The Lets Read Podcast - 8: Episode 008 | Burger King Creep & Fake Uber Stories | 36 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: October 20, 2018

Welcome to the eighth 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 Burger King Creeps, Fake Uber Drivers, and Haunted Houses. 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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Same game, parlay, it's all fine You'll put a smile on your face Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook. Take a chance! I was almost 30 and female and I have been told I look 16 to 18 depending on the outfit. I have an anxiety disorder and additionally I have issues picking up social cues so sometimes I misunderstand things or get paranoid about things that are really innocent so I've learned to question my thoughts. I've been working in the food service industry for a few years and in particular about two years at the Burger King this happened in. This incident happened about four years ago now. I had just started working some late night shifts

and we hired a new manager, Paul. He was a foot or so taller than me, skinny, with dark eyes and usually wore large glasses. He wasn't physically imposing but still made me nervous because he was new and male. There are reasons new males put me on edge but that's for another day. After a few days I noticed some strange things whenever I worked the counter he would stand so close behind me that I could feel the cloth of his shirt brush my neck because he was looking over my shoulder again I worked here before he did and had for a year so it bugged me if I was stuck in the drive-thru area instead he would stand in such a way that I was blocked in and couldn't get past him and every time I bent over if I looked up I could way that I was blocked in and couldn't get past him and every

time I bent over if I looked up I could tell that he was staring right at me. At first I figured I was just imagining it that he wasn't purposely blocking me in I had to be just paranoid again I assumed. After a few more weeks of working there he started buying pizza for the crew or drinks etc for a nearby business and he always was the one to go pick it up and bring it in. I wouldn't eat anything unless the rest of the crew did and I never drank anything I didn't get for myself nor did I leave anything in the back office just in case because I just felt something was wrong. I kept telling myself it's overreacting, you're fine, but I couldn't shake the feeling. One night I was told I had to do a late night shift, just me, Paul, and Jack, someone that has worked there for a long time and I trust him implicitly. Before the others

left, I asked Jack to please keep an eye on Paul because he scared me. That night Paul asked me to clean the bathrooms and I had no choice but to agree. To illustrate the layout to the bathrooms of the building, in order to get to the bathrooms from the main office you go by the kitchen, around the corner, through a door, into an entryway. From there you open the men's room door and from there there is a back wall stall with a door. That's the stall I was in. So I'm there in the main men's stall and Jack is in the kitchen as far as I know with Paul in the office. As my back is turned I hear the propped open men's room door shut.

I turn around and blocking my exit to the men's stall is Paul. Immediately I panic because that means that's three closed doors between me and Jack. Paul holds up a pair of drive-thru headgear and makes a comment like, so I found these new ones in the office. Want to use them? I probably shouldn't give them to you but I like you so I figured why not. I decline and honestly I was shaking out of my shoes. Innocent as the dialogue was he was looking me up and down the whole time and it just felt creepy. He stood there about a foot away and just stared at me not saying anything and after a minute or so Jack came in and said that there

was a phone call and Paul had to come get it. Naturally I booked it out of the bathroom and stuck myself to Jack explaining that I was really scared and felt uncomfortable with the way Paul looked at me and the odd way he was behaving. Well to me it was odd anyway but again I felt like I was probably being paranoid. He told me he wouldn't let me out of his sight the rest of the night and that he was sorry that he had been distracted. He didn't like Paul either and he kept good on his word. A few hours later Paul says he's grabbing pizza and some soda from the place I mentioned earlier. When he came back he called me to the back office and offered me a glass of soda pre-poured. I said

no thanks I'm fine. Thinking to myself to the time that I'm being overly stupidly paranoid but then again why did he always bring soda we had over a hundred kinds on the premises he asked me another two to three times if I was sure and I again declined jack right beside me then Paul asked me if I had a boyfriend I did but I lied and said fiance because I figured it maybe dissuaded any potential flirting. He says, fiance aren't you a little young for that? I don't know why but I told him my age. He just kind of sat there and looked me up and down really slow. Oh I thought you were 16 or 17. From there he left me pretty much alone. Believe it or not, three days later he was arrested because the place he worked for before he had inappropriately

touched an underage female co-worker, threatened them, and told them he was a cop and so on and would arrest them if they told. Eventually he was transferred from there to where I work and we were never told anything till his arrest. He comes by twice since then even though he's not allowed on the property because we have minors on site. I'm still freaked out especially because the last time he came around he came through the drive-thru where I was standing. So to Paul, I hope I never see you again and you get exactly what you deserve. I was in high school at the time. I was babysitting my cousins one Friday evening.

The young girls were about three and five. Kim was five and Tabby was three. I didn't mind. They were usually pretty easy to watch and it gave me extra cash. We spent most of our time in the computer room so that I could do some research for a project I needed to do for school. Kim and Tabby were playing with some dolls on the floor but after some time they began telling me that they were hungry. I took them into the kitchen, placed Tabby in her booster seat to wait while I cooked. I made them nuggets, listened to both girls talk about silly kid stuff. I noticed that Tabby kept looking into her room which was across from the kitchen. I shrugged it off at first thinking that she was just being a kid

but she just kept looking. She kept staring into her room and it looked as if though she was trying to look at something. I was starting to get a little freaked out. I turned off the oven and set their plates aside to cool, still watching Tabby carefully. Sis, what are you looking at? Kim asked impatiently. Tabby turned to her. That. She pointed into a room and I tried to follow her gaze but from where I stood in the kitchen I couldn't see that far into her room. Kim looked where she pointed and a look of alarm crossed her features. I frowned. What is it? I asked walking towards them. Kim turned to me. There were tears in her eyes. There's a man in our room, she said in a whisper. She burst into tears. I didn't hesitate. I raced

over and scooped Tabby out of her booster chair and took Kim's hand. I glanced at the room and saw a shadow slip into the closet. I didn't want to panic the girls. I didn't want to scare them any further but I rushed them to the back bathroom and locked the door. I told them to stay quiet and to not say anything. I pulled out my phone and my first instinct was to call my aunt and tell her what was going on but I knew I better call the cops first. I did and they informed me that someone was on their way. I turned around and called my aunt then too. She was thoroughly freaked out and said she'd be coming home soon. She thanked me for taking care of her girls. I was very freaked out trying to calm the

now crying Tabby and Kim. I think they were trying to be quiet but I couldn't blame them for being scared. We waited in the bathroom until the police came. At one point I thought I heard a thump but that could have been my imagination. The police arrived shortly after. Over the phone I had told them where we were hiding. There was a knock on the bathroom door and an officer called. Rachel, it's Officer Reyes. Open the door and one of my buddies will escort you outside while we search the house. Your aunt is waiting outside. Relieved, I followed the officers outside with Tabby and Kim. It turned out that the guy in the room had already left. The bedroom window was wide open. I can't get over the fact that the guy had been so close, that we had been so close. I can't stop imagining what could have happened to my cousins, or me.

My best friend growing up was named Sarah. From the ages of 8 to 23, we were inseparable. I might as well have lived with her most of my life. Sarah, her husband, and her baby, I will call her Bug, lived in a small house built in the early 1900s. It had two rooms at first, then was sloppily added on to until the early 70s. The kitchen and bathroom had six foot ceilings. The attic was stuffed to the rafters with straw when they first moved in, early insulation. They replaced it with fiberglass after finding this massive fire hazard that people had been living under for a century. When Bug was born, Sarah would often ask me to stay the night for various reasons. I loved my little Bug, so I had no problem sleeping on the couch and even

getting up when she fussed. When Bug was around three months old, Sarah started to complain about sleep paralysis. This had never happened to her before. I asked her if she ever saw anything. The first was just pressure on her chest. The second time she said a huge Jack Skellington-esque figure was standing on the edge of the bed. She described the figure as bony but colorless, a black mass absorbing all the light that surrounded it, but clearly dressed in a nice suit. Her voice was shaking when she told me about the third episode when she woke up. It was on top of her, breathing hot, moist nastiness into her face. She told me its breath smelled like rotten eggs and an old mildew wash rag. I knew this wasn't sleep paralysis then.

I told her next time she was alone she needed to demand the thing to stay out of her room. I should have said house as it took to the attic where it decided to make itself known by scattering straw along the whole attic floor. Sarah's husband made a fuss about it and refused to believe what was going on. All the straw had been removed months prior and someone was playing a joke on him. One night I stayed after Sarah begged me, even bribed me with alcohol and breakfast. I sighed and took my place on the couch. Somewhere between episodes of the Golden Girls, I fell asleep. I woke up in that too comfortable to go pee state so I lay there with my eyes closed until I had to go. When I opened my eyes I saw what Sarah had been talking about.

The figure filled the entire top half of the doorway. Half its head was hidden. I could feel it looking at me. I tried to lay still, tried not to blink. I could make out the edges of a nice suit. Its shoulders were pointy, its torso was long and met a slender hip. Its legs seemed to seep into the floor. I don't know how long I looked at it or it at me. I blinked and the figure was gone. I slowly got up from the couch and tiptoed into the kitchen. I didn't know I was holding my breath until I sighed in the kitchen when I found nothing. I finally was able to relieve myself but when I unlocked the door and turned the knob, it stopped halfway, like someone was holding the knob on the other side. I panicked like a coyote in a snare. I pulled the door with my whole might, even putting

my foot on the door frame. The knob wouldn't budge in either direction. I slumped to the floor, still turning at the knob like a maniac on speed, still only getting a half turn. I was about to overpanic and start screaming when the knob finally turned and the door came open against my legs. I laughed nervously and opened the door. No one was there. Bug hadn't even budged and I'm glad I didn't wake her in my state of blind horror. I sent Sarah a text and left her house at 3.30am. I refused to stay in that house again. Come to find out it had latched onto the negative marriage between Sarah and her husband

and has now moved to two different houses. In 2015 some life choices had led us in separate directions. I blame it on my hippie soul and her husband. I still wish Bug all the happiness in the world and I hope she never has to fight any demons like that on her own. I grew up in a really safe neighborhood. My elementary school was two blocks away and another one four blocks away from the bridge down the street from my house. I could see my middle school from my house which sat on the other side of the bayou. A Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and my Lutheran church all sat neatly spaced out on the same road. The Catholic adjacent to my elementary school, the Methodist and Presbyterian across from my middle school,

and my Lutheran church across from the neighborhood library. It's as middle class and safe as you can get. Not rich enough to be Stepford, but think Leave it to Beaver set in the late 90s. I wasn't a dumb kid but I could be oblivious and naive. All kids whose ages are a single digit are. Because I had a tendency to tell my parents I was going to play with my friends at the park and then wander the neighborhood with them when we got bored. A lot of the times my mom would make my older sister walk me to and from the elementary school playground and soccer fields and park just to make sure I was with someone a little more cautious. My sister and I both hated it but now I know it was for a good reason. One day my sister and I are walking home. I don't even remember a whole lot of the day because it was just so ordinary.

It was summer, hot, late afternoon and I was bickering with my sister and solemn that she could boss me around. She was 11 and I was 8 and she was just as solemn that she had to babysit me. We were walking along the main road in our neighborhood away from the school and towards our house. The road usually had cars parked along it especially in front of the school, soccer fields, and park. Parents park in the street when the school parking lot fills up and wait for soccer practice to finish or their kids to see them from the park and know it's time to go home. Sometimes people cruise slowly down the street looking to see where their kids are

and then drive off when their sure little Jimmy isn't there. Not weird and not creepy when you live in leave it to beaver town. My sister and I had passed the soccer fields and were starting to pass by the park when my sister started nagging me to stay with her more than usual. I don't remember what I focused on. I guess I had my game boy or a book with me or something. I'd probably fallen behind on accident first but kept walking slowly just to anger her when she snapped at me to keep up. I was vaguely away from her car slowly driving by us but like I said I figured they were looking for their kid. At one point my sister

turned to the car and asked the driver if they needed something. I finally looked up from whatever I was focused on and glanced over towards the driver. A middle-aged Indian woman was sitting there with her window rolled down and just staring at us. I only remember her because I thought she looked like my friend Gretchen's mom but thinner and a little younger. She asked my sister if she knew where some street was. My sister shook her head and said no. She asked if the lady was looking for her kid and the lady said no. My sister said okay and kept walking telling me to hurry up. I followed her and went back to what I had been doing before. After 30 seconds my sister stopped and bent down

to mess with her shoe. I looked around and noticed the lady was still even with us and had stopped too. She was still staring at us. I was too naive to be scared. I just thought the lady was weird. But my sister noticed all of this and grabbed my hand and dragged me off the sidewalk and into the park, cutting through it to get away from the street and the lady that wasn't even using her gas pedal to roll along and kept up with two children walking home. My sister loudly said, Let's take the shortcut home or we'll be late. I was really confused and really dumb and said this wasn't a shortcut. It was a longer route and we weren't going to be late anyways.

