posturing towards this poor old woman behind the counter. I didn't know what to do. This woman was in danger but my family was outside and I didn't want to bring any unneeded danger to them. Actually, I didn't know if they already were in danger and could be in need of help outside. Luckily, my cell phone was on me. I went into the bathroom and quietly called the authorities. The lady on the phone told me to stay on the line and just before I could respond to her, the bathroom door busted open.

I jumped up on the toilet seat and turned the call volume all the way down on my phone. I looked through the crack on the stall door and there was the guy covered in blood. I was holding my breath, hoping he wouldn't come into the stall. I also began fearing for my family because the other man could have went outside and noticed my family in our van. The man in the bathroom began to wash his hands and kept uttering the same line, We got this, we got this, we got this. My instincts were telling me to jump out and attack but my brain was telling me to just wait. This man had a knife and if I tried attacking him it may not end up well for me and how could I protect my family if I was

injured? After about a minute he left the bathroom. I forgot that I was still in the line with 911 and I put my phone back in my pocket. I slowly crept out of the bathroom and didn't see the old woman at the register. All I saw was the two men behind the counter stuffing what looked like cash in a bag. I saw sirens coming through the lot and that's when I decided to book it out the door and back to my family. As I ran out the door one of the men lunged at me with a knife, missing ever so slightly, causing me to fall to the ground. At this point the cops were already running into the store. One of the men immediately fell to the floor and threw down his weapon,

but the man covered in blood tried to run out the back. The cops were able to get him quickly and apprehend him without incident. Both men were arrested and placed in the back of patrol cars. The elderly employee was okay and apparently only suffered minor injuries. The reason why I didn't see her was because one of the guys had knocked her over the head with a blunt object and she had fallen to the ground. I got back to my car and thankfully my family was alright as well. My wife thought I was taking a while and was wondering why I wasn't answering my phone, but couldn't leave the car

with the kids inside alone. Also from her vantage point, she couldn't see what was going on inside the store. As I was giving my statement to the police, I found out that when I walked in, the employee behind the counter wasn't ignoring me. She was watching the live camera feeds of the outside of the store where the guys were pacing back and forth. I'm very grateful that myself nor my family weren't harmed during this terrifying event. We were able to continue on with our trip without any other issues, but understandably I was shaken up for a while and certainly didn't have a clear mind for our trip. You never in a million years think something like this can happen to you.

Looking back on it, it almost feels like a dream or more of a nightmare. Anyway, I hope none of you who are reading this have to experience something this unsettling in your lifetimes. Beaches often come to mind when you think about spring break. That's probably because most people need a break from their stressful job or school work and want to get away. And what better place to unwind than on the beach with warm sand, cool breezes, and refreshing water? The scenario in my story was unfortunately not the relaxing getaway that I had hoped for. A couple of years ago my boyfriend and I took a trip way down south to enjoy some much-needed relaxation. We both were extremely stressed with work and really needed a mental

break from everything at the office. To be fair most of the trip was pretty relaxing until a night where my boyfriend and I were laying on the beach, which was weird for us, we never really went to the beach at night as we both preferred the warm sunlight during the day. We were watching the moon reflect off the water when we saw two people walk up to us seemingly out of nowhere. I noticed that one of them was a girl, quite pretty actually. She had wild, curvy hair and from what I could see of her eyes they looked very dark. She was wearing a beach cover up over her bathing suit and she was with a guy. I assume her significant other because she was holding his hand.

He had a huge beard with long brown hair that was in a bun. He was wearing a red flannel that was unbuttoned with no shirt underneath and just plain bathing suit shorts. They just stood there standing over us, way too close making us uncomfortable. Both of them just staring and smiling at us, honestly smiling for no reason. Finally my boyfriend, a little annoyed, said, excuse me, can we help you with something? The woman, still smiling, said in a slow, soft voice, you two are quite beautiful, you know. I was at a loss for words and just looked over to my boyfriend and he just said, uh, thanks. Can you leave us alone now? Clearly, his annoyance was turning into anger. The woman looked at him and said in a chipper, creepy voice,

No thank you. While she still continued to smile. Her boyfriend still continued to just stand there, stiff and not moving. After a moment, another couple came over. Again, both were smiling. She also had a cover up on but was sporting some pigtails that were not even close to symmetrical, and her boyfriend had really curly, shaggy looking hair. The woman standing basically on top of us, adverted her attention to them and said,

Look! A new couple. I was pretty unsettled and these four people just kept inching closer and closer to me and my boyfriend. My boyfriend finally stood up and stepped to one of the guys and said, yo, take one more step man and... All four of the smiling weirdos began laughing and before I could even react, one of the guys lunged on my boyfriend. It was the scariest thing that I had ever seen. Both men started to beat up my boyfriend while both girls just sat there and laughed.

I tried to intervene but one of the girls tossed me to the ground. The two guys then threw my boyfriend down in the sand next to me and with a blink of an eye their permanent smiles turned into faces of anger and malice. Somehow my boyfriend had the mindset to do something to help us get out of there. He kicked the ankle of one of the girls so she stumbled. This brought the attention of the others to her stumbling backwards in the sand. In this split second he grabbed my hand and we ran as fast as we could towards our resort. Looking in the distance, we could see the two couples standing there, but they were not giving chase.

We got back to our room and locked the doors and turned the lights off. All night long in the hallway, we could hear giggles and shushes. I don't know if we were just paranoid but I think we both feared that it was the freak shows from the beach. The next day we checked out early from the hotel and left for home. We didn't want to risk running into these dangerous strangers again. We also didn't want to call the cops and file a report and all of that. As we were leaving the hotel and walking to our car, we saw the two girls on the corner of the street waving and smiling at a car that wasn't ours. We couldn't believe it.

We just peeled out and left for home, putting this experience behind us. When we got home, we decided to inform the resort of our incident, and they apologized and said they would look into the matter, but stated since no report was filed at the time of our incident, they apologized and said they would look into the matter but, stated since no report was filed at the time of the incident, there was probably not much that they could do. I know some of you may not find this story particularly scary on the traditional sense, but encountering such psychotic people who would harm strangers without a second thought is by far the most traumatic experience of my life. Yeah, happy vacation. Let me preface this by saying that terrible things don't just happen in the movies,

but in fact they can happen in an everyday normal life. Most people are lucky enough to go through life without any major encounters. I had an experience that I would like to share to see what people think. Was I rational in my choices? Did I overreact? What would you have done? I think hearing responses will be therapeutic and perhaps help me get past the events of this story. Last year I attended a major university on the southeastern coast of the United States. I loved it so much, mainly because I didn't have to deal with snow or the cold weather. I basically had hot or warm weather every day which was a huge change from the climate I grew up in. Anyways, on this particular spring break

from school, I decided to go home and visit my parents back in Maine. I decided that I was going to try to drive the over 20 hour drive straight through, perhaps stopping for brief naps or food along the way. At first, this seemed like an awesome idea. I could get there relatively quickly and spend most of my time at home rather than traveling. I spent most of the drive listening to music and catching up on some of my favorite podcasts. Unfortunately, the trip would take a terrible turn in Pennsylvania. I was driving through PA shortly after midnight and, well, my eyes started to get a little heavy, and I was having a lot of trouble focusing on the road. And anybody who has driven through Pennsylvania knows that it's a hard drive even when you have complete focus.

It's always foggy and very mountainous with many twists and turns. I decided that my next rest area I would pull over and at least rest my eyes for an hour or two just to be safe. Well, I never made it to the rest area I would pull over and at least rest my eyes for an hour or two just to be safe. Well I never made it to the rest area. I dozed off for a second and lost control of my small car and went right off the side of the road through a guardrail and down to a small drop off. Miraculously I wasn't injured too badly but my car was destroyed and I was completely surrounded by trees, not sure of how to get back up and onto the highway. Of course it was pitch black outside and the trees consumed the entire area, blocking out most of the natural starlight. I tried to remain calm and ignored the terrible

pain I was experiencing to try and call and get help. One problem, I couldn't find my phone. It was in my cup holder but after the crash it was so dark I couldn't find it anywhere. Inside or outside of my car, no luck. I didn't think I was injured badly as previously mentioned but I wanted to use the flashlight on my phone to make sure I didn't have any major cuts or anything. I then decided my best course of action at this point would be to see if it was possible to climb back up the slight decline that my car had fallen off of. It seemed impossible in my condition and with the limited visibility. It just wasn't a height I could reach at the moment and truth be told I was lucky that I wasn't injured further after my car

dropped down. Thankfully the guard rail slowed my car down enough. Realizing that climbing, driving or calling anybody wasn't an option I began to yell and scream for help. But as you can imagine it didn't work. I slouched to the side of my car and finally started to feel real emotion. I was scared and cold, and now the real fear finally started to make my eyes fill up with tears. I had no survival skills. What was I going to do until morning? Just sit in a ball in fetal position?

I decided that walking through the wooded area until I can find an area to climb where maybe there was a slight hill instead of a drop off where my car was. Of course, now in hindsight, my best bet would have probably been to just stay put because somebody in the morning would have noticed the accident and phoned it in. Maybe even someone passing by in the night and noticing the damage at the side of the road. As I grabbed some items from my car, I heard a noise. It sounded like ruffling of tree branches and footsteps. I hid on the other side of my car, paralyzed in fear. What kind of animals did they

have in Pennsylvania? My first thought was a bear or something like that. Is that how it's going to end? Mauled by a bear? However, what actually presented itself in front of me was even more shocking. It was three men coming out from the trees. I couldn't make out too much, but all three of them had huge beards, looked like their clothes were completely dirty and were carrying hunting rifles. I wasn't sure if I should yell for help or to stay hidden from those men. For some crazy reason my instincts were telling me to stay hidden, which seems like the exact opposite thing you would be in a situation like this.

One guy, who looked like the tallest of the three, yelled out in a raspy, rugged voice, They didn't have any flashlights or anything, so I decided to quietly sneak around the other side of my car and make a run for it into the woods. As I slowly and very quietly made my way around the car, I was wrestling with the idea in my head that these people probably just wanted to help and I was probably putting myself in more danger by running into the woods. But their demeanor and possibly of getting shot was a chance that I didn't want to take. I was about 5 feet cleared from the car when I started to sprint and of course in no time at all I brought noise and attention to myself. The same man as before caught a glimpse of me as I ran into the woods and yelled,

Hey, hey, get back here! I swear I heard the loud boom of a gunshot. I didn't hear it hit a tree or anything, I just remembered hearing a loud boom. I don't know what else it could have been. I was terrified. I heard them following me from what seemed like several directions. I heard one of them yelling something about private property or restricted land, something of that nature. I just kept running and running for about an hour until I finally saw faint lights shining through the trees. It was a road that looked

like it led to a small town or at least a few stores with lights. I walked into the gas station feeling and looking bloody, battered and bruised. The worker inside looked baffled and disgusted. I told him to please call the police and the police showed up in no time and my parents were notified. They were going to drive down and pick me up as soon as they could. The police insisted I go to a local hospital so my injuries could be assessed. When talking to the police I told them everything about the three guys that came to the scene of the accident and chased me with weapons into the woods. The police said that they would locate my car and take a look to see if they could find anything or anyone. My car was empty. Everything had been

stolen out of it. Even some of the interior car parts had been removed. Nothing else really came from this incident. I didn't have any major injuries and my insurance took care of the car. I now live back home with my parents and attend school locally. I try not to drive at night if I don't have to. I guess I have a phobia or something now. I am thankful to be alive and well but still have anxiety and terrible thoughts pertaining to that night. I don't know what was more damaging to my psyche, having a major accident, or being chased through the woods by three random people. The story happened to me when I was 18 years old in my senior year of high school.

It was spring break of 2009 and my family was taking a trip to my uncle's house in Florida. He lived in a small but really beautiful home in West Palm Beach, Florida. Any of you who are familiar to this area know that it's really nice and a lot of people go there when they are reaching retirement age. My uncle was around that age and really enjoyed the community that he was living in. For as long as I can remember, we would make this trip for spring break. It was cheap and affordable for my parents because we obviously didn't need to get a hotel and we cooked at his house every night. So the most expensive part of the trip was just getting down there which wasn't too bad. Next door to my uncle lived a guy named Robert who was basically part of the family.

He was an older guy who always made terrible jokes but knew they were terrible so usually got a pretty good laugh anyway. My family and I enjoyed his company especially when we would play cards. He was a great partner to have in most card games. Unfortunately in 2009 when we went down to my uncle's house for our yearly trip, Robert was gone and my uncle had a new next door neighbor named Leo. When we arrived at my uncle's house Leo was standing in his garage pretty much just staring at our car. We waved and he waved back. Only when he waved he had no emotion in his face. He was pretty tall, definitely over 6 foot and slightly overweight. He had the build of a bodybuilder who had just gotten older and was not able to keep up with

the lifting. He had dark black hair that was parted with a bit of white hair sprinkled throughout. The first few nights went great and we had fun just visiting and enjoying the beautiful Floridian weather. I think the third day my brother and I were throwing the football around the yard and we noticed Leo just staring at us again through his front window. I mean it was harmless, just kind of weird and creepy. He was blatantly just standing there holding the curtain back and watching us. Later that night my brother and I just sat outside on the porch just hanging out talking about the NBA and enjoying the beautiful Florida night. All night long we heard strange noises coming from inside Leo's house. It sounded like metal grinding, lots of coughing, and even some faint yelps. And I kid you not, when I say all night,

one, two, even three a.m. all this commotion persisted. We thought it was weird, but we really didn't think anything of it. In the morning we were eating breakfast and there was Leo, just sitting in the open garage looking back and forth between his garage and my uncle's house. How was he up so early? This guy literally must not sleep. He was up all night doing god knows what making all sorts of noise. We asked our uncle if he knew anything about Leo next door and he said he didn't really. Other than good morning or a polite how are you today, they really didn't say much to each other.

My uncle did say that he was quiet but always polite to him and stays out of everyone's business. He didn't attend any community meetings or activities or anything like that. We asked about the loud noises at night and my uncle said he didn't really know too much about that and had never really noticed anything before. Later that afternoon my brother and I were throwing the football around again. Leo left his house to his teal minivan. We waved but this time he didn't wave back. My brother and I both looked at each other and decided to go look in his windows. Now we knew that this was wrong and I would have never ever recommended doing this but our curiosity got the better of us.

When we looked through some of the exposed windows we could only see a little but it was weird. There was really no furniture. There was a wood saw in the middle of one of the rooms and sheets hanging everywhere. There was also several shovels by the back door and some plywood on some of the floors in another room. Now, when Robert had lived there in the past, we had been in that house many times

and it looked nothing like this. The house was completely changed and not in a good way. As we started our way back to the road we were stopped on the side of the house by Leo. He stood blocking our way. He said in a very stoic and low voice, what are you doing on my property? Thinking quick on our feet I just said to him very casually, oh sorry our our ball took a really awkward bounce and we couldn't find it. We got it now though, we're all good. We started to walk by him, as he barely gave us enough room to cross.

