The Lets Read Podcast - 50: Episode 046 | Night Shift & Haunted House Stories | 24 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Welcome to the forty sixth 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 Night Shift Workers, Meeting the Ghost that Owned Our Home, & Lunatics in the Woods.  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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If you have questions 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. Then MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Back when I was in university, I used to work nights at a pub just a few miles from my parents' house. We lived out in the countryside, so I had to commute to nearby Leeds on weekday mornings, whilst at the weekends, I'd spend my nights earning much-needed beer money. Point is, when my late shift at the pub ended, I'd have to walk about two and a half miles along narrow, poorly lit country lanes in order to get home. Yeah, we had a taxi service in a village nearby, but on the weekend it's pretty much fully booked at all times. That, and I didn't fancy blowing my nightly wages on a taxi at the end of every shift.

I was that frugal student. One of the great things about working pubs in the countryside is that the tips are phenomenal. The sense of community and old-fashioned values meant that farmhands and landed gentry alike would always tip on their orders. Sometimes it was the take your own amount of about 20 pence, but sometimes they'd leave you with maybe four or five pounds of change, especially when they've had a few too many and were feeling overly generous. Anyways, my shifts usually ended at about 11.30pm, once last orders had been called and we'd cleaned down the bars. All the staff

would then usually hang around for a drink until about midnight before going our separate ways. Now this one Saturday in particular had been insanely busy. The weather had been spectacular and there had been some kind of garden festival in the area. This meant that all kinds of people from near and far had rolled through the pub and added to my tips glass. By the end of the night I had 112 pounds. It was more money than I'd ever had in my life and I'd be kidding myself if I were to waste some of it on a taxi, especially when a belly full of lager would see me home no problems. So off I went, merrily meandering homewards feeling like a very rich man

as I planned how to spend my newfound fortune. It was dark out, like really dark, with only a sliver of the moon in the sky to light my way. But I was just too buzzed and cheerful to care. It didn't occur to me once that I would be in any kind of danger. About a mile back into the journey home, I'm blasting some ACDC in my earphones when I see the lights of a car coming up behind me. It passes slowly and for a second I think the driver is about to ask for directions, but the car just keeps on going. Like I said, we'd had a lot of city folks passing through the village since the festival was on, so I thought nothing of not being able to recognize the vehicle or its driver. But once the car had passed me by about 200 yards or so, it just stops in the middle

of the road. I watch it sitting for a minute or so, continuing on my merry way until it dawns on me that it's not going to just drive off. I got the weirdest feeling that it was sat there, waiting for me. I know that sounds paranoid, but sometimes you just get a bad feeling about something don't you? A kind of tight feeling in your stomach that tells you something is badly wrong. So I too stopped walking at the side of the road, just stood there staring at the car's rear lights until it finally revved its engine and took off into the night. I wasn't freaked out but I think I can thank the belly of beer for that. If this had happened while I was sober, I know I'd have much more of a scare.

I'm not some big tough guy, like at all. So when a couple of minutes go by and I see a pair of headlights coming at me from the opposite side of the road, I'm not worried in the slightest. I just keep walking as the car passes me, but I realize as it does so that it's the same car from before, and just like before it stops just a couple of hundred yards down the road from me. I'm now convinced that it's a car full of city folks who have managed to get lost in the dark, so again I stop at the side of the road waiting for it to reverse so

the driver can ask for directions. Only, it doesn't. The car does a U-turn in the middle of the lane, then switches its headlights off and begins to creep slowly down the road towards me. I wasn't freaked out before, but I was then. In fact, I'm not afraid to admit that I was completely and utterly terrified. I had no idea what exactly the driver's intentions were, but they were obviously not good. My head was spinning with grim ideas of what they were planning. Flashes of robbery, kidnapping, and worse. I just started running, looking for a gap in the hedgerows so I could jump into one of the nearby fields to hide. I finally found one, scrambling over the dry stone

wall and badly scraping my elbows in the process. My first thought was to grab my phone from my backpack to call the police but the light of the screen meant that the driver would be able to find me pretty quickly. I panicked, threw it into the back of my bag and decided that hiding was my best option. Even if I did get through to the police it would take them a while to get there, it might be too late by then. So I'm crouching in the base of a hedge, terrified out of my mind, just trying to hide so the driver thinks that I've just legged it off over the fields. The only thing I'm relying on at this point is my sense of hearing. I'm listening for footsteps, the car's engine, anything to give me an idea of what's happening on the other side of the hedge. I know it's cliched but a couple of minutes passing

really did feel like a half an hour and in that time I hadn't heard a single thing coming from the road. When it got to the point that I felt like it was safe to check, I started to slowly edge up towards the section of hedge I dove over, readying myself to peek over the dry stone wall for any signs of the car. It's right then that I heard the sound of car doors slamming. Not one door, but two or three all closing at once. The car hadn't moved. That whole time they'd been sat in the middle of a dark country lane waiting for me to emerge. My heart was pounding at that point. I can't convey just how terrifying it is to know you're being bloody

hunted by a gang of complete strangers. I just bolt, hurtling across the dark field in the direction of a small wooded area. I know the area quite well so despite me not knowing exactly where I would end up, it really didn't matter by that point. It was either Leggett or face being caught by the guys hunting me. I hid out in the woods for as long as I could, watching the field I'd just cross for shadows or torches, but again there seemed to be nothing. When the coast was clear I took off in the opposite direction I'd come, crossing fields and staying off the roads until I could find my way back home. Even though it was the middle of the night I woke my mom and dad and told them exactly what had happened. Naturally they

called the police and arranged for some officers to visit the next morning so I could give a description. A month or so went by and we heard nothing. I'd stopped walking home and had started ponying up for taxis just to make sure I had made it back safe, but I was actually managing to forget about what had happened or at least let it slip to the back of my mind. That's when the police called back. The guys had been arrested for committing an assault on an elderly man just a few villages away from us. They were part of a gang based in nearby Leeds where I went to university who would drive out into the country at night where there are hardly any CCTV cameras before assaulting people as part of some initiation. I was glad that they had been nicked but it still really bothers me that some

people seem to be so willing to commit violence against a total stranger. I still walk places at night sometimes, but I don't use noise-canceling headphones anymore, and I always carry a small penknife, just in case. If you work night shifts too, I'd recommend you do the same. You never know who's out there, lurking in the the darkness just waiting to make someone a victim I work nights in the secure units of a nursing home here in Massachusetts for those of you that don't know the secure unit of any medical facility is where at-risk patients are housed.

So anyone with mental illnesses, degenerative diseases, or general behavioral problems that mean they can't be given the same sort of freedom as other patients. When I'm on the night shift, I'm pretty much locked in alone with the patients. Their rooms jutting off from the long long dimly lit hallway where my desk resides. Nobody likes working up there at night, it's not like it's any busier but the lack of support means you just kind of feel vulnerable. Sure, I can just buzz for help from other night nurses if there's an emergency but other than that it's pretty much just one or two nurses attending the entire ward. That and well, it does get a little spooky sometimes on nights.

I don't believe in anything supernatural. I've been a nurse way too long to still entertain ideas about spirits and other such nonsense. But there have been a few incidents that, on the ward, that have creeped me out. And here are a handful. One night, I'm right in the middle of my night shift. It's like two or three in the morning and the ward is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. So when I hear a voice coming from the end of the hallway it immediately sets me on edge. I can see you was all said, in this almost playful voice. I got up from my desk and looked around, but I was alone. No one was in the hallway, all the patients were still asleep.

I can see you, it said again, even creepier this time. I tried to find the source of the voice, but it seemed to be echoing around the corridor. I checked every room, but each and every one of my patients was fast asleep. I was practically shaking by the time I sat at my desk and I was rigid with fear for the remainder of my shift. I told one of the other nurses about the voice that I had heard when she arrived in the morning to take over. When I described what the voice had said, she grew quiet before solemnly telling me that one of the recently deceased patients used to say that to his younger granddaughter whenever she came to visit. She'd hid behind the curtain for him like a little game, and that's when he'd say I'd see you in that sing-song way.

We eventually discovered that it was someone talking in their sleep, someone who'd witnessed the little game being played between grandfather and granddaughter and had it slip into their unconscious mind. Totally rational explanation, but for a while we were all really freaked out. We had one particular sweet old lady in the ward whose neighbor in the bed next to her was not a very nice person. I mean, not just rude or snarky. I'm talking full-on vile and spiteful. She was horrible to everyone, patients and nurses alike, but she was particularly despicable to the sweet old lady in the bed next to her.

This sweet old lady would just smile and ignore her, occupying herself with her knitting, even though her arthritis made her fingers hurt like the devil, she would say. Better to stay occupied, better to keep the mind busy, she'd always say. We were all real sad when she passed. It was quiet during her sleep, a painless way to go. Thank god for small mercies I suppose. But what was really weird about the whole thing was how her mean neighbor began to act following her passing.

Suddenly her less than friendly neighbor was absolutely terrified to sleep in that room. She flat out refused to sleep in the bed that we'd once had an incredibly hard time getting her out of and if by some chance you did manage to get her into bed she'd anxiously plead with you to leave the lights on. One night she made it all the way out into the hall without her wheelchair which was honestly sort of scary all on its own. I'd never seen her walk without some kind of mobility aid. She was out of breath and there was pure fear in her eyes, the kind I'd never seen in her before. When I called for assistance, myself and another nurse took her to the TV room and let her sleep in one of the recliners. She never, ever said it, but we were all inclined to think what she was afraid of.

We all thought that she was afraid of the sweet old lady that she had been so mean to, coming back to visit her during the night. The next one probably freaked the nursing staff out the most, so I'll end it on this one. We had this Greek grandmother staying with us for a while. She was a first generation immigrant who had lived near Boston for many years and hadn't bothered to learn much English. She'll be talking up a storm. No idea what she's saying but it'll be loud enough to hear all the way down the hall. When I go down to check on her she stops talking and pretends to sleep only to resume her

one-sided conversation when I return to my desk. This happened a few times until she genuinely drifts off but it's a regular occurrence. Most nights she'll repeat this same process talking to herself in a rather loud voice until she falls asleep. So one day her son comes to visit and I jump at the chance to ask him why his mother talks to herself before she falls asleep. He asks her in Greek but the face she pulled required no translation. She looked like her son had just asked her the silliest question she'd ever heard before responding with just a few words. The man in my room. her son relay to me,

she's talking to her friend. I'm sure I don't need to add that she stays in a room where there aren't any men. Now I'm pretty sure that she's just imagining her friend, she's certainly displayed signs of being in the early stages of dementia, but one or two of the other nurses here don't quite believe she is losing her mind. They talk about how she's the most lucid woman on the ward, despite not being able to speak English. Maybe it's because the residents here are so close to death themselves. Maybe it's because the staff are in a constant contact with mortality. Maybe this is just how we deal with the stresses of the job.

But some things happen in this place that we can't entirely explain. Or maybe it's just because we really don't want to explain them. Almost 20 years ago now, I used to work the overnight shift at an animal shelter. I know that's a long time ago, but something happened one night that is burned into my memory. I can recall the whole thing like it was yesterday. The textures, the smells. It's something I've carried with me for nearly two decades my shifts were from 11 at night until 7 in the morning a solid eight hours of sleeplessness that grounded me down over the course of my time there night shifts can be good if you need the money

even better if you're anti-social but the lifestyle grinds you down. Put it this way, I had a full vitamin D deficiency after just six months of working there. It's not a healthy way to live. The animal shelter itself was actually a pretty big place. A horseshoe-shaped building complete with a waiting area, a series of offices, medical examination room, and, of course, hundreds and hundreds of kennels and cages. Aside from once a week when the overnight cleaning staff were there, I spent all of my shifts alone behind the shelter's reception desk that gave me a direct line of sight through the security glass of the shelter's front doors. My only duties were to monitor the emergency phone line, check on the animals now and then, and do some basic filing. I'd pack a few snacks and sandwiches for when I got hungry mid-shift,

and every so often I'd call up the 24-hour pizza joint just a few miles away and get them to deliver a box of hot cheesy joy to push me through the night. Sure, the hours sucked, but working at the animal shelter gave me a great deal of freedom and it paid really well. I mean way better than any other night porter jobs I'd seen advertised. It was quite a happy time in my life which I suppose is why I remember this story so well. It was such an odd event in an otherwise joyful time in my life. Anyway, on the rare occasion that someone came in, it was to drop off a stray animal that they had found or one they no longer could care for. The shelter was always happy to take them in and make them as comfortable as possible. It was kind of nice

being the first point of contact to a lot of these animals. A lot of them were nervous or scared and calming them down with treats and petting was more fulfilling than words can describe. I made a lot of furry friends during my employment at the shelter. I should add that the only exception to the shelter's rescue policy applied to fighting dogs or feral cats. As heartbreaking as it is, dogs that have been trained and conditioned to fight other animals are more often than not hopeless cases. Even if they're sweet and well behaved around humans, if other animals or even small children aren't safe around them, they've no hope of adoption. Most tend to be euthanized, which is something so sad I can't even bring myself to write about it. But even as hard

as these cases are, what happened this one particular night was so much worse. It was just past three in the morning when I finished a cigarette outside and was returning to my desk. It was one of those quiet fall nights where the silence seems to hang heavy in the air, so I heard the sound of footsteps coming from quite a ways away. There was a woman sprinting full pelt down the sidewalk towards the front entrance of the shelter, banging on the glass and buzzing the intercom over and over as she reached the doors. As I moved to greet her, I noticed that her cheeks glistened with fresh tears. Something terrible was obviously happening. I hurried to unlock the glass door, trying to remain calm as I asked her how I could help. She didn't answer the question at first, which is really unusual. Normally,

that's the first thing out of a person's mouth. They've got a thousand questions about adoption, what shots an animal might need, etc. All she asked was if she could come inside. She didn't have an animal with her, so I was beginning to get a little suspicious as to why she was there. But nevertheless, I'm not one to turn away an upset person, so I invited her inside, gave her some tissues to dry her cheeks, and proceeded to try to get more info out of her. When she calms down, she begins to tell me that she needs to get her cat back. This was a problem since I wasn't authorized to return any interred animals without the proper signatures and paperwork,

all of which was in the locked office of one of the resident veterinarians. There was absolutely no way I'd be able to return her animal, especially not in the middle of the night. She'd have to return during regular hours to talk to one of the vets. It's when I tried to explain this to her that things started to go downhill. To my absolute horror, she goes on to explain that she actually came in earlier that day to have her cat put down. She had returned to claim the body in order to give her precious kitty a proper burial.