My sister snapped at me to shut up until we were on the other side of the park. When she finally dropped my hand, she looked back and pointed out that the lady was still there. Window still rolled down, still watching us. We were the only people in the park. My sister told me that the lady was being really weird and was probably trying to kidnap us or something. I didn't want to admit that my sister was being responsible. So I just told her she was stupid and we went on home. My sister told my mom as soon as we got home and I remember making fun of her

because she was scared from all those pg-13 and r-rated movies she and her friends would watch together in secret. I thought I'd get her in trouble but my mom actually looked really scared and called my dad in and made my sister tell him everything. My dad left the room to go call someone, police probably and the neighborhood phone tree. And my mom sat me down and gave me the, if you see adults acting weird around you or they try to get you to go with them, yell that you don't know them and you need help and run away talk. I can remember bits and pieces of this. It was weird but boring thing that happened. I remember the lady only because of how she looked like a friend's mom and I remember bickering with my sister and her weird behavior and I remember the reactions

of my parents and feeling like I got in trouble. The rest my sister filled in for me. She told me later that she asked all her friends if they had seen the lady, that my dad went out and talked to all the neighbors to see if they'd ever seen the woman and that police cruised the neighborhood every day for a while after that. I never saw the lady again. Gretchen and her family were out of the country visiting family and no one seemed to know anything about this lady. It's a memory that still scares my sister especially now that she has her own kid even though she lives in a safe tight-knit community of her own. I still don't know what to think about it. I'd like to think that she was just lost and needed help but didn't know how to ask two young

kids. Maybe she was hoping to follow us until we would lead her someplace familiar to her. Maybe she wasn't trying to kidnap us at all. But then, I don't know how to explain why she'd have her window rolled down in the height of Texas summer heat and keep following us when we didn't know where she was looking to go, her car slowly rolling forward, always staring at us as we escaped across the park. So this happened about a year and a half ago when I was around 13 or 14. I'm a female and at the time I was in 8th grade. My entire class in middle school was very small, only around 60 to 65 kids every year, so all of us knew each other very well. Although my school is a private school, I'm now an upperclassman so I still go there.

I live in one of the most dangerous states in the nation and things tend to be sketchy all around, not excluding the majority of the students who go there. I have a lot of stories about so many kids in my grade doing sketchy and disturbing things to other people, which I may get to putting up sometime in the future and of course, that's where the story begins. There was this kid in my class who always acted weird on purpose to freak people out and make them uncomfortable, most likely for attention. He would say creepy things and make jokes to all the girls in our class and even threaten to do things to one of my friends. I'll call her Jenny.

Jenny had told me and all of her friends about how he had harassed her and threatened to hurt her at her house, but then played it off as a joke and proceeded to talk to her normally as if they were friends. He got reported for it immediately and was put on behavioral probation for two weeks, which honestly isn't enough time for the things he said to her. He said other things to other girls too, mostly about things I don't even want to mention that are completely inappropriate to talk about, especially in a school environment. He also tends to act as if he's dumb, like he's a child or something, when he has clearly acted his age in the past with teachers and guy friends.

Overall, he oversteps boundaries so often that, at this point, most of the girls in our grade know to stay away from him. But on one fatefully unlucky day, my worst encounter with him began. I had to be picked up after school by my mom, who works a 9-5 job all over the city. She works in hospice and has patients all around, so I would never know exactly where she'd be coming from to pick me up. Today she was coming from a town bordering ours that was over an hour away and then had to stop at her office to do paperwork so I had to entertain myself at least until 5 30 when she would come get me. The way our pickup line works is there is a sidewalk against the

main school building where most of the kids wait for their parents to pick them up. There's only one bench and it's near the door to the building so most of us just sit on the sidewalk with our backs against the wall looking out into the street with friends which is where I was. Since my mom was going to be two hours late picking me up I was practically the last person there. I'll accept that boy who I'll call Nate for the sake of the story. For around an hour he sat a few meters to my left and generally didn't bug me until we were both alone of the story. For around an hour he sat a few meters to my left and generally didn't bug me until we were both alone on the sidewalk. Then he started to try and strike up a conversation with me. At first it was fine, he started asking me questions like what I was doing

on my phone and I would give him one word answers, all with my earbuds in. But with every question he would come a little closer to me until he full-on moved all his belongings next to me and was touching me. At multiple occasions I asked him to leave. Each time him being childish and annoying asking why and when I would tell him exactly why I wanted him to leave he would divert the conversation to something perverted. He started asking more personal questions and getting creepier as he went along. Things like, Do you know what it's like to have a good time? Can girls do it when they're on that time of the month?

At this point, I had determined to completely ignore his gross questions and ask him to go away more firmly, but he wouldn't budge. He started getting closer and closer to me, looking over my shoulder to look at my phone and putting his face close to mine and pressing his body into my leg. I contemplated getting up to leave but my phone was about to die and I needed to know when my mom would get there. That and I knew that Nate would follow me wherever I went. He started to put his hand on my knees and shoulders and even when I asked him to stop he would just play dumb and ask why until I pushed him off of me. I asked him multiple times

not to touch me and he would do that same stupid game where he would hover his finger next to my leg and say I'm not touching you. I was extremely annoyed and he continued to get more invasive. As he kept getting closer to me, his questions started escalating more and more. Do you know what assault is? Go away, Nate. I don't want to talk to you. Do you? Do you know what it is? Bust off, Nate. I started hitting him where he was touching my knee. Do you know that Jenny forced herself on me? Forced me to do it with her. I looked at him dumbfounded. At that point I was done. His hand was still on my knee so I hit his arm. Not as hard as I could have but hard enough to get him to stop touching me. I turned my body to look at him and screamed at him. Pointing at him and slapping his arm. Stop touching me Nate.

I'm sick of you. If you touch me again I'm going to punch you and I'll tell the dean all the things you've said to me. Now go away! He looked shaken for only a second before he fake frowned and looked at me as if though I was the one who'd started it. He started talking in a baby voice, mocking me. Oh, I'm going to tell the dean on you. He was acting as if though he did nothing to make me mad or uncomfortable and that really pushed my buttons. He kept talking to me and looking over my shoulder for the next five minutes until his mom showed up and then got up and hovered around me for a few seconds. Then as he was leaving, he said goodbye to me and waved as

if though nothing even happened. At this point I was so shaken and angry that I couldn't react anymore. I felt like crying and I felt so violated and disgusted that I couldn't do anything but sit there. I did not tell anyone but my friends about what happened and to this day I regret not doing anything. I have this intense fear of being assaulted as any woman does but this kid who was younger than me had just invaded my safety and I didn't try hard enough to get him to stop. I sent all the signals that I didn't want to talk to him and that I didn't want to talk or interact at all and the whole encounter almost sent me to tears. It's a shame that I even have this story to tell or that I even had to try harder than a simple go away to get him to tears. It's a shame that I even have this story to tell or that I even had to try harder

than a simple go away to get him to leave. Sadly Nate still goes to my school and after that experience I began hating him. I left out a few of the other things he said to me because I can't remember specifics and I have lots of trouble with long-term memory in general but this still stuck in my mind. This goes out as a warning and a message to all my fellow girls and guys out there. If someone is doing something that is making you uncomfortable, do not hesitate to do what you can to get them to stop. I regret not doing more and not telling the authorities at my school because he has continued to do these types of things throughout the years.

Luckily, he has gotten in deeper trouble for different things, and has stopped doing such intense things to other people. I have many more stories about people from my school, as I said before, but for now, I hope no other girl at my school has to experience the same thing I did. I'm telling you this story three years after the incident took place. At the time, I was a 15-year-old boy and was home alone for the night with my dog, which was a beagle named Dodger. I was in the room with my dog and was playing some games with my friends like teenage boys do. My parents had gone out for the night to go to my father's friend's birthday.

I was used to being home alone at night because I am an only child and my parents go out a lot during the night and day. It was about 11pm when I decided I was going to take a break and shower and watch TV for a little while. I'm quite the active person after all. When I got out of the shower, I went downstairs to make some popcorn and watch The Office when I heard a large group of people sort of yell, talking to each other. This wasn't new to me as I live just down the street from a bar and it happens almost every night. When they walked in front of my house my dog started barking at them like dogs do. Suddenly there was silence outside and I was a little

startled for a second. Then I looked out the window to see them eyeing my house down and looking right at me and my dog. I didn't know what to do at this point so I turned off my tv and ran in my room with my dog. I go to look out the window in my room to see that they had gone. I was relieved for a moment until I heard a shattering coming from downstairs. I left my dog in my room and grabbed my baseball bat since I played when I was younger. I crept down my stairs just enough to see the living room and I saw one of the men peering through the window that they had broken. I yelled down at him that I had my father's gun. He doesn't own one, but I had to try something,

and to my surprise, they yelled back that they had a gun too of their own. I was frozen at this point and didn't know what to do yet again. I ran back to my room and called the police, probably something I should have done long before that. Two minutes passed passed and I hear nothing downstairs so I go to investigate. I see the glass of the window was now completely out of frame leading me to believe that they had climbed through. Luckily the police showed up within the next 45 or so seconds and when they searched my home they said they found nothing and had been taken. They searched the surrounding area and they were not found anywhere.

I have since gone to college and moved out but I will never forget that night. I guess I should consider myself lucky but I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't called the police. My name is Tatiana and my story takes place during my freshman year of high school while I was on winter break. Before I begin my story let me clarify my living situation. When I was younger my mother and father separated so my father moved in with his parents and years later my mother passed away when I was around the age of six and my little brother was four. This caused me to move in with my grandparents and father. Fast forward to December 2017. My aunt and uncle and two younger cousins live in another state and every year they visit my

grandma during summer vacation and Christmas. My uncle only visits in the winter however because we don't have the best AC. Anyways the trip started out normal and we were all excited to see each other again and the same goes on for a few days. Then on about the fourth day I got a weird vibe from my uncle when my older cousin told me that my uncle went up to her and said, You're looking hot today, babe. Not pretty. Not beautiful. Hot.

She told me that she felt sort of uncomfortable around him, but I thought that maybe she was just exaggerating. I later believed her when it was just me and my uncle home alone while I was sitting in the living room on my phone, when he laid his arm on my shoulder, sort of pushing it down, leaned in and whispered in my ear, you look very beautiful today. The statement alone didn't bother me, it was just the way he expressed it and made me realize what my cousin had told me was true. For the rest of the week I didn't want to be alone around him anymore. I always tried to have someone else in the room but he would still do little things like grab my shoulders or touch me in areas near my chest even with others around. I sometimes felt afraid to fall asleep with him in the room because he, my grandmother and I were sleeping downstairs together while the others took the upstairs.