As we got to the road, he shouted in a bit more of a frantic voice this time, If I catch you on my property again, you'll be sorry. My brother has a bit of a temper, so I thought he was going to confront the creepy old man. But to my surprise, he was just as freaked out as I was. What did this guy mean? We'll be sorry, I thought. The next few nights, we heard the same noises during different parts throughout the night. The last night of our trip, we decided that we were going to get to the bottom of this one way or another.

At about 2am, we snuck outside and crept up to the window we looked at the other day, and now it was completely shut up, just like all of the other windows. Couldn't see anything inside. and now it was completely shut up, just like all of the other windows. Couldn't see anything inside. Just as we were going to give up and go back, my brother had noticed that there was some light shining from the back. His back door window was exposed. We snuck to the window and looked inside.

What we saw inside still creeps me out to this day. We saw a bit of Leo from the doorway. He appeared to be using the wood saw that we had seen and on the ground we saw something that looked like another human but it was stiff and stuck in a position like a mannequin. The mannequin or whatever it was looked like it had blonde hair that had been glued on. Has our imagination finally gotten the best of us? What were we witnessing? The tinkerings of a madman? Or someone preparing for something much more sinister? We left the next day and saw Leo again standing in his driveway waving goodbye to us. My brother and I felt sick about the night before. Unfortunately, we never did go back to that house.

My uncle bought a new larger home about 35 miles away from his previous community. I often think back to that trip and really wonder what was going on in there. Was Leo really up to something evil or were we just two young adults letting our minds get the better of us? Maybe he was just a creeper with some type of weird fetish. Either way, I'm glad we never had to see him again. I've only shared this story one other time before and that was with my brother. I'm hoping that by getting this down and writing it may help me get past the incident or at least be therapeutic. This story starts when I was in my mid-twenties. I had started and stopped college twice already and was constantly in and out of new jobs.

I didn't really have a direction in life and was kind of just going through the motions. I still lived at home with my parents. I wanted to move out, but simply couldn't afford my own place yet. Our next door neighbor to the left was Zeke. This wasn't his real name, but when he introduced himself to new people, he always just called himself Zeke. It's important to note that Zeke was middle-aged, probably about six foot tall, with a decent build other than a slowly developing beer belly. He was slightly bald on top and had long hair about shoulder length. For the most part, he was a pretty miserable guy.

Every time I saw him, he looked angry or upset about something. He was up all hours of the night and would always be wandering around his yard complaining about something. I used to tell my parents I didn't think he slept because he would be up late messing around in his backyard and would also be out on his front porch extremely early in the morning when I left for work. As far as I could tell, he rarely left the house, and when he did, he usually came back within minutes. I don't know if he was independently wealthy or what, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have a job, unless he worked from home.

My parents know Zeke a little better than me. He was their neighbor when they first moved years and years ago, and always told me that Zeke was a much different person back then. Apparently, when I was younger, too young to remember, Zeke lived in that house next door with his family. He had a wife and two daughters that I think were close to my age. My parents tell me that they would often be in the backyard having cookouts and swimming in their in-ground pool. Come to mention it, I do think I somewhat vaguely remember going over there for a cookout or two when I was a kid. Apparently, all of a sudden, things started to diminish. My family would hear fights next door that seemed to always end in the police being called.

They would hear the poor children crying as Zeke would unleash his verbal violence tirades on the family loud enough for the whole block to hear. Now my parents have lived here for decades and they would often say that they never heard this family fight and they always seemed like really great people so they were pretty shocked when all of this erratic behavior started. My parents say that one day out of the blue, Zeke's wife left with the children and never returned. As I grew up, I noticed that Zeke spent most of his time in a room adjacent from mine across the sides of our individual houses. This room that he frequented had no TV or no radio or anything other than a chair. At least that's all I could see from my point of view.

He would just sit in this yellow room and seemingly stare at the yellow walls. He would drink beer, sometimes too much, and he would cry, and sometimes he would just talk. Sit there and talk to himself alone in this room. Fast forward to the time that this story took place. It was spring break and most of my friends were going down to Miami Beach. Unfortunately, I was broke and had no job so I was going to have to stay home. One afternoon, I was sitting on my porch and Zeke came over and approached me. This was probably the first conversation I've had with the man in five or so years. He told me he had won some contest and won a free three-night stay at some private ski resort in the mountains.

He then asked if I would watch his cat and just make sure that the house was okay while it was gone. He told me he would pay me for my services so I of course accepted knowing I could use the money. He gave me a key and told me the cat food was on the counter and that I couldn't miss it. He told me to come over at 6pm and to use the back door because nobody uses the front door anymore. I found it pretty weird that he didn't want to bring me into his house and show me where the food was or even introduce me to the cat or anything. He literally just gave me a key and left, but I just figured, whatever, he's weird so it kind of makes sense. At 6pm the following day I showed up at his house and walked to the back door as I was directed to do. The backyard was disgusting and not how I

remembered. The pool had no water in it but was filled with half dirt and half murky liquid. The grass was either dead or super overgrown in spots. There was trash and broken lawn furniture everywhere. I walked into the house and it smelled absolutely horrible. It smelled like bad steaks. It was seriously repulsive but I guess people can go nose blind to certain smells if you're constantly subjected to them. When you walked in through the back door you walk into a long hallway. There were two rooms to my left and two rooms to my right. The first two on the left were the two little girls rooms.

It was haunting and a little sad because the rooms looked untouched. There were still toys on the floor and clothes folded on the dresser. One of the rooms had a board game on the ground that looked like it was in mid-game. The first room on the right was the master bedroom. There was a king-sized bed that wasn't made but didn't look like it had been used in years. There were clothes including what I imagine were his ex-wife's clothes on the dresser, all folded. The second room on the right had the door closed but a light shining underneath the doorway. I opened the door and it was the yellow room that I could see from my bedroom. But I could

barely concentrate on the room because when I opened the door, I was almost knocked out from the smell. There was also a major chill when I opened the door, I was almost knocked out from the smell. There was also a major chill when I opened the door. It was like opening the door and walking into a cooler or something. I shut the door and made my way to the kitchen and living room that were at the end of the hall. All I can remember thinking is that my friends were down in Miami Beach enjoying spring break, and I was in a disgusting and depressing house trying to make some extra cash. I found the cat dish and the cat food but hadn't seen a cat yet. I poured the food into the dish and just tried to take in my surroundings.

The kitchen looked like a bomb exploded. Garbage and trash everywhere. It was clear that Zeke had really given up on cleanliness or at least pertaining to his residence. But who was I to judge? While I was looking around the kitchen, I couldn't shake this weird feeling of wanting to go back and look into the yellow room. I made my way back down the hall and actually the smell didn't really bother me anymore and I didn't notice the cold. Very strange, I thought, so I opened the door and looked inside. The room was definitely strange. There was a brown wooden chair in the middle of the room that just faced the wall.

The bottom of the wall had a small vent that had some burn marks on the side of it. I can't explain why, but I just stood and stared at the vent for a few minutes. I finally broke my stare and looked all around the room. There were scratch marks on the hard wood floors. They were more prevalent over in the opposite corner of the room. My heart began to pound rapidly because I thought I could hear voices down in the basement through the vents. It was the strangest feeling that I had ever had.

It was fear, but nothing like anything I had ever felt before. I started to focus on the vent again, trying to hear what these voices were saying. They sounded muffled, but they were clearly voices. Was it a radio or a TV left on in the basement. It sounded like a woman, and an elderly woman I thought. I finally broke my trance and delusion in the yellow room and wanted to investigate the basement. I made my way to the basement door which was off of the kitchen. There was a giant pile of trash blocking the basement door. I kicked it all to the side attempting to get the doorknob. After some struggle I got to the doorknob and forced the door open. Again I was hit by a gust of cold air, even colder than previously mentioned about the house and the yellow room specifically. I could now smell the horrid smell again and the voice or static voices seemed to be getting louder. I turned on the light and proceeded down the stairs and half-heartedly spoke out.

Is anyone there? Are you okay? There was no response and as I got further down the stairs I realized that nobody was down there. It was empty. Deserted. Not even any garbage or storage. Nothing. The basement light was clearly dim. To be honest, there was more illumination coming from the streetlights outside the basement window than there was from the light itself. With the orange glow from outside, I could see some kind of silhouette in the back of the room that I hadn't noticed before. I spoke up again in a shaking voice. Hello? Is someone back there? Are you okay? Right as I stopped speaking, the shadow or silhouette or person, whatever you want to call it, made a quick move towards me. I screamed and just ran away.

Ran back up the stairs not looking back. As I flew up the stairs I could swear I heard a hissing noise. I made my way to the top of the stairs and was now running down the long hallway. I could again hear the muffled voices that I heard earlier as I was running by. As I got to the end of the hallway and approached the back door I turned around to see if whatever again hear the muffled voices that I heard earlier as I was running by. As I got to the end of the hallway and approached the back door I turned around to see if whatever was down there had followed me up the stairs. Again I saw the dark figure. It was very tall and I couldn't really see a face.

I turned and ran as fast as I could. I didn't even run back home I just kept running and ran all the way to the local convenience store a few blocks away. I sat there for a few moments trying to comprehend what it was that I had seen. Had someone broken in? Did someone live in the basement? Did I experience something paranormal? I went home and hugged both my parents and told them that I didn't want to go

into that house anymore and asked if I could contact Zeke to find someone else to do it. They agreed and didn't press me any further for information. I can't explain what happened in that house and I'm not sure what I experienced or what I saw. I still feel guilty I didn't call the cops in case there truly was a home intruder. Zeke never came back to that house. He never answered his phone. I don't know if he moved or what happened. He never contacted any of us and to be honest I don't think I have ever seen anyone at that house since that night. One positive thing that came from this story is that it was the turning point in my life where I started making better decisions.

I started to go back to school and am actually on track to graduate next year. I have a job and am saving up to get my own place once school is over. Does anyone have any insight on this matter? Any answers to this mysterious occurrence? How did I hear voices in the vent? What was causing the changes in temperature and smell and what was it that I saw? Was it human or perhaps paranormal? normal. Spring break has always been one of my favorite times of the year. As a child I used to go on vacation to the ocean or sometimes even Disney World and now

as an adult my wife and I go on vacations together around the same time our children are out of school for spring break. For me there is no better place than the ocean at night. The way the moonlight glows on the waves of the water and the sound of the waves crashing always give me peace of mind. Well this particular year my wife and I saved up a little extra money and rented a private house right on the ocean. It was amazing. Drinking my coffee on the ocean every morning and enjoying an alcoholic beverage every night as the moon rose was truly great. One day I passed out on the beach for a couple of hours, only to awaken with horrible

nightmares. They were strange and the only thing I remember is darkness and screaming. A lot of screaming. My wife asked if I was okay and I said yeah, just a little shooken up. That night my wife went to bed fairly early but I couldn't sleep. Not sure if it was the long nap that I had taken earlier in the day or the horrible nightmares that woke me from said nap. Either way I wanted to clear my head so I decided to go for a walk on the ocean. As I kept walking on the desolate beach, I approached something that appeared to be glowing in the sand. I started to approach it quickly, but with a little bit of caution. It was some sort of glowing red ball. It's kind of hard to describe but I'll do the best I can.

It didn't look like cheap plastic. It literally was a glowing red ball of light that didn't seem to have any actual shape. I stared rather intently until it flashed so bright that it knocked me down on the sand. The ball flew up in the air and shot itself out into the ocean, and as it reached the horizon, there was a huge blast of light. Within seconds, the sky looked as if though it was storming, but there was no rain. I saw all sorts of color in the sky and lots of red flashes that I could only describe as looking like heat lightning,

but these flashes were lighting up the entire sky. As I watched all the intense flashes of light before I knew it I blacked out completely. The next thing I remember is my wife waking me up the next morning in a frantic panic because she didn't know where I was. I tried explaining to her what I had witnessed but she said I was just dreaming and was upset that I had wandered off last night. Accusing me of getting drunk and passing out, but it's important to note that I don't get drunk, and I would never just wander off and never come back. Something I can't explain happened that night. Can someone let me know what I experienced?

Could it have been a vivid dream if I passed out? Has anyone else experienced something similar? Either way I know that I don't have the same affinity for oceans and vacations as I did before this occurrence. When you want to bet on sports, play it on a field or ice or course. BetRivers is the place. Over, under, money, line. Same game, parlay, it's all fine. You'll put a smile on your face.

Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. The growing fascination of there being life outside of our own planet is definitely running in the minds of many, and there are also countless individuals who wonder if those life forms from said distant planets

wonder the same thing that we do. However, what enacted this large obsession on a worldwide scale as it is today? Although countless UFOs and USOs have been sighted throughout the world since the early ages of man, it was in 1947 when the world had its first and second extremely well-documented events that cause much widespread speculation about the idea of aliens being in the midst of our planet. Maury Island. On June 21st, 1947, Captain Harold Dahl, who worked as a harbor patrolman officer in Maury Island, which is about six miles west of Des Moines, Washington, was on patrol with his two rookies, his son and his dog.

However, this was no ordinary day out in the sea, for when Dahl gazed up into the sky from his patrol boat, he saw six aircrafts floating around 2,000 feet above his watercraft. The objects were reported by Dahl and his crew to be made of a reflective material and were in the shapes of flat donuts about 100 feet in diameter. The center holes located on each craft were noted to be about 25 feet in diameter and more circular objects were located along the sides of the aircrafts which were determined by Dahl and his crew to be observation windows. Soon Dahl and his fellow crewmen noticed that five of the UFOs circled over the sixth and the sixth itself was lowering towards the patrol boat. This caused immense panic in most of the crew because they all thought that the aircraft was going to collide with their patrol boat so not wanting to be sent to a watery grave, the crew hightailed it toward the shore. Upon reaching the shore, Dahl retrieved his binoculars in order to spot the bizarre aircraft

from the shore, and he also grabbed his camera to take photos as evidence that he spotted the strange aircraft. While taking the pictures, the lower craft stayed in a still position while the five others circled around it for about five minutes before the lower aircraft suddenly dropped down but stopped abruptly at about 500 feet above the water. One of the five ships circling around the lower ship came down to meet it. The two crafts stayed in this position for several minutes until eventually Dahl thought that he heard a thump. Instantaneously more thumps followed to which Dahl using his binoculars saw that the middle aircraft was now dropping what

Dahl suspected to be newspapers from the inside of its center hole as it swiftly approached his watercraft. When the aircraft got close enough, it was discovered that the objects weren't newspapers, but instead white, lightweight metals and black lava-like rocks. Dahl even stated that when the lava-like rocks landed into the sea, it caused the water to steam. With these dangerous pieces of debris falling ever closer to their boat, the crew sought cover below deck. However, not before one of the materials struck Dahl's dog, killing it in the process, and another one wounding his son in the arm. Dahl even tried to radio for assistance, but the transmitter wasn't functioning.