Seriously those were her exact words. She's still in tears at this point and she's getting gradually more upset again the more she's talking about her dead cat. I just wanted to get her out of here. She didn't seem it at first, but the more I was around her, the more I gathered that she wasn't exactly all there, if that makes sense. So, like a fool, I took a brief description and went looking for her dead cat. The shelter keeps the bodies of euthanized animals in large blue plastic drums. You know the type. The kind that chemicals are kept in in the black plastic lids. These blue drums are in turn kept in a huge walk-in freezer located in the shelter's basement.

I gained access to the room in question, opened the freezer and began to look for whichever barrel had been sealed the previous day. Finding it was the easiest part of the whole process. As I pulled off the black plastic lid, the smell hit me. Even when they're frozen, the animals still gave off this faint, sickly smell of decay. Throw a load of them into the same plastic drum and, well, the stink gets intense. I had to sift through scores of twisted frozen corpses laying them down on the cold metal floor of the walk-in and studying them in order to find the one that matched the woman's scant description. Eventually, I did find the cat that seemed to match the description I was given. But there was one thing. The cat was frozen solid and was actually stuck to another dead cat.

I tried pulling them apart with my bare hands but it was no good. I'd need something else for leverage so I put the frozen mess of bodies on the freezer floor, put one foot on one of the cats and proceeded to peel them from one another with a horrific snapping sound. I nearly puked when I'd seen what I'd done. A huge portion of the cat's frozen flesh had been torn away and was still stuck to its frozen partner. Keeping hold of one that was the crying woman's I threw the other back into the plastic drum, found an opaque plastic bag and returned it to its former owner. She seemed happy enough and actually tried to hug me as she was leaving, but I really didn't feel

like it was worth it. The whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth. I had no idea what she was going to do with that dead cat, even if she did reassure me that she was just going to bury it. Sometimes, even to this day, I wonder whatever happened to that woman. Back in my early twenties, I used to work for a relatively small security contractor. It was a privately owned operation with around 30 employees in total, so we were all pretty tight. We'd get a contract with a factory or a shopping mall, and then it was down to us to sit in that factory for 8-12 hours at a time when the place was closed. So more often than not, I'd be standing guard overnight by myself, completely alone in a totally empty facility. In my two whole years of working security not once did I see a single thing that I could call supernatural. I see a lot of nonsense stories about seeing spirits or hearing

voices from beyond and they make me laugh every time. Some of them are well written, I'll say that much, but anyone who's ever worked night jobs knows that it's not ghosts or ghoulies you need to be afraid of, it's people that are the real danger. Now with that in mind, let me tell you about Pete. After about a year of working with a security firm I was given the responsibility of training new team members. This meant more money, but it also meant I had the pleasure of dealing with some pretty unsavory potential candidates.

So when my boss calls me and asks if I can meet a trainee at some far away site at 5 in the morning, I wasn't entirely thrilled. But still, I accepted. Such an early call meant a few hours of double pay and this is not something I could have turned down. The following morning, I rock up to the parking lot of this large factory complex, still nursing the flask of coffee that had been keeping me warm on what turned out to be a frigid Michigan morning. It's about a quarter to five in the morning and I'm still half asleep so I step out of the car to smoke while I wait for the new guy to show up I'm not waiting for long when a car pulls up so I assume this is the trainee and starts walking towards the car as it slows down in the lot that's when the engine of the car revs wildly and it takes off again. Obviously I'm a little startled by this so I just ignore and stand there, watching in wonder as this car begins to kind of circle the

parking lot, driving erratically the whole time. This is the guy I'm going to be training, some twitchy tweaker who's never going to pass the probation period. Fantastic. I finish my smoke as the car finally comes back around and parks up not far from where I'm standing, but the driver doesn't get out. He just stares at me from his seat, eyeing me suspiciously as I'm just sort of staring back with this confused look on my face. That's when I notice the two kids in the backseat, no older than 10 or 11 and I really start to wonder what's going on. It dawns on me that this isn't just any old trainee, not at all.

This is Pete. Pete is super rough looking, like he'd been a coal miner and heavy smoker since a single digit age. His clothes and mannerisms placed him in his mid-thirties, but the guy didn't look a day older than 50. God knows what sort of things he'd subjected his body to over the years, but if I had to guess, I'd hazard that it began with M and ended with F. No taller than five foot, P was wider than he was tall with a painful, crusty looking rash covering large patches of his face, neck and arms. He gets out of the driver's seat, closes the car door, then commences to speak.

This place ain't easy to find. His rough voice sounds like gravel, if gravel could smoke a pack a day. He then extends a hand for me to shake and when I look down, I notice he's missing two of his fingers. I try not to stare and simply return the handshake, feeling pretty bad for the guy even if he is kind of weird. The sympathy doesn't last long. One of Pete's young kids opens the car door and attempts to clamber out of the car. The kid is also overweight, has a similar rash, but unlike his father, his face is entirely lacking in symmetry.

I mean, the kid was hideous. Dad, can I? The kid begins, but Pete hears this and cuts him off before he can finish. Get back in the car, Jacob. He barked, so loud and angrily that it practically made me jump. Get back in the car and don't you dare get out again. I'm just stunned at this. I cannot believe this guy is talking to his own kid like this in front of a prospective colleague, but no matter how much I initially dislike him, I still have to show him around the factory space and give him a rundown of his job description. So I'm pretty nervous as I begin to take Pete around the factory's perimeter fence, explaining the patrolling system we have to ensure any fencing or barriers aren't compromised. I show him all the emergency procedures we follow if a break-in should occur,

all that stuff, when I notice that Pete smells really bad. It sounds mean, but I wasn't surprised in the least bit. I mean, since when does a guy like that smell like roses? But it was the questions he was asking me that I found really disturbing. He asked me if I'm screwing any of the girls that work at the factory, if he can hunt on the grounds, that sort of thing. He also took a big interest in any violent or threatening incidents I experienced during my employment, pressing on the details, taking way too much amusement in some pretty harrowing stories. When we're done, he tries making small talk for, I'm not kidding, about a half an hour, just rambling on and on and

following up with the same line of bizarre questions surrounding my personal life. I immediately call my boss and tell him just how weird and sketchy this guy is. How it was nice of him to give the guy a break but I thought he'd be a serious risk to company contracts. But my boss didn't want to hear it. For some reason he was dead set on giving the guy the job. I wondered if we were even talking about the same person and actually asked at one point if we're still talking about this Pete guy. That's when my boss flipped out on me.

He told me not to question his judgment and to be back the next day at 5 in the morning to carry on with Pete's induction. He'd never ever spoken to me like that before. I'm pretty sure he'd never spoken to anyone like that before. Just who was this Pete guy to him? A friend? A relative, I wondered. The drive back to my hometown took about two hours and the whole time I'm racking my brain as to why my boss would defend a guy like that. There was no way I'm going to call back and ask him myself, but there was also no way I'm going to spend an entire shift with Pete the very next day. Scrubbing myself clean in the shower for like a half hour,

terrified that Pete's skin condition was contagious, I mulled over my options. I decided to just bite the bullet and call my boss. After a long conversation, my boss conceded and transferred me over to a different site. I would never have to lay eyes on Pete ever again. But ten years later, that encounter still bothers me. I wonder how Pete's kids are doing, and if they're doomed to live the same bizarre life as their father. For most of my twenties, I was a munitions systems technician in the US Air Force, serving in a massive ordnance storage facility in Germany.

This place had like a dozen buildings, including many underground bunkers that contained literally thousands of bombs. All in all, the place must have covered about 11 or 12 square miles. This one particular storage site was completely forested and heavily populated with wildlife. Most are deforested because of the obvious fire hazard, but the part of Bavaria that this bomb dump was in required that the area be maintained as a natural preserve. Twice a day we had to run a perimeter security check to make sure that no holes had been cut through the fence and all the buildings were closed and locked. The checks were run by the morning and afternoon crews unless they messed up and

unfortunately for me one time they did. So at like one in the morning one night some moron from command suddenly realized that there hadn't been an evening security check so he bolts down to our office room and asks us to get it done before we all get disciplined. We were not happy about this. A buddy and I had just finished regular duties and had settled in to play Xbox for an hour or two, and naturally we were the ones who were voluntold to go do it. Reluctantly, we grabbed our radios and flashlights and then headed out to Motorpool to grab a truck. First we run the perimeter fence check. It's not a massive task, but we have to cruise pretty slowly to get a good look, so it's a time-consuming ordeal.

Around two we started off with the building checks. Only my buddy decides he wants to get a smoke break in before we continue, since the check is going to take another hour or so. He proceeds to shut the truck off, drop the tailgate, then we get out and just stand there in utter darkness while he smokes. To this day I don't know why in God's name he chose to shut that ignition off. When we jumped back in and tried to start up the truck, nothing happened. The ignition just wouldn't fire. No attempted turnover, no sputters, nothing. I just figured we had a dead battery or something. We radio into command about the breakdown,

even more annoyed since we weren't even supposed to be there. We heard nothing back, just silence. Again and again we tried, but still we were met with total silence. I must have thumbed the radio for a good five minutes before we finally accepted that we would be walking all the way back to barracks. We should have stayed on the road. We would have had to walk about a click or so to the main roadway, the turn east for another three miles. Not a particularly long walk but like I said we were majorly angry that we were stuck out here so we foolishly decided to take a shortcut through the woods. The trees were so dense that it was pretty hard to work or snake your way through them and even with our flashlights navigation was still pretty hard. It was probably only about 20 minutes or so since we

had left the truck, but it may as well have been hours by the time we reached a row of buildings. These were all World War II era brick structures and they were practically falling apart, rusted all over and coated in moss. Only thing we kept in them were plain MK-82, your cheapest, most basic kind of aerial ordnance. We started walking down the gravel road that these buildings lined, passing one after the other until, to our absolute shock and bemusement, we saw that one of our side doors was just wide open. Now this is bad, really bad. Like some really bad people could have broken in and stolen a buttload of high explosives to sell in the black market.

It's not just the kind of thing that leads to expulsion from the military. People go to prison for this kind of thing for long, long periods of time. My buddy scrambles to report this via his radio, but just like like before there is no response from command. I understand that equipment has dramatically improved since the last time I was serving but back then our personal radios were notoriously unreliable. Seriously one of the techniques to fix them was simply calling it the six foot drop. For the second time that night we shared a moment of grim realization as we understood that we'd have to search the place ourselves. We took out our sidearm and began to approach the open

door. It smelled like wet concrete and mildew as I shined my flashlight down a row of bombs. There must have been hundreds in there, thousands. When we were satisfied the place was clear we began to depart, intent on rushing back to command to tell them the bad news as soon as possible. If we were diligent we could cover our butts and ensure that any court-martials would not be involving us. That's when I heard it, the most blood-curdling howl I've ever heard in my life. Something was in the bunker, with us. My heart was in my throat. Each of us was panicking at the thought of what it could be. Then we were running, bolting through the woods as fast as our legs could carry us.

We found a kind of clearing in the trees, turned off our flashlights, then began to stalk backwards towards the bunker, sidearms drawn and safeties off. We just sat there panting, watching the door. Whatever was in there, it seemed to have no interest in following us out, but we also knew we had to go shut the door. Terrified, we both began walking up to it slowly, careful not to shine the flashlight into the opening. We paused about three feet from the door, gathered up a little courage, then pounced on the thing, slamming the door shut and bolting it shut before whatever was in there could make a break for it. Crisis averted, or so we thought.