One day I was upstairs in my room collecting my little cousin's pajamas because I would help take care of them while they were over. My uncle came into the room to thank me for helping out. I wasn't bothered by this until he slid a five dollar bill up my sleeve and accidentally touched my chest and just walked away. I felt disgusted but at the same time I was able to laugh it off telling myself that he acted like I was some sort of dancer by putting money in my clothes. That aside I was still disturbed. The last incident I recall occurred while my grandma, aunt, uncle and cousins were in the room. I was opening a kitchen door and he was trying to move past me. He could have

excused himself so I would let him through, but instead he grabbed me by the hips and thrusted into me from behind and stayed there for a good 10 seconds and said, excuse me babe. The day they left could not have come sooner. We said our goodbyes, I got an uncomfortable hug from my uncle and they were off. It's currently the end of August and I start school soon, which means before I know it, my cousin and I will have to get through another visit with him. If he's willing to do all of that, I'm afraid to know what else he's capable of or having to find out the hard way. This happened when I was a kid, I would say about 6 years old.

Because it happened so long ago, parts of the story are from my mom's experience, as well as my own because I can't fully remember all of it. So the way my house is set up, our front door leads into the gaming room. We use the back door because we have furniture blocking the front door. My house is also located on a dead end road so when someone knocks at the front door automatically it sets off red flags as neighbors, friends, and family know to knock on the back door. I remember it was a Saturday around 10am so I didn't have to go to school and I was spending my morning playing with my Barbie dolls in the living room which is right next to the gaming room. I kept playing until I

heard a knock at the front door. Being the naive little 6 year old girl I was, I figured it was a friend of my mom's. As I had previously mentioned we kept furniture in the gaming room and it blocked off the front door. Because of this, I ran upstairs to the balcony, in which you could see the front door. I leaned over the balcony rail and saw a man. He was wearing an orange t-shirt and dirty baggy jeans. Altogether, he didn't look very clean. His hair was dirty as well as his face. He looked up at me and smiled. Hi, doll. He yelled at me, all the while waving. Hi, I said, smiling back, forgetting completely about the stranger danger rule.

He looked around my yard, noticing that there were no cars around. I guess because of this, he assumed I was home alone, but my mom was actually in the bathroom taking a shower. Doll, are your parents home? He had a wide grin on his face, almost like how a kid looks before they get a new toy. The grin was filled with excitement. Yeah, my mommy is. These words made his excited face drop into a frown. Can you go get your mommy for me? His tone was different, more angry. I nodded and ran into the bathroom. My mom was brushing her wet hair and smiled at me. Mommy, there's a man in our yard who wants to talk to you. Her smile went away and she immediately told me to go to the room while she handled it. She went outside and came back in about 20 minutes later.

I asked her a few years later whatever happened that day and she told me the rest of the story. According to my mother she went outside and greeted the man. See my mother is easily set on edge because of this she immediately asked why he was bothering us. He responded by explaining that he was a part of a construction company. My mom couldn't remember the name but she knew she had never heard of it. While he said this he pointed to the name tag which was written in crayon which said the company's name. He explained there was construction going on in another county and wanted to let us know. This county was two hours away so there was no need to tell us. He then began asking my mom to come in the house. Of course she said no, this county was two hours away so there was no need to tell us. He then began asking my mom to come in the house. Of course she said no, that there was no point for him to come in but

he wouldn't drop it. He kept asking her, saying he only wanted to see the interior design of the house as it was so beautiful from the front. He then began to push past her trying to get to the back of the house for a way to enter. My mom pulled him back and told him that he needed to leave right then and there. With that, he got in his truck and left and that was the last we saw of him. Until my mom got a phone call that night. She answered but all that could be heard was heavy breathing. Now we don't know if that person that called was him. But it honestly was really creepy.

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When I was in the 5th grade, my class starts at 7am but I usually come in around 6am because I share a ride with my cousins who went to a different school but will take the same route as mine. One day my cousins have to leave early so I came to the school at 5am. It was still dark during that time. The guard already left the school's gate open for me as he knows that I always come early. When you enter the school gate you will see a basketball court and rows of classrooms facing the court. On the side of the

classrooms is a corridor leading up to the next level of classrooms. You go further down and you get to the school's auditorium. My classroom is in the basement area. You have to pass the auditorium for you to get to the stairway down to the basement. I know, it's weird. While I was on the stairway on my way down to the auditorium, from there I can see the empty stage and the big empty hall. No one is around. I'm the only one in the school, aside from the guard at that time. I continued walking and as soon as I stepped into the auditorium I can hear a girl singing. At first it was very soft. I can barely make out the words.

I looked around but I can't see anyone. The girl's singing became louder and louder. As it gets louder the notes go higher and higher. She's now singing as if though she's holding a microphone. I was stunned. I didn't know what to do. I was so scared. It's impossible.

There's no mic on the stage and the guard confirmed that I'm the first one to come in. Not even the teachers are in the school yet. As the singing gets louder and higher, I see a white light in front of me. It slowly moves towards me, like a train that's ready to hit me. I couldn't move. I was mesmerized by the white light. Suddenly I heard someone calling my name. The light is gone. The singing is gone. I can see that I'm now standing in the middle of the auditorium. I look back at the stairway and

there I see my classmates looking at me. They told me that they've been calling me several times but I am not responding. The sun is already up and it's already six. I've been standing there for an hour. I asked my classmates if they had heard anyone singing and they said no. After a few hours I did some research on my experience and what happened to me in the fifth grade. I read that if you see a light coming closer to you it means that a spirit is trying to take over your body. I read that if you see a light coming closer to you, it means that a spirit is trying to take over your body. I'm glad my classmates came in on time to prevent that from happening. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I tend to be verbally aggressive, confrontational, and basically I don't shy away from a fight if I feel the person has wronged me somehow.

I have yet to get into an actual physical situation, so I digress. I doubt I'd do well in an actual fight. My bravado usually seems to scare people off. I've also mentioned in passing my sexuality, which is garnered towards the same sex, female if you have to know. Dating hasn't always been my thing. In fact I've gone on the most dates this last year out of my two short decades of existence. I met this one girl on OkCupid and before you start thinking no it doesn't go aw. We actually hit it off on our first date and ended up spending a few extra hours together before I went home, and then we ended up going on two more. So, needless to say, I am no longer a fish available to catch. For a little more context before I get

into this, I don't live in the city where this takes place. Well, I do live there for eight months at a time. I'm a university student, and in some Facebook photos I have, there's evidence of my school logo. My girlfriend, M for the story, had a daughter with her boyfriend, but he's no longer in a relationship with her. So she's a single mom living in an apartment complex in the middle of the city, and it's where we're going to establish. And while the story affected her the most, it's now affecting me too. Nutty is who this story is about, my nickname for her, and overall description of this girl. You see, Nutty and Em worked together at a Wendy's years prior to meeting me. Em always had a thing for girls who were quirky and a little alternative. She's also got a big heart, so when Nutty asked

her out, she couldn't turn her down. Em and Nutty dated for four months, but it wasn't long, of course, before the warning signs appeared. Nutty is mentally unstable, and while I get that, hey, I know where she's coming from. It's not an excuse for the actions I'm about to describe. She's also refused any sort of therapy or assistance and her family has decided not to help her. So you've got a non-medicated undiagnosed ball of mania that you're dating essentially. Now what could possibly go wrong with that? Warning sign number one. Nutty mentions that she wishes M's ex-boyfriend was dead. It's one of those, well okay then, thing you can normally brush aside. Where you can't is when someone starts saying it over and over.

M's ex wasn't abusive. He's actually a really great guy by conversation. The whole reason they broke up was because she figured out she liked girls. So Nutty continuously says, I want to kill him. And things revolving around that train of thought. Warning sign number two, Nutty is pushy and aggressive. Where I'm aggressive is that if I think someone has done myself or another person injustice I'm quick to respond verbally or with a short charge at them. Where Nutty is aggressive is that she got very upset if she didn't get her way,

or was quick to become threatening of a person. She continuously pushed M to hang out, to come over, to go on a date, and even go further than that. She wouldn't stop until she got her way, not caring that her girlfriend didn't always want to do those things or hang out with her. Which brings me to warning sign number three. Nutty is clingy. She would call Em at all hours to do one or more, message her on Facebook, and basically stalked her social medias to see what she was up to. She didn't like Em going to things without her, getting mad and insulting Em's friends and family. The two major events that led up to their breakup shows also how messed up Nutty is.

Nutty tricked Em's daughter into telling her when her mother was home this one time she called. Em was in the shower, her daughter answered it, and because she knew Nutty, she told the stalker exactly where her mom was. So Nutty shows up, comes into Em's apartment, lying and saying she forgot something there. When she and M were alone Nutty proceeded to attack M and she didn't beat her if you catch my drift. Of course the cops in our city don't get it yet. That assault perpetrated by a woman against a woman is actually feasible. So guess what? Nothing was done. The boneheaded morons decided to just charge Nutty for trespassing and she got a fine. I for one no longer trust the police after learning this. Event number two occurred after,

when M of course broke up with her. Nutty went ballistic. She threatened to end herself and that it would be M's fault. She took a video of herself swallowing a ton of sleeping pills and sent it to M, claiming it was her fault she was doing this. Em of course called the cops, but yes, you guessed it, nothing. They honestly didn't take that seriously either. It's appalling what law enforcement thinks is necessary around there. In all honesty, I think they were mostly corrupted. Nonetheless, Nutty didn't end herself.

She threw up the pills apparently after taking the video and then waited until the next day. She then contacted Em pretending to be her mother and told Em that she was to blame for her daughter's death. Well needless to say, Em didn't buy it for a minute. She called out Nutty's bullcrap and Nutty came clean. Promptly afterwards, Em blocked her on everything why she hadn't earlier I don't know and quit her job at Wendy's. Six months later after a new position at a Starbucks and deciding to try dating one more time, we met which brings me full circle to recent events. I'm away from the city and the small town I'm originally from working my butt

off so I can at least afford groceries for the next eight months. I'll be an unemployed student. M and I have been in contact the last four, chatting and planning out a big date for the weekend I get back. M and I have been in contact, chatting and planning out a big date for the weekend I get back. M contacted me out of the blue after a couple of days of radio silence. She told me that Nutty had come into her work when she wasn't around, asking another employee about her. She figured out where Em was working and claimed to be an old friend. The idiot blabbed, telling Nutty all about Em and, yup, me. So Nutty is angry. She gets a new

number and account, contacting Em and threatening to cut me if she sees me. Nutty also found my Facebook, I've since switched it to private, and now knows where I'm going to university. Due to me also being an idiot and leaving the photos with my uni's logo up, I got a threatening message from her a few weeks ago saying that when I'm found, I'm going to pay for messing with what's hers. The silver lining in all of this is that she thankfully doesn't know where I live. I've actually kept that off my profile. I also don't link any of my other social media platforms to my Facebook, so she has no way of cyber-stalking me. I just blocked her on Facebook after getting that

message. The bad news is that she knows where I'm going to school and that I live in the dormitories. Emma's worried about me. She isn't sure if Nutty would actually be bold enough to come onto the campus to try and find me. Reading all of your stories and listening to narrations of them has inspired me to take the next steps. As soon as move-in day arrives and I'm back in the city, I'll tell the university what's going on. I'll make sure my new dormitory mates know who Nutty is and to not answer our security door for any reason or whoever asks for me. Since concealed weapons like pepper spray guns and tasers and knives aren't allowed, I'll keep my alarm box on me. M is also taking precautions which I will

only say involves keeping one of the above concealed weapons illegally. So to wrap this up, two weeks ago I get a message from an unlisted account and it was, you guessed it, Nutty herself. She said some pretty violent threatening stuff that I don't think anyone wants to read. I reported and blocked her, not responding with anything, and I've informed my RC of the situation and the campus is now on lookout in case she pops up. Still, I have a couple of weeks left so for now I'm in no real danger. I may never be, but I'm not pressing my luck pretending nothing might happen. I'll update if there's any more developments. I awoke, my vision blurry. The room around me was dark and the only source of light seemed

to be a lone candle upon the dark mahogany table in front of me. I was strapped to my seat and couldn't move. There was one other chair to my left with no one in it. There was no light and simply one door across from me. I yelled out for help but received no response. I shuffled in my chair hoping it might move or better yet topple over. It stood fast and I realized I was stuck there. I called out again with panic growing in my voice. Hello? Is anyone here? After a few minutes I heard a muffled voice finally respond. Just a moment my dear, dinner is almost ready.