Even though his radio was out of action and no help was on the way, most of the debris splashed into the water. Soon after the raining of metals and rocks, the airships rose up high into the sky and zoomed westward together. The crew then exited the lower deck and examined the boat for any damage. Luckily for the the crew the boat was hardly damaged and they set sail back to their dock in the process lowering the dog over the side and into the water in the form of a burial at sea upon docking doll took his son to the hospital so that his wounds could be treated and afterwards explained the incident to his boss Fred Fred Chrisman, who didn't believe Dahl because when the photos Dahl took of his patrol were printed and examined, the strange airships Dahl informed him of and

showed him in the now developed photos were compared in believed to be film noise and damage caused by radiation. Not wanting to shy away from proving the incident's authenticity, Dahl returned to Maury Island to collect rock samples in hopes of finding the ones dropped from the middle aircraft that he had encountered during the incident. Dahl reported that while he did this, he spotted one of the aircrafts hovering above him as if it were spying on him. He eventually gathered the rocks and was preparing to show them to his boss the next day, but when that day came, he was visited by a small, pale man in a black suit. The man suggested that the pair of them should get breakfast together, to which Dahl agreed, so he followed the stranger to a restaurant. While they ate breakfast together, the strange man asked no questions but instead gave a

descriptive account about what Dahl had witnessed the previous day and eventually warned Dahl that bad things would happen to not only him but his entire family should he continue with the investigation or tell anyone about the now famous incident. However this did not change Dahl's mind about the incident and he showed Chrisman the fragments of metal he found in the rock samples he had taken, to which Chrisman then acknowledged that Dahl had been telling the truth. So the pair of them sent a package to publisher Ray Palmer in Chicago, who later founded Fate magazine.

The contents inside the package were the metal fragments and statements about the strange incidents and findings on the 21st and 22nd of June, a noteworthy incident that we continue to discuss and debate amongst ourselves to this day. Yet not even a month later would another incident occur that is possibly the most well-known and talked about alien encounter in history roswell on july 8th 1947 in the small town of roswell new mexico there were reports of a flying disc that crashed into the desert not far from the walker airbase that made front headlines around the world the reports noted that bodies of aliens had been retrieved from the crash site and were hauled to the infamous Area 51 airbase in the Nevada desert where autopsies were performed and carried out.

Shortly afterwards, a press release by high military authorities stated that rumors of a flying saucer had become something of a reality and that an intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Airfield was fortunate enough to gain and hold possession of one of the saucers. This statement sent newspaper reports of the incident around the world insane and news headlines of this Roswell flying saucer was everywhere. However, just 24 hours later that high military authority changed their story stating that they had made a mistake and that Flying Saucer was actually in fact a weather balloon. Unbelievably, the public appeared to have accepted this explanation, and very little was said about the Roswell incident for many years afterwards.

It wasn't until the late 1970s when some military personnel involved began to speak out about what happened all those years ago, and ufologists as well as conspiracy theorists thoughts went into overdrive, thus developing the Roswell case and incident as we know it today. One of the first military personnel to speak out about the Roswell UFO incident was Major Jesse Marcel. He was one of the two military personnel sent to investigate the crash site. The other one who was with Major Jesse Marcel was Sheridan Cavett who had always claimed that he wasn't even there. Major Jesse Marcel described how large amounts of metallic debris were scattered all over the area so the craft

had obviously hit the ground at a high speed. He stated that it was clearly not a weather balloon, aircraft, or missile because he recovered fragments from the crash and described seeing hieroglyphic types of writing painted on it. The metal was also reported by him to be light, thin as paper, but incredibly strong and hard, which was unlike anything he had ever seen in his career and life before. He also helps answer the question as to where the fragments were taken by simply saying, not only did they just have the one I analyzed, but others as well, to which are being kept well preserved in the military installation somewhere. Marcel's story doesn't end there, however, because later in life,

he told his expanding family about his investigation at Roswell. According to his grandson, my grandfather Marcel would privately share details of his experiences with the entire family and when I was a kid, basically around the dinner table. He told us how he was the head of intelligence and lead investigator of the 509 bombing group. He would talk about it with people continuously, asking a multitude of questions about the Roswell UFO incident the National Security Agency published a report in 1994, a staggering 47 years at the initial incident, which stated that the

alien bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site were in fact just life-size test dummies. Many saw this as the government just trying to dig itself out and cover up the situation which only continued to fuel conspiracy theories. Lots of more witnesses came forward and spoke out about the Roswell UFO incident including a photographer who claims that he was asked if he could photograph the crash site. He explained how he was asked to take photos of the inside of a dark tinted area and this is where he observed four identical bodies with humongous heads and shadowy skin. After taking the pictures he was debriefed in order to forget everything he

noticed at the crash site, but then a witness more credible than everybody else combined spoke out just before he passed away in 2005. His name was Lieutenant Walter Hott, the man who published and released the original weather balloon report back in 1947. Before his passing, he wrote and left a sworn affidavit. In it, he claimed that the weather balloon story was a cover-up for the UFO that had been successfully recovered from the crash site, and he also confirmed that he had seen dead alien bodies in this still widely debated Roswell UFO incident. With these two incidents raising so much speculation and questions, one might ask if we will ever know what went on. However, as the years fly by and as the people, or the next incident does that for us, we can only continuously marvel at the fact that these two instances combined have been not only the gateway to extraterrestrial debates as we know them today,

but also might just be the biggest government cover-ups in history regarding human contact with alien and otherworldly beings. Though these two events are the most widely renowned encounters with extraterrestrials thousands of encounters have been reported throughout the world to present day these next 15 stories are only a sample of this ever unfolding phenomena To be continued... evening and had gone to sleep for the night. I lived with my significant other and two indoor cats but she was out of state traveling for business. I woke up in the middle of the night. I wasn't sure of the time but it was completely dark because my body was freezing cold. I actually like it cool when I sleep and usually have the temperature around 70 degrees or colder since I live in central Texas. But this was different. I was ice cold but wrapped

in blankets. It was the middle of the summer so evenings aren't supposed to be cold. When I grabbed my phone to look at the time it seemed to be off and I pressed the on button but it didn't turn on. Since I was half asleep I shrugged this off. I walked out of my bedroom to go adjust the thermostat and noticed that the cats weren't around. This was weird because these fur balls are always hanging out in the bed or around the bed. Anyhow I walked to the thermostat and tried to adjust it but the power to the thermostat, I have a nest, was nil and the power to the house seemed to be off. I peeked out of the upstairs window to see if any of my neighbors were having power issues and noticed that all of their outdoor lights were

working just fine. From the time I woke to this moment was probably one to two minutes maximum. I decided to wander downstairs to grab some water but was startled when I realized there was a glow of light coming from the first floor. The way my house is situated I couldn't see the light until I'd approached the stairs. I found this odd because the power seemed to be out just upstairs which didn't make a lot of sense. I started walking down the stairs and began to hear a faint humming sound. The noise had a high pitch to it with arbitrary pulses of low sounds, almost like a muffled weed whacker that someone is throttling at random. As I continue to walk down the stairs,

I spot a dark, slow-moving figure in the room, with light at the bottom of the stairs. The next step that I take feels like I walked off the side of a cliff or was sucked into the floor. That is really the best way I can explain it because I don't remember what happened after that moment. I just lost all feeling from my body. My next memory is waking up again to the sound of my phone's alarm. Everything seemed to be back to normal. I sat there in bed, cats back to being lazy in bed next to me and tried to think about the two minute incident that happened in the middle of the night.

I'm not a sleepwalker and I was definitely not dreaming. My security systems app shows the time whenever a door is opened or closed. I realized that the security system was disarmed on the app and that the front door had been opened and closed several times throughout the night. I pulled up my security footage from the exterior cameras and was surprised to learn that there was zero footage from the night. Like the motion sensors reacted to a random car driving by around 10pm and then the next thing is another random car in the morning. So someone or something walked in and out of my front door but the cameras did not capture any footage. My neighbor across the street has a good security system that points at my house so

I asked if he can review the footage from his cameras. I told him some made-up story about how I thought someone had broken into my truck. Anyway he said it was weird because when he pulled up the footage from that night his cameras did not record anything just a time gap once again. My first thought was that I was sleepwalking and that the memory was a dream but it just couldn't have been. When I looked out the window in the middle of the night I distinctly recall a red pickup truck parked the wrong direction in front of the neighbor's house. I always notice when cars are parked left wheels to the curb because I've gotten a ticket for this in the past. Anyhow, the truck was not there before I went to sleep, based on footage, but was there in the

morning, based on the footage as well. So the truck was there when I saw it in the middle of the night. I definitely woke up in the middle of the night, cold as ice, no cats, no working phone or thermostat, saw the truck out of the window, and then got warped by something on the stairs. A couple of additional things were different in the house. The security system was disarmed, and I definitely armed it before going to bed. The light was still on downstairs, and that was absolutely off before I went to bed. The light was still on downstairs and that was absolutely off before I went to bed. My whole body smelled like burnt marshmallows. I know this is weird but it's really how it smelled. And lastly my 55 gallon fish tank that sits at the bottom of the stairs in the entryway was missing two-thirds of the water. Seriously where did 40 plus gallons of water go? The whole area around the

tank was bone dry and the fish were fine. I feel like I was mind hacked by some thirsty aliens. I had a year-long experience of strange events that I have never been able to explain or have a full memory of. It started in winter working up north on a project. Our crew was put up in a motel 10 minutes outside of the largest town in the area. I somehow got upgraded to a king-sized bed with couches, pretty nice room. Our days were long so I used the couches to stack my clothes in piles, jeans and hoodies. I had brought my entire desktop computer with me and was in the middle of a massive argument with my ex over Facebook Messenger at 1am during my second week up there. At some point I opened my eyes and was sitting on top of a

pile of hoodies on the couch. The time was now 4am. I rushed over to the computer. At some point after 1am I had stopped typing a sentence midway through. My ex had left a ton of messages throughout the night demanding I answer her back. She also left missed calls and texts on my phone that was still sitting beside the mouse. I figured I had somehow passed out but wasn't sure how I ended up on the top of my hoodies on the couch and not just fell back into bed. I then went to sleep normally for the remaining couple of hours before work.

A couple of days later a stranger scenario happened. My routine was we'd finish work. I'd come back to the motel around 9pm, shower, change and drive into town for late night dinner at Boston Pizza, only restaurant open later other than McDonald's. So this particular night I went through my routine, took a shower, changed, headed for the door. I got to my car and when I turned it on something felt really wrong. I looked at the time. It was now 2am. I had no idea how I had lost around 4 hours between showering and getting into my car. It felt weird. My whole body felt weird. I felt violated like an assault victim would describe waking up from being

assaulted while passed out. You feel violated but you have no idea what happened, not a single memory or explanation. I stayed up all night, scared senseless trying to figure out what happened. Why I was missing four hours? If I had passed out, why didn't I wake up on the floor? Why did I feel violated? The rest of the project, nothing else happened, but once I got back home, things started happening that were just weird. For the first month or so, nothing happened, but then something weird started happening. I began waking up around 2am and not being able to fall back asleep until the sun came up. I would wake up and have the urge to turn on every light in the apartment and stay up, find things to do and wait until the sun

came up before going back to bed. I started to notice that in my dreams, random strangers would show up telling me to wake up. If I tried to ignore them in my dream, they would find ways to harass me and tell me to wake up, telling me it's really important that I get up. Then there was a really vivid dream. I had gotten dressed up in my dream and driven to an upscale hotel, no idea what the context of this dream was. When I got to my hotel room in the dream someone started knocking on the door shouting hello, hello over and over again. Just when I was about to open the door the phone rang. I answered and the voice on the phone told me not to open the door. I kept telling whoever was on the phone that I really should see why this person keeps knocking but the voice kept

urging me not to answer. I finally hung up the phone, headed to the door, opened it and woke up in bed in a cold sweat. 3am. Couldn't go back to sleep. These were the kinds of dreams. People trying to get me to wake up and random flashes of bright white light that would light up everything no matter where I was or what time of day in my dream. I remember one dream being outside in the middle of a sunny day and a bright white flash that overpowered the sun and usually at this point some random person in my dream would run up to me and urge me to wake up or tell me the flash wasn't part of my dream and I should wake up. Random people in your dream telling you you're in a dream and that you have to wake up

is incredibly creepy and they were always strangers, no one I knew in real life. A precursor to these dreams was the urge to go to sleep early. I would have these urges to drop everything that I was doing and get in bed, sometimes leaving lights on, TV on, in the middle of games, in the middle of eating. There was no fighting it. I would put down the controller or put my fork down and march right to my room and lie down. It was this weird zombie-like drowsiness. But I would always wake up after 2am and not be able to go to sleep again until the sun came up. During the summer I took a trip to upstate New York with a friend and we stayed at some motel

overnight before heading further on our trip. That night I remember knocking on my door and someone who kept yelling hello hello just like in that hotel dream. I remember my friend was fast asleep unfazed by the knock but I ended up going to the door and unlocking it. I don't remember anything after that. I woke up sitting on my office chair by the desk around 6am. I checked but the door was locked and nothing had been taken. It didn't look like anyone had entered. I woke my friend up and asked if he'd heard knocking during the night. He said no. I told him what happened and he was pretty angry that I would wake up in the middle of the night to open the door to a stranger but there was no sign that I did or that someone had

come in. Just that I somehow ended up on that chair and not on the bed. I still feel like I was awake when I went to answer the door though. The weird thing was is that these dreams and urges to go to sleep wouldn't always happen, maybe two to three times a week. But I was starting to fear going to sleep without the lights being on, all blinds closed, or I'd fight to stay up all night and just go to sleep during the day. After this I was getting really fed up with how messed up my sleep schedule had become and I started to notice that when I get the feeling that I should go to sleep I would take that as a cue to get in my car and head for the busiest section of the city at night I could find filled with people and I noticed that the urge to go to

sleep would go away instantly. So every time I felt the urge to drop everything to go to sleep I would fight the urge and drive downtown. Anytime I felt like I was being watched too I'd get in my car and go downtown. I messed up work because after a few weeks of doing all of this, all these strange urges to go to sleep randomly, dreams with flashes of white light and people telling me to wake up all went away. I haven't had a single recurrence of these events since however I notice I still have a fear of going to sleep until the sun comes up that I'm always fighting. I also recently noticed that pictures of the typical grey alien now scare the life out

of me and I hate looking at them. Even seeing the cartoon ones on South Park I get mini panic attacks. Those pictures have never bothered me before in my life, but now they send me into waves of panic. I still have no explanation for the missing time up north, the weird dreams, or that one night at the motel in upstate New York, which I don't think was a dream. It felt very real and felt more like another missing time event. Most people I've told don't know what to make of it. My current girlfriend has noticed I obsess with making sure all blinds are closed with no open slivers no matter where I sleep.