Shaken, we started up the gravel road towards the main roadway, ready to tell command that we had something trapped inside the still-unsecure Unit 65. But once we were only about half a mile away from the barracks, another howl echoed around through the forest. We froze. It was coming from just ahead of us. The most horrible, gut-twisting sound I've ever heard with my own two ears. I shined my flashlight about, but there was still nothing but dense, dark foliage. I started to sense movement around us. Then we saw them. Eyes glowing in the beam of my flashlight. I sent the beam to and fro panicking as more and

more pairs of glowing yellow eyes began to emerge from the pitch black night. Eyes, eyes everywhere, huge yellow eyes glowing as they were fixed on us. We were literally surrounded. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't make a sound. We just were frozen in complete and utter terror, watching as a whole herd of deer rose up from their sleeping spots and lazily cantered away. We both began howling with laughter. I had never felt so relieved in all of my life. Once we had laughed off the fact that we were huge wussies we walked the rest of the way back to our barracks the combination of trudging through pitch black woods and hearing the screams had primed us for sheer terror by the time we stumbled on the herd of deer normally deer feed at night

but it was one of those especially dark moonless nights when even they decided it's too creepy to go out for a nibble. The screams turned out to be an owl. Yeah, I know, an owl of all things. A preliminary investigation discovered that it was a bunch of German teenagers from a nearby town that had broken into the bomb depot. They had no idea what was in there and were terrified when they discovered the bombs, hence them just running and leaving the doors wide open. But heads did roll as a result. The colonel on base ended up being moved on and the guy they replaced him with was a real hard nose. So as much as we hated the new CO, there were never any more incidents that meant we had to walk through the woods in the wee small hours. And for that, we were extremely grateful.

Back when I was still a teenager, I took a part-time job stocking shelves at Meijer. And like a lot of kids my age, I was automatically given the night shift. No kids, no school, you're on the third shift. A lot of people resent that and don't even bother turning up for their first shifts, but the schedule kind of suited me. I've always been a night owl, so getting to work when I'd normally be awake anyways is something that never really bothered me. So on the morning in question, I walked down the center aisle and noticed this guy walking through the store.

He'd look to be an older guy wearing a poorly fitted suit. I didn't really think anything of it at first because sometimes the regional manager would show up early at this time. As we approached one another, I could get a good view of his face. When we got within 10 feet of each other I wished him a good morning but I still couldn't really see his face all that well. He gave a cheerful good morning in response and I just continued on my way to the stock room without giving it too much thought. The manager of the morning team entered the stock room and started giving me the instructions for the seasonal items I'd be dealing with that morning. After she finished giving me my action items, I asked who the corporate guy was who'd visited that morning.

She gave me this weird look, let out a little laugh, and then told me that we weren't expecting anyone. She asked for a description and I shared it with her. She felt it could be the new regional marketing guy but that couldn't be because he doesn't have keys and they never come at 2am. She darted off to the neighboring admin office to find out if anyone was expected and I went back to work. A little while later my manager comes back with more questions about the guy I'd seen. She actually asked me if I was trying to prank her when I say no. She asks if I've had anything to drink. I swore to her that I'd seen this guy and we'd even exchanged words. There was no way that I'd made a mistake or I was making

something up. My manager is one of the most confident, cheerful people I've ever met. She's honestly a pleasure to work with and she's always in a good mood. This was like the one time that I saw her get really serious. She didn't smile at all as she asked me to accompany her to the office to check the camera feed. I thought she was just worried she'd missed a corporate visit but little did I know something entirely different was happening. I was really amazed at the kind of camera technology that management had access to. They were not just using the cameras for security purposes, but for marketing research too.

The software that would capture shopping behavior that helped Meyer identify where to put items on the floor. To a tech nerd like me, it was pretty impressive. She pulled up the interface for the cameras and set the timer to the hour we arrived. When I saw myself walking down the aisle there was no one else with me. I couldn't remember exactly where myself and the night visitor had crossed paths but I figured it must have been a different place than the camera shown. With the same unusual stern look on her face, she asked if I was drunk again. I was actually starting to question my own sanity at that point, but I was already tired and felt like I was going nuts. She pulled up the next camera angle and this time, we saw a shadowy figure moving around in the back of the store. They were scrambling around weaving through the clothing racks with the clothes moving around on their hangers.

I was vindicated. I practically jumped up and down as I pointed and told her that that was who I'd seen. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't crazy. There had been a visitor in that store that morning. My manager continued to switch camera angles to try to get a better look at this guy in the suit. Via one angle we could make out the same dark shape that must have been the visitor. Only this time it was moving around really fast and low to the ground. It was almost like he was running on all fours like an animal. I told her there is no way the guy I saw was so athletic. He was well into his fifties and looked pretty frail in that poorly fitting suit.

We then checked the cameras covering the entrances from the time we'd all arrived, trying to catch the guy leaving to get a better look at him. It slowly dawned on us that whoever I had been seeing wandering the aisles was still in the store, hiding, lurking somewhere. It was at that point that my manager decided to call the cops. For safety reasons, the manager called all team members to the staff lounge on the pretense of a team meeting. She told the 911 dispatcher to come to the back of the building because she felt the intruder was still in the middle of the store. We continued to look through different camera angles until the police made their way to our office. Two officers walk in and we started to relay the

information that we could. After explaining that we believe the person is still in the building, one cop said that he would stay with us and the other volunteered to walk the floor. The cop that stayed asked me to see the CCTV footage. I sat there watching the cop's face instead of the video footage. He was obviously confused and disturbed by what he was seeing. At one point he even asked us if we were sure it wasn't a stray dog or something. He looked at the video system hardware and asked my manager what year it was purchased. She explained that it was brand new, that it had been recently tested, and there was no reason that any blurring or distortion should be occurring.

He started to question the quality of the video. Then I told him I saw the guy this morning but he looked normal considering it was dark. I explained that we both said good morning and he was wearing typical business clothes. I had definitely not imagined this whole thing. Within ten minutes additional patrol men began to show up and they completed a comprehensive search of the store area. We all stayed in the back watching the cops watch the video. After looking through all the video and searching the floor nobody was found and no video showed him leaving. They got out their paperwork and started to interview us. During this time we viewed all camera angles in fast mode to see if we could see him before we all arrived. We found one instance where a

coat fell from the hang hanger onto the ground but nothing near it. No video of anyone except the crew that closed. The entry system log was shared showing no intrusion or access request was made. In the end they had no idea who it was or what exactly happened. A report was filed and video was taken. The cops went to the neighboring stores and went through their video feeds. Nothing. We opened up at usual time and no shelves were stocked beforehand. I'm not saying that what happened that morning was anything supernatural, but this guy's ability to just show up and disappear is something I've never forgotten. Strange people were out there in the wee small hours of the morning and I just pray I never have to run into him again.

It was pretty quiet at the gas station and it was around a quarter till ten. There were no customers in the store and my co-worker and I were doing the usual cleaning chores. I was busy cleaning the large glass doors when my co-worker said something to me. I turned to respond and when I turned back to cleaning the glass door I nearly wet myself as I see a tall man in a sweater wearing a beanie and the object that scared me the most, a black face mask. My mind begins racing as I reach for my keychain to lock the door but the man was moving too fast and was inside before I could unclip the keys from my pants. The man looked at me and in my mind I thought he was sizing me up.

I ready myself for whatever this guy plans to do. My heart was racing a mile a second and I almost thought that this was going to be it, that we were about to be robbed. That's when the man pulls his mask down and reveals his face. He asks if we had restrooms and I gesture him towards the restrooms. As he walks away he pulls his mask up again as he passes my co-worker who was quickly but quietly coming up to me. We both were shocked at what was going on but both of us had hoped that this guy meant no harm. Five minutes later the guy comes back from the restroom and he quickly leaves the store. After a little while my heart stopped racing and things calmed down. That's when I made a realization I had seen a man who looked a lot like the masked man walking around the station and peering through the windows at the inside of

the station. I don't know if they were the same person or not but after thinking about it for a bit I realized the guy may have been thinking about causing trouble, but when he saw my 6'8", 200 pound co-worker walking towards him, he decided against it. I have to go back to close the station tonight. I will be carrying extra protective measures on my person, but I am hoping he doesn't return. Or if he does, he doesn't have that mask. Every gas station employee has that fear of a holdup, and last year a station in the same chain I work for in the same city was robbed, so the fear is especially real for me. I grew up in a small South Texas town, about an hour south of San Antonio.

My mom and I spent years at my grandmother's home before she made enough money to get us out. I was an only child and my mother was a single parent. The home we moved into was bigger than we needed for just the two of us. My mother had opened up her own floral business and I spent a lot of time at home alone during the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years. You have to understand the layout of this home to fully picture the events that occurred there. My bedroom had many doorways, one to the living room, one to the family room, one to the main bath and one to the bedroom next to me which was empty. My room was positioned in the middle of the house, the family room to the back, and a big L-shaped room to the front which was the dining and living room.

When we moved in the home it was completely empty except for two items. One big antique wooden dresser and an old old rocking chair. After some time of us living in the home we incorporated these two furniture pieces with our own. More importantly was the rocking chair. There was weird things that would happen. The usual lights being turned on and doors being opened when you know that they had been closed earlier. But the thing that stood out the most was, do you remember the older TVs? The one with the tube in the back? When you turned them on you could hear the electronics working inside to turn on the screen, almost like a hissing sound. Well,

early in the morning, just about every day I could hear that sound coming from the living room in front of my bedroom. The thing is that we didn't have a TV in that room. There wasn't even a cable connection in there, and we lived too far to pick up any kind of over-the-air signal. I always came up with a logical explanation for it. Neighbors, maybe? If it were quiet enough, you could hear the voices, like if someone were watching the news. I'd usually only hear this when my mom was working and I was home alone. Between the kitchen and the dining room there was a swinging door that would open in either direction. Only problem was that the kitchen floor was a bit warped so the door would only open about a foot or so towards the kitchen but would fully open towards the dining room.

On a regular day or night I would grab what I needed from the kitchen, make my way through the family room and head into my bedroom. But this one particular night I made a bowl of cereal and headed through the dining room. As I made my way through the L-shaped room turning the corner into the living room, there was an old lady with crochet needles in her hands and a partial sock hanging from them, sitting in the rocking chair that came with the house. We made eye contact. She had this look on her face like she was frightened to see me. Knowing that it was just my mom and I that lived here wasn't the odd part. We're Hispanic, my extended family was also. The old lady I was staring at was Caucasian and what made it clear to me that what I was looking at was the carpet had a floral print design with vines and the harder

I looked at her the more I could see she was transparent. I could start to see the carpet right through her. Finally at this point the only thing that went through my mind was Ghost. At this moment, I knew I had two options. Either turn around and run into the door that will only open a foot into the kitchen and slam my face into it because I'll be running at 100mph, or run right by her into my room. So I ran right by her and closed my door. Up until this moment I didn't believe in ghosts. I was more concerned about being abducted by aliens or something more sinister. I was so scared I didn't say anything for months. The TV noise continued, the lights being switched

on and off did also, but I didn't see anything. We were fixing on moving out soon, so I finally told my mom what I had seen. She laughed and said to come with me. I didn't know where we were going, but it turned out she was delivering the written notice to the landlord that we were leaving. By this time, they had become somewhat friends and spent a few moments catching up and talking. I sat in her living room and noticed some decor hanging on the walls, designs made of crochet. Then at the end of the room was an 8x10 frame photo of the woman that I had just seen a few months back. It was her mother's home.

She had passed and we were the first ones to rent the home since. I'll never forget the look on her face when she made eye contact with me. I am 1000% sure I know what I saw and to know the history and my father had just been let go at work. We lived in my parents' dream home in a hole in the wall called Brookfield, New Hampshire, and they absolutely hated that we had to move. We ended up finding a home for rent in Wolfboro Falls that was a historical site built in 1800 and listed from 1912 as the location the history of Wolfboro was written. This is where things started to get a bit weird. I have always been very sensitive to the paranormal, as well as my dad. The house we lived in before, where I practically grew up until we moved,

did not have any bad spirits but I would tell my mom that there was a woman and baby in my closet. I would tell her people talked in my bedroom. My dad had the same experiences with talking but that was the extent of the activity in that house. The house we rented however was absolutely riddled with activity. My dad took one step in and decided he would be staying in our former home until the very last minute he could. He stayed with just a reclining chair and a fridge completely by himself even after my mom voiced how much she hated the idea. We didn't really have anything happening when it was my mom, myself, and my two brothers but when my dad was literally forced to start actually sleeping in this house, the atmosphere was completely different. We started hearing disembodied

knocking on walls, footsteps up and down the hallways, and capturing orbs and photos that were so crystal clear that you could see the actual electricity inside of them. I'm still looking for them, I don't know if my mom still has them or not. Our three cats would stare at the corner of our dining room wall between the downstairs bathroom and living room so intensely that even clapping in their face or picking them up wouldn't make them flinch. They sat there for a solid 30 minutes straight just watching the corner almost every day. That corner was also where my older brother's friend and his girlfriend took one look at and refused to come back to our house.