The person said. The voice sounded male but I could tell little else about him. I could only sit and wonder what he meant by dinner. I also could not recall how I came to be here. All I knew was my head was pounding and the last thing that I remember was having drinks with my friends for girls night. I had not been out of the house since my mother passed away last month and they all agreed I needed to get out of my head for a little while. At that particular moment all I wanted was to get out of that chair. I tried moving again and a pain pulsed from under my legs.

I cringed as it shot up my thigh. I tried to lean back and see what the cause of my suffering could be but it was no use. I was bound too tightly to my seat. I cried out for help again, but my pleas were cut short as the door swung open and light filled the room. A tall pale man stepped out from what appears to be a kitchen. The fluorescence behind him blinded me from his appearance to begin with, but he soon stepped in to allow the door to close. Ah, you're awake. Good. I'll bring you some wine, the man said. His black hair had been slicked back and he wore a white double-breasted jacket with an apron wrapped around his waist.

It appeared I would be the unwilling guest of Chef Crazy. He disappeared again into the kitchen only to return a few moments later with a bottle of wine and two glasses. He set them adjacent to one another and filled them carefully. Then he lifted the bottle slightly and turned the label toward me. This is Pinot Noir, 1956. It will pair well with our meal and I hope you enjoy them both. A smile curled behind his words. He looking down at my secured frame then he tapped his palm against his head as if he could have forgotten before stating, silly me you need help with your drink. He picked up the glass and brought it to my lips. I turned my face away and stared intently at him from my peripheral. I growled at him. What is this? He set the glass down and wiped his hands

on a small black and white hand towel that rested at his hip. He gave a disappointed sigh while leaning down. I felt his fingers brush against my cheek but I quickly pulled away. You see, I do enjoy cooking. I always have but I am told I am not very good at it. He said while emoting with his hands. I usually stick to the simple recipes and I am working on perfecting them. I know you want to know what we are having but you have to be patient. I would really hate to ruin the surprise. The words fell from his lips easily and as soon as they were done he turned to walk away.

The whole thing unnerved me. He sounded too comfortable and must have done this all before. Before I could speak again he had faded into the kitchen. I began looking around the room for any possible means of escape but all I could see was the table set and the kitchen. I began looking around the room for any possible means of escape but all I could see was the table set and the candle. There were two windows but large crimson curtains covered them and let no light through. I tried to move the chair once more and again. I felt pain pulse through my lower body. The chair wasn't moving and I couldn't stand trying to make it. My chest became tight and I felt as though I might hyperventilate. I could barely contain the feeling of desperation.

I could feel the warmth of teardrops cascading down my cheeks. I had been with my friends all night. I never took a drink from a stranger. I must have been drugged but I have no idea how or when it had occurred. I had only had two cosmopolitans that I could remember. My internal conversation was interrupted by a smell wafting through the air. It was familiar but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. My captor arrived again, pushing a service cart with a silver tray that was covered. He moved the tray from the cart to

the table before pushing the cart to the side. His hand reached for the covering, lifting it quickly and shouting in a fake Italian accent, Voila! The sudden noise made me jump. My eyes shifted to the dish that revealed pale, winding noodles knotted into a pile with red chunky sauce that included ground meat. I had been abducted to have a spaghetti dinner with this psycho. I looked at him, my eyes furrowed and narrowed, he was giving me the cheesiest grin I had ever seen. He truly looked pleased with himself. I hope you like it, he beamed. It's my best dish. I don't know what made this man think I would be putting anything he brought me into my mouth, but within moments, he was wrapping strands of pasta around a fork and guiding it toward me.

I turned away again before speaking. I'm not eating that! I quickly closed my lips together and cut my eyes at him. He lowered the fork and his smile faded. I think you would like it if you tried, he murmured. It's good, I promise. If you don't believe me... He paused and pushed the fork into his mouth.

He chewed for a moment before speaking again. See? Delicious. He scooped more onto the fork and twisted the strings around again and leaned toward me. No! I yelled. Just get me out of this chair and get me out of this place! The fork was set upon the plate and his hands rested on his hips. How about this? He mused. If you would take a few bites of my pasta, I will let you up from the chair. His tone raised to signify a question along with his eyebrows. I thought for a moment as my eyes turned toward him. I had no real way to make him let me go, and maybe this was my only

way out. I just wasn't sure if I should because he ate it doesn't mean something might not be wrong with it. Even something as simple as him not washing his hands could make me sick. How well was the meat cooked? I could get E. coli or salmonella. He had said earlier he was a bad cook. I could be allergic to something in it. I didn't even know what was in it. Well, he interrupted my thought process, his voice growing more annoyed. Fine, I said with a sigh of defeat. I had given in and I could only hope that this wouldn't be my last meal. He clapped his hands together and gave a little giggle before turning to grab the fork again. The sauce dribbled from

the thin strands of pasta as it came closer. Just the sight of it in his hands made my stomach turn a little. I opened my mouth slightly and he placed the portion within. I closed my mouth and eyes at the same time and prayed to myself. It rolled about between my teeth for a moment and when I opened my eyes he was giving me that stupid grin again. Surprisingly, the food was good. Really good, as a matter of fact. I chewed every bit and gave a gulping swallow. My eyes probably gave away my enjoyment and he went for another forkful.

He brought it quickly and pressed it toward my face. I hesitated, but this honestly was the best spaghetti I'd ever eaten. After I had consumed half the plate I finally remembered that the whole point was to taste it in order to be set free. Okay, it was good but I really like to be out of this chair now. I gave him a stern tone. He frowned a little bit but set the fork back down. Alright, a deal is a deal. His voice sounding disappointed. He approached and removed the straps holding my upper body to the back of the chair then knelt down to release my legs.

A sound of metal clanking was heard. I could only assume he was unfastening whatever held the chair in place first. Then I could feel his hand brush against my thigh as the binding across my legs was loosened and allowed to fall to the side. As soon as I was free, I attempted to stand up. Hot, searing pain echoed up from my legs to my spine, and now that I was loose, I could move back enough to see why. Long strips of skin and muscle had been removed from my thigh region and been covered slightly with bandages. The cloth had been soaked through with my blood, but I could tell that this wound was deep. I'm sorry, he frowned. The numbness will wear off in a few hours. I accidentally used too much anesthetic. I have always been bad with measurements.

My body shook and tears rolled down my face. I touched at the bandages, my legs not wanting to move. I found myself spouting anything that came to my mind. Why? What is this? Who are you? Oh god, my legs! The man simply dried his hands on the towel again and watched me, his face expressionless. When I noticed him staring at me, I leaned forward and the words came out. What have you done to me? He stepped forward and picked up the plate. He began taking bites of it. I told you, I had been trying to perfect my cooking.

The words were slightly garbled since he was spurting them through mouthfuls of pasta. Then a thought crept into my head. The entire time I had been devouring the delicacy, I had not even let myself consider that it hadn't smelled like any spaghetti I had ever had and definitely didn't taste the same. My eyes slowly widened and I could feel vomit rising up my throat. I hunched over and the rancid dinner splattered across the floor.

The man jumped back from the mess quickly and sat the plate on the cart. Did my spaghetti not agree with your stomach? He asked as he rushed to wipe the remnants off my face. Don't worry, there is plenty more and since you won't be going anywhere anytime soon, why not have a few more bites? The question came with that same sick smile. I spat at him and tumbled on the floor. My body screamed at me as I slammed hard onto the wooden floor.

I cried out before yelling, no, I'm getting out of here. I'm going home and you're done. He smiled at me and came closer. He picked up the chair and placed it at the table, then leaned over to try to help me up, but I refused. He shook his head and leaned closer. The deal was I would let you out of the chair. I never said anything about letting you go. I leaned back and turned for the kitchen. My breath held tight in my mouth at the thought of being trapped here with this man. As he passed through the kitchen door I began to crawl toward it after him. The wood splintered into my knees and my muscles cried for me to stop. The door shut in front of me and when I reached out to

press upon it I heard the distinctive sound of metal sliding upon metal. He had engaged the lock and when I touched the wooden entry it didn't budge. I was trapped again and when I turned back to look at the window I heard the man speak once again. Don't bother with the windows. They have been barred shut. You might as well sit back down at the table and finish your food. That was a week ago. As I finished my story, the detective sat scribbling notes in the pad as he sat next to my hospital bed.

I lay there covered from the neck down, bandages. The pen stopped moving long enough for him to ask, So, how did you escape? He took a little from me each night and I thought I was going to die. I lost consciousness and when I woke up I had been dropped off here. I tried to move my hand when speaking but it hurt too much. He asked if I could remember where I was and I simply shook my head. I had been unconscious both coming and going from the place. Nothing about the room or the kitchen looked familiar. I know I wasn't being much help.

Why do you think he let you go then? He looked down and started writing again as he questioned. I thought to myself for a moment and said the only thing I could possibly think of. He needed fresh meat. Many places have what's called a ghost tour, where you go around a town and stop at locations that are supposedly haunted. Of course, being around Halloween, I was really excited to go on a tour of a city I didn't know much about. The city has the nickname of the Halloween capital of the world which I thought was just a title until what happened during the tour. We started out at about 10pm. For the first couple of places nothing really happened until we got to a house where a doorbell had been known to ring by

itself. This house is very old and you have to really work to ring the bell and there is no way the wind could press the bell. When we were done at the house and started to walk away the doorbell rang. No one was near the door as we were all walking away and were about 10 feet from the door. A while later the tour was close to an end when we stopped at this cement coin in the middle of the sidewalk. The tour guide was talking about the history of it when all of a sudden, my hair was pulled so hard that my head tilted backwards and my eyes started to tear up because it hurt so bad. On the way home, my family and I are talking about the tour when I asked if anyone else had their hair pulled or experienced anything else. But I was the only one. fun online quiz asks you about your diet, health goals, and lifestyle choices, and takes only five minutes to find out what vitamins and supplements you specifically need. Utilizing the free online

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This happened to me just last night and I'm still a little shaken up by it. Where I live it's winter, meaning it's still dark outside when I leave for work in the morning and gets dark again while I'm on my way home. Last night, I'm on my way back from work, and considering it's my friend's birthday, decide I'll get off the train and a few stations early and swing past a local shopping center to pick up a gift and some groceries for dinner. This suburb is generally known for being a little bit sketchy after dark when the cooked units come out to play, but is close enough to the city to have very accessible public transport. I've never seen anything too awful, mainly just your garden variety street harassment, a few brazenly public

narcotic dealings, and a couple of arrests now and then. I spend a while trying on clothes and grabbing my shopping and a bottle of wine for later. By the time I head outside, it's probably dark and I make my way to the closest bus stop. As I'm walking there, I realize it's not as populated or well lit as I anticipated, and it's in front of a number of closed cafes and shops, unlike my usual stop near the probably police patrolled train station. The bus drives past as I'm walking there and I figure I'll check the timetable and walk back to the other stop just to be safe.

For context, I'm a 5'6", 135 pound woman and I generally tend to avoid being out alone at night especially since there have been a number of public crimes against women in my city that receive widespread media attention. It's only about 10 minutes until the next bus, when a dark car pulls up at the bus stop. I assume it's someone there to pick up a friend or a family member, considering this is, after all, a bus stop and you're not legally allowed to park there. I realize the passenger side window is rolled down, odd considering that it's freezing outside. Out of nowhere, the older man in the driver's seat yells out, this is the ride you ordered, get in. I assume he's talking to someone perhaps behind me as I'm

waiting at a bus stop, not for an Uber. I look up from my phone and there's no one around me. At this point I'm startled because when has a legitimate Uber driver yelled out to a random woman on the street to get in his car or had someone else in the car with them? I responded with no, mainly out of surprise. Get in the car he demands. Okay, now I'm freaked out. There's no way I'm willingly getting into that vehicle. I remain at the bus stop for a few seconds, tossing up my options. This is until both men exit the car which is still running and begin walking in my direction.