I told this story to someone at a party once and the guy came out and told me his abduction story and he was pretty positive that I had been getting abducted during that year and that they'd either gotten bored of me or I'd become a hassle with constantly trying to drive to places full of people to avoid the happenings. Other friends either offered no explanation or believed some sort of abduction scenario was taking place. Who knows? I have no memory of physically being abducted, but those weird feelings of being watched,

being urged to go to sleep, feeling violated when waking up, that felt real and still bothers me. My junior year in college, I had a strange experience. First, a few background details. My dorm room was attached to my roommate's so that I had to go out hers to get to the bathroom or the hallway. She was a light sleeper, but I wasn't the type to be out late so it didn't matter. I had two normal operations in my life at that time and discovered that while under anesthesia I would wake up briefly toward the end before I was supposed to. If I got a

mosquito bite I got to deal with it for at least a month. I'm not a fast healer. One night I had the most vivid dream of my life. I woke up briefly somewhere else and then I went right back to sleep. In this dream I looked left, I looked right and then I passed back out just like if I was in surgery. I was on a hospital gurney, slightly inclined, facing the wall. There was an ambient noise behind me and the echoes suggested it was a very large room. There was nothing sinister about the noises. On either side of me was a row of empty hospital gurneys. At my feet, just to my right, two people were having a conversation sitting on a bench against the wall. One was a person in a dark suit. The other was... I don't know what it was. It was small. I saw its hands, which appeared to have darker skin, grayish.

They were speaking together so animated and excited like two old friends who hadn't seen each other in years, and they didn't notice me wake up. I didn't recognize the dialogue. Though I don't speak German, Mandarin, Russian, etc. I can recognize them when I hear them. This language was wholly unrecognizable yet the person in the suit was fluent. I went back to sleep. In the morning I said to myself that that was a messed up dream and went to the shower. As I passed my roommate who was still in bed she asked, Where did you go last night? I thought that was odd.

After my shower I started to put my makeup on and noticed something on my face. I leaned closer and could not believe what I saw. Two perfectly parallel lines and possibly thin and possibly perfect. There was some clear hard gel on the top and that's what I felt. There was no blood. My own hair was thicker than the width of the cuts yet I could see down into my skin a little ways. This was 1996. I had never seen anything like this. These days I would say it was a laser cut topped with liquid band-aid but neither of those things seemed to be prevalent in those days. I said okay, there's an explanation. I slept on a staple or a paper clip. I do homework in my bed all the time. I went and scoured my pillow for anything sharp and

I found nothing. So I got my sewing needle, a staple from some homework, and a paper clip. I dunked them in hydrogen peroxide and made cuts on my face similar to what was there. Immediately, blood welled up and the skin was jagged from all three objects, and the width of all cuts were thicker than the laser cuts. I determined that nothing in my room could have made the cuts. I didn't have an exacto knife but I knew the blood would well up the same way if I did. I skipped my first class as I tried to figure out what to do. I kept obsessively feeling my face all day in awe of the perfection of what was there and how it could

have come to be there. There were only two people on campus rich enough to have a digital camera which meant I would have to borrow a friend's 35 millimeter because I didn't have my own. That meant I would have to explain myself to my friend and possibly the photoshop when the pictures came back. Who would I even give the photos to? Who would I even contact and what would I tell them? In those days if you even said the word alien you were a pariah. After hours of mental debates sitting on the edge of my bed I gave up thinking about it and finished my classes for the day. I sat on the edge of my bed into the night debating, unsure of what to do. In the wee hours of the morning, I woke up. The cuts were gone, completely healed, no trace of even a scar.

I was disturbed for a few days but then I eventually forgot about it. A few years after graduating, I decided I was going to have some dental work done and I went to two different offices to get quotes. They both took a full facial x-ray. I had long since forgotten my crazy dream and the cuts until I sat down across from the first x-ray technician and pointed to a strange thing showing up above my teeth. I asked if I was looking at a mirror image because it was on the same side as my cuts had been rather than the opposite side. No, I was told the x-ray was an actual, not a mirror image so the right side of the image corresponded with the right side of my face. I pointed to the almost square image above my teeth and asked what that was. It's just an x-ray anomaly. He didn't seem bothered by it. I figured that meant that there were some damage or irregularity with the x-ray plates and let it go. Then I went to the second dentist, an orthodontist, and had another x-ray done. You guessed it. The square was there in the exact same place. This time I didn't even try to make polite small talk

or beat around the bush. I pointed to the square and said, what is that? This time the tech looked at me funny and said, it's an x-ray anomaly. And she leaned closer and whispered, we see them all the time. In a way that gave me goosebumps. This was in Spokane, Washington. I didn't know what else to say so I said nothing. Could it be that whatever negatives or plates or whatever they used for an x-ray were damaged in exactly the same spots and exactly the same shape? Maybe I guess. I don't know much about x-rays. But after that I reflected on my situation. I don't feel freaked out but I think there might be something in my face put there by somebody else. Here's what I know. We do this all the time to other species. We chase them in helicopters,

shoot at them with tranquilizer darts, take rectal temperatures, take blood samples, stamp radio tags in their ears with no regard to if it hurts or the trauma of the event, or if their furry buddies will ostracize them later because they have something funky on their ear. In my situation, I was clearly well cared for, if it really happened at all. Someone was there as some kind of representative on my behalf. I was handled in such a way that if I didn't have a weird metabolism I wouldn't have known what even happened. I never once felt pain. My cut healed instantly. If this is some kind of research driven radio tag for the purposes of data collection, preservation of habitat or species like we would do. They did it with far more regard for me than we have for other species on our own planet. I don't know

what might happen if I get another x-ray 20 years later. I have tried to look when I go through airport security if anything shows up on the image we see in the booth but I don't see anything. Surprisingly I'm okay with this. I think it might just be science and nothing nefarious or evil. I wish my consent to be asked first but I suppose it's hard to ask for consent when you're not even supposed to exist. When I was a child in Collinsville, Mississippi, I used to see lights. I lived out in the country on a farm in Washington State, out near Beacon Rock. I remember one night looking out at the pasture from the front porch. I thought I was looking at the full moon but it kept getting bigger and was moving left to right over the tree line. I turned around to go get my big brother and when we came back it was gone. He thought I was messing with him and punched me in the arm. That next week I went out to camp in the woods. We lived on a few hundred acres and were surrounded by woods.

I would just walk for about an hour or so with my walker coonhound and Australian shepherd until we found a decent spot. I had a.22 long rifle with me usually or a.20 gauge. We had settled on a beautiful clearing by a small creek and set up camp. I remember it starting to get dark and starting a fire. The dog started acting strange and getting loud. My walker starts baying loudly. Next thing I know I'm in my tent and it's super early. The tent is halfway open. The birds haven't even started up yet. The fire is completely out and my walker is gone.

My Australian Shepherd is outside of my tent whining. I had this really bad feeling and knew something wasn't right. I got up and puked next to the tent. I still had all my clothes on but my boots were on the wrong feet. I took them off to correct it and noticed my socks were wet. I became terrified. This was a new feeling in the woods for me. I was about 11 years old and had been in the woods most of my life. I had never had a feeling like this before. I grabbed my.22 and took off, leaving the tent and everything else I had brought. I sprinted home through the woods and was absolutely relieved when I broke through the pasture. That dog and I never stopped running.

When I got home my mom was waiting for me and snatched me up. She was crying and said my dad and brothers were out looking for me. She told me buddy, my walker had come home at around 11pm that night and was baying. That dog never left my side since I got him as a pup so they knew something wasn't right. She went out to our old red suburban and started laying on the horn to signal my dad that I had made it home. Cell phones wouldn't become a thing for another seven to eight years. I told her what had happened and she kind of shook it off. Nobody really thought anything about it. A few days later I had just gotten out of the shower. I had this weird habit of chewing my toenails. I wouldn't embarrass myself publicly like this if it wasn't important to the story.

I was going to town on my right foot and noticed two little punctures on my right ankle. It almost looked like a snake bite. It was small and red. I instantly thought about that night in the woods and that missing time. Nothing else about it was strange. It matched an identical set on my left foot, exact same location. The first ones had showed up when I was five or six. My mom had found me outside by the mailbox sleepwalking one night at around 10pm. No one was ever sure how I snuck out of the house. My father would tell me this story repeatedly with such a straight look on his face I never knew if it was a myth but when I asked my grandmother about it she says she remembers it clear as day as well. My grandmother was just known as mother back then having three children one being my future father. They were living out in the middle of nowhere Michigan lost in the

trees and tranquility preparing for a weekend without kids my grandfather was dropping the kids off with relatives when he returned the house was dark that creepy dark where everything feels eerie and you feel alone they had a fine evening despite his ill-minded thoughts and they didn't have any problems falling asleep they didn't have any problems falling asleep. They didn't have any trouble waking up either as they were woken up by bright flashes through the tiny solo window in their room. They quickly made their way to the kitchen where they opened the back door to see what was causing the bright light. My grandfather, wanting to be brave, told his wife to step back.

As he opened the back door and more bright colors appeared, an array of colors neatly set in a weird shaped circle, floating just right above the ground. As his eyes adjusted to the odd inhumanely bright colors flashing abruptly, he noticed they were coming from some sort of mishap in aircraft, almost shaped like a football. It was just a little more round but still resembling the bare shape of a deformed football. He couldn't tell what color the material was made out of due to the bright flashing color coming from the odd craft. It was just small enough to fit in between the patch of trees and large enough a family could easily fit inside. He noticed something walking towards him on two

legs and feet just like a human. It seemed to be nude and it didn't seem to have genitalia from what he saw but everything else was very human-like. The head was an elongated eyes bulge but could probably pass as a deformed human. The creature walked up to him and brought his hand out like a wave but instead of moving back and forth making a wave motion his hand was still as if waiting for a high five. Not knowing what to do my grandfather stood still until he noticed my grandmother had joined him outside and was witnessing this as well. Seeing her face made him realize that they weren't dreaming. Once the strange human-like creature put its hand down, another one of their kind appeared,

walking out onto the same platform his accomplice was standing on that protruded out of the aircraft. He was holding what seemed to be some sort of flat substance. The original creature took it and began offering it to my grandparents. Nervously, my grandfather reached out for it but the creature retracted and reached out to my grandmother instead. She looked at her husband, wary if she should accept their mystery gift but finally did. It seemed to be squishy and round, like a pancake but larger the creature brought out another pancake substance for themselves and began eating it they looked at my grandparents waiting for them to eat as well without thinking each tore a piece off of it and ate it realizing it must have been made out of

some type of wheat or grain but not one they've seen here on Earth. It was a different odd grain from wherever those creatures were from. After they saw my grandparents try their pancake, they gave another still wave and retreated into their craft. The platform disappeared with them, and the flashing colors started to fade into the sky. I always asked them, What did you do with the pancake? Did you give it to the government? Did you report it at all? Both my grandfather and grandmother said that back then, it would have been hard to report something like that, without everyone thinking they were crazy. To clarify, I didn't think I was abducted, but my friend did. I was about 15.

Every night a guy I'll call Jay and I would sneak out at about midnight and go back home at around 4 to 5 in the morning before our parents would wake up for work. On one particular night, we had just snuck out and it was about 1am. We headed to my backyard, laid on the trampoline and stared at the stars and talked like we always did. Now if you're in a room right now and you look around you'll see the defined four corners where your ceiling and walls meet. You can see how square each turn is. Edge of wall, sharp turn, second wall, same with your ceiling. You can see each individual flat surface. The sky did that. It went from looking like normal stars to looking like a cube of sky.

From the southeast corner of the sky came this giant UFO. I mean huge, as if it took up a quarter of the entire sky. We both stared at it in dead silence. It didn't make any noise, even as it moved, and while it spun, it was only hovering straight. The spinning didn't move like you imagine a frisbee doing, the sides just turned while it moved. I guess what it looked like doesn't matter but Jay and I had our eyes dead set on it. We didn't say a word. We didn't point to show the other person. As it began coming towards us we both flipped over. Again no hints, no talking, no eye contact. In total sync we flipped onto our stomachs and stayed as flat and quiet as we could. Now ducking from something sounds totally normal, an instinct, but that's not

what this was. It was literally almost like telepathy. I can remember us having a mental conversation of stay flat and it won't see us. Don't move. We watch it make a weird angled C shape across the sky and although it felt totally in slow motion it could have only been a few minutes because I think both of us held our breath the entire time. Not for the weirdest part. As soon as it was out of sight, boom, daybreak. We had literally just gotten to the yard and I know it was 1.15am because I checked, but the minute we felt released from laying flat it was very bright, like 7.30 to 8am bright. I don't remember talking to him at all afterwards other than making eye contact and then making a break for our homes before our parents

noticed we weren't there. A few weeks later, even months maybe, I'm talking to my brother's girlfriend about what happened. Apparently she's real into that stuff but also completely terrified. She said the fact that it felt like a few minutes but when it suddenly was six or seven hours later 100% makes her think that we were abducted. She was serious. I made a joke about how I should go to hypnotherapy to unblock the memories and she deadpans and says don't. People who were abducted are traumatized by what happened to them. They even get PTSD. I was camping in a campground in North Georgia with some friends. It was starting to downpour so everyone left their tents in the woods and decided to rent one of the on-site cabins for everyone to sleep in.