They never said why but I'm guessing it wasn't a good reason. My brother started sleeping in his car that he parked in the parking lot of the church across the reason. My brother started sleeping in his car that he parked in the parking lot of the church across the street. My father started drinking heavily to the point that my mom told him to choose alcohol or us. He only answered with well it's going to be hard to say goodbye and that absolutely terrified me. And my little brother who was extremely mild-mannered and complained about next to nothing started telling my mom he hated the house so much it made him angry. He started to self-harm in the form of digging his own nails into his forearms whenever he got that level of angry. And people

actually started refusing to enter our home. My younger cousins called our attic the ghost place with zero prompting and because of that my mom went up and started taking pictures, asking questions which was a bad idea. After she did that my closet door would slam open and shut at random times during the night. Knocking started on my little brother's bedroom wall that he would ask to stop because it was scaring him. It would actually stop for a good 15 minutes before starting up again and he usually ended up going downstairs to avoid it. And our house was suddenly infested with bees, ants, and fleas. All of which we had literally never had a problem with. My dad was still out of work because he's gotten a medical related disability that almost ended his life twice so he would be home during

the day by himself and one day he was folding clothes when he heard what he still swears sounded like someone running down the stairs in heavy boots. He literally thought it was my brother and came out of the master bedroom to yell at him but there was nobody else in heavy boots. He literally thought it was my brother and came out of the master bedroom to yell at him but there was nobody else in the house. He still gets noticeable goosebumps talking about it. At that point my parents decided we needed to get out of that place. We packed up, took the first place we found and tried to inform the landowner that her house was haunted. He called up my mom and said that even with multiple exterminators they couldn't stop the infestations for close to

a year and they were all completely baffled. My mom and I drove by a few years back while visiting friends. We moved down to North Carolina after my parents divorced nearly nine years ago and I had just glanced at it out of curiosity to see if it was rented out again. Nobody was living in the house, no lights were on, no cars in the driveway but there was someone standing in the first floor window looking at us and it still makes me sick to my stomach thinking about it. It was dark and kind of murky looking like if you stand behind one of the thick screen doors which was impossible because the windows were glass. It happened very quickly then vanished and I didn't say anything in case it scared my mom but she actually ended up slamming on the brakes and asking if I saw what she saw. I didn't see features, just what I can

call an idea of a face, and she swears she saw an older woman, but all I know for sure is that that was 100% not a normal face. I will never, and I repeat never, go back to that house. There's a local, famously haunted road in my town called Upson Road. However, it is more commonly known as Green Lady Cemetery Road. You can look it up online. There have been lots of reports of incidents on this road. It's a hot spot. If you grew up in my town, you've been down GLCR. I could go on for days telling you about stories I've heard from other people about this location, but I would rather tell you about the two experiences I've had on this road.

The second one made me swear to never go down that road again, daytime or night. The road had never been paved. They've left it a terribly bumpy and dirt road to stop people from going down it. Most times of the years, the town puts up barriers so no one drives down it. Not because it's a walking path but simply because they don't want people going down there. At one end of the road there is an old piece of property that the town bought that you often see a police car sitting in. If you decide to pull on to GLCR you will be pulled over immediately and be told you're trespassing, even though it is in fact public property. They can't legally stop you from driving down there, but most people don't know that and will turn around. The road starts

off as just a wooded dirt road. It's only about a mile long, so you can drastically see a change of scenery in a very short amount of time. As you pass the wooded area you come up to a section of road where on your right is a small swamp and on the left is more forest. However nothing seems to be able to live out there. When you hit this section of road you're officially in the hot spot. If you park your car and look around you'll notice that trees don't seem to grow there. They're all dead and rotten. You will not hear birds chirping. It's completely silent. Going just slightly further up the road just past the swamp is where things get very eerie. On the left hand side of the road is a very very old cemetery where the green lady stays. The headstones are all dated about 17 and 1800s. There is also a small foundation next to the cemetery where a house used to stand.

It's been reported time and time again that people have witnessed a green mist floating around the cemetery. People have seen this green mist form into the shape of a woman in a dress, walk back and forth around the cemetery. There are a few theories as to who the woman is but I'm not completely sure anyone knows exactly who she is. It's a bit of a rite of passage here in town where every kid who gets their driver's license goes down GLCR at night time just to be able to say they've done it. Here are my two stories about GLCR. When I purchased my first car, the first thing my friend Jordan and I did was take a drive down this road. I had picked him up at his house at around 10.30 at night and we drove over there.

It had been extremely hot that day and towards the night time it had rained a bit and cooled down a bunch. That combined with the swamp being on the road, it had rained a bit and cooled down a bunch. That combined with the swamp being on the road it was so foggy that you couldn't see more than three feet in front of you. It was absolutely the worst time to be driving down there to be totally honest. We had both been a bit nervous and the fog wasn't helping us at all. We had been creeping down the road slowly and we couldn't really see where we were going. We had gotten about 200 feet from the cemetery when a teenager comes running out of the fog and runs right past our car. We didn't recognize him but man this kid was bolting down that road. He was dressed in a gray Nike t-shirt and black basketball shorts. He looked like he was about our age,

so we were even more confused that we didn't recognize him. Jordan and I both agreed that the kid looked like he was running away from something, so we decided to turn around to offer him a ride. Mind you, there is a ton of bears and other large carnivores, so we had thought maybe something was chasing him. I quickly turned the car around and started driving back the direction the kid was running. We drove for a little bit and we didn't see him. The fog had started to clear up a bit so we were able to see a decent distance in front of us but we still couldn't see him. He wasn't on the road, he wasn't in the forest, he was just gone.

I rolled down my window and started to yell out, hey man are you okay? Do you need a ride? Hoping that maybe the kid would pop out from behind a tree or something. But nothing, the kid was gone. Maybe he was some kid who decided to walk down that road at night and got spooked maybe he saw our headlights and thought we were the cops and hid from us we still don't know to this day we had asked around in school if anyone we knew had gone for a walk down glcr that night before and we never heard anything if there was a kid out there that late and he ran up into the forest that's even scarier than the thought of a ghost teen running past our car. I'll never forget the look on that kid's face

as he ran past the car. He looked like he was scared, panicking. I really wish we were able to find out who he was. Now for the second and final experience, Jordan, the same friend from story one, had gotten his first car, so obviously the first thing we had to do was go down GLCR. The weird thing about this drive is that once again, as we got closer to the cemetery, a thick layer of fog had started to pour out of the trees from the swamp, although the weather had been the same all day. No rain, no temperature drops, nothing. Luckily this fog wasn't as thick as before and we could see in front of us. We had gotten up to the cemetery and Jordan parked the car. We sat around for a while and looked at the cemetery, the forest, just observed everything. After five or so minutes, Jordan looked

to me and says, dude, how weird would it be if I looked in the rearview mirror and there was someone in the backseat? Who says that? I mean, honestly, dude, look where we are. That's not even a joke. That's seriously not funny, bro. I told him. He looked up at the mirror and screamed. I spun around in the back seat and nothing was there. He starts laughing and says I got you. Again, you are not funny, Jordan. He didn't want to keep wasting gas so he turned off the car and shut off the headlights.

Now, this idiot has us sitting on a famously haunted road in the middle of the night in pitch black. We're parked right in front of the old building foundation so the cemetery is just ahead to the right. We sat there for another few minutes, smoking cigarettes and just talking about nonsense. I'm kind of staring off into the trees at this point, honestly a bit bored. When out of nowhere Jordan says, Hey, there's someone in the forest. I shrug it off assuming he's messing with me again. When I see a subtle light in the forest behind the cemetery. It looked like a flashlight with batteries that were as close to dead as they could be. The light vanished after a few seconds and we both sat there with our eyes glued to the patch of forest. Roughly 30 seconds later, a tall, ovular light started to appear in the same spot

the light came from. Jordan says to me, okay dude, I'm done, let's go go and I tell him no no no hang on dude wait his hands are on the key and he's ready to start up the truck and drive away the light was very faded a little hard to see but when the forest behind it is pitch black it stood out it slowly started to move along the rock wall at the backside of the cemetery and Jordan started up the truck. He was so ready to leave. As his headlights kicked on, we saw a green mist floating around on the road. Jordan yells out, forget this, and slams the truck in reverse and backed us up until he felt far away enough to turn all the way around. We had always heard reports of the green mist.

Supposedly if you wait long enough you'll eventually see the green lady walk around in the mist, but we were too big of a bunch of babies to see what happened. I never thought that the green mist was real until that night, and to this day I swear I will never drive down that road again. I will preface this by explaining that I've always been a skeptic regarding paranormal activity, ghosts, stories, demons, etc. If you ask me today, I'd still say that I don't particularly believe in that stuff. I find them really interesting and love scary movies,

but I've always been of the mindset that until proven objectively by science, that this paranormal stuff is all misunderstandings or hoaxes. That said, I have a handful of creepy unexplained events happen in my life, none of which have been particularly traumatizing or life-changing to me, but still creepy and unexplained to this day. I've told only my girlfriend and my older sister about this stuff. I'm always on Reddit, however, so I figured this would be the place to get this stuff off my chest in a slightly more public manner. Around my sophomore year in high school I had a small room toward the front of the house. I live in a raised ranch style home

for those who know what type of layout they typically have. My parents had the largest room across the hall and my sister had the room at the end of the hall between my own and my parents. I had a small box TV on one of those ceiling wall mounts that I used to play video games on. I would often play them in bed after finishing homework until pretty late at night. One night, probably at around 11pm to midnight, I had finished playing a game and was pretty tired, so I got myself into bed and spent maybe 20 minutes laying in bed, very close to falling asleep, with my door cracked open a few inches. I noticed who I thought was my mom, leaning into

my door when she said something to me. I was yawning at the time, so I couldn't hear what she said. I couldn't tell what she said. I couldn't tell what she said but it was definitely plainly spoken English at a normal tone of voice. Then she walked down the hall toward the kitchen. I said huh? We got no reply. So I said mom I couldn't hear you what did you say? No reply again. So I got out of bed and walked to my door, leaned into the hallway and called for her. But all the lights at the end of the house were off. Nobody was in the kitchen like I thought she was. I figured I must have been seeing things and that she instead went into her room or perhaps down the hall to the bathroom which also had a door to her room.

So I opened her bedroom door, saw her dead asleep, snoring, next to my dad, also very asleep and also snoring. I tried asking her what she wanted but she wasn't waking up. So naturally I figured it must have been my sister instead. All I knew for sure was it was a woman. I opened her door and asked her what she had said to me in my room but she was rolled up in her blankets in a deep sleep as well. I got angry and called her name to wake her up and when she did I asked again. She got angry with me and said she wasn't in my room. I was the only one awake in the house before getting out of bed so it seems like none of

them had come into my room like I thought. This freaked me out and I slept with my door shut and the lights on that night. Connecticut is rich in history. It's filled to the brim with historical sites and home to some important events in history. However, Connecticut is also rich in paranormal events. It's been noted to be one of, if not the most haunted states in America. If you were to go on Google and search Connecticut hauntings, you'll find plenty of examples of famous hauntings that have happened in Connecticut,

as well as a couple of famous movies. However, we're going to focus on just one today. Dudleytown. In northwest Connecticut, there is a town called Cornwall. It's rich in farmland and good old country folk. It's gone through quite a few changes over the years. However, one of the most notable, however not well known, is the small section of Cornwall known as Dudleytown. It rests in a secluded area supposed to be on an Indian tribal ground in between three hills. The town has been abandoned since the late to early 1800s.

Now there's people out there far more versed on the town history than I am but I know enough to share with you what makes this town so interesting and so creepy. In the mid-1700s, the Dudley family moved on to a secluded plot of land after moving to America from Europe. The Dudley family had been known for being followed by a curse that had followed their family all around Europe. Moving to America was hopefully the beginning of the great fortunes and a curseless life. The family soon found that the curse may have caught up with them. They found that the land that they purchased wasn't much good for farming as the soil and dirt was completely filled with large rocks that went deep into the ground.

Which, let's be fair, isn't much of a surprise considering that every side of the town was surrounded by mountains. Because of the mountains, sunlight would vanish early into the day so plants struggled to survive. By midday the town was completely covered in shadows and nighttime came early, leaving the village pitch black until the following morning. The Dudleys did make some money off of their timber, however surviving did not come easily as they had hoped. The Dudleys did make some money off of their timber However, surviving did not come easily as they had hoped The Dudleys' curse had began to rear its ugly face after a short while Citizens of the village started to experience bizarre happenings Some people had reported very strange creatures lurking in the surrounding forest Some of the workers cutting down timber had reported seeing sickly animals lurking in the

forest. They had reported seeing bizarre creatures that they'd never witnessed before walking around the outside of town. Some villagers had even reported seeing demon-like creatures skulking around town. After the reports began to circulate, strange occurrences began to arise. Townsfolk had began to die often, some due to accidents while working, some in ways that couldn't quite be explained. People had also started reporting family members and friends acting strange. Shortly after, reports of demonic possession began to circulate through town. After a while, people began to leave town and find shelter elsewhere. Eventually, the town was completely empty. The houses were torn down, any remaining useful lumber was cleared out and all that remained was some old cellars and

foundations of old homes. Dudleytown remained a sightseeing attraction for paranormal enthusiasts for years to come However, it also became a popular place for vandalism Due to vandalism, the local police began to keep their eyes on the main road into Dudleytown Also known as the Dark Entry Forest While Dudleytown is still accessible by hiking trails The police have made it quite a bit more difficult to access. I went there with some friends back in high school in 2006, maybe 2007. While we did not personally have any experiences that night, we did notice that the town had a bizarre silence to it.

No crickets, no birds, no bats, nothing. Which for a Connecticut forest is extremely bizarre. Our forests are lush with living creatures and for there to be any silence is unheard of. The town absolutely has an extremely bizarre negative energy to it. You'll also catch a strange wind come through town. You won't hear any leaves rustle from it. You won't even hear the wind itself but it will be a frigid wind even in the middle of summer and when it does make a sound

it can very easily sound like whispering which may be explainable by the mountains or possibly something else. Now as I said when I went there I didn't experience much. It was absolutely creepy and the energy is off but nothing much besides for that. However our friend Jason had brought us down there. He's actually camped out overnight in town and he's a veteran of exploring Dudleytown. On the hike in he had told us a few stories of his experiences over the years. Now, as there are stories from a third party, I cannot corroborate any of the stories, but I would tend to believe Jason, possibly with slight exaggeration. One of the stories he had told us was about the first and last time he camped out overnight. He and two of his friends had set up a tent in the foundation of an old house While they were laying in the tent getting ready to go to sleep They all had heard what sounded like someone wearing boots

Walking across a wooden floor It only lasted for a couple of seconds But it had freaked everyone out enough that they weren't able to fall asleep He had explained that at this point they were all very exhausted. Although couldn't sleep perhaps the exhaustion have played a part in their experiences but the fact that everyone experienced the same event makes it hard to blame the exhaustion. After the footsteps everyone sat up in the tent and began to talk about what they had heard and were all a bit shocked.