Nope. I drop my cigarette and start walking frantically towards the shopping center, praying the lights will change before they get there. I don't care if they have non-ulterior motives, my potential safety matters more than I offending them. I duck behind another bus shelter, looking back as I do. The younger man is still on the other side of the road, waiting for the traffic to part, the driver out of sight. Pretending to hail an oncoming bus, I duck into the shopping center. I take a few seconds to compose myself, don my scarf and hat, obscuring my distinctive red hair, and remove my jacket, switching it for one I just purchased. While still inside, I order an actual

Uber, glancing constantly between my phone and the entrance. The minutes until the driver arrives pass excruciatingly slow until I make my way back outside and maneuver myself between a group of people waiting out front. A million thoughts are passing through my mind. I always like to think I could handle myself well in potentially stressful situations and not let my emotions get the better of me but now I'm regretting not checking the dark car's license plate or getting a better look at the men in the vehicle, just in case. I practically fly into the Uber, barreling my bags in before me, scanning the cars around me. What if I'm being followed? Am I just being paranoid? Either way, my head is

turned backwards the entire way home, watching for any dark cars with two men in the front. By the time I arrive at the end of my street, I'm confident there's no one tailing us, but still nervous and shaking nonetheless. Again, I run from the car to the front door, fumbling with keys, hands shaking all the while before slamming the door behind me and bursting into tears. I'm met by my startled partner whose face turns from excited to see me too incredibly concerned. Despite being home with doors locked behind me I continue to panic. The adrenaline is overwhelming and my brain seems to think now is a good time to remind me of an article I read in the local paper recently about two offenders who escaped from prison, who I recall were known to frequent the

suburb and those surrounding the one in which I'd just fled from in a paranoid frenzy. I feel sick to my stomach. Tears stream down my face. I manage to recount the events of the past 15 or so minutes, frantically searching the internet for any information regarding the convicted creeps, all the while considering calling the police. I only managed to calm down after I failed to find any recent news stories. The men were nor their intentions but I can only assume it was something sinister. I continue to tell myself it was just a coincidence and find a logical explanation for what happened as I have to wake up the next morning for work and walk the 20 minute route to the train station alone. So this happened when I was 8 or 9 years old. My parents had just given me the house keys so I could get back from school on my own.

This was a normal day. I was getting back from school with my friend who lived in my neighborhood. We passed by a lady who looked pretty normal, so we just ignored her. While we were talking, someone stepped in between us. It was the lady. And it wasn't even an a-hole move when you want to pass by two people walking together so you go in between them and walk away.

She was walking along with us, as if though she was part of the conversation from the beginning. We started to walk faster, but she just kept along with us as if though she was part of the conversation from the beginning. We started to walk faster but she just kept up with us. Finally I was across the street from my home. I said goodbye to my friend who went to his house and the lady just walked away in a different direction. I opened the gate, stepped into our front yard and closed the gate. When I opened the door to go inside my house my dad was just going out to see what was going on because he saw everything through the window. I told my parents what happened and when we looked out the window that lady was trying to open our gate.

My dad rushed out to get her out of here. He asked her why she was going with me and my friend and why she was trying to get into our yard. She said, my little child Barbara went into your yard and accidentally locked herself in here. I'm here to get her back. My name is Alex, not Barbara. This lady thought I was her kid or something, so she decided to attempt to break into my house. My dad explained to her that her child is not here and I'm just his daughter going back from school. He got her to get away from our house and she was still standing on the other side of the road. I looked out the window. She looked directly at me. Dad called his friend who apparently was this lady's landlord. His friend said that she was

always messed up and apparently there was a case when she was running down the street with a knife. His friend called the police to come. When the police came, my parents went out to explain what happened. They wanted me to stay in the house because they didn't want me to be too close to that lady, so I was watching everything through the windows. The last time I saw her, she was getting put into an ambulance. This started towards the end of my 8th grade year. Basically my friend had this guy who was following her on Instagram and he would comment on all of her posts telling her how pretty she is. Now that wasn't super weird but we found it kind of creepy because this dude was obviously in his late 50s and she was 13 and then he also started messaging her every day. Nothing overtly creepy

just mainly small talk at first. Eventually he finds my page and starts commenting but I don't post pictures of myself online much, and basically all of it was just doodles and pictures of my dog. Now this guy's account also mainly consisted of art, and most of it was actually pretty good, so I didn't mind him commenting on my art at first. Eventually though, he also started to message me and try talking to me. Now I have pretty bad anxiety and I hate coming across as mean so I wouldn't really respond with words unless he asked me a direct question.

Mainly what I did was send just a heart or a smiley face. Stupid I know. So this continues for a few weeks and I learned that this guy can randomly blow up. I learned this because I had responded to a message from him asking my age. I told him I was 13 and then put my phone down because I had to help do dishes. When I came back to my phone, I had like 10 messages from him asking why I wasn't responding and also telling me he was just joking. I was super confused at first as to what he could have sent that would have made me mad and basically he had responded about how both me and my friends looked like we were 18. I found that to be kind of creepy but I didn't want to confront him about it so

I told him it was fine and that I was just doing my chores and the conversation moved on and I made an excuse to stop messaging him for the day. One really creepy thing he did was when I posted a picture of my grandma's dog which is a corgi and put in the caption how much I love that dog. He liked that photo and then a day or so later he sends me a picture of a corgi he drew for me. I thanked him for it and then he asked me to tell him my address so he could send it to me. I refused but he kept asking me telling me that it was a gift and he wanted me to have it. I had to send a message explaining that it was a family rule that I was

not allowed to tell him my address and for him to drop it. Eventually after a bunch of little creepy things my friend blocked him so he started ranting about it to me saying how she shouldn't be creeped out by him and he was just trying to be nice and that if she had a problem with anything he was saying how she should have just told him. He basically continued on like that for the next few days and then he pointed out how he was following her backup account and how he was going to start talking to her on that one. So I immediately told my friend about all of this and she blocked him on her backup as well. It's amazing to what extent these weirdos will go to. When I was in kindergarten I met this woman I'll call Mary. Apparently I actually knew her for a while before my first memories of her, because she helped out in my Sunday school class.

I don't really remember that. It's just what was told to me by her and my mother. The first time I remember meeting Mary was when I was walking through the hall of our church. I knew a lot of the adults there and generally felt safe. I was walking down a hallway when this woman stuck her head out of a supply closet and started talking to me, asking me to come over and started giving me the whole, you're a good kid, why don't you help me with something sort of spiel. And she knew my name without me telling her. I was about five or had just turned six and particularly aware of stranger danger, but couldn't decide if I should be creeped out or not. There was this strange lady

seemingly hiding in a closet asking me to come over to her. How was that not sketchy? But this was church and church was supposed to be safe. Somehow she managed to coax me over to the closet. It turned out that she was trying to fill in the birthdays of the kids in my class so that they could be given little gifts when it was their birthday and she assumed that I would know all their birthdays for some reason. When she found out I didn't, she settled for asking me when my birthday was. I got kind of cagey because I knew better than to give out information about myself and that was one of the specific things my mother told me not to divulge to strangers. But then she claimed to

already know that my birthday was in April. Wrong. In fact that's about six months off. I told her she was wrong but didn't feel right about telling her the truth. Partly because I felt like her false guests and offers of future birthday gifts was some kind of ploy. But when I wouldn't divulge my real birthday she called me a liar and then she threatened to tell all my teachers what a liar I was if I didn't tell her when my real birthday was. That was the point when I ran to go find my mom and explained to her that there was this strange woman in the supply closet who was asking me for personal information and threatened to get me in trouble if I didn't

tell her. She came to confront this weirdo only to realize that they already knew each other. The woman, Mary, was someone who helped around the church and basically everyone knew her. Mary laughed off my claims and assured my mom that I was exaggerating and, of course, she would never threaten a kid with something like that and my mother believed her. My mom explained the fact that my birthday was indeed not in April but came away from the conversation with the idea that I was paranoid and just overreacting to someone asking me for my birth month. Either right before that or after that I had another incident with this woman but didn't realize at the time that she was the same person.

Similar to before, only not in a closet, this woman, Mary, came up and struck up a conversation with me, saying that she knew how much I loved to help out my teachers and wouldn't I like to be able to help out even more. The obvious answer was yes. Long story short, she was organizing some kind of teacher's conference in this cabin way out in the woods. They weren't allowed to have a lit sign, but she was worried that a normal cardboard sign wouldn't be visible at night. So she had decided that the best solution would be to take one of the little kids from the church, dress them up in an angel costume, and have them stand next to the sign for hours using a small switch to turn a lit sign on when cars approached and then turn it off again so that it wasn't by definition a continuously lit sign. This woman should have worked in sales. I did not see anything

wrong with this scenario and excitedly went to tell my mother about this fantastic opportunity I'd just been given to help someone. She was much less enthused, pointing out that this would be outside in October when the average temperature at night is under 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I would be standing outside, alone, freezing my butt off, and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes just to flip a switch so that she could bend the rules about not having an electric sign. There would apparently be no one there to make sure I was safe from wild animals or any human predator who happened to drive along and spot a random kid out by themselves in the

middle of the night. My mom tracked down Mary and gave her a pretty thorough overview of her opinion about the whole thing. Mary said something like, well fine, I can just go get some other kid to do it then, which prompted my mom to go to the pastor and tell him what this lady was trying to do. He was a nice guy with three girls of his own and put a stop to the whole plan immediately. I could tell Mary was upset with me afterwards for having supposedly told on her and putting an end to this weird scheme of hers but since I didn't really know her I didn't care. Of course after those two incidents all of my teachers became a lot more chilly toward me and one especially tactless woman

flat out told me that she had been warned about me. Come to find out that Mary had gotten her revenge on me for effectively embarrassing her twice by making good on her threat to tell everyone I was a troublemaker and a liar, even though by that point my mother had already told her that I'd been telling her the truth about my birthday not being in April. What a witch. I'd like to say it ended there, but of course it didn't. My family stayed in the area and she continued helping with various social functions, so inevitably we ran into each other several more times. One of the most outrageous things she ever did, I was 12 and my mother had decided to enroll me in some kind of VBS summer school sort of thing.

Surprise, surprise, Mary was the main coordinator. This place was so screwed up. Not perverted or anything, but just the sheer magnitude of poor planning was incredible. Lunches were provided, but it was weird stuff like gogurt and slimy pears that had a texture like raw fish. Basically all the kids hated everything they served us. On one occasion I was served SpaghettiOs and tried to make the best out of it because at least it was better than the pears. Only to find out that Mary had slipped gummy worms in before microwaving them and they had melted into the SpaghettiOs. When she found out I hadn't liked her prank, she ridiculed me for not being able to take a joke and insisted that I eat it anyways. At some point, it had also been decided that the schedule could not be flexible to any degree.

All age groups were expected to get something like half an hour outside every day. Bear in mind the state where this took place has unpredictable, sometimes extreme weather, so this included days when it was pouring rain out and our breath was fogging up in front of our faces. They'd ditch one of those little event canopy tents and force us to sit outside under it in a little plastic chair until our half hour of outdoor play was up. Even this one girl whose father had told the teachers beforehand not to make her go outside because she had a fever. Naturally, she got worse.

They called him to come pick her up, and he chewed the teachers out before taking her home. It also included days where the temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We'd be forced to line up alongside the buildings so that we could stand in the shade of the eaves of the roof because it was physically too hot to be in the sun and none of us had access to water or sunscreen. I wish I was joking about this. We had three kids drop from heat stroke in the same day and have to be taken by ambulance to the hospital. The sheriff personally came out and gave the teachers a massive tongue lashing, threatening to shut the place down if any other kids came into the hospital from there. Of course then they decided it was okay to bend their roles and keep everyone

indoors instead of forcing them outside. There was a point to me mentioning all of this and that is so that you understand the context behind what happened next. My mother was working overtime and Mary had volunteered to drive me to this summer camp since she was there every day. On this day, she had her niece and nephews in the backseat with me. Where this place was, it was out near the edge of town and mostly surrounded by crop fields which weren't in use. The area had a decent amount of traffic but there weren't many buildings close by.