I decided I'd just sleep in my car because they wanted to stay up late and I was tired from kayaking all day. I woke up to the rain stopping. It was kind of cold in the car and I had forgotten my sleeping bag in my tent. I checked the cabin to see if there was any room left. The light was on and everyone was fast asleep at about 3am. I didn't want to squeeze in so I decided to trek my way to my tent in the dark with a small pen light. In order to get my tent I had to pass by everyone else's to my left. Mine was the last one and was at least 50 feet from the previous tent before it. I got in my tent, covered up with my sleeping bag and prepared to catch the last few hours of sleep before sunrise. No more than 10 to 15 minutes from me getting in my tent I began to hear light whispers from right outside the tent

door. They weren't in English and to my recollection indecipherable, not any language that I had heard at all. Just as the voices started, two orbs appeared together outside the tent. They weren't the same glare as a flashlight would make, and both were of two different colors that, to the best of my memory, had no real distinct color, just colorful. The whispers outside the tent began arguing louder between each other, but still in a hushed tone, and as the whispers outside the tent began arguing louder between each other but still in a hushed tone And as the whispers grew louder the lights began swirling around the tent behind me To the side and to the front It wasn't any movement that one could make with flashlights And at this point I realized no footsteps could be heard

I uncovered myself and knelt on the tent floor preparing for the zipper to come undone like in a horror movie and I was flipping through my mind on what option to take. I was the most terrified that I've ever been, fight or flight. The lights swirled faster and the voices grew louder but still breathy and whispery. My mind raced and I was sweating despite the cold and then just like that the light shut off like a switch and the whispers stopped and nothing was left but the silence of an empty woods. I stood there as still as I could and didn't dare go outside that tent till the sun came up. It was and still is the scariest moment of my life I hope this makes sense I have never written it out before if I need to answer anything I can try in between moments at work interestingly

enough I went to a horror movie premiere recently beacon point and there was a scene that had the same voices in it and goosebumps ran up my arms it was identical to what I heard that night in my tent. First, I want to say that this may or may not be a humanoid encounter. I may just be having dreams, but if it's the case, I've never had a dream so absolutely lucid or realistic. In my dreams I'm almost always compelled in my actions but in this recurring situation I am in full control and can feel and smell everything. So this first came about sometime when I was about 11 or 12 years old which puts us around 2009 or 2010. I can't

really remember which, I just know it was this point when I frequently stayed with my great grandma shortly before my great granddad died of cancer. It is in northwest Georgia in Chattanooga County, pretty rural by most standards, just a couple thousand people around. Anyways, I had been staying with my great grandparents then in their rather large house in the very rural neighborhood of about four houses, all sparsely spread at the end of the road, somewhat near a nice lake and park. At sometime around 1am, I decided to get up from my bed, walk down the long hall to the living room and get myself a glass of water from the kitchen that basically connects directly to the living room. I walked down the hall as normal but when I approached the doorless entry to the living room I instantly felt like something

was wrong. It felt like time itself had slowed down and the moonlight that shined into the living room from our large side windows didn't quite look right. I then understood what was so amiss to me. The lights in the living room were on, but in a way, not so. There was a yellowish light like someone had cut the lights on as normal, but it wasn't the same as what I had always grown up with. It was slightly off. Anyways, I walked a few steps around the corner,

thinking I had figured out what was bothering me so much. Well, I was wrong. I turned the corner, and in the midpoint of the room, about six or seven feet from me, was a tall figure in an obscure cloak. To the left and right of him were two much smaller figures, but they seemed to disappear as soon as I focused any attention to them. I can't even be sure what they look like. The smaller ones were the classic grey alien shape that I now am aware of, but whenever I tried to glance to them, they just sort of faded to an indescribable there- not their shape. The best way I can describe it is if a shape became the static you would see on a television screen or if they had been drawings they would have been hastily scribbled in. My eyes darted from the tall figure to them at which point they sort of disappeared and then back to the tall figure. This was all I could do before the tall one was alerted,

seemingly by them disappearing. The tall one was somehow much more unnerving than the other two. When I looked at him from behind, he was incredibly tall, reaching the ceiling. He had to hunch over a small bit in order to not hit his head. That was the strangest thing though. When viewed from behind, his black cloak only extended up the height of a very tall person and ended, but when he turned around, he was even taller. It was like his head was totally invisible from behind. Now the tall one is the biggest thing about this whole story. He turns around and it's like everything around me just warped. Remember when I said earlier that everything felt wrong or out of place in this general area? I got intensified by several orders of magnitude as soon as he turned around, somehow seemed to gain several feet in height and look at me.

He seemed very surprised that I was there. Sound seemed to completely fade away, but i remember exactly what he smelled like i couldn't place it then but after spending the next several months visiting my great granddad in the hospital and then going to his funeral i can affirm that it was the smell of death and the kind of smell that you only find in places with people dying it's very particular Not a horrible stench, but you can feel its morbidity. It's like it thickens the air. The moment he turned around and looked at me, two things happened. First, I became instantly paralyzed. I couldn't move, couldn't scream. I could only stand. I didn't feel like I was there and I couldn't help but think that I shouldn't be there.

I had an instant overwhelming feeling that I shouldn't be there at that exact moment in time, that exact place. Secondly, I saw his face. It was very much like what would be considered the standard grey alien face although incredibly white. Not a bright white but an unnaturally white form of white, just dulled a bit. Blemish-free, no hair, no variance in coloration. Had a large conish head, small mouth, small nose holes, etc., but his almond-shaped eyes were absolutely horrifying. I don't think I've ever seen anything remotely as disturbing. They look like they didn't belong in this place of existence, like a two-dimensional or four-dimensional object existing in a three-dimensional world.

I could only see his face, the rest of what I could assume to be his body still underneath his black cloak. The worst thing came next. He seemed to just look at me in some form of panicked curiosity for a moment or two, with me still paralyzed, literally in fear. Then he produced a long arm from the side of his cloak, with thin, elongated fingers. He bent his body towards me as though one would bend over to pick up something, but bent forward towards me. His mouth seemed to expand and possibly wide for his head. His hand creeped closer to me and right as he touched my face i lost consciousness and woke up the next morning the scariest part of the whole

ordeal was what i felt like when he saw me i was sure he was going to kill me but not in the way you would expect like getting stabbed or shot when he me, I felt like every part of me would be absolutely annihilated. I'm an atheist and was at the time, but it felt like for that one brief moment, I had a soul and he was going to steal it from me. It's such an immense feeling of dread, thinking that even more than your very life is about to become nothing. When I woke up, everything was not as it was when I had went to sleep or when I had woken up originally to get

water. This is what scares me most to this day, confirming to me that this was not a simple dream. While I had originally went to sleep in my bed in a room down the hall from the living room, I woke up in an obscure hall from the living room, I woke up in an obscure position on the living room couch. It was early in the morning, probably 6 or 7 AM judging from the light outside, so I went back into my bedroom and crawled into bed. It was only after I made it into my bedroom that I remembered what had just happened to me. I became absolutely mortified, covered myself under a blanket and waited until I heard the sounds of my great-grandma cooking bacon in the kitchen.

That was when I came out of my room and went back to the living room. Fast forward about two years later, my great-grandad has passed away, I'm a bit older, and I kept having dreams about the tall one that I saw that one night. I had these dreams somewhat often and every time. I woke up in a cold sweat, usually unable to sleep for the rest of the night. The dreams were most frequent shortly after the first encounter and every night for four nights in a row before the second which I now detail. The second time I saw him, it played out much like the very first. I got out of bed sometime at around 2-3am and went to the kitchen to get a Dr. Pepper this time instead of water. Around 3-4ths of the way down the hall I remember what happened that night

and I instantly froze. I could feel them close again. I could feel the aura of wrongness that I had originally felt right before the first time I saw them I tried to turn around and sneak back to my room or my great-grandmas or my grandparents who had come to live with us after the death of my great-granddad I couldn't turn around though I felt absolutely compelled to continue into the living room it was like I didn't have a choice but I suddenly felt very okay with the idea, like I was calm despite what I knew was going to happen to me. Sure enough, in the living room was the tall one, but he was already facing the entrance to the living room where I was walking from,

and he was unaccompanied this time. He also didn't smell this time. There was no stench but I could hear a faint humming that sounded like it was coming from outside. We live near a highway so it could have been a car but it didn't sound like one. He knew I was there and I'm pretty sure he was the one that calmed me and forced me to come into the living room. He seemed much more approachable this time, but he did the exact same as before. He studied me for a moment with a small smile

and then put me to sleep with his hand. Again, I woke up on the couch. When I woke up, I felt less horrified about what happened and more curious as to why, and I remember distinctly feeling like I was trapped by fate into seeing him multiple times like I was sure it would happen again whether I wanted it to or not. Throughout the years I never distinctly remembered meeting him again but he did appear in my dreams. I moved twice and he was still there every four to six months. Sometimes it was a singular

appearance in my dreams, other times it was up to three nights in a row. On the fourth night after I had the third dream I stayed up at night sitting in the living room of my new house waiting to see him but I never did. Instead I woke up still in the living room but upside down against my couch and my legs up in the air, my upper back on the floor and my lower back resting on the edge of the couch cushion. Several blankets were haphazardly spread around me. I guess he knocked me out before I was able to see him and he did whatever he does. In all this time I still have no idea what he actually was doing or why it was me. I still am very,

very unnerved every time he was in my dreams but I was less surprised. So that ends the tale for now. I sort of await my next encounter as the hooded one in the dream did tell me we would meet again. In 1997, three of my friends and I were driving down a long winding route to my house at around 10pm. I was in the backseat, it was very cold, February or early March in New Hampshire. Suddenly my friend driving says what? My friend in the passenger seat starts saying oh my god oh my god. The two of us in the back seat are craning our necks trying to see and then directly in front of the car a bright light dilates then gets smaller. The car is at a crawl now and we are all looking up astonished at four to five other lights dilating and receding. They go to about the size and

brightness of a police searchlight but then get so small that they disappear. This part is going to sound insane but we were all there and we all saw the same thing. We pulled over on a shared driveway that has a good view because it's on a snowy hill overlooking a reservoir. The reservoir is frozen solid with enough ice to ride a truck on for all of you swamp gas naysayers. But now that there is somebody else around, just the four of us in the freezing cold, we get out of the car and look up, hoping to see the lights. We saw lights alright, but they were acting very differently. High above us were large elongated lights shaped like lozenges. They were about a dozen of these, and they just kind of hung in the air, milling about slowly in various directions.

These occasionally got brighter and dimmer, and what really freaked us out were the smaller lights, the size of bright stars, which exited from the sides of the larger lozenges. These would emerge, four or six at a time, and then they would start moving quickly back and forth and side to side, very quickly and changing directions instantly. Then they would start squiggling about very erratically before stopping, moving along or in tandem with others before retreating to the lozenges.

Meanwhile, others were emerging from other lozenges, so there was a constant busy display of these little ships zooming about almost as though they were dancing with each other. It was insane and thinking about it now it is so vivid in my mind that it seems like yesterday. We stayed outside for an hour before we couldn't take the cold anymore. My friends dropped me off at the bottom of my half mile long driveway so as not to get stuck on the ice. My driveway was poorly maintained and I was embarrassed to have friends at my house anyway because my dad was an alcoholic and we lived off the grid. After they pulled away I looked up but saw nothing. No signs of any UFOs but there were here, so I couldn't see as well.

Then I had a sudden twinge of panic. It was a deep panic. Overwhelmingly horrified, but also still in shock about what we had seen. I was suddenly afraid to be out there alone. I ran up the driveway, not thinking about ice, and snuck to my room where I probably didn't even sleep, not that I recall. We have all spoken of this since. For the first few days we were all still in awe, but we never really seemed to be telling anyone else at school about it. At least I didn't. I don't know how the others were dealing with it. We slowly stopped talking about it.

About seven or eight years later I met up with a couple of them and I asked if they remembered. I was afraid I had made the whole thing up and that it was a dream or maybe I was going crazy or had been crazy at the time. They both remembered in the same detail as I did although we were all little embarrassed to discuss it again. I was about 8 or 9 and my mom tells me we were going on a day trip to meet her high school friend. Cool. I grab my Game Boy Advance because I know my mom's friend has kids my age and wanted to show them up in this racing game I had. I overheard this from my mom talking with her friend at her house.

They told me to leave the room because they needed to talk about adult things. Little innocent curious me wonders what exactly are adult things that I can't hear. Were they gonna throw some new juicy cuss words out? Well, my mom's friend had a little girl who would sleepwalk at night. Started when they moved into their new house, North California. It was a suburban area, but not too suburban. New neighborhood with a lot of empty homes and forest patches in between each community. She was about four years old and they found her one night in the backyard just sitting there. After that incident they

decided they needed to lock her in her room at night and bar up her windows so that she doesn't end up in the woods nearby or anywhere besides her room really. So one night my mom's friend and husband wake up to a loud boom on the side of the house in the middle of the night. It felt like something hit the house because everything shook. They check on their boys, they're good. The boys didn't hear anything and go back to sleep. They check on their daughter, unlock the door and realize she isn't in her room. They start to freak out, then hear a knock at the door. They open it.

It's the effing sleepwalking four-year-old daughter. They ask her where she's been, and she said with the men, and points down the street. The angry dad sees two guys in coats walking down the street. He yells at them and starts sprinting. Mom's friend said the coat guys didn't react at all. Coat guys turn the corner, dad turns the corner, and they're gone. Mom and dad check the locks and windows. No tampering. They notify the police who pretty much say there's not much they can do but will keep an eye out. This sleepwalking four-year-old daughter is fine, isn't scared at all. She's just tired and goes back to bed. I wouldn't say that I was abducted by aliens specifically, but I was definitely taken somewhere. It was more of an abduction of consciousness, if that makes sense.

I don't know, it might have been my body too, it was a weird feeling I can't really explain. I was sitting at the park one day in broad daylight with four or five friends. I lived in a small community in the Midwest so the park was empty except for us. We were talking and smoking when suddenly everyone just kind of slowed down and eventually froze completely, myself included. I couldn't move or talk, I couldn't blink. I had to focus really hard on just breathing and then I blacked out. I woke up alone in a dark nearly pitch black room with three large illuminated screens around me. On the screens I saw the park from above, the exact spot where my friends and I were sitting. It felt like I was in that room for

hours until I blacked out again. I finally came to and realized that I had been crying hysterically on the ground. The rest of my friends seemed pretty wrecked too, like they all just experienced something equally terrifying. I was the first one of us to speak. I said, I think I met God. And they all responded with similar brief statements. I remember one girl saying, we're on TV somewhere. Which explained the feeling of being watched watched unsafe and violated really well. I can't remember what anyone else said just the general idea of

we just got taken somewhere. We didn't talk about it besides one weird short sentence each that was the strangest part for me that we didn't talk about it but we all understood that we'd seen the same thing. It felt like we couldn't talk about it where it or they could see us. We left immediately and haven't spoken about it since. I don't keep in touch with those friends anymore but it would be interesting to know if they felt like it was an abduction of some kind too. The abduction started when I was really young. They were not scary experiences but more like odd dreams. Every night I would sneak down to our living room which had a large window. I would face the window and say, ha-woo. After that, a large wolf head would materialize and say,

ha-woo, back to me and my next memory would be waking up. I was never caught getting out of bed or going down the stairs but I do remember that occasionally there would be leaves or dirt on the living room floor that my parents had no clue where it came from. We moved into a suburbs and that changed the nature of the experience. I don't remember being afraid when I lived in the country but once I lived in the suburbs I was terrified of going to sleep. My first memory of an abduction experience was caused by a doctor's visit. Someone I went to school with got sick with something and everyone who had contact had to get a shot. I had never had a shot before but when the nurse approached me with the needle I lost my mind. I was probably nine or ten but it took three nurses and poor old Dr. Lee,

my pediatrician, to hold me down. I remember telling them to get that thing away from me and getting images of shadowy figures and flashes of pain in my eyes. After that, I was always awake when they came. I'd wake up and they'd be next to my bed or looking in the window, but they never tried to hide their intentions after that. The abductions peaked around 13 or 14 with about one every two months. By that time I had adjusted my life to try to deal with it, going to sleep as soon as I got home from school and waking up at around midnight and staying awake until I went to school hoping

it didn't happen. It might have worked but it didn't help with school and family life. Slowly the incidents became less frequent and maybe once a year. My last abduction was on my 27th birthday. I was fully conscious and I had just gotten done calling into work saying that I would not be coming in that night. I walked outside of my car and looked up and saw something moving through the sky. It was black and amorphous and kept changing shape. At one point I thought it looked like this space shuttle but then it started heading towards me. I got in my car and tried starting it but it didn't turn over. Right after that I got this buzzing ringing in my head that was jarring and painful.