Jason had decided to light up a cigarette a minute or so after the footsteps, however it refused to stay lit. He would light it, take a puff, and then it would go out seconds later. He had began to get frustrated with it and threw the cigarette out of the tent. He checked his watch and decided that maybe it was a good idea to try to sleep again. When he checked his watch it was about 1.33am and they had to be up by 5am. They needed to pack up and leave before sunrise in case any police came through to patrol. Everyone talked for a minute and tried to fall asleep again. They all laid down and tried to sleep. Everyone had tossed and turned and none of them were able to stay comfortable. They all laid down and tried to sleep. Everyone had tossed and turned and none of them were able to stay comfortable. They all had complained about the sensation that their skin

was crawling. They had all experienced sudden hot flashes and all night they'd felt as though someone was watching them. Jason had finally sat up and decided he just wasn't going to be able to sleep. He pulled out his phone to text his girlfriend and noticed his phone had said it was about 1.35am. They were all far beyond confusion. They felt as though they had been tossing and turning in their sleeping bags for at least a half hour but it had only been a couple of minutes. For the next hour or so they sat in their tent smoking cigarettes and having random conversations. However their camping trip was turned upside down when at around 3.20am they

heard a loud crunching of leaves coming from the forest next to them. The footsteps had come out of nowhere. They didn't hear the footsteps start further away and come closer, they just started and seemed to start out of nowhere, at most 30 or 40 feet from the tent. They had thought maybe it was a bear or deer, but the footsteps were abnormal. Jason had described it to me as though someone would take two quick steps, then stop for a second or two, then take another two steps, stop for a second or two, and then take two more quick steps. Almost as though someone was leaping from one point to another. Everyone in the tent began to panic. Everyone had a weapon of some kind in their hand and sat there frozen while the footsteps circled the trees outside of the tent.

The footsteps stopped after a minute, but they didn't seem to walk away from the tent. The footsteps stopped after a minute but they didn't seem to walk away from the tent. They just stopped. They began to panic that someone was outside watching them from the trees. Jason's friend had yelled out something like, is somebody there? To which there was no response. After a few minutes they decided they should check. Jason grabbed his flashlight and so did the others. They slowly opened the tent, shining as much light outside as they could. They pointed their flashlights towards where the sounds were coming from but nothing was there. They kept the lights on the trees for a while when they heard a very deep, very guttural, very raspy growl from the trees behind them.

They spun around, flashed the lights, and behind them was a rather open section of the town. The nearest tree line was about 100 feet away, and they saw nothing in the openness. At that point, they decided it was time to leave. They grabbed their valuables, but actually left the tent, as they were too freaked out to bother packing up a tent they spent $40 on at Walmart the day before. Jason had told us that the hike back was nerve-wracking. The entire 10-minute hike out of town they felt as though they were being watched and something was trying to push them out of town. Once they had gotten out

of Dudleytown, limits, their anxiety and hot flashes, cold sweats and feelings of being watched melted away. Now as I said, I personally do not have any real experiences to write about, although I would love to go back to Dudleytown one of these days. Over the past 10 years or so, the police surveillance has inflated quite a bit. The main road into town is inaccessible without going past a handful of police. The walking trails that would lead you into the backside of town are also under watch. There are still a few ways to get into town, but it will take around 30-45 minutes hiking to reach the town.

However, once you enter town, so long as you don't make your presence super known you are home free. The police only go into Dudley town itself if there is reports of anyone being there. Jason very well may have told us a tale just to get us a little on edge before we enter town or maybe it was a true story. After his dozens of visits I wouldn't be surprised if the events happened on different trips and he combined them into one terrible evening. If you live in Connecticut, New York or Massachusetts Dudleytown should absolutely be on your paranormal bucket list. The Warren family investigated Dudley Town in the 1970s, and Lorraine verified that there's absolutely multiple demonic presences in the town. Everyone seems to have a ghost story to tell. Though it frightens the life out of us, we always stop to listen with bated breath.

Prisoners to the rollercoaster of emotions they put us through. These tales draw you in. The primal part of your mind wanting to know what happens, just in case it ever happens to you. A few weeks ago my friends and I visited the beautiful island of Cyprus for a short holiday. We stayed in the Famagusta district, the secluded northern tip of the island. Only a handful of houses populate the area and to conserve energy the power grid is turned off at 11 p.m. every night. A few fuel generators are kept on, humming through the night, to power the outdoor toilet lights, but pretty much everything else is dependent on the ambient glow of the stars.

Twelve of us sat on the beach that night in complete darkness, except for a small battery powered electric lantern. The light cast a dim yellow circle, like a poor man's campfire. We used it as a beacon to find our way back if we went for a walk or braved a midnight swim. It was one of the most incredible nights I've experienced. The absolute darkness meant we could clearly see every star in the sky. The Milky Way was vivid and bright, like a cover photo from the National Geographic, stretching out across the horizon in every direction. Looking up too long made me a little uncomfortable as if the earth would let me go and I would fall into the sky. We had a few drinks, but we're just merry,

not plastered. One of my friends had the wise idea to share ghost stories. A few protested. Great idea. Let's scare ourselves silly before sleeping in pitch dark, exposed to the elements and anything that walks along the beach, one of them said. In the darkness, our imaginations ran wild, seeing non-existent crabs crawling towards us and strangers standing by the sea watching. A few more drinks gave some courage and we started to share our stories. The first few stories were funny, mainly dirty jokes which

is the norm when the 12 of us are together filled with alcohol. The stories grew solemn but were about their friends or families, not them. One friend told us about a rock in the village that looked like a face. It cried red tears once a year but none of us in the group had actually seen it. I asked if anyone had actually seen a ghost or experienced something that directly happened to them. One of my friends said that they had heard things at the end of the garden when no one was there. We joked saying it was probably his ex-girlfriend climbing over the fence. They asked me if I had seen a ghost. I said I hadn't, but something I couldn't explain happened when I was young. I didn't want to share my story, not in absolute

darkness in the middle of nowhere, and not if I was going to spend the entire night on the beach. I don't actually know what happened the night of my story and I never found out afterwards. All I know is that it was the most frightening night of my life, locked away in my memories, peeking out when it's dark. They insisted I tell them. I warned them that it had me scared to this day and may scare them too. They called me chicken, so I began. I don't remember how old I was exactly. My brother was born after my fourth birthday, so it would have been before that. I had an overactive imagination as a child, as all children do. I used to build entire worlds at the end of my garden with nothing more than mud and sticks. When I rode my

bike I was exploring uncharted worlds. The old washing machine box became a single seat spaceship for exploring the universe but my imagination sometimes got the better of me. Back in my old house in Enfield London to the left of my bed a dark oak cupboard was built into an alcove into the corner. Occasionally I would dream that the door would open and my bed would turn and be drawn into the cupboard like a nightmarish ghost train. I would dream that things would try to touch me, like cobwebs and creatures with gnarled fingers, reach for me as I pass by. But when I awoke, scared and sweating, I knew I was dreaming. I had never really felt those things. No decaying mummy had tried to grab me. It was just a bad dream. It was a cold night. I remember because my mom had tucked the duvet around me like a butterfly cocoon and laid a heavy throw over it to keep me warm.

There were no strange thoughts that night or bad dreams. No cupboard ghost train take me away. At some point I awoke. Well, my mind did. My body lay frozen, unable to move. I was experiencing what I later learned to be sleep paralysis. When you sleep your body turns off the impulses to the muscles so that you don't act out your dreams. I was a little frightened but thought it was strange more than scary. That was when I heard the cupboard creak.

The funny thing about sleep paralysis is that you can hear and feel everything. I felt the cool air on my forehead covered in sweat, the heat within the duvet growing hotter, and the weight of the covers holding me tight like a butterfly cocoon. I tried to cry out to my parents. It was a strange feeling. The air would push against my lips, but my mouth refused to open. My small throat was making a noise like trying to scream while a hand covered my mouth. The cupboard creaked and began rocking like a saloon door. I started to pray.

Some prayers my mom had taught me, some I made up on my own. I prayed harder when I felt something next to me. It's a strange thing not hearing or seeing something next to you, but knowing it's there. Maybe it's the air pressure. Maybe your eyes can pick up subtle changes of light through their lids. I may have been able to open my eyes at that moment, but I didn't want to. I began praying faster, over and over then stopped something gently pressed against my chest I'm not entirely sure what happened after that but the next morning I asked if either of my parents had come into my room last night my father said that he had peered from the door to see if I was sleeping but never came in they asked why I was asking and I told them it was

nothing. I wouldn't say I believe in those things that go bump in the night. There is usually a rational explanation. But till this day as a fully grown adult, I never found out what had touched my chest. I wrote this post during a bright summer's day and the hairs on my arms still stand on their ends. Just imagine what my friends felt in complete darkness. A black veil in every direction. In the middle of nowhere. My father's house is a creepy one. It isn't secluded as we had many neighbors, but it was in no means a suburb, if you catch my drift.

Today's stories will be about my father's first experience and also my first experience with the paranormal. My father is a skeptical man when it comes to the paranormal. Skeptical meaning if something is explainable, he will not bother with it. This fact is what makes everything I'm about to tell you in this post and more to come that much more terrifying. As he used to work graveyard shift for the school district in our town, he would sleep during the day. Back when this incident happened, we only had a cheap futon for a couch. The futon had a metal frame with a dingy cover as the cushion portion of it. And the back of the futon, when locked up into a couch, had vertical hollow bars.

The specificities of this futon are important, I promise. He told me that one day, while everyone was away at either work or school, he was having trouble sleeping and was awake for about an hour before being able to fall back to sleep. He told me that while he was laying there trying to convince himself to sleep, he heard someone open our front door but never heard it close. It's a finicky door so no one has to slam it to get it to actually close. Essentially he would have heard someone close it. He has reason to believe it is his girlfriend now acts coming home from work early for lunch and thinks nothing of it. While he is waiting for her to come to the bedroom, he suddenly hears heavy footsteps walk around what he believes is our living room and slowly run their fingers, theoretically, across the back of our futon. This is where the description earlier comes in.

There is a distinct metallic thunk, thunk, thunk when someone does so and not mistakable for anything else in the house. It's the only object that could make that sound. He immediately thinks it is an intruder and rushes into the living room, but no one is there. The door is wide open and no one is in the house. I should mention that we have a deck made of wood that has a flight of stairs leading down to ground level Also, the walls are paper No one can hear anything from any place in the house I can hear my father sneeze in his room while I'm in the living room This means that he would have heard or at least saw someone walk out the front door and down the stairs to leave the house

And consequently, he did not. This experience had him on edge for months. He tried talking to whatever manifested in the house and taking pictures of it just to get some sense of closure from that day. This next story should be shorter. When I was a teenager, my sister and I would hang out in our bathroom to talk and whatnot. Don't ask why, it was a thing for us for some reason. One particular day, one of my sisters and I were in there talking to each other when we heard someone sprinting down the hall. It's a very short hallway, so it didn't faze us when it stopped abruptly at the end of the hall. We were on edge, and as we thought it was our younger sister and didn't want to get in trouble. As mentioned my father worked nights and he would be upset when woken

up while sleeping. So I open the door and as soon as I do this huge gust of wind hits me in the face like you know someone is running past. I look out into the living room and see my father's, now ex, sitting on the futon watching television. I asked her where my sister was and she pointed next to her and motioned that she was sleeping. I asked if she had just heard that running and she gave me a funny look. As my heart sank I slowly closed the door and looked at my sister who was frozen in fear. We both knew what it was and didn't really mention it for a while. We didn't want to make the story feel any more real than it already did. This happened about 13 years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, attending a liberal arts school in Suffolk County, New York.

Within the first month or two of freshman year, I found myself in a very tight-knit group of fellow theater geeks, six guys, myself included, and one girl. And they all loved horror movies and ghost stories. I found myself my crew. Freshman year was tough but we all held each other up and made the whole experience more enjoyable for one another. At the beginning of sophomore year, we decided that in October, as the Halloween season was ramping up, we would find a creepy wooded spot in a nearby town some night and scare the life out of ourselves. We did some research and found that there was a particularly isolated area about 30 minutes away, infamous for paranormal sightings. Perfect.