On the left hand side of the building there was nothing but fields, maybe two to three acres. On the right hand side a tiny farmhouse and beyond that a pawn shop and then a gas station. So I was in the back of Mary's van with these other kids and we happen to look out as we're passing the pawn shop which hasn't opened yet and there's this scraggly bearded man stalking around outside with a rifle or shotgun in his hands not like gee I wonder if it's open so I can sell my gun but like he was either the owner and thought an intruder had broken in or he was the intruder and was in the process of breaking in. We all started telling her in a panic about this guy and she just tells us to be quiet and

then tells me that she knows I put them up to it and that when we get there she's going to tell all the teachers not to listen to me. That day inexplicably the schedule that was never changed unless the sheriff threatened the teachers was randomly changed so that my class was sent outside immediately instead of later in the afternoon and the doors to the building were locked so that we couldn't go back inside even use the restroom. I spent like an hour fearing for my life because I knew that if that guy robbed the pawn shop and tried to escape by foot there was nowhere for him to run to that had cover except our building. I even begged to call my mom and Mary refused to let me anywhere near the phone, saying

that my mom had better things to do to be bothered by my stories. So yeah, basically the coordinator of the summer school changed the whole schedule for the day and locked a bunch of kids outside just to get back at me for truthfully reporting seeing a creepy man with a gun nearby, and also forbade me from contacting my parents, which she was never supposed to do. My mom was ticked when she picked me up and learned that I'd been forbidden from calling her when I felt I needed to, although she didn't realize the full context of the situation until later, when I had a chance to explain it better. It doesn't even end there, although I wish it did because the last part was the worst

series of events that had ever happened to me. I guess it was kind of a perfect storm. From six to ten years old, I had been best friends with this boy, whom I'll call Michael. Not boyfriend-girlfriend, but real true best friends. I don't think we ever really argued about anything, except maybe his father, who seemed nice but always seemed to try to spin whatever I said into some kind of innuendo so that he could complain about me to my parents, like getting on my case about having mentioned the term pussy willow once, or claiming that the word pooter was grossly offensive when he knew that was the alternative my parents made me use instead of fart.

I got some weird vibes from him, but not enough to warrant his own post. Michael and I were inseparable up until his family decided to move three states away, after which they only occasionally dropped in to visit every couple years. When I was 14, they dropped in to visit again, and so on Saturday, I was invited to stay over at the house where they were staying while they were in town to catch up with him. I also had been friends with a girl I'll call Julie who was my age and Michael had been friends with Julie's younger brother Nate who was his age so Julie and Nate and their parents were also there visiting with Michael and his family. I had grown apart

from Julie due to other reasons but having everyone back together was fantastic. I had grown apart from Julie due to other reasons, but having everyone back together was fantastic. I was on cloud nine all day. Julie's younger brother had been a bit of a handful when he was little. He had temper tantrums, kicked small animals, randomly screamed at me multiple times, and would sometimes cry for no reason while claiming that somebody else had hurt him. He was severely, in my opinion, bullied by his sisters, so I never took any of it personally or really considered it his fault. Since I hadn't seen much of him or his sister in years by this point, I had no idea how he was getting along, but because he was so much more grown up, four plus years had passed, I assumed he'd just grown

out of it. That afternoon we were all playing tag in the front yard, which was sort of a U-shape and surrounded by hedges. At some point I lost sight of the others. I guess they had gone inside or something. I was at the end of the U that was near the garage door, playing fetch with Michael's dog in this big walking stick, when I heard Julie's mom call my name from the other end of the U, which was near the house's front door. I took the stick because I thought leaving it lying around would be rude and started running around this U. Apparently when Julie's mom had opened the door and called my name, Nate had darted out the door and come running around the

U to come find me, Only he didn't say anything and I didn't know he was there. We were both closer to the inside of the bend and when we reached the middle there was no chance to stop. We ran straight into each other. He landed flat on his back and I nearly fell over too. His chin hit me hard in the collar though. We just stared at each other in shock for a second. Finally I reached a hand forward to help him up and ask if he was okay. Immediately, his eyes filled with tears. He started screaming, seemingly in pain and in absolute terror, and turned around and bolted back the way he'd come.

I knew he had to be bruised at least as badly as me, but was also totally confused. The way he was crying I was afraid he might have broken an arm or a leg or something but if he was hurt that bad then how could he run so fast or if he was afraid what was he afraid of? I ran after him feeling like there was an axe murderer behind me or something. I reached the door but nobody was there and it was closed and locked. I knocked and Michael's mother answered it. She saw me still holding the walking stick and looked confused but let me inside. I could hear Nate screaming and crying in the kitchen.

His mother had him up on the counter and was looking at him, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. She seemed just as confused and scared about the whole thing as I was and then he saw me and immediately pointed and screamed, she beat me with a stick. He just screamed the same thing over and over. I didn't know what to let me go downstairs where he and the others were so I just stood by myself in the foyer next to the door and tried not to panic. Maybe Nate hadn't grown out of crying wolf about other people hurting him but this was way different from what he'd been like when he did that as a little kid. This time he seemed hysterical and he seemed like he legitimately believed what he was saying.

I had been holding the stick when we ran into each other. Even though I certainly didn't hit him with it, maybe he didn't understand what had really happened. I tried to go back into the kitchen thinking I should try to explain to his mom what had happened but Michael's father stopped me. I don't even know where he came from. I must have been really freaked out because from my perspective, it seemed like he just appeared in my way. He told me not to go in the kitchen. I tried to explain that I needed to talk to Nate's mother and explained very shakily that Nate was telling her I'd attacked him.

So Michael's father asked, Did you? I told him no, of course not. He pointed out that I didn't seem to be hurt at all, which I refuted, telling him I'd gotten my own bruises from running into Nate. He asked for me to show him. I said no. He asked why. I pointed out unnecessarily, I think, that I was a 14-year-old girl and so I couldn't just take my shirt off the way a 12-year-old boy could. He asked me why again and persisted in stating that I needed to show him and that if

I didn't, he couldn't help me because I refused to give him any reason to think that I was innocent. This miserable sod who had known me growing up and had allegedly been a close friend of my family for years and knew that I had never hit another kid in my life was essentially trying to blackmail me into undressing in front of him. I still feel angry just thinking about it because the entire time my family had known this he had always come off as this perfect kind and caring father and he always found things to nitpick in whatever I said. Even as a first grader who didn't know what anything was somehow I was allegedly spouting all kinds of innuendos all the time, and now this. I've learned as an adult that people who talk excessively about a topic

generally do so because it occupies their own mind too frequently, and it makes me wonder if maybe that wasn't his problem all along. If not, I don't know how to explain anything. All I know is that night night it was like everyone I knew had gone insane at the same time. But I did say no to him and went into the kitchen, more to get away from him than anything else. Nate's mother was still frazzled but was starting to seem more exacerbated than anything else. Somehow he still hadn't stopped crying. I asked her to please call my mom to come pick me up. That hadn't been the plan. The plan that I was to stay until after dinner but I couldn't handle the situation anymore. She could see that I was shaking and agreed. I asked Michael's mother

if I could say goodbye to any of the others but she didn't want me anywhere near them. My mother was tense and quiet all the way home and I was afraid of what she might have been told over the phone. She asked me once if there was anything I wanted to tell her. I panicked and said no. The next day was Sunday. I habitually stayed with the adults instead of going to the teens class because the teacher, who was coincidentally Mary's husband, picked on me sometimes. In retrospect, I should have spoken

up about that, but I was an insecure teen and thought I might be oversensitive and wasn't really sure how much of what he said could be considered harmless ribbing. The end result was that I didn't see Julie, so I had no idea how the situation with Nate had resolved until after church was over. The phrase, news spreads like wildfire, doesn't even begin to fit the bill. It was like everyone had developed telepathy. I overheard part of the story from Nate's mother while she was telling it to Mary. Nate had continued to insist, even after I left, that I had savagely attacked and beat him for no reason. He had some pretty nice green bruises

that seemed to back up his claims. I did too, right on my collarbone and shaped exactly like his chin. Nate's mother was completely unnerved by how sincere he seemed and was torn between believing him, because he was so grown up now, because there were those bruises, because he had been legitimately too scared to come to church in case he saw me again, or not believing him, because I seemed so scared too, because she had the decency to remember what kind of kid I had been growing up. While I hadn't been there, Julie had told all the girls in my class that I attacked her brother. Michael told me that he didn't know if he believed that I had done it or not, and his parents refused to let him stay in contact with me because they were both certain I was

guilty. Julie and Nate's parents had wanted to talk to my mother to try to resolve whatever had happened because they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. But they couldn't find my mom and didn't want to take the time looking for her because they had left Nate home alone and were eager to get back to him. So instead they told the whole story about what had happened to Mary trusting that she would convey the whole situation to my mother. That was not what happened. Mary changed the story. Now it was Nate's parents, herself and Michael's parents who all knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was guilty, with the added insinuation that it might not have been just an assault because apparently that wasn't good enough for her. Yeah, she decided to play that card just for the sheer fun of it.

By the time I just started to realize that the issue with Nate was still an issue, half the people in the church had already been told what an awful, despicable person I was. The head of the youth ministry personally sat me down to tell me how unacceptable my behavior was. I had former teachers I hadn't seen since first grade coming out of the woodwork to tell me how disappointed they were in me. Everyone flat out refused to hear my side of the story. They already knew everything they said. Nothing I said could make up for what I did. Mary had already told them that I was a rebellious lying kid, a troubled child, and had stuck to that story over the years,

including during the pawn shop incident, so it seemed like there was precedence. She'd been building off the same claims about me for eight years by this point. Why would anyone believe in a lying, rebellious, troubled teenager over a charismatic adult who was always doing her part to help the community? Mary was so disgusted with me, her words, that she refused to speak to me. She specifically told her yarn to everyone but my mother, having learned earlier on that my mom was not going to stand for baseless rumors and accusations about me. Mary was of the opinion that my mom was in denial about what an awful kid I really was. Mary's husband, my current youth teacher, somehow snowed me into

thinking that my mom knew about everything and that I shouldn't try to talk to her about it because she was so angry with me that she would basically explode on me. I spent the next two and a half years despised by almost everyone I knew. All the adults I knew were against me except for the pastor who refused to take sides and my mother. Mary's husband continued to make snide remarks and insinuations whenever he thought they were vague enough that other adults wouldn't know what he was talking about. All the kids I knew who were in my age range shunned me. Even when new kids came in who didn't know any better, they were quickly told to stay away from me, ruining any chance I had of making new friends to replace the ones I'd lost.

Even random strangers in the grocery store would glare daggers at me, sneer at me, or just watch me with creepy disapproval. The shyness I always had became full-fledged social anxiety, complete with what I suspect was selective mutism, because I was afraid of virtually all the adults I knew, afraid of the little jabs they'd make at me. Afraid because I didn't know if my mom knew or not and was afraid to find out. If she knew. If it was true that she was just so indifferent in reality that even though I knew she loved me, for some reason she still let everyone pick on me. It seems so stupid now that I was afraid of talking to her about it. If there were any one thing in my life I would choose to change, I would have told her immediately. But that isn't what happened, so I lived with it by myself.