By then the craft was right over top of me and ahead of my car one of the creatures just materialized and moved towards me. My car door just kind of opened on its own and it touched me with this rod thing it was carrying and I blacked out. I came to an hour later and immediately went to work even though I called off. I haven't had any experiences since but I still live the way I did when it was happening. I can't sleep at night so I work at night and sleep during the day. Relationships were difficult to maintain but I'm doing much better now. I have some suspicion that my parents were slightly aware that something was going on when I was younger. I've had several experiences of waking up some distance away from where I was previously or sleeping at. Twice I

was wearing clothes that were not mine. This isn't my first encounter with those beings. I've had a few encounters with them so far and it only left me confused and freaked out. My parents decided it was a good idea to send me off on a small vacation with my grandparents to Turkey. They thought it was a great idea to have me relax after such a stressful year. I went to a doctor after my first experience thanks to my parents who only sent me to a therapist to see if something is wrong with me. So far, no one believes me for what I've seen, but that doesn't stop me from believing it. My grandparents have this small house in the village. The next neighbor is several kilometers away which makes it almost impossible to visit someone else.

However, there are barely any trees. It's always very hot around June and sleeping at night is way more difficult than anyone thinks. My grandparents were already sleeping and since there was nothing to watch on television, I decided to call an end to the day and sleep outside. Of course, I didn't actually go camping, but used the balcony instead as I did not want to wake up with a snake around me. I grabbed some pillows and a few blankets after I turned the lights on. Sleeping in the dark isn't really something I enjoy a lot, not after the many experiences I've had. The light was more for my own comfort than anything else, but I already could feel something was off.

It was suddenly colder outside than it was a minute ago and this awful feeling of being watched started to make me feel paranoid. I quickly looked back inside but I saw nothing and shrugged it off, thinking I was making myself paranoid. That was at least what I had really thought. Once my eyes traveled down to the garden, I saw something way too familiar. It was dark outside, but my eyes never betrayed me for what I've seen and the light I had. Below me stood a tall grey. It was very tall and skinny. I'm not really sure how tall, but definitely taller than an average human.

Its shoulders were very thin and the arms reached its knees. But to make it a bit clearer, it literally looked like those toys that you could stretch their limbs. All it did was stare at me as I stared back at it. I'm not sure how long this lasted, but I blinked my eyes and the creature was all of a sudden a bit closer than it was before. That's when I knew that it knew I was there. I was frozen in fear, and the alien moved its head a bit to the side, only to move it back straight. As if it was curious to see me, and after a bit, I finally got the courage to do something.

Instead of freaking out like always, I thought it was a better idea to react calmly. The first thing I did was wave my hand slowly at it and only to have it give the same response back after a few minutes. I did as much as I could trying not to freak out, but I only became even more scared. I asked what it was doing here, but that was when I felt my whole body becoming stiff. My mind was telling me to scream for help, someone to come and get this creature away. I knew one thing for sure, it wanted something for me, something I had no idea of what it could be. I asked the creature again why it was here and only got a reaction by moving its head a bit to the side again. The alien moved a bit closer,

standing right underneath me, looking up at me with those big black eyes. I wasn't able to see a mouth before but now I could. I was shaking in fear not knowing why it was standing this close. A loud voice of a man called for me, asking what I was doing on the balcony in the middle of the night. My eyes quickly moved to in the middle of the night. My eyes quickly moved to the police officer of the village who was always driving around at night. However once my eyes met the officer's I quickly looked back down only to see that the alien had disappeared. The officer saw how alarmed I was as it was easy to see that I was shaking and nearly at the point of falling to my knees. All I did was say that something was in the garden and that's when the officer quickly entered the garden to check if someone was there. However he told me he saw nothing and called a few

other officers to check the surrounding area. My grandparents were woken up by the officer and told them what happened. However my grandfather who has a bit of an obsession with aliens asked me many questions about the alien I've seen. It seemed like it isn't the first time this has happened at all and that it has been common in our family for encounters like this. He didn't tell me much but what I did learn was that my grandfather was or still is an abductee. This happened to me during my junior year of high school. I'm in my second year of college now. The bus to my high school departed every weekday morning and at around 7 30 a.m.

So I would usually leave my house at 7 15 since it was a short walk to my high school departed every weekday morning at around 7.30am so I would usually leave my house at 7.15 since it was a short walk to my bus stop. This event took place during a dark morning sky. It was clear out, just the sun hadn't risen yet. I walked to the bus stop during my usual time, got there and stood among the usual group of students who also took the bus to school every morning. I had been waiting for the bus while scrolling through my phone for about five minutes when I got tired of looking down and decided to put my phone away. I began to analyze the beautiful dark morning sky when all of a sudden would appear to be a large green glowing orb that appeared to be followed by two or three smaller ones. Very quickly they soared across the opening between the tree lines and disappeared into the horizon behind a thick tree line facing a lake. It happened very fast, made no sound and left no trail at all.

I was left confused more than startled. I know for a fact that I hadn't imagined what I had just seen. I looked around myself to see if anyone else shared my same expression only to notice the guy standing next to me was erratically scanning the sky. He saw that I was looking at him and asked if I had just seen that. I said yes and asked him what it was but he obviously didn't have the answer. No one else in that group of people saw it. The bus got there at that exact moment and we all got on. Fast forward to about an hour later I got to my physics class and sat on my assigned table. I heard the girl behind me talking loudly about the weird flying thing she saw this morning. I quickly turned and asked her what the color was. She said green. I said I saw it too and she got very excited expressing her gratitude to me for showing the other students that she wasn't crazy.

Class began after that. I really don't know what was happening that morning and I don't expect you guys to have the answer either. I just wanted to share this story since it has remained in the back of my head ever since. It's not the only encounter that I've had of this sort but it was definitely the first. I am glad that these other two people also saw what I saw because it means that it really did happen. Keep in mind that the girl in my physics class didn't live in the same community as I did, meaning that whatever this UFO was, it must have soared pretty high in the sky. I haven't seen anything quite like this since. So I've had a handful of paranormal encounters. Now that I am older they have really stopped.

This one happened when I was around 21 to 22. I'm now 30. I rented a room in my friend's house on the second story. I had a female boxer dog that would sleep with me in the room. I had one window that would face the neighborhood street. One night my dog jumped on my bed, blocking my view of the television. I tried to move her with my feet but she wouldn't budge. She started a low growl facing my window.

Since she didn't want to move I turned off my TV and went to sleep and she kept growling. I don't know what time it was later but I woke up to a very very bright light shooting through my blinds. I instantly became annoyed and got up to see which car had their lights on so bright that it was coming into my bedroom. Mind you never had I experienced this level of brightness. I got up and put my fingers through the blinds to open them. Then after that everything went blank. I remember opening my eyes and walking inside a type of room. The room was metallic with no seams just perfectly curved metal. In front of me was a perfect metallic bed. It was just a metal rectangle in a gray color. Behind me I could sense that there were things guiding me to this metal bed.

We were communicating but not through speaking. We were kind of talking through our minds. I could tell that they were just trying to guide me to the metallic bed in the middle of the room. I remember standing right in front of the metallic bed like thing and just like that I was back in my bedroom. I remember standing in my room but this time with my back facing my window. The next morning I woke up. I actually didn't remember any of this. This all came to me later.

I woke up feeling extremely sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up. I stumbled down the stairs because I was also extremely hungry. I got the milk out of the fridge and was getting ready to pour it into the box of cereal. I stopped myself and went over to the sink which faces the backyard. That was when I saw my dog running around the backyard. The dog who should have still been in my room. That was when it all hit me. All the memories came back. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could to look at the condition of my room and furniture was thrown around.

This was around winter time so it got cold and I would sleep with three blankets. All three blankets were formed into perfect spiral-type designs on my bed. I went to the spirals and destroyed them, since I couldn't believe what had happened. Something changed inside me after that day. I got dumber in a sense. I had speech problems on which I would stutter after every other word. Also, I couldn't comprehend what I was reading unless I read it slowly three to four times. I knew something happened that night.

It wasn't until almost a year later I was in my room just chilling in my bed. I was at the house alone since my roommate was working. Once again a bright light shot through my room but this time the house began to rumble. It literally felt like an earthquake had struck. Fear struck down my body since I already knew what that light was all about. This time the light just went away. The rumbling only lasted for about five seconds and everything was gone. After that day I regained my reading and speaking levels. It all just kind of went back to normal. Definitely one of the weirdest moments in my life. About 13 years ago a few buddies and I were really into urbex.

We didn't call it that back then. We weren't part of any sort of community, nor were we into taking photographs of places we visited. We'd find some old apocalyptic-looking derelict on a Friday or Saturday night, get some beers and some smokes, then spend the night getting wasted and fantasizing about zombie survival scenarios. I've pretty much settled down now. I'm in a long-term relationship and we're even talking about having kids. I doubt my girlfriend would be too keen on me exploring old abandoned buildings but that's not exactly why I don't urbex anymore. The reason I stopped is because of what we say at the Danvers State Medical Hospital shortly before it was demolished back in 2007

So, there's this movie that came out in 2001 called Session 9 We saw it in the movie theater near Boston Common and were instantly obsessed Sure, it's a good movie, but the star isn't really David Caruso The real star is Danvers State Medical Hospital. Location scouts must have giggled like schoolgirls when they laid eyes on Danvers. It looks more like Hogwarts than a place where some of Massachusetts' most dangerous mental patients were housed. The huge gothic building was built in 1874, and it was quite the sight to behold.

Seriously, Google it and you'll see for yourself. But in the early 90s, it was abandoned when all remaining patients were transferred to other sites. Once we learned that the magnificent looking building was only 13 minutes north of Boston, we were already making plans to visit for a little midnight drinking session. One Friday night, we make the drive up there, parking our buddy's car about a mile away before walking over to the abandoned hospital. We may or may not have committed criminal damage in breaking through the flimsy perimeter fencing. I'd rather not say anything too incriminating. I don't want to get arrested over some dumb Reddit post, but once we were inside, it's as incredible as we imagined. The place didn't feel like it had ever been a hospital.

We picture hospitals these days as being these white-on-steel, sterile places, but Danvers really did feel like it was straight out of a Harry Potter movie. Intricate patterns on the tiled floor, grand staircases, more like an old mansion than a treatment center. We're still in awe when we decide to make our way up on one of the staircases to explore the upper floors, wandering down long dark corridors with the only light being from cheap plastic flashlights we were carrying. One such corridor had lots and lots of smaller rooms running off of it. It was clearly some kind of high security wing. The rooms looked more like prison cells than hospital rooms.

There were even rusted iron shackles still attached to some of the walls. Evidently, some prisoners were restrained when they became too violent. But when I shined my flashlight into another one of the smaller cell-like rooms, I froze. Caught in my torch beam was the dull steel of a steak knife. I can still remember how its teeth glittered in the bright white light. Next to it, a rather dirty looking sleeping bag lay on the cold tiled floor. Someone was here with us. I can't remember who said it, but one of my buddies muttered something about us not being alone here, and when a strange voice spoke through the darkness, I think all of us just jumped out of our skin. Hi. That's all it said, at first anyway. There's a young, dirty homeless guy walking down the corridor towards us,

hands up and palms out. I can't remember the exact exchange, my adrenaline was pumping the entire time, but I'll try to paraphrase. We were just about to leave, dude. We don't want any trouble. It's all good, he replied. Something friendly in his voice set me at ease. I really didn't mean to scare you guys. It's cool. Kind of a scary place anyway he separated from what i assumed was his steak knife but i still kept my eyes on where it was sat in the darkness making sure he won't be able to grab it if he decides he doesn't like us so much but as i said he was actually pretty friendly for a guy who seemed to be living in an abandoned insane asylum. We gave him a beer, a kind of peace offering, and then spent about a half an hour just

wandering the corridors and talking. None of us wanted to press him on why he was there, he seemed nice enough, so we passed the time talking about Boston, complaining about the socks, that sort of thing. After a while, he does in fact tell us some of his story, how he's been a drifter for a while, not exactly homeless but not exactly the 9-5 kind of dude either. He liked to explore weird old places too so that was like another half hour listening to all the awesome abandoned places he'd visited across America. He'd even been to Bodie, California, which has like this legendary status among urbex enthusiasts because it's an entire mining town that was abandoned after the gold rush or something. So about the point that we're thinking this is one of the coolest guys we've ever met,

he asks us something that at first we thought was some kind of joke. So, uh, you guys are human, right? One of my buddies actually laughed, but the guy shot him this look. And man, if looks could kill. He was serious. And the more it dawned on us that he was 100% serious the more freaked out we became I just uh you know hate meeting cool people than finding out they're reptilians you know you can only really tell once you peel that fake layer of skin off I mean that's what the knife is

for he'd seen my eyes flicking towards it. Don't look so nervous dude. You guys seem cool but sometimes it just gets real tiring. They've been after me for so long now and they never ever stop. Sometimes then I think I should just kill everyone just to be safe. An uncomfortable silence came over us. I wanted to run from this crazy monster, but that might anger him. And we really didn't want to anger him. Dang, dude, we're almost out of beer, one of my buddies says. Here, man, why don't you take our last one? We'll go buy some more and be back in like an hour. Again, probably not word for word but I'll never forget the relief I felt when he said those words. It was a stroke of absolute genius to be able to get us out of there so quickly without raising too much suspicion in the guy.