The seven of us split into two different cars and headed out into the night. Allow me to set the scene. You turn off a busy main road, flooded with strip malls and restaurants and whatnot, and you are almost immediately greeted by complete darkness. Again, this area was very heavily wooded. It was essentially a large web of winding roads surrounded by trees. Very few streetlights and very few houses. Without a GPS or a good sense of direction, one could easily get lost in there. We all made sure to have fully charged phones and flashlights just in case, but the goal was to keep driving until we collectively decided to

pull over and go exploring. So per the directions we made a left off the main road, driving for 30 minutes or so into this dark network, picking directions at random, just getting intentionally lost. Our cars made a turn and to our surprise there was a huge log in front of us. We had reached a dead end of some kind with nothing but trees beyond it. We all got out to see what exactly this was, stepped over the log and noticed two narrow trails leading in different directions. This seemed like as good a time as any to grab our flashlights and do some amateur ghost hunting. We flipped a coin and set off on the trail to the right. The trail was so narrow that we had to walk single file to avoid

getting whacked by branches. For whatever reason, I ended up in the back. I'm usually pretty rational and level-headed, but I have to say, the further we went in, the more I was overcome with an uneasy feeling. I kept hearing sounds deep in the woods, unable to shake the feeling we were being watched. But I seemed to be the only one who heard these things, so I shrugged it off as my imagination. And in any case, the whole point of us being there was to get scared. Not to mention the fact that we were seven able-bodied college students. What would we come across that could take us down? We headed down this trail for about 20 minutes and just when I thought it would never end, we came to a massive clearing,

and I mean massive. It was a large open field of unkempt grass, comparable in scope to a golf course but not nearly as well manicured. Trees surrounded the entire field which was so large we could not see the end of it from where we were standing. I was thrilled to get out of that narrow trail but I don't think any of us were expecting to find an area so vast. One of us looked to the right and said, hey check that out. We all turned and there was an old dilapidated house several hundred yards away. The house was completely dark with no cars or signs of anyone actually living there. We walked over and shown our flashlights at it and sure enough the windows and doors were all boarded up. I managed to peer between the boards on one of the windows and what I could see was an old

white couch covered in plastic but an otherwise empty room. Whoever used to live here they were long gone. Because there was no way in and because we all felt sufficiently creeped out by the house anyway, we decided to walk closer to the trail we had come in from, have a seat in the field and figure out where to go next. We walked towards the narrow trail but before we could sit, my friend Mark stopped what he was doing. His expression dropped and he pointed. We all turned on a very far side of the field directly across from where we had come in. We could see someone tall, lanky and pale dancing among the trees and by dancing I mean it was skipping around, grabbing a tree, swinging around it, and then doing the same to another tree.

Basically a do-si-do. The moon was so bright and the woods so dark, it actually took a second for us to really understand what we were looking at. Jay, the 6'4 skeptic of the group, wasn't seeing it. I leaned into him, pointed in that direction and said, Jay, look where I'm pointing, don't you see that? He squinted a bit and the second that he saw it, he gasped with everything he had, clutched my arm and whispered, What is that?

What happened next sent shockwaves through all of us. Whoever this was, they stopped dancing, looked in our direction, and started charging straight at us. Without even thinking, we freaked and ran back to the trail. Yet again, Jay was the only one who didn't see what was happening. He shouted after us, Guys, what is it? Where are you going? After about 15 seconds of running like mad, I heard Jay scream. I looked back and saw his flashlight following the rest of us into the trail. While the walk into the woods took about 20 minutes, we made it back to our two cars, hopped in and were peeling away and closer to five. Once we were a safe distance away we pulled

over, got out and checked in with each other about what just happened. My heart was pounding and I know everyone else was feeling the same way. Nearly 15 years later we are all still friends, living in different states yet keeping in touch through marriages, divorces, children, etc. But occasionally out of the blue one of us will send a group text to the others with something to the effect of, the woods, that really happened right? It most certainly did. That experience is always in the back of my mind and I'm pretty sure it always will be. Here's the thing that still resonates with me about that night. Whoever that was, they were dancing maniacally in the

woods at one in the morning and they ran directly for a group of young adults, not at all fazed by the fact that they were severely outnumbered. Did he know we were there from the second we parked? Was he the sound that I kept hearing when we walked the trail? Whatever the case may be, when he came for us that night, you can be sure none of us wanted to stick around and see what he was truly capable of. Sometimes in life we see or experience something so jarring that it becomes embedded forever in our minds and can even affect our lives. This is one of those situations. To be honest, I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I think it's safe to say I was around nine or so. My parents are Caribbean, and I was born in the U.S. As a way to keep in touch

with my roots, they always had me travel once a year during the summer to visit family and get to know my culture. So in one summer we packed up, I didn't think anything out of the ordinary. We got there safely and went about our weekend unpacking and catching up with family. Monday rolls around and my cousins came over to see if I wanted to hang out. We'll call them Manny and Layla. We grabbed our bikes and decided to go to the hill where we usually went to have a game of hide and seek. It was my turn to find them so I started counting and they ran off. When I hollered I was going to look for them I had an uneasy feeling. I couldn't shake it but I just decided to shrug it off. Sometimes when I find myself alone I get a mini panic attack. By this stage I've learned to cope with them for the most part.

I started checking the usual spots. Finally I found Layla. So she and I go to try and find Manny. We approach some trees and start to scan the area. As I was looking my eyes widened. I know I had an active imagination so I really think at this point it's my mind playing tricks. I whisper to Layla. Who are they? She turns around and sees what I'm seeing. Two large men beating some poor fool senseless. Layla quickly say anything, we grab him and make him get low and cover his mouth and point at what we're seeing. His eyes got big. I whispered, shh, don't let them hear us. We don't have cell phones at this time and the closest house was a long way out. We couldn't risk running or they'd see us. We were helpless. The guy kept cursing at this dude. Then one of them pointed something at him. A loud pop rang through the air. It echoed.

Then silence. The man on the ground wasn't moving. The two men looked around and then walked off to some rusty old truck nearby and left. My heart was pounding. I wanted to know my way out of there but I felt paralyzed. We had just witnessed a murder. Layla's eyes were filling up with tears and my breath was going fast. I was having an attack. She managed to calm me down but I couldn't move. Manny went to go get help. I don't remember much after that. I do remember my parents rushing to us. The police asked us some questions. My mom telling them that that's that and let me be. She did not want me to be involved in face retaliation. Turns out the guys we'd seen were from a retired cop there, and I think he pulled some strings to keep me from having to come forth on anything. And have our description of the events be released anonymously. The guys, to my knowledge, weren't caught. I'll never forget what I witnessed. It's one thing to see this kind of thing on TV and movies, but to see it in real life, a human just shoots someone point blank like that with no remorse, yeah, that was something that will always stick

with me for the rest of my life. This happened back in 2002 when I was just a 7 year old boy, currently 23. Over the years I kept thinking about this story and wondering what exactly happened as I only vaguely remembered it. This isn't a first hand account so I recently asked my mom what exactly did happen that day as she is the one who actually experienced it. My mom used to have a job at her local blockbuster video store. She would often see this strange man who would come into the store and drop small packets of ketchup on the ground in front of women who were browsing for movies.

His women of choice wore open-toe shoes like sandals or flip-flops. My mom said that he placed these packets of ketchup on the floor so these women would step on them and cause them to burst open. This gave him an excuse to crouch down and offer to clean up their messy feet. My mom would overhear him apologizing to the woman when they stepped on the ketchup. He would say something like, oh I'm sorry, let me clean that up for you. It was clear that he had some sort of strange obsession with feet. Apparently someone eventually reported this odd behavior to the police but it turns out that this man was the son of a sheriff. Needless to say he didn't seem to get in any trouble. In addition to this, my mom caught sight of him doing the same exact thing to a female customer at a local Borders bookstore not too long after.

Now here's the main part of the story. I grew up in a nice, quiet neighborhood in Long Island, New York with my mom, dad, and three siblings. The neighborhood has always been safe, and there has never been anything too eventful in the area. First, to start off this part of the story, I would like to describe how my family's house is set up. The house is one story with a total of three outside doors. The front door is in the living room and there are two doors that led to our fairly large backyard. One placed at the side of the house and one attached to my parents' bedroom. The door at the side of the house which leads to the kitchen has a screen door and

your typical door with a deadbolt. This door with a deadbolt has a little window which allows you to look to the outside. One morning on her day off from work, my mom was reading the local newspaper and drinking her daily cup of coffee at the kitchen table. She was home alone because my siblings and I were at school and my dad was at work. For a visual, the kitchen table is right next to the side door of the house which is almost always locked. As my mom was reading the paper, she thought that she could hear shuffling outside the house. She immediately froze up. She looked through the little window of the door and happened to notice a tall young African-American man with coke bottle glasses opening the screen door which was unlocked. To get to this door this man had to

have walked up the long driveway and trespassed into the backyard. As she watched this man in shock she noticed that he looked very familiar. She thought he looked an awful lot like that strange man with the obsession for feet. Her heart raced as he tried opening the door with a deadbolt. Fortunately, that door was locked. After his failed attempt at opening the door, he made eye contact with my mom. Then he just threw up his hands and waved to her before quickly walking away from the door. My mom proceeded to rush into the living room in a panic and look through the front window. She could see this man dashing away from the property and out of sight. She immediately called the police and they soon came by. She gave them a

description of the man but she didn't mention anything about him possibly being that weird man at Blockbuster. This was because she wasn't 100% sure that it was him. Obviously there wasn't much that the police could do since the man was already gone. To this day my mom still swears that the man who attempted to break into our home was the same weirdo who cleaned ketchup off women's feet at random stores. He could have somehow gotten my mom's address or followed her home from work one day, planning a break-in or something worse. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence and he was searching for any random home in the neighborhood to choose as his target. I've known people who don't normally lock all their doors during the day.

Luckily, my family does. I have lived a long and eventful life for having just turned 30. I have been through some of the most amazing and wonderful experiences of human compassion, and I have seen what darkness is in many, many forms. Today, the story I'm choosing to share with you is all centered around the type of darkness that comes in human form. I was 26 and had just been separated from a brief marriage that had ended in stalking, kidnapping, and unspeakable violence. This is a story for another day though. I've heard people say that once you're a victim of certain acts, if you aren't careful to heal properly, predators can

smell it on you like prey. This is an explanation I have heard countless times as to why victims are so often preyed on repeatedly by different people. It's as if we become destined to be locked in a cycle of abuse. All I know is I remember a day that I was no victim. I was staying with my stepdad and mother having just moved out of an abusive relationship and was on the hunt for an apartment. They live way out in the country so getting anywhere is a hassle and you have to remember to pack everything you'll need for the day because there is no turning back once you get to the city. Approaching a hill I remembered that the owner of a firm I worked for was going to be in town and we had been asked to dress business casual with collared work shirts with the logo on

them. I found a gravel drive and turned around to head back home to grab my collared shirt with the logo on it. In 2008 I had a nearly fatal accident going 87 miles per hour with no seatbelt. I flipped my car five and a half times end over end and I was almost decapitated through the sunroof because I had managed to spin the car back around. The initial impact came from behind sending me into the back seat rather than out the windshield. I have metal throughout my body from that crash. That's another story for another time. It's also the reason I hug this center lane sometimes. Maybe it's out of habit or maybe it's out of fear not to go flying off the road again Funny, that's the exact place in the road. I was speeding down on this day

Hugging the center lane on was the exact same hill. I had my crash that February morning This time there was no car wreck There was a car. However careening towards me Also hugging the center lane. We averted collision and that was that, or so I thought. A few seconds later, the car I had passed earlier comes flying over the hill behind me. This person gets on my tail and is honking. I have no idea at this point why the person is so angry or what their motive is. Just then, the silver car darts

around me, slams on the brakes, and floors it in reverse towards me. I back up to avoid collision. I end up in a ditch. I have no choice but to try maneuvering back around this car and getting myself home to safety. Somehow, this guy passes me again. We reach a steep hill, one of those that you cannot really ever know if a car is coming or not. The kind of hill that requires a bit of faith to even cross the road at this point. Yet, he still puts his car in reverse, driving me across the opposite side of the road where oncoming traffic would be driving down. Had there been any, this person could have killed us just now, I thought. This should have been my first sign of his instability. This is where it gets scarier. I take the chance of crossing that hill

again and get around him long enough to get down my mom and stepdad's road. For the third time, he gets in front of me and throws it in reverse, this time fully shoving my vehicle into a ditch filled with bushes and trees. It's a dead end road. I had no place to go. Don't ask me why but I got out of the car. I legitimately thought once he saw I'm a female he might lose his urge to fight. Maybe he was just looking to pick a fight with a guy. Maybe if I showed him I was a female he would cool down and we could figure out why he was upset. At the time I didn't even realize it was over the fact that I was a female, he would cool down and we could figure out why he was upset. At the time, I didn't even realize it was over the fact that I was hugging the center of the road. I legitimately had no idea why he was doing this to me at the time it was happening.

He gets out of his car, a pretty big guy, fit and enraged. I keep this deer-getting knife under the seat of my car. Some random kid gave it to me one day. The entire scenario of how it was given to me was just all around weird as it was, but this random guy had told me to keep it on me on days I don't have my pistol, since I was dealing with a stalker ex. I was particular about what I carried and where, because I knew my ex knew me all well, and would overpower me, and use my weapons against me. Nevertheless, here I was on the dirt and gravel road. My mother and her husband made their life together,

just less than a mile away from the crash site that almost took my life seven years prior, standing face to face with a completely unhinged man-man. I placed my hands in the air and walked towards him, slowly apologizing. He kept screaming and lunging, no more like running, towards me. I ran as fast as I can, back to my car, my heels digging into the gravel and slipping loose with each thrust. The door to my back civic was open. That knife was so close, one more step. I grabbed the knife, slipped the sheath off and turned around i was another shock at what i saw this man was literally inches away from me his hand centimeters from my

head and hair it was obvious he was going to snatch me by my hair i held the thick long deer cutting knife with a hooked end piece directly onto his stomach take another step and i swear to god i fucking gut you all over this fucking road. I said. I was shocked at my actions and words. I couldn't believe this was coming from me. He complied with every order. I ordered him to place his hands in the air and walk backwards slowly and then get into his car and place his hands on the steering wheel. I don't move a muscle. I slammed his car door shut as fast as I could and ran to the safety of my car

and drove home to wait on police. The weirdest part of the entire thing. A few days later, my mom calls me whilst I'm at work. She said a neighbor who lived on an old dirt and gravel road came by with his wife and children. He came to apologize for attacking me. I didn't realize that was your daughter. he supposedly pleaded to my stepdad.