There were some mornings where I would just spend an hour in the shower crying my eyes out because I didn't want to have to go out and deal with it all over again. I don't know if you'll know what I mean when I say that having other people expect you to feel guilty is oppressive in and of itself. When you laugh or smile or just feel normal but they believe you should be ashamed of something and don't like that you aren't. For a while I tried just not remembering what had happened. It is possible to make yourself forget something, but don't ever do that to yourself. Once you have a memory, you can't really destroy it. The best you can do is bury it. Part of your mind will still always know it's there. I still got all the same judgmental looks and hurtful remarks. I just no longer understood why people were acting that way, and I had all kinds of awful nightmares until I finally

dug those memories back up and faced them again. I got over it but slowly. So many people who had known me the entire time I was growing up had immediately assumed the worst just because some gossip had been told to them. I never knew who had been told and who hadn't. Every time I thought people had forgotten, Mary's husband would make some new cutting remark or someone else would and I'd lose whatever sense of security I'd started to scrape together. It was only in my early 20s, a few years after we'd moved out of state, that I finally found the courage to bring up the subject with my mother, which led to some interesting revelations. It turned out that

Nate's mother hadn't divulged anything about what had happened over the phone. My mom had been tense on the drive home because of something totally unrelated to me, and had asked if I wanted to talk not because she thought I was guilty about anything, but because she could tell I was under stress of some kind. Mary's husband had lied through his teeth about her knowing what was going on or being angry about it. She had never known. This was why Mary's husband always tiptoed around the subject in her presence. Because he knew she didn't know and wanted to keep it that way. It was practically a conspiracy.

My mom, the one person who had actually had a right to know what had happened, had been denied the opportunity to try to make things right because everyone else was so busy judging me for themselves. And Nate's parents, the two people who had actually had a semi-balanced view of that night, had no idea how bad things had gotten after they left that day because they didn't live in our area anymore and weren't there to see it. If they had, I'd like to think that they would have put a stop to it. They were good people. That's the end, I guess. I don't have nightmares anymore and I feel more or less indifferent to the situation now. It's over a decade behind me at this point, but Mary and your husband. Holy crap. I never want to meet either of you

again for as long as I live. All of the stress and fear and heartache I've mentioned here, and that's still not even mentioning how much you badmouthed my mom behind her back, gushed over her cancer scare because it gave you something to gossip over, and generally treated us both like dirt. I never want to meet Michael's father again either because whether he is just some sort of deviant or just too dense to realize how wildly inappropriate he was being doesn't really matter at this point. Either way, it was still beyond creepy and wrong. Never meeting Michael again is still kind of painful to think about, but I guess it can't really be helped.

I even tried contacting him on Facebook a few years ago but to no avail. I already know Julie and Nate never want to meet me again. I guess that makes this sort of a round robin. Let's not meet. When I was 16 I got a job working as a barista at the local Caribou Coffee. I was in high school so I worked closing shifts. My first job was at a hospital so I was used to nights and I thought that Caribou would be less crazy than a hospital. On my very first shift, at 9 at night, the store was completely empty. The girl who was training me decided to go in the back and do the dishes.

She went outside and smoked by the trash, leaving me alone to run the store. We closed at 9.30 and it was Tuesday so she didn't think anyone would come in. Well, a few minutes after she left this guy comes in. He's a giant. I'm 6'6". He was taller than me and looks like Hagrid. Scruffy, beard, curly hair, built like a barrel but he had a ring of either psoriasis or acne around his face. He's got those eyes that shook me to the core. Crazy Charles Manson eyes. He's completely drenched in sweat and he can hardly breathe. He comes to the counter and grabs a ginger ale right out of the cooler, opens it, and pounds the whole thing in one go. He takes another one,

opens it, looks me dead in the eyes and says, I don't feel so hot. Bam, collapses to the ground. I kept trying to call my co-worker over the headset but she was out of range. I was so scared. I was gonna call 911 but my phone was shut off. The store phone was in the back room but I wanted to make sure that this guy was alive first. So I run around the counter to try to help him. I kept asking him are you okay are you okay do you want me to call an ambulance but he just kept shaking his head. I started to get up to go get the phone to call the police and like he read my mind he grabbed me by the arm pulled me down to his face and said, They can't help me. No one can help me. I'm fighting a spiritual battle,

and I'm losing. Well, my idiot self decides, Okay, let's just hear this guy out. So I get him off the ground and sit him in a chair and ask him what's wrong. He starts rambling on and on about his mom and his stepdad. I kind of disassociated so I didn't get everything. My heart was pounding because I had a feeling that this guy was not only crazy but that he would hurt me in a heartbeat. So after he tells me his tale I just shrugged and said, you do you man. You gotta do what you gotta do. He lit up and gave me a big hug and said,

you're right. Thanks for the help. And he left. Well, a week later, while in my current events class, I pulled up the local paper and guess who's on the front page. This guy's mugshot with the headline, man strangles Stepfather to Death in the Street. This happened about 15 years ago, but it feels just like yesterday. It's crazy how fast time goes by once you become an adult and start paying monthly bills. I had moved into a really scary part of town in KCMO. My father being from an even worse part of town in New York would always justify living in our neighborhood and made sure everyone knew how much worse his old neighborhood was as if that made this neighborhood a good one. Typical New Yorker. Anyways when we first moved to this area,

I had just finished middle school and started high school. Now, if anyone here is from KC, they should be able to agree that KCMOSD is just crap. It's known all over the state as being pretty much the worst district available. The district isn't just bad because of their academic failures, but because they honestly don't care about anything, mostly the students and their safety. School started really early in the morning, so in order to get there in time for free breakfast, which every one of the students took part in, our buses got there so early that in winter months it was still dark out when we would walk to our bus stops. When I got my bus assignment, I couldn't believe how far my bus stop was, especially since I was the only student that caught the bus at that stop, so it's not like they couldn't have given me a stop closer to my house. When my mom tried to ask them to move it, they refused, so for the four years I attended my

school, I walked five and a half blocks in the dark to catch the school bus. Now, I have to mention that across the street from us, there are no houses. In fact, in my neighborhood, there are a ton of blocks that are just empty lots where old mansions used to sit. From before blockbusting and white flight, leaving the area to lower income residents who were mostly African American. So on my side of the street there was a row of old run down houses and then across the street nothing. But the block before mine there were houses on both sides of the street and in one of the terrible houses a block away but facing my house lived my creepy disgusting neighbor. This guy was most likely in his late 20s or early

30s and without a doubt had some sort of learning disability. In fact, I heard at one point he was quite normal but took so many drugs that he ended up with seizures and completely fried his brain. I also called him gross because he was. He never showered, he was always dirty and dripping with sweat, but no one paid him any attention due to him looking and acting just as weird as the homeless people and addicts that frequently hung around the block. For a long time, any time I would pass his block, he would be standing outside, and when he saw me, he would wave, oftentimes running up to me and trying to get me to talk to him, but

I would ignore him and go home. Everyone knew that he had a thing for me but brushed it off as being harmless due to his mental illness. This often angered me because even though he wasn't all there in the head, that didn't give him the right to make me feel so weirded out all the time and I was only 12 or 13 so he shouldn't be talking to me all the time or asking me to give him a hug every time he saw me. Ew, I wouldn't touch him if you paid me. This behavior happens so often that people around the neighborhood would joke about it

and just laugh when he would say something like she's my girlfriend or I'm gonna marry her one day. Even my parents would laugh about it rather than listening to me when I would tell them how uncomfortable he made me and how the behavior was actually getting worse the older I got. Fast forward to a few years later. One summer morning I was woken up by my stepmom who wanted me to go to the door and give the creepy guy some loose cigarettes. I guess he woke her up by banging on the front door for 15 minutes and when she answered he asked her who was home. She wouldn't tell him and then he asked if he could come in. She told him no and he tried to get inside so she pushed him out. He then asked if he

could just have a hug and she told him no and that he needed to leave. He finally agreed to leave if she would just give him a few cigarettes so she decided to make me give them to him because of the fact that he creeped her out. Sure, thanks mommy dearest. I gave him the cigarettes quick and slammed the door and locked it. The behavior continues but not as often as it's summer and I'm not riding the bus. But when school started I had to ride the bus and almost every morning and evening there he was. Then one morning it was really dark and for some reason I decided to walk to the bus in a direction that I normally didn't. It was behind my house which would make the bus stop a straight shot after that. Except instead

of him just waiting for me at his house, he decided to follow me. He must have been watching me. The worst part about my decision was that the block I was walking towards was one of those empty blocks. One side was a gigantic church that someone had attempted to build but never finished, so it was abandoned. The other side was an empty lot. I was walking further and further towards the middle of the block where we would be completely alone. I couldn't run back home because he was in that direction and could catch me and I couldn't run further into the block because he would probably catch me and we would be in the middle of an empty city block.

I started to freak out. I'm scared. I just knew that this was it. This was his opportunity. This is what he had been waiting for all these years. He was getting closer and closer. So much closer. I lost my mind. I flipped out. I went off. I freaked. All of the anger and all of the fear that I had harbored through the years came spilling out of my mouth. My actions, all of it. I pulled my hair, jumped up and down. I spit, I cussed, I threw my shoe. I wanted him to be so scared of me that he never messed with me again. I started running in circles around him as he cowered, literally in fear of my sudden behavior. I made him feel the way he made me feel since I was 13 years old. Get away from me. I'm crazy. I howled. Don't you understand? I'll end you if you need to. Stay away from me. Stop following me. Stop talking to me. Stop asking

me for hugs. I can't stand you and if you don't stop you'll regret it. He stood stunned, shocked and honestly scared of me. He suddenly began walking backwards towards the way he followed me. Jesus girl, I'm not following you. I'm, I'm, bye. He ran away from me and honestly never bothered me or my family again. Later on I told everyone the story but no one really understood how scary he was. They all figured he learned his lesson but that I was fine the whole time. Jerks.

So this took place when I was around 10. I live about a block away from a park. There's a path that leads through it and comes to a T. Left leads down to a lake, right leads across a wooden boardwalk, around a swampy area and back to a main road. I was at this park one Saturday night with a friend, Charles, and he was about 13. It was probably midnight. Charles and I had just crossed the parking lot and were walking through the baseball fields that leads to the park when we hear a car pull up into the lot. We thought it was just a car

full of stoners or something of the sort and kept walking. The driver turned on his brights for a few seconds and then someone rolled down a window. The people in the car began shouting at us asking what we were doing, if we wanted to hang out with them and go to a party. We yelled no and just kind of shrugged it off as the car was turned off. At this point we were about three fourths of the way across the field when we heard all four doors of the car slam shut, then some more indistinct shouting. Charlie and I were a little freaked out and I remember joking with him saying things like, wouldn't it be crazy if they came after us? The four from the car began crossing the field as well. We could hear them on the gravel of the baseball field. At this point, Charles and I were walking backwards to the park watching the group. They kept shouting at us to wait up for them and that they just wanted to hang out with us.

They all began jogging towards us. Now this wasn't the first time I'd been in a situation like this, so I told Charles that we needed to book it, so we did. We took off towards the T-junction, the forest surrounding us blocking more and more of the light. The group behind us however decided we couldn't just leave like that, so they chased us, and they were fast. As we reached junction and took a right, we slowed down to cross the boardwalk quietly. When we got roughly halfway through it, the people behind us were at the junction. As it was dark and they couldn't hear or see us,

they pulled the classic stop and split up, except it didn't take very long. We broke free of the trees and moon provided just enough light for them to see us. A few shouts of over here and all four of them were hustling after us. We took a right turn after the boardwalk to circle back to my house when we realized our pursuers were just about to finish crossing. The swampy area I mentioned earlier plays a part here, it's just off the right of the sidewalk we're on. Charles and I knew we couldn't outrun them if we just went straight, so we decided to dive off the path, in the bushes, trees, and murky swamp water. We ended up somewhere between knee and waist deep in muck, breathing heavily, covering our mouths and noses to try to be as quiet as possible.

The group after us started pacing up and down the sidewalk, shouting for us, saying we could talk it out and that they were cool people and we could be friends. All the while, they began poking around in the bushes above us. After what felt like an hour but was probably five minutes I guess they got bored because they went back across the boardwalk. Charles and I waited a little longer just to be sure then crept out and started the jog back home. As we got onto the street I live off of we noticed their car was still in the parking lot. Not wanting to risk another encounter, we took off running as fast as we could. After finally getting back to the house, we saw a car with its brights on speeding down the street.

Charles and I both took showers to clean off, and never spoke of it again. I'm a 20-year-old girl. Two years ago, I started studying at my chosen university, thanks to which I had to move to one of the biggest cities in my country. I rented a flat in a residential block. As I learned, the area was calm and quiet, but definitely not fancy. I got used to living there pretty quickly and made a lot of new friends. Not long ago, I decided to go to a party with my friend and her boyfriend. The event was taking place quite far away from the flat, but seemed fun enough to give it a shot. We danced a bit,

talked, and laughed.. Eventually we got tired and decided to go home. They were going together and I was going alone. I wasn't too concerned since I've done it a lot of times before, not to mention it was Friday and even if it was around 2am, there was still a large number of people around. I was walking and listening to music on my headphones. The air outside felt quite refreshing after the hours of partying. Eventually I got to the front door of my block. At this point I felt completely safe since I was pretty much at home. I was looking for the keys in my purse however I had some troubles with it since it was dark. Suddenly I heard footsteps behind me. I looked

there and immediately fell paralyzed. Just a few steps away from me there was a man who was almost completely naked. The only thing he was wearing were boots. He was walking past me very slowly and kept his eyes on me the whole time. I'm not quite sure if it was because of the panic but I especially remembered his expression. It seemed calm and collected but there was some creepy wilderness in his eyes. I remember them as very dark. He kept them focused on me which made me feel even more unsettled. This man seemed to be in his mid to late 20s maybe even around 30. I'm a girl of a very petite build I'm only about five feet two inches and I remember thinking I could never overpower him.

I looked away from him pretending not to be bothered and tried to focus on finding the keys. I simply couldn't do it though which made my eyes fill with tears of frustration. I felt like I was in danger but at the same time I was so close to safety. Meanwhile this man walked a few meters past me. I didn't look at him but I felt that he kept on observing me and my desperate attempts on finding my keys. Something told me to check if my feeling was right and I looked in his direction quickly. Of course he kept his focus on me all that time. Once he saw that I looked at him he turned back and started walking towards me again. My heart starts to pound even faster as I tried to find the keys even more desperately knowing he's pretty much attacked the doors with it and jumped right in. When I turned back this

guy was just standing there looking at me through the window. The thought of how close he was getting to me before I jumped through the door seemed absolutely terrifying. We stared at each other through the window for a few more seconds and then he turned right and left. I finally felt safe. By the time I was in my room it was almost 4am and I had no idea what to do with myself. I called my boyfriend who insisted that I should call the police but I was too scared and tired to do this at that time. I kept on thinking about the what ifs and how lucky I was that nothing happened. After that I decided to stop walking by myself at night and if I absolutely have to do this I call somebody and talk with

them till I'm in my flat. This whole situation taught me that danger can be found in any place, even the one you feel safe in. I'm 18 and my ex-boyfriend is 23. We dated for about three months and then two months ago I decided we weren't compatible for various reasons. A major one of which was that he didn't respect my religious beliefs. Our relationship seemed good although it was my first relationship so I don't know a lot to base it off of. And he always seemed

like a good person. Our breakup was amicable enough and he wanted to stay friends which pretty much consisted of texting each other, small talk, meeting up occasionally, more like acquaintances than real friends I suppose but the point is we didn't fall out and there weren't any particular red flags before about two weeks ago when we had a bit of an argument. It was Sunday, so I went to church as usual and to my surprise, he came to meet me afterwards. We set off, walking back to my house and he rolled his eyes at me and said something along the lines of, I can't believe someone like you would buy into rubbish like that. Honestly, even if he was joking, the fact that he wasn't even making an effort to tolerate my beliefs,

he could have just said nothing about them, I didn't bring it up, bugged me a little when I told him so. His response? Yeah, well, I'm not going to like it if that's the reason I haven't had my way with you yet. I wasn't at all prepared for him to say that and I was just shocked and disgusted that he was being like that after we had tried to have a normal friendship so I just walked away from him. I couldn't think of anything to say so I sped up and walked away. He caught up with me and tried to put his arm around me telling me to be honest

because he knew I wanted him. I pretty much shoved him off and ran the rest of the way back home. Almost straight afterwards he texted me an apology which I ignored for a while while I tried to calm down then replied with fine just please don't say things like that in the future and I genuinely believed he wouldn't. A little dumb I know but he had always seemed pleasant before. His apology seemed genuine and I'll confess I may have been a bit soft touch where he was concerned seeing as I still cared about him and had regretted breaking up with him a few times since we broke up. Things settled back down to normal for about three days then he messaged me again saying he still wanted me.

Before I could reply, he sent an apology and I reaffirmed that I only wanted to be friends with him now. That's when he decided to flip the crazy switch on me. I received a string of texts telling me that a platonic relationship wasn't going to work. We should be friends with benefits because he had to have me at some point, promptly followed by a request to meet up. I thought the best response to that level of sudden weirdness that had caught me off guard was no response at all, which is usually a pretty clear no if everything I had said before hadn't been. He didn't stop, even after about an hour's silence from me. In fact, he got creepier.

He accused me of teasing him, and then said that we were going to do it, whether I was playing his game or not. At this point, I became pretty panicky, because he started to sound like he might assault me or do something worse, but I tried to calmly respond in case I was getting things out of hand in my head and reading it wrong or in case he was generally thinking I was just playing hard to get. So on the off chance it was misunderstanding I spouted out for him telling him clearly I was ignoring because I wasn't interested. His follow-up to that chilled me to the bone. He accused me of being some terrible things because I was mad about Sunday still then told me if I didn't want to go meet him he was gonna come around when you're home alone

and get what I want quote unquote. At this point I felt like I didn't know him at all anymore and I couldn't predict if he was serious or not so I got scared and decided I should get the police involved. I told him as much and hoped he would back off now, but he didn't. He just seemed to find it funny and told me that, quote, by the time they manage to do anything, you'll be mine, end quote. At this point, I thought I wasn't safe in my own home and I got out. Well, I put the post online first because I wanted some evidence if I really didn't make it to the police, then packed some emergency things and drove to my parents' house and addressed my ex was thankfully unaware of. Once I was there, I showed my father the messages I'd been sent and he took me to the police station for moral support and because

he was very angry at the time. The police did drive by to my house that night because we were concerned about break-ins after threats to come and get me and happily no one tried to break in. Even so they took my ex in for questioning in the morning. A police officer handling this got in touch much later that day and told me that he had adequate evidence for me and detaining and questioning him. I gather he basically admitted it, wasn't very repentant about it, for me to press charges. Currently planning to charge him with harassment and threatening behavior. After that he was released on bail with conditions not to contact me. I wish I could say that's the end of it,

but I'm suspicious that he has contacted me. Two days after the original texts were sent, I worked the breakfast shift at the cafe I work in and not long after I arrived, some flowers with a card were delivered. The delivery person had clearly been given my name since he asked for me by name. The card was the creepy part. Though it was written to order thing and probably toned down quite a bit in comparison to what he might have written personally, it made my skin crawl. First off it started by calling me love, referred to this incident just as falling out, apologized like it would make me feel better, then said that I should apologize to him too

because we both took it too far then said I'd be happier if we got together again it wasn't signed by name and but it isn't hard to tell who it is but I don't have hard evidence so I don't know if I can say that he's violated his bail conditions I did report it to the police but they didn't have much they could do either, given the lack of proof it was his. I've also had similar issues with social media. Some weird Facebook friend requests I've deleted that I think were from him, but nothing serious thankfully. All I can really say to finish this, or at least hopefully finish this since I'm praying this is not an ongoing story is to my creepy ex. I've got my pepper spray and I'm staying with my parents where I can reach my

dad's gun so it's probably in both our interests to not meet again until I take you to court that is. So this happened 10 or so years ago. When I was 14 I befriended a girl named Rebecca. Now Rebecca came from a terrible home. Her clothes were always dirty, she never had lunch and she sure did have a mouth on her. We were friends though and everything was sweet. My mom had a bad upbringing as well so she didn't mind Rebecca coming over to have dinner with us every night. On more than one occasion my mom bought clothes and underwear for her.

I cannot stress this enough. We treated her like family which makes what happened all the more messed up. Rebecca and I ended up having a fallen out. She dropped out of school and I didn't see her for a while. Fast forward a few months and I'm waiting at the bus depot to go to a mate's house. I see Rebecca and she's hanging out with a group of girls who come from a well-known violent family in a small town. These girls were and are always picking fights, intimidating others, and just generally terrible people. The kind of people who start a fight if you looked at them for a second too long. I didn't want to look at them, but I could see in my

periphery that they were all looking in my direction, pointing and laughing. I decided to walk to the bay where my bus was supposed to be and they followed. Just before my bus pulled up, the leader of the pack came up to me and said something about her knowing that I called her something terrible and I was going to get what's coming to me. Now, I never said a word about her in my life. It was obvious Rebecca was the one feeding her these lines. This went on for a while. I would be hanging at the local shopping center or be at the bus depot and see them in the distance causing me to hide or run. Sometimes they would see me and run after me. Other times they would just yell stuff. I didn't know what it was at the time but my anxiety was crippling. I was constantly terrified. So one day

I'm in a jewelry store with my friend. I look up and see Rebecca and one of the girls walking past the shop. I immediately turn around in hopes that they wouldn't recognize me but it was too late. Rebecca comes in and starts letting out this stream of abuse at me telling me she's going to beat the crap out of me and that I'm all these terrible names. My friend ran away and I'm looking at the shop workers with pure terror on my face, but all they are doing is telling me to get out because they don't want us to break anything. I felt so alone. Rebecca's friend is egging her on, telling her to give it to me before security comes. I can see that Rebecca is hesitant, but she also wants to seem tough in front of her friends. Now, I don't know if it was

the adrenaline going through me, or she just threw a terrible punch, but I managed to grab her fist before it hit my face. I think it surprised us both. Rebecca and her friend ran away. I'm crying. The shop people were yelling at me to leave but the girls might still be in the shopping center and I'm so scared to run into them again. I end up leaving and calling my mom on a payphone. She knew what had been happening so instead of me catching a bus home she said she'd pick me up. Our house is a 10 minute drive from the shops but mom's didn't show up until 15 or so minutes later. When I got in the car I was frantic, asking my mum why she took so long.

She informs me that as she was driving, she saw Rebecca and the other girl walking. She pulled up and yelled out to Rebecca to leave me alone. Rebecca tells my mum to buzz off so my mom grabs her by the shirt, pulls her clothes and says it again while also adding that she'll personally flog Rebecca if she tries to hurt me again. My mom is an incredibly kind and patient woman but she will not tolerate things like that towards her children. I constantly see all the other girls but I haven't seen Rebecca in years and I hope I never do. Probably around two years ago I had gotten a job at a certain Australian rip-off steakhouse in my hometown.

I was really excited to start this job because it had been the first time I'd had a job while in school that year due to how busy I was. It was nice, healthy distraction from constant school work and extracurriculars, plus I was getting paid. Being able to afford food was a fun thought. I don't think I had ever been so excited to buy hamburger meat. My days there were a lot of fun but we had this one horribly mean manager named Steven that would get super upset and angry at other employees but he would never get upset at me. Steven was probably in his mid-60s and was the kind of guy you could just tell hadn't been happy with how his life had turned out. Now I was a super hard worker and liked my job but there were definitely some times that I deserved to get yelled at but he never would. Like he never raised his voice at me. All of my

co-workers started making jokes that I was Steven's favorite. It got to a point where I would be on shifts with some other girls and he would rip into them for stuff that was definitely wrong on both of our parts and would never touch me. Eventually I wasn't capable of putting up with the poor treatment of my co-workers anymore and pulled another manager, Elliot, aside to see how I could file a complaint and get justice for my fellow servers. Elliot and I had become super close since I started working there and when he sat down with me he held me as I cried over my uncertainty. This job meant the world to me and I didn't want to lose it. He reassured me that I was alright and that he would handle it. Over the next few weeks he would make me feel better whenever

something happened and he constantly reassured