The homeless looking crazy person seemed very happy at this, like he'd made himself a trio of new friends, guys he could finally trust. And as we walked out of Danvers and back towards the car, I felt a new, fresh feeling. Guilt. I'm an urban explorer. Urban exploration, or urbex as we call it in the community, is the exploration of man-made structures often abandoned or hidden from the general public. Generally speaking, photography has played a large role in its popularity, but

historical documentation has also become a factor in recent years. As austerity has taken hold in the UK, urban decay has become much more prominent, with abandoned factories, amusement parks, and other such places becoming increasingly common across the country. To my knowledge, the term urban exploration was invented in the mid-90s by a Canadian guy by the name Jeff Chapman. But one particularly harrowing story tells of a French urban explorer by the name of Philibert Hespere. The story goes that Monsieur Hespere was a hospital porter in the 18th century who had heard rumors that there were riches to be found in the deep, whining catacombs beneath Paris. Priceless jewels, golden medallions, and hundred-year-old bottle of expensive spirits waited for those who were brave enough to search

for them. Monsieur Esper packed a knapsack, bid his wife adieu, then wandered down into the catacombs in search of his fortune. His skeleton was discovered in the damp, dark tunnels just over eleven years later. Now, I'm not sure if I believe that story. There's always been a kind of glamour that came with the apparent dangers of urban exploration, and I'd be lying if I'd said I didn't find that attractive. But the story of the French explorer seems a little too far-fetched for me, not to mention that the risks involved these days are minimal. It's pretty much impossible to get lost and an emergency mobile phone means that medical assistance is usually just minutes

away. That being said, it doesn't mean you find some genuinely weird or disturbing things while exploring. And not too long ago, myself and a friend of mine explored a place that actually made me question if I wanted to involve myself in urbex anymore. Just out of Farnham, in a leafy rural place called Surrey in England stands an old abandoned puppy mill. The building has been deserted since 82-year-old John Lowe was arrested for killing his former partner and her daughter with a high-powered shotgun. He had shot his wife Christine Lee at point-blank range with a shotgun, later telling police that he wanted to put her down. His daughter Lucy Lee made a call to the emergency services before courageously returning to the scene of the crime to face her killer one final time. The building has a sinister air about it before we even laid eyes on it,

but when we'd actually seen the thing, the apprehension was palpable. It looked like a typical haunted house, all red brick and Victorian arches like it was just waiting to be the cover art of the next Stephen King novel. We took a few pictures, nervously chuckling to each other as we made our way inside. The interior has been almost completely gutted. There wasn't a scrap of furniture to be seen and almost all of the electrical fittings had been torn out to prevent accidental fires. The glass windows of the conservatory attached to the house had smashed wholesale. Not a single pane of glass had survived some previous visit from local vandals. It only

added to the eerie feeling of the place like some terrible vengeance had been wrought by angry locals trying to destroy a place that was haunted by so many terrible events. My friend and I separated as I ventured upstairs while he remained on the ground floor, searching the kitchen. The upstairs bedrooms were still carpeted, but leaks in the roof meant that larger patches of black mold were growing on the walls and floors, the place reeked of rot. Yet just as I was headed back downstairs, I heard my friend call out for me to join him in the kitchen. And all the time I'd known him, I'd never ever known him to sound too scared. My initial thought was that we'd been joined by some police who'd received reports of us exploring the murder scene. The empty alcohol

containers on the first floor told me that this place was probably the haunt of drug users and criminals. All it would take was a simple explanation, maybe with us walking away with cautions. As I entered the kitchen, there were no signs of police, just a friend staring wide-eyed at one of the white painted walls. When I asked him what was wrong, he just pointed at the spot on the wall he was staring at, not saying a word. There on the wall was a small, jagged hole in the masonry, framed by some dark, muddy stain. It only took me a moment to realize just what I was looking at. It was a hole made by the shot that killed

Kristen Lee. It must have been. The muddy stain around the ragged opening must have been her blood. I peered closer, recoiling in revulsion as I saw something that clung to the jagged edges of the roughly cut hole. A few fibrous strands of something dark and glossy matted together with the same muddy stain that marred the white painted walls. It was hair. Human hair. In all my time taking part in urbex trips, I had never felt so utterly terrified. I'd been chased by the cops, punched by angry security guards, but I'd never felt like anything like this. The death was thick in the air. It was a horrible feeling just knowing that something so terrible had happened right where we stood. I've never believed in ghosts or anything remotely

paranormal, but there's absolutely no denying the feeling that came over us as we stared in horror at that hole that fatal gunshot had made. It was haunting. The place felt haunted. It felt exactly as if we were transgressing on some kind of hallowed ground, disturbing the restless spirits that lingered in the place they had so horribly lost their lives. It felt wrong. I turn to my friend, giving him a look that said far, far more than words ever could. He just nodded before we quietly made our way out of the building, not once looking back as he walked back through the woods towards town.

I'm still very active in the urbex community, although I did take a prolonged break from it after what I saw in the low house down in Surrey. I now actively warn people against visiting former murder scenes, telling them that some places are better left undisturbed. Like I said, I'm not a believer in the supernatural, but that doesn't mean that some places aren't haunted. Not haunted by ghosts, but by the reality of just how cruel and heartless human beings can be toward each other. Even by people they love. I'm an urban explorer from Scotland over in the UK and I've been involved in the urbex community for coming up on 15 years. I've probably explored more than 500 abandoned places over the years and at least 99% of them are exactly what you'd expect. Run down houses, factories and hospitals.

Creepy enough to make for amazing photography, but nothing remotely sinister about them. Honestly, the number one feeling you get from Urbex is kind of sadness. Especially when the site in question is an old gothic building that's more deserving of investment and not demolition. I've been to pretty much every stereotypically creepy place you can imagine. Old Victorian hospitals, haunted stately homes in the middle of nowhere, several morgues and operating theaters, abandoned graveyards, creepy basements and tunnels, you name it and I've explored it. But one place was different from all the others. Out of all the places I've explored, only one genuinely scared me. A bit of background information, we absolutely adore finding new places, but it's not exactly easy.

It takes a lot of research, and we get most of our locations from Google Maps, news articles, land registries, and the obvious shares from other members of the urbex set. So often, unless someone has left kind of an urbex review, we don't know what a place will be like before we turn up. Sometimes they're sealed, empty or demolished and sometimes I wish this place had been like any of those. We would have turned up, found the place inaccessible and simply gone home or found a pub to drink our disappointment away. A lot of the time my urbex pals and I will organize a kind of day trip, something to look forward to and bring relief from the stresses of our boring or stressful jobs. We'll go about visiting a certain town or city that has a few potential urbex sites, and then exploring them all throughout the course of a day. We get a hotel, find a few nice places to eat, but it also helps to socialize with the locals a wee bit.

After a few pints, even the most hard-hearted of people will spill the beans on derelict buildings in the area. This one place was the last abandoned building on the trip. It was getting dark and rainy as it often does in rural Scotland but we decided to push on and get a few photos before sundown. We had kind of a long drive to get to the hotel so we couldn't just put it off until the following day. At first it didn't seem abandoned, just a church in the middle of a very well-kept cemetery. My friend assured me that from his research it definitely wasn't in use and I was pretty keen to get inside because abandoned churches can make beautiful photos. Only by this point we were losing daylight at a rapid rate.

We'd have to get in there if we wanted to make use of the last of the natural light. iPhone camera flashes just don't make for good photos. Only natural light produces the kind of results that get noticed on photography forums. The rotten back door to the church was wide open, old paint peeling in patches from the splintering wood. It was hardly the most inviting entrance, but the only visible way of getting into the building. One by one, making sure there was no one around to report us for trespassing, we made our way inside. Now side note, a lot of urbex enthusiasts talk a good game about climbing into places, through open or broken windows, onto roofs to find service hatches and all that.

I can categorically say that climbing an abandoned site is definitely not a good idea. From experience, the fastest way to the emergency room is trying to climb something that is literally falling apart. Inside, we came to what appeared to be a small kitchen. I'm not remotely religious, so it did kind of surprise me that whoever the priest was actually used to live in the church too. That kind of dedication to something so intangible was just beyond me, but I suppose that's why they call it faith. The kitchen naturally led on to a small corridor before opening up into the main church hall. That was the last time we spoke for a long time. There were beautiful color-stained glass windows, albeit a little grimy from the abandonment, but that's not what drew our eyes.

A distinctly uneasy feeling overtook us as we saw just what was laid out in the hall before us. I for one was completely lost of words, while one of my friends went deathly pale as if he'd seen an actual ghost in that old church. Instead of the standard empty pews and religious iconography, the interior of the church was filled with children's toys. They were stuffed neatly and uniformly into every pew, all facing the same way, forever listening to some silent sermon. All of the children's toys and dolls were worn and filthy, in a creepy kind of style that kids' toys haven't been made since like the 70s or 80s.

There were little ornate prams, that's strollers for yanks, and matchbox cars all facing the same way towards the empty priest's podium. It dawned on me that since there were no toys there, whoever had arranged them this way had stood at the podium and admired their handiwork. There was also a kind of bedroom area, one bed having been clearly made up for a child and surrounded by children's books. No adult-sized beds, not a single one, so I don't think it was anything like a homeless family squatting there. How long they had been there was anyone's guess, but one thing was clear. Whatever the reason these toys were arranged like this, it was not a good or pure one.

We left the place, still in silence, too creeped out to discuss the scene as we drove back to the hotel we were staying at. The mood of the whole day had changed in mere moments. It was still too raw to try to make sense of the things we had just seen despite our outward appearances the place was collapsing inside a huge hole in the floor had formed and damp was setting in so any evidence of the toys the bed and the sinister atmosphere may well be lost or buried soon. I don't know if anyone else had discovered this place or knows what happened but it's not somewhere I'll ever return to. I refuse to share the location even with my closest explorer friends

for fear if that they visit they'll run into whoever had arranged those toys into such a ghostly congregation? I've seen a few scary urbex posts on this subreddit over the past couple of days. They've been some amazing stories, but they've reminded me of my own terrifying experience that I haven't actually thought about in some time. I've never really told anyone this story but now I feel like this is the right time. I mean I am pretty much anonymous here and it really has been years since this whole thing went down. I live in Liverpool over in the UK, you know, the place where the Beatles came from. It's a beautiful city with a

rich cultural history, but beneath the old Victorian streets there are old mysteries that had never been solved. Dark secrets that pass from the world along with the dead men who kept them. Let me tell you the story of when a friend and I explored the Williamson Tunnels. The Williamson Tunnels are a bunch of massive subterranean excavations in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool, which were created under the direction of a tobacco merchant, landowner, and philanthropist, Joseph Williamson, between the early 19th century. Although generally described as tunnels, the majority of the complex is comprised of brick or stone vaulting. Essentially a series of interlocking rooms have been carved out from the rock underneath the city. The purpose of the works remains unclear. Although quarrying,

a philanthropic desire to provide employment and Williamson's own eccentric interests have all been suggested. Now, this all seems pretty harmless, just some rich old guy providing jobs for the local people. But when a local journalist by the name of Stonehouse became suspicious of Williamson's motives, he went about researching the true purpose of the tunnel network. On hearing that Stonehouse planned to publish his research on Williamson's excavations, Williamson's friends, the artist Cornelius Henderson, threatened to sue Stonehouse both for libel and trespass, leading to his journalism being suppressed for many, many years. Eventually, the British Army got involved and a mandatory survey of the tunnel

system was ordered. Yet despite the massive amount of work that went into the surveying, army engineers simply did not have the manpower to cover all the grounds. Larger excavations, such as the vaulted Great Tunnel, have yet to be located. Still think the whole thing is harmless? No, neither did we. So it came to pass that myself and a friend of mine, we'll call him Chris, began to plan a clandestine exploration of the Williamson Tunnels, namely the parts that hadn't already been explored. We stocked up on a few snacks, two flashlights, each along with a lot of batteries.

There was no way either of us was getting caught short in some dark underground tunnels. That would be like the start of a bad horror movie or something. Some warm clothes, one first aid kit between us, and we were set. I gotta say, it was incredibly exciting, planning a little expedition like that, knowing we'd be venturing into places that no one had stepped foot in for almost 200 years. We joked about finding a huge stash of treasure, Spanish gold and silver doubloons, but I think I half believed we might. Why else would a man dig so deep into the earth unless he had something really worth hiding? The whole real way to get inside the tunnels is to use the official

visitor's entrance. The plan was to get inside, look like a pair of well-meaning tourists, then hide out somewhere until closing time when we would have the place to ourselves. Simple, but effective nonetheless. Naturally, it worked. We found some dark corner as far deep as we could manage without cutting away at the chain-link security fencing that kept us from the deeper recesses. After 5pm, a solitary security guard made one final sweep of the public areas with his flashlight, turned off the main power and then went home for the evening. Maybe it was a bit early to be high-fiving each other, but we were still pretty ecstatic that the first phase of our plan had gone off without a hitch.

The next phase involved finding a way around the previous mentioned chain-link fences that had been erected to keep tour groups from venturing into restricted, supposedly dangerous areas. With a little help from a pair of pliers my friend had borrowed from his dad's toolbox, we were in. We got out our flashlights and began to wander deeper and deeper into the unknown. It didn't take long until we were hopelessly lost inside an unending series of pitch black rooms. I had assumed that there would be some sort of order to the layout, but each adjacent room seemed to take us deeper into what had to be a huge labyrinth underneath the streets of Liverpool. The deeper we got, the more debris covered the floors,

chunks of hewn limestone that we began to stumble over as we pushed on. I noticed that my ears were popping just in time to hear my friend let out a yelp as he slipped among the rubble and crashed into the rocks beneath him. It looked bad. I rushed over to him, struggling to find stable footholds among the rocks and was incredibly relieved to discover that all he had were a few cuts and grazes. I don't quite know why I did this at the time. Maybe it was because I knew from the look on his face that he had had enough. But I left him for a few moments to go see if there was any of that treasure stashed away in the rooms ahead of us. Of course, he wasn't there when I got back.

But of course, he wasn't there when I got back. Of course, the room he was sat in was empty, no sign of him anywhere. I was kicking myself. He'd obviously gotten annoyed that I'd left him alone and was now marching back on his own, bleeding and tired. I tried to find him, heading back as fast as I could to catch up with him, yet there was no sign of my friend at all. No torchlight in the darkness, no one responding when I called out his name. It was about at this point that I started getting pretty freaked out. Either he was playing a bad joke on me or there was something terribly wrong.

Then from the rooms behind me I heard footsteps. Not walking pace, not at all. These feet were sprinting, hurtling through the rooms towards me in the darkness. I wheeled around and shined my flashlight, relieved beyond belief to see my missing friend. But his face... I've seen a look of terror so etched into someone's features. He didn't have his torch or his backpack, and he almost crashed into me as he sprinted through the tunnels. He just whimpered one single word as he ran. Run.

To this day, he's never talked about what he saw down there that made him run like that. He started drinking a lot, even getting up late and getting drunk all night. It wasn't long before we drifted apart and he ended up moving down to Portsmouth, way down in the south of England. He was never quite the same after it, but that doesn't mean I haven't stopped wondering and one day, maybe over a few drinks, I'll ask him. But it's not asking him that I'm afraid of, it's what he might tell me that really scares me. When I was in university I used to work the closing shift at a McDonald's here in the UK, which is without a doubt the weirdest shift to work.

It happens to be the most consistently busy shift of the day, yet somehow it's invariably worked by incompetent teenagers who are somehow corralled by a manager who are barely out of their teens themselves. And before you go saying that's a mean thing to say, or that I should have more respect for hardworking young people, I think I've earned the right to say it because I used to be one of those previously mentioned incompetent teenagers. At about 11.30 each night when the closing shift ends, myself and a few of the guys who work there used to go have a smoke at a nearby play park before going our separate ways.

Only one night in particular, one of the guys has the idea to drive over to the grounds of an abandoned psychiatric hospital and have our smokes there. Granted, it didn't seem like the best idea at the time, but the guy was offering to drive us there and back and even said that he'd had a few beers in the cooler tucked away in his car. And trust me, if you finish a late shift at McDonald's, stinking of grease and sick to the back teeth of rude customers, you jump at the offer of a free beer. My only question was where this place was exactly. He said it was only a few miles away, at a place called Whittingham. So, the grounds that Whittingham Hospital is built on are absolutely ginormous. There are about four or five different annexes constructed around a cricket pitch,

a duck pond, and even a small train station built specifically for the purpose of receiving patients. I'm not actually from the area. I moved to attend the university in nearby Preston, so unlike the locals, I had no idea of the story behind Whittingham Hospital. One of the lads starts to tell it as we parked the car and began to walk over to the grounds. I think if he had told me before we'd left, I'd have been much less keen to accept the free beer. Basically, back in the 60s, the hospital was the subject of a huge controversy involving abusive staff and illegal medical testing.