You see, my stepdad chairs neighborhood watch meetings. He is a first generation immigrant. His family fled from Nazi Germany and he is known to not miss a target practice. I would bet that guy just about freaked out when he saw me drive up to my stepdad's house after the encounter. But all was forgiven the moment my stepfather shook his hands on my behalf to try to bring some civility to all of it. I don't blame him for shaking his hand. I suppose we have to have some civility. I didn't press charges either.

I had enough going on at that time and couldn't afford any trouble. After all, it was his word against mine, but I figured when you wait long enough people like that get their karma. The part that traumatizes me though is that someone like that knows where I live. It makes me more uncomfortable that his wife and children have to live with him, and we all smile on the sidelines with a neighborly wave. That woman has to live with a monster. I had just escaped an abusive marriage myself. A man who would snatch a young girl up by her hair on a

country road in a fit road rage is a man whose capability for darkness knows no bounds. I don't know what he was planning to do with me that day. I still have nightmares about it. Just a few seconds short of grabbing that weapon and my life could have ended that day. I still have nightmares about it. Just a few seconds short of grabbing that weapon and my life could have ended that day. Just another step and there I would have been, standing in the road with a gutted and dying man, probably facing murder charges. I am so grateful for the experiences I have had. They taught me who I am in dire situations and it makes me more confident in my abilities to defend myself, though now I prefer to not have to get as close to my attackers as I did that day.

A gun can be a far better repellent without having to be eye to eye with your attacker and risk being overpowered, because that man could have overpowered me. What saved that day was what surprisingly came out of my mouth, as I looked him square in his eye and the fact that he and I both knew In that moment, I meant what I said Language is powerful What is most powerful though is how accurate our intuition and instincts can be in situations such as this Sadly, this isn't the only time things like this has happened to me What I have learned is that if we allow instinct to guide us, we can sometimes make it through to see tomorrow, even if it doesn't seem possible at the time.

I hope that none of you have ever had to deal with anything like this, but if you do, listen to your instincts, and don't stop to think twice. If I had, I might not be here today. My friends are really into camping out and everything about outdoor stuff. I like it too, but not as much as they do. Once we were camping in a forest about 10 miles away from the nearest town or village. It was only me, Oliver, Jacob, and Nathan. I noticed some weird stuff that was happening, but neither of them believed me and just told me I'm being paranoid. I was like, eh, they're probably right. The sun was coming down and we decided to roll one. While we were smoking it I saw someone in the forest.

I was freaking out and told them what I saw. Nathan decided it would be a great idea to go out there and look around. He took his flashlight with him and went. After about five minutes he came back and said he saw nothing. I didn't sleep this night. The worst thing was that we didn't sleep in a tent but in our hammocks. The next day was the worst thing. When the sun was coming up I went to collect some wood for the fire. I was about 50 meters from our camp when I saw something hiding in the bushes nearby. I thought it was one of my friends so I took one stick and threw it in the bush and yelled gotcha. It wasn't any of my friends. He stood up.

I freaked out. It was some middle aged guy who looked like an addict. I started screaming and sprinted to our camp. Everyone was up and wondering what was going on. When I told them, thankfully they did believe me. We packed our stuff as fast as possible. When we had everything packed, we wanted to go all the way back. But then Nathan said,

Guys, you should see this. We asked him what we should see and he pointed in the direction we came here. There was a bear trap on the ground. What should we do? Oliver asked. I just told him we should get out of there. About two miles away from where we were camping I noticed that someone was following us. I told my friends and all of us started running. When I said all of us, I meant that guy as well. He was behind us for about two miles and eventually stopped, turned around and just vanished. When we arrived to the nearest town, we called the cops. Don't know what happened afterwards, but I hope they eventually got him.

This story takes place when I was about 15 years old. It was the beginning of summer and my family planned to take a two hour road trip to visit my aunt and uncle for the weekend. This visit was especially exciting as my other aunts, uncles, and younger cousins were meeting us there. My aunt and uncle lived in what I would call a cliche haunted looking house. It has two stories, tall with an attic, white with chipped paint, a cornfield in the backyard, no neighbors in sight, and sat along a rock road. Although this house would make the perfect setting for a horror film, I honestly never got any weird vibes. Flash forward to that evening, my parents, aunts, and uncles were going to make the 15 minute trip into town and grab some

drinks at the local bar. My sisters and cousins and I ended up lounging around the living room and watching movies. I'm a total night owl surrounded by early birds so I ended up being the last one to fall asleep. It was around midnight and I wasn't planning on sleeping anytime soon. I decided this would be perfect time to call my boyfriend since I had finally had some privacy. I was laying on the couch in the living room with a flip phone pressed hard against my ear, barely able to hear my boyfriend because of the poor reception. As I was laying there on the phone, I heard a long, slow creak come from the hallway on the other side of the wall. I assumed the adults were home already and the creaking sound came from the kitchen, where the front door was.

I quickly hung up the phone as I didn't want my parents to ask who I was talking to this late. I laid there for a few seconds before realizing nobody was coming into the living room. I got up and walked around the corner. Fear took over my body as I saw that the door leading down to the dark basement was open. I was frozen in place for a second. I ran to the door, slamming it shut, and then raced to the living room and jumped back onto the couch. Nobody ever goes in the basement. It's completely unfinished with dark floors and only holds a washer, dryer, and some junk. My cousins and sisters were all still asleep in my uncle's bedroom that connected to the living room. The more I thought about it, the more I started to

freak out. I decided to go lay down in the bedroom with everyone else. The whole house was completely dark, except for a little nightlight in the kitchen. I didn't feel comfortable in that bedroom because I didn't have a real door. I think it was an ordinary dining room that they had turned into a bedroom. I was laying on the side facing the swinging saloon doors that led into the kitchen. A few minutes went by and I saw a human-sized shadow move behind the swinging saloon doors. I'm not sure how I fell asleep that night. A couple years later, not due to related events, my aunt and uncle moved out of that house. One weekend while visiting their new place, I walked in on my aunt and uncle moved out of that house. One weekend while visiting their new place I walked

in on my aunt and mom talking about the old house. I told her what happened that night and she said that strange things had happened to them as well. For example she had heard footsteps upstairs in the middle of the day when she was home alone. She never pegged her as someone who would believe in the paranormal so I was surprised to hear that she had reached out to the original homeowners. They informed my aunt that the house was extremely old and has a lot of history. One of the things I can remember her saying is that a young boy accidentally shot himself upstairs. Apparently, some people have reported seeing a young boy looking out the small window on the second floor. I know this isn't a super spooky story, but I have never experienced anything like that

before or since. As long as I can remember, I've always believed in the paranormal, but also have held a lot of skepticism. I truly loved that house and had such great memories there, but ever since then, it's given me a very eerie feeling. Every time I drive home from visiting my aunt and uncle I pass by it. They only moved a few miles down the road. I'm a 22 year old female but this happened to me when I was 8 or 9.

Growing up I can't remember a single time where my mom and I spent any actual quality time together. She was single and supported my brother and me by herself. I always had the feeling though that she wasn't happy being a mom. Most nights my brother and I were with random babysitters while she went to party with her friends. We never got goodnight kisses or a home cooked dinner but rather fast food the babysitter brought with him or her and

the lonely feeling of falling asleep in front of the TV hoping mom would be home soon. On occasion though she would take us to her friends parties. These nights were equally the best and worst nights. On one hand, she would try to get us to sleep on strangers' couches in a very alien environment while she went to the backyard or garage to throw darts, play poker, and drunkenly sing her heart out to the country music that shook the walls of the house. On the other hand, the drives to and from these parties were small moments when we didn't seem like a broken family we talked we laughed we all sang to the radio and brother and i told her stories about school so it saddens me to think that the only moment i shared with her that stuck with me all these years came from on one of these rides. It saddens me more to know that that

moment wasn't one of joy but of fear and utter confusion. One night the party my mom had brought us to was finally drawing to a close. I was homesick and hadn't slept at all like most nights when she takes us to these parties. My mom had wrapped my sleeping brother up in his blankets and buckled him up in the back seat. She motioned for me to take shotgun and so I did. We live in the south and so this house was tucked deep into the countryside so we took winding back roads to get home that night. The kind where there are no real lanes, just a small strip of old grey road that went on for miles. The music was playing softly and the heater was blowing onto my face. I was finally getting comfortable enough to doze off if I wished, but I fought that urge. I wanted to hang out with my mom,

even if we weren't saying anything. At about the same time she and I noticed an old cop car pull out behind us from a turn that we were passing. I'd say it could have been from the 80s. Pardon me for not being a big car person, I can't tell you the model or whatever. All I can say is that it looked like the type you saw in 80s movies. However the headlights were dim and it was traveling awfully close behind us. I hadn't seen this car when we were coming up to the turn, but I just thought that I hadn't noticed it. I noticed my mom glaring in the rearview mirror. She whispers to me,

Hey, can you see inside that car? I turned around and looked hard. The windshield looked as if it were blacked out and I couldn't see a thing. I told her that I couldn't see in. She locked the car doors and tossed me her flip phone. She told me to be ready to dial 911 as she suspected it was one of those creeps who impersonated cops to prey on vulnerable women late at night. She was big into true crime shows so she got paranoid easily. A lot of the time I'd laugh off her suspicions but this time I was uneasy as well. The car didn't need to be that close behind us. We drove for what felt like an hour with the old cop cab right behind us. My mom glanced into the rearview mirror ever so often she drove the limit steered straight and

anything else that she could in efforts to not be pulled over by this car soon we came to the first stop and first turns we'd seen since the cop cab had started following us it was a small four-way stop with a single traffic light in the middle. As we approached it, my mom looked back at the car while asking if I was still prepared to call 911 if anything happened. I said yes. The light turned red. She said someone may get out of the car and come to beat on the windows when both cars are stopped and if that happened, to call the real police. I got the phone ready with 911 typed out and one press of a button away to be called. She and I both looked forward as we slowed to a hard stop. We were both nervous. Now was the moment of truth. Would some guy get out of this old cop cab and

harass us? My mom checked that the doors were still locked and then glanced back into the rearview mirror to see if anyone was getting out. Elizabeth? She said. Please tell me I'm not going crazy. Please tell me you saw it too and that I'm not dreaming this all up. what what i asked it's gone she said i turned to look out the back window only to see it had indeed vanished mine and my mom's relationship has gotten better as i've grown up we talk about it sometimes and we still have no explanation it It had been right behind us until we stopped, but it's one of the reasons I'm scared to drive back roads at night. I am writing this as a warning to anyone reading or listening to this story, and a reminder to myself, never underestimate how fast the weather can change. It is a common mistake, but in some cases it can be a very costly one.

This was my experience making that mistake. I live in the Midwest, specifically Iowa, so I grew up around severe storms and have always been fascinated by the weather and what it can do. I even took a year's worth of meteorology when I was in high school, and I continue to study it to this day. Now, going storm chasing has been on my bucket list for a very long time, but I was only able to really get a chance to do it recently. As before, then I was busy paying off college debt and taking care of family matters but a few weeks ago my chance had come I had a week's worth of pay time off and I was going to put it to use and finally see my first tornado

but ironically the days I had specifically set aside to go storm chasing, somehow the entirety of a tornado alley was completely clear. After two days of beautiful, clear weather, I decided to throw in the towel, and when my parents asked if I can come out for a quick visit during my time off, I decided to go see them for a day. A good friend of mine also was tagging along. We were roommates during our freshman year of college, and always enjoyed

hanging out. Our trip out was uneventful and I had a good visit with my family. Towards the evening, my friend and I got ready to leave, but one of my brothers had asked if I can come see him where he had worked before I left, so I obliged and went to see him. On our way out of the hometown, I spotted a massive supercell to the east which immediately made me uneasy. For those who may not know what a supercell is, a very large thunderstorm that can produce large hail, strong winds, intense lightning, and when the conditions are right, tornadoes. They are most easily recognized by their round, anvil-like shape, and when you see it rotating towards the bottom of a supercell. That's a good sign that it may spawn a tornado. I'll leave a link to the photo I took in the comment section. Now, my buddy and I were watching the supercell as we were making our way south

towards the interstate, and I could easily see the storm was moving west, and we were in the crosshairs. However, I knew that we would be heading west to get home and could probably outrun it once we were on the interstate so I pressed on only making one step to see my dad as he works for a farmer and has been very busy the past few days trying to get the crops in. Once we were back on the road I had my friend check a weather radar app I have on my phone so we could see how fast the storm was moving in. When the radar image appeared on the screen, I was shocked to see a line of severe thunderstorms all along the interstate

from Iowa City to Des Moneys. Still, I knew all about driving in bad weather, and I was confident that I could handle whatever the storm could throw at me, so we kept our course and drove straight into the teeth of the large storms. As we approached the storms I could see that it was very large that the sky was pitch black and flashes of lightning every few seconds. My friend and I were getting more excited by the minute as we pushed onwards as thunderstorms at night can be a spectacular show and the lightning this storm

was generating was some of the most intense i'd ever seen then we went into the storm darkness enveloped us with the only lights being the lights of the cars and trucks around us and occasionally street lights along the road but the strange thing is that despite the lights being even more intense now there was very little wind and no rain. I guess that the lightning could be generated by the heat and humidity, as it had not been hot that day, and we had nothing to worry about, so we pressed onwards. Now, I admit night driving makes me hungry, and I was thinking about stopping along the route for milkshakes, but due to the storm, I put that thought on hold,

while I kept my focus on the road and my trusty old pickup, making sure all the gauges were in the green. That's when I saw I was at three quarters of a tank. I thought while I could make it out to our destination without stopping to refuel, I didn't want to take a chance of running out and having the storm unleash its full might while we were stranded so I stopped in the next town Williamsburg to top my tank off before proceeding. As I exited the interstate the lightning was still flashing in the sky as intense as ever but the wind and rain were nowhere to be seen. I pulled into the gas station and began to fill my truck with the fuel. After I started the pump I felt the call of nature and had my friend watch the truck as I went inside the gas station to empty my bladder and check in with my parents. After I finished, I walked back outside and could see it was starting

to rain. It was raining very hard so I thought nothing of it. My friend was sitting inside my truck so I climbed inside and glanced at my phone. The radar was still on and I could see that we were in the middle of the largest storm in the chain of storms along the interstate and yet it had decided to continue to hold back its power. My friend looked over at me and asked, are you sure that we should keep going? I responded, ah yes, it takes a lot more than light rain to keep me from going home. Almost as if the storm heard my comment and took it as a challenge. Our surroundings quickly changed as winds picked up in mere seconds and rocked my truck and walls of rain beginning to pound on the roof as we were parked in the gas station. I had started the engine and began to drive around the station looking for a good place to park and be out of the winds as it continued to gain strength. My friend was starting to get scared and I was

betting nervous. I know that the conditions we were experiencing were very similar to what's known as the bear's cage. The storm chasers the bear's cage was the area that formed very close to tornadoes. I know that while it being dark we would have no way to see a tornado until it was far too late. After making a complete circle around the station the storm had reached its peak and I know we were not safe in my truck anymore. I parked the truck with a tailgate against the wind as there were no other places to park. My friend reached for the door's handle and I had to tell him to stop. With the winds strong, if we opened the doors at the wrong time, the winds could damage them and even rip them off

the hinges. We had to wait for the winds to lessen before we could make our exit. If we wanted the best chance for our only ride back in one piece. Just then I see a large black shape appear out of the wall of the rain in my mirror. It was the semi truck that had pulled in behind us. Its trailer gave us some protection from the winds and a chance to make a break for shelter at the gas station. We bolted from the truck and ran into the station getting completely drenched in the process. Once we got inside the station the power went out leaving us in the dark with the storm still screaming outside. A few seconds later we heard the sound I had been dreading, the tornado siren. The gas station employees quickly shouted for everyone to get inside the restrooms as that was their best

shelter. Once the 15 or so people were crammed into the restrooms a manager from the adjoining diner came in and said that they had a basement that we could go use instead. We all hustled to get to lower level. As we hurried over, I saw several old farmers still at their tables eating their dinners in the darkness. I knew that this was not their first rodeo and that if something bad happened, they would join us in the basement. After descending into the basement and finding it in fact was an old wine cellar, the little group of refugees began to introduce themselves and chat. I look at the radar and see the storm was gradually moving south and that so far there were no tornadoes spotted in the area. Then look at my watch and figure out. To my shock, the storm had went from awesome lightning show to

dangerously high winds and walls of rain in less than three minutes. My friend and I each contacted our families to let them know we were safe. As we waited for the storms to pass, I remember hearing the diner manager talking to some of the other stranded travelers that a similar storm had hit them last year, and that while they were hunkered down in the cellar, two ladies quietly broke into bottles of wine that were stored there. It eventually became so drunk that they had carried out of the basement. This little story seemed to lighten the mood and raise the spirits of everybody there. After 20 minutes of sitting in the dark basement, my friend and I decided to head above ground again to see if the storm had finally let up.

Once we got into the dining room, I could see the old farmers were still in their places, watching the storm slowly begin to subside. My friend and I waited another 10 minutes before we made our way outside and back to my truck. Once I saw it, I was happy to see that the only damage it had was some dings and scratches on the tailgate, and it almost appeared to have been pushed a few inches forward by the wind. We got inside and it started up without a problem. We made our way out of the lot but before we left we spotted the same semi that gave us our opportunity to escape and get to better shelter. After thanking the trucker for his help we got back on the interstate. Within minutes of getting back on the interstate we spotted a semi that had been blown

over on its side by the winds. Thankfully, I could see that the person I assumed was the driver talking to some state trooper who had come to assist the trucker. While the lightning never seemed to stop, the wind and rain were done, and my friend and I made it back to our home safely. As I lay in bed, I realized the mistakes I have made. I underestimated the storm. My hands began to shake as I realized what could have happened if anything had happened differently, and I knew that my guardian angels were watching out for us that night. So I learned that lesson the hard way, as so many others have. Some people who underestimate the weather aren't so lucky. There are many people who are killed every year in their own foolish wishes.

Yes, I know the weather can be a spectacular thing to watch, but if you don't respect what it can do, it will make you pay. For some like me, we get off easy with little to no damage. Others aren't, and some don't walk away. These stories aren't mine. They are my boyfriend's. He had never told me about these incidents until last night when we started talking about weird experiences. Now, this happened when my boyfriend was much younger.

I'd say probably around 11. He often went to visit his cousin down in a small town in Colorado. His cousin used to live near the local high school, this comes into play later in the story. The two of them would often go on what they called midnight adventures. Basically, they would wait until the later hours of the night, then they would take their bikes out and ride around the town, going to restaurants and getting food, just cruising around town finding things to do. This particular night, they had been out for a while. They had just gotten done going to McDonald's to have the breakfast after midnight special they had been putting on at the time.

They were riding their bikes next to a park that had a fence around it and suddenly they notice a massive white dog that resembled a husky barrel out of nowhere towards them. They both were startled as it seemed to come out of nowhere so they rode faster parallel to the fence. As they rode the dog came running on the side of the fence matching their pace. As they rode, the dog came running on the side of the fence, matching their pace. As they reached the end of the fence, it disappeared. They hesitantly stopped to look around for the dog, but it was nowhere to be seen. Freaked out, they decided to go back home, but they were on the opposite side of the town from their house. My boyfriend's cousin says that he knows a shortcut through an alleyway. This alley is narrow and has a singular street light at the end. As they turn and begin to go down the alleyway,

guess what's sitting under the street lamp? The white dog. It just sits there looking at them. They decide to get out of there and go around. As they turn the corner of the street they see the dog still under the street lamp staring. Then the street lamp turns off. They decide to hightail it out of there and they make it back home without any more incidents. This next story also happened during one of these midnight adventures. The two had just gone out for the night and they decided to go to the high school parking lot to mess around. Since they had bikes they figured it would be a good spot to ride around since it was flat and well lit. Suddenly my boyfriend sees a man in dark clothes walking

through the opposite side of the parking lot. At first he thinks nothing of it until he takes a closer look. The man was a reasonable distance away from them yet he seemed tall. He said he probably was about eight feet at least. Boyfriend quietly asks cousin if he's seeing the man too and he confirms. The man continues walking down the parking lot until he reaches a light post. He walks behind the light post and disappears. He doesn't come out from the other side. My boyfriend and cousin freak out and decide they have had enough already and they instantly turn around and go home. The last story my boyfriend told me was not a part of the Midnight Adventures saga but instead occurred when he was way younger.

My boyfriend was probably 8 living with his mom and his sister. His sister and he shared a room in bed. Back then both the boyfriend and the sister had a very bad habit of sleepwalking. One night boyfriend's sister sits up out of bed and looks at a corner. At first he thinks that she's awake but soon realizes her eyes are still closed. Suddenly she jumps out of bed and starts screaming, how did you get in here? What do you want? In between she takes a blanket and covers my boyfriend all the while looking in one corner yelling, don't hurt him. She starts screaming for their mom who comes busting in the room flicking the lights on. There was no one there. All the commotion caused the sister to wake up. She claims she swore someone was in the room with them. My sister and I have had paranormal experiences our entire lives. She'd been able to communicate with spirits since she was very young,

and I honestly think she would make a great medium if she wanted to. We moved into a new house in 2003, Mom's current home. The first experiences were mild. I'd see a girl about my sister's age walking around and think it was her or we would wake up to all the cabinets in the kitchen being wide open and the lights turning off and on. No big deal. We were used to it. We got a Ouija board for a holiday around a sophomore year of high school. We decided it would be a good idea to try and figure out who this little girl was. We made contact with her on our very first attempt.

She explained that her name was Abigail, and that she had died in a car accident in the intersection past our house. We thought it was very cool, and we started conversing with her on the daily. Eventually, we got brave enough to ask if there were any other spirits around the property. Abigail was always very responsive, and would answer any of our questions, Eventually we got brave enough to ask if there were any other spirits around the property. Abigail was always very responsive and would answer any of our questions, but not this one. Shed responds with, he won't let me say, or he's watching. Of course us being the young and dumb kids that we were, we kept pressuring the issue for many weeks. Fast forward to summer that year.

I started waking up my closet door opening at night or overhead light being flipped on. My sister started swearing her bed would shake just as she was about to fall asleep every night. My parents wrote it off as us scaring ourselves, playing with the board and would hide it from us. Eventually we stopped looking for it. One day we came home from school, way before either one of them got off work. I went to my room and put my things away. I opened the door and there sat the board on the foot of my bed. We assumed our parents changed their minds about it since we had long stopped telling them when things happened of paranormal nature. We were excited as it returned and wished to speak with our ghost friend promptly.

We made contact and nothing was out of ordinary. When it was close to time for my parents to arrive home, we tried to end the conversation but she kept saying, he's coming tonight, over and over. We were both understandably rattled and made the decision to end the game without her saying goodbye. We turned the board over in the box and hid it away in my closet. That night, I woke up to the usual, my closet door sliding open. I turned slowly to look at it. I saw nothing at first, but then I noticed that the corner of the room was much darker than the rest. As I had started sleeping with my bedside lamp on, I stared closely afraid to move or get out of bed. I could make out a figure of a man.

He was abnormally tall, and the whites of his eyes glowed unnatural, and the light of my lamp clasped. I finally got the courage to sit up in bed. He immediately lunged at me, hands around my throat. I felt the pressure of his fingers stifle any breath that was in my lungs. I tried to scream but nothing came out. He was on top of me now. I felt his warm breath in my ear and his grip tightened. My whole body was pressed into the bed. I couldn't move even my fingertips. I tried my best to scream, no avail. I couldn't breathe. I began to panic. His presence was so dark that not even my lamp was a match for it. The entire room went dark. I don't know if it was from me being on

the verge of passing out or that he was blocking out any light. I did the only thing I could think of. I started reciting the Lord's Prayer over and over in my head. The whole incident seemed like it lasted an hour, but it could only have been a couple of minutes. I continued to recite the prayer. His grip let up, and he whispered words in my ear in a language I had never heard. His hissing voice sent my whole body into shock. The room grew light again, and I felt him crawl off the end of my bed. I heard the closet door close back. I was paralyzed in fear. I laid there, taking it all in for several minutes until I heard my sister scream from the next room.

I mustered all the courage I could and sprinted across the hallway. My sister was sitting at the foot of her bed, rocking back and forth, sobbing. I tried to ask what was wrong with her, but I couldn't understand under all the sobs. When she had finally calmed down enough to speak she still didn't. She slowly turned to me and held her hands up palm facing me. I was confused at first but upon closer inspection I saw them. One perfectly prick on each of her fingertips. The blood had pulled in her palms. I saw hand-shaped bloody prints on her bed sheets. She refused to tell me what had happened, but promised she would when it was light out. We gathered our blankets and

headed into the living room to finish out our sleepless night together. My neck would start aching and it hurt to talk, so I decided to go to the bathroom to get some water and wash my face. I flipped on every light in the room and hallway that I passed through. When I finally arrived at the bathroom, I shut and locked the door behind me. I stood facing the mirror with my hands perched on the vanity for a long while, too afraid to look. When I did, I saw the bruises around my neck. They were perfect finger marks. I took pictures of them that of course are lost now to show my parents in case they somehow vanished in the night and they didn't believe me. We spent the rest of the night awake and jumping at every sound we heard. We talked about the events when sun came up and both vowed

to never touch that board again. A vow that kept for several years. We tried to burn it and bury it but it kept showing back up. We decided to hide it and bury it, but it kept showing back up. We decided to hide it deep in my mother's wooden shed and hope never saw light of day again. It didn't help though. We had already opened the door. We both had several run-ins with this being for the next few years. I moved out the year after I graduated high school. I still refuse to be there at night by myself for any reason. My mom and sister live in the house. The activity has died down over the years but my sister still has experiences with spirits she believes should just be passing through. Abigail is still there and we believe she stays to warn them if the man is ever coming back. My father

cleaned out the shed a few weeks ago but only found the plinth shed. We expect the fort to show up anytime now. I could tell all the stories but it would be a novel. If anyone is interested more I would be happy to tell them. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe

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