But whatever the truth was, it had been lost in the subsequent rumor mill as the local population embellished and exaggerated the story until it was something of an urban legend. People talked of haunted buildings, mass graves, and patients who refused to leave when the place was shut down in the 90s. With those thoughts rattling through our brains, we climbed the large stone wall that surrounded the complex and began to explore. Each time we would wander into one of the dusty old buildings we would often find that the floors would give way or that they'd rotted away entirely. It was pretty dangerous but the sense of adventure was palpable. I'd never done anything quite like it in my life. The sight of such magnificent buildings being left to crumble was sad but exhilarating knowing we had them to ourselves. There were long wards lined with damp moldy beds housed inside huge Victorian buildings

complete with towers. There was even an old church which was just as creepy as you can imagine. I mean it was like the perfect place to shoot a horror movie or something and we relished the opportunity to scare the ever-living dookie out of each other. I remember this one place, an old operating room that we were exploring. One of my mates ventured into the middle of the room when we heard the rotten old floorboards creaking ominously beneath his feet. Then watched in absolute horror as the ground beneath him gave way and he plummeted into the darkness below. It was honestly horrible to watch, but I can't even tell you how relieved we were to discover he'd gotten away with nothing but a few scrapes. The worst part was trying to get him out. It was absolutely filthy down there and he reeked of rot when we finally pulled him out of that hole.

But that wasn't the worst part, not for a long shot. We were exploring one of the larger buildings when we came to a locked door. By this point the other guys had done a fair bit of climbing and crawling to allow us entry into each of the buildings and it was my turn to pitch in. So, after crawling through a small jagged hole in the wall, I got to the door opening and we all went inside. It was a huge mansion-style building with those stairs that are split at the bottom and curve round to join together at the top. We used our phone torches to cut through the pitch blackness as we ascended, following a long dark corridor until it became clear what this building was used for. There were scores of smaller private wards with bars attached to the windows.

It was obviously some kind of secure unit where the most violent of the patients were held. We walked into one, and it was like a loop back round to the main corridor again, evidently designed to make it difficult for the patients to hide or escape. So we wandered down, noting that all the beds were just metal frames with nothing else. But as we turned the corner there was one larger bed, the only one which had a mattress on it. What's more, this mattress had a large dark stain marring the once white sheets. It was a big stain, a horrendous smell emanating from it.

Out of nowhere, one of my mates freaked out. He was pointing at the filthy, dust-covered floor, pointing towards a few patches of a similarly looking muddy stain that led from the ward. I would say that the most scared I've ever been was then. We were already a bit panicky, but seeing that had us fleeing the building as fast as we could. We decided to enter one more building before leaving, only it just so happened that this building was locked. Lucky, we found a basement door around the back, but you know those creepy thin stone steps that lead underground with a wooden door at the bottom? Yeah, it was one of those, hardly the most inviting threshold we'd ever seen. We pushed our way in and found ourselves in some kind of underground corridor that had all of the pipes on the ceiling running the length of it. At six foot one, I'm a big lad and I had

to crouch a little bit just to get through, so you can imagine how it felt. Tight, low ceiling and pitch black. We dared each other to go first, but surprise, surprise, no one would volunteer themselves. Anyway, this corridor seemed to go on for ages, and we concluded that we were definitely in the underground network of utility tunnels that connected all of the buildings. There were a couple of staircases leading off every now and then, but most were blocked off, so we just continued as we could. After a good few minutes of walking, we arrived at the end of one particular corridor. It had a huge steel door like one of those classic hospital jail doors you see in films with the little window hatch at eye level. With apprehension, we pushed this open.

The room was empty except for one thing. There was a single metal chair in the middle of the room fastened down to the floor and above it, hanging down from the ceiling, were two metal chains with manacles attached to them. Even if we didn't know the room's true purpose, it may be the most disturbing thing I've ever laid eyes on. None of us knew what it was and what had likely happened there, but we could guess, and there's no way it was good. I realized that as we were leaving, this was kind of a bizarre rite of passage I'd just undergone. This place was famous as a place of evil among the locals, but I'd never even heard of it. Now after a night of exploring the most haunted place in Lancashire, I appreciated that now.

I too had my own little Winningham story. I would be able to regale both locals and my friends back home with the story of how I'd ventured Whittingham but that came with a price. The price of never, ever being able to get the image of that final room out of my mind and the inability to stop wondering about the horrors that went on in there. There is an abandoned factory complex in Detroit that I've often seen posted about, both on Reddit as well as various other urbex sites around the internet. I've personally explored the place about 8 or 9 times over the course of a decade and each time I've found something new. This is because the complex is absolutely massive. I mean, it must be a few square kilometers all in all.

What I've never seen posted nor even mentioned, however, is the maze of tunnels that run underneath. The subterranean network or underground passageways is filled with pipes and wiring that provides everything from steam and fresh water to chemical compounds and electrical power. The tunnels are all extremely low and narrow that descend at least 15 to 20 feet under the earth. Each one leads into a series of basement rooms under each section of the complex and, to the relief of many urban explorers,

are complete with emergency escape hatches that take you way out into the woods surrounding the factory complex. I can't tell you the peace of mind that kind of feature brings an urbex enthusiast. Not many of us have died doing what we love, but the number is high enough for us not to want to become just another statistic. One weird thing about this particular site is that most of the entrances in the tunnel system are hidden in the walls. I pushed my way through an old plastic panel door once and found myself in a room that was the complex's mail room, a place that I'd literally been five or six times

before, but had never noticed that there was a hidden passage integrated into the network's plastic paneling. The complex has been abandoned since the late 80s, so entire sections of the tunnels are practically flooded from leaky and busted pipes. When you're down there, you're constantly hearing ambient noises, creaking pipes, the rumbling of the railroad above, echoes from your own movement. There is nothing remotely reflective down there and aside from your own flashlight, there's absolutely zero sources of light. Plus, if you skimp on the aforementioned flashlight and get one with a weak beam, it can get kind of difficult to make out details in the darkness. Often you're left relying upon the slight tonal differences of what you can see to determine what something is before you're right up on it. First of all, I had a really dumb and dangerous habit of going to these places alone. It's hard to find people willing to commit to doing such scary stuff,

but the bottom line is that if you don't have a buddy to urbex with, you shouldn't go at all. Pretty much every urbex veteran will tell you that, and many people actually end up traveling to far off places just so someone has a buddy to explore somewhere with. But the last time I was in the tunnels, I was by myself, with a single AA battery powered 75-100 lumen LED flashlight. To the uninitiated, that won't mean anything, but any hardened urbex enthusiast will tell you that that's way too weak a torch for underground tunnels. With zero ambient light, you really do need something powerful to cut through the darkness. And that was my first big mistake.

So while I was down in the factory tunnels, all on my own, I decided to follow one particular passageway down to what was probably the water treatment facility for the complex. The tunnels sloped quite steeply downward, so the leaking water I mentioned previously has collected at the tunnel's lowest point. At the end of the tunnel I entered this large room with two huge water storage tanks, each of them at least 15 foot tall. There is probably an inch of filthy stagnant water on the floor, stinking and making a loud splashing sound as I walked in it. Not exactly a deafening sound I know, but when everything around you is completely

still and silent, even the faintest noise sounds incredibly loud. I'm standing still looking around with my flashlight and from the opposite side of the room, around 20 or 30 feet away, I hear that same splashing sound, only it's not an echo. There's someone else in this underground room with me. I shine my flashlight across the huge dark room, but I don't see a thing. All I'm hearing is that horrible wet splashing sound of footsteps in the water. All of a sudden I shine the light on this human shape that is completely covered in black clothing. I mean it was so black that there was no difference in the shading or anything. It's just like a shadow against the peach colored concrete wall. I stammer out a nervous greeting and all of a sudden I can see this person's two eyes flash up.

A distinct pale blue back my flashlight. I mean, I knew it was a person. I'm not a believer in ghosts or the supernatural, so it's not like I was scared out of my mind. But people can be weird. I know that firsthand. I don't know if the person was in some kind of body suit or what but it's impossible to make out anything distinguishing about them other than the color of their eyes. I don't know what kind of weirdo sets out in a full black getup to rummage around

the underground but this guy's silence was beginning to seriously creep me out. What's more, I noticed that he didn't have a torch. He didn't have anything in his hands for that matter. So how was he able to find his way around in the dark? Sure, he could have turned it off when he'd heard me coming, but at the time it really made me feel uneasy. After all, it's fear of the unknown that's without a doubt man's biggest fear. Then out of nowhere he just rushes me, splashing through the shallow pool of water, sprinting in my direction. I just freak out, spinning on my heels and absolutely bolting back the way I had come. I'm flying up the inclined tunnel, slipping and sliding all over the place on the slippery, slimy concrete.

I fell down a bunch of times, grazing my knees quite badly and almost straight up breaking my wrist at one point. But I didn't feel the pain. Pure adrenaline just kept me flying through those tunnels towards the emergency exit. It must have only taken a couple of minutes to get out of there, but it felt like an hour of sprinting through this tunnel network, praying I wouldn't get turned around, praying the man in black wouldn't find me. It was the closest thing I've experienced to a living nightmare. I've never been so terrified in all my life. I'm sure whoever I met down there in the dark was probably as terrified as I was. Maybe they thought I was going to attack them, hence why they turned off their own light

source and rushed me. That was just my gut reaction, kind of a primal self-preservation. Looking back, I have no reason to believe they actually followed me, and they probably ran back the way they came, same as I did. But just so we're clear, I've never visited an urbex site alone since, even if it takes waiting a while to find a buddy, because no abandoned building is worth meeting that one weird stranger who isn't scared. Back when I was a sophomore in high school, my friends and I got heavily into urban exploring. We spent a lot of time in urbex forums online, uploading photos and sharing experiences, but it wasn't long before we found ourselves in

a kind of friendly competition with a group from Ohio. The Michigan-Ohio rivalry is very real, and although we weren't exactly into college football, we still relished the chance to show up our counterparts in the next state over. It was a playful rivalry, however. I mean, who could ever take pride in the whole my state is more messed up than your state thing. So one summer, my urbex friends and I were on a long bike ride scouting for potential urbex sites in an old run down industrial area out near Kalamazoo. We take a break in this wooded area and one of my friends goes off into the bushes to pee. About a minute later, we hear them shout excitedly for us to come look at something.

Once we make a few jokes about his junk being nothing to write home about, we follow and lay eyes on his sweet little discovery. It was this creepy old cave. I mean, it seriously looked like it could be the secret entrance to the Batcave or something. But a little preliminary exploration revealed that the place was an abandoned cement mine. Mines required a lot more specialist equipment. Any seasoned urbexer will tell you that it's crucial to bring respirators to anywhere where air quality might be compromised. Mines are filled with all kinds of stuff that you really don't want in your lungs. So about two weeks later, after a fair amount of

planning and preparation, all four of us returned to the abandoned cement mine with the appropriate safety gear and a camera, ready to properly explore. We discovered there was basically one main shaft that sloped down into the earth so we followed that main route. It was wide enough to drive a pickup truck through and was still in a pretty decent condition, so traversing the mine shaft was much easier than we'd first thought. There were many rooms, old machinery and rusting equipment off of this main shaft but we mostly avoided it in the beginning. We were just trying

not to get lost or turned around in the darkness. As we shone our flashlights along the smooth rock walls, we saw that they were almost covered in spray paint graffiti. Mostly just the classic abandoned building stuff. Jimmy was here, swastikas, initials, and dates. But as we got deeper and deeper, the graffiti really thinned out. Whoever was hanging out here before us obviously didn't go too deep into the mine, probably for good reason. As we wandered deeper and deeper into the old abandoned mineshaft, all natural light had faded, and we were relying solely on our high powered flashlights. The air was so stagnant and hazy with particles that even the light from expensive flashlights would only go about 20 feet or so before getting totally obscured by dust. Oh, and that dust has us thanking the big guy upstairs that we'd remembered to pack the respirators. And the glow sticks that we had

brought were basically useless because they would disappear in the haze only a few steps after dropping them, and we had only bought a handful. Once we were about 30 feet below the earth, we started arguing among ourselves. Our little crew was nervous about going deeper with the air quality being so terrible and without a good way to prevent us from getting lost.

We somehow managed to override our anxieties by assuring ourselves that the path was easy and straightforward so we'd have a hard time getting lost. We were going to rely on level-headedness, sense of direction, and flashlight battery life to get out. Despite the agreement to push on, it was becoming very creepy for everyone. We walked in total silence for a long time, hearing nothing but our own footsteps and the steady drip of water coming from somewhere deep in the cave. I think we were all pretty scared at this point, but nobody was willing to admit it to each other, call it bravado or whatever, but we just kept pushing on. Pushing further and further into the mine, we stumbled across something that had us stopped in our tracks. Dug into the side

of the deep stone shaft we were slowly descending was diverging tunnel. Little more than a passage way cut into the rock, it was narrow. You'd have to crouch to go through it, and it was also a good few feet of ground, so it required a scramble to reach it. But that wasn't what made us stop. It was the graffiti. We hadn't seen any of it for a while, and like I said, we assumed the graffiti artists had never gone this deep. But someone else clearly had, and the messages they left were disturbing to say the least. The tunnel was lined with words written in a white chalky substance, words like rot, decay, plague, and carry on. They were just words scrawled by some degenerate, but it scared the life out of us. Who else would come this far just to write such a terrible message

in a mysterious tunnel that broke from the main path? However, no matter how scared we were, there was no turning back now. We had to see where the tunnel led to. Despite our fear, we were overwhelmed by the intense curiosity. So as foolish as it seems now, one by one we crawled through the tunnel to the other side. What we found was a strange flooded chamber. Around the pool of water was a series of these large carved stones, each covered with dozens of burned out candles. There must have been hundreds of pieces of melted wax dripping down each of the stone pieces. The walls had a few twisted, malformed faces scrawled on them, and the tunnel entrance back to the main shaft was ringed with a spray-painted, blood-stained mouth. What was this place?

Some bizarre cloister where black masses were performed or something. An elaborate hoax set up by a bunch of kids. We couldn't find much evidence to figure it all out and we were all absolutely exhausted by this point, both from the exertion and the adrenaline crash. We all crawled out of that weird little chamber and back into the main mine shaft where we promptly headed towards the exit. When we finally saw natural light coming from the main entrance, we were relieved beyond words. We never did figure out what that mysterious cavern was for,

and I think I'm content to leave it at a mystery. No, we didn't hear any eldritch creatures howling in the depths of the tunnel, nor did we find any entranced devil worshippers, but just finding that room, buried deep in an old forgotten mine, was enough to creep all of us out for a long time. Be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, rletsreadofficial, and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video.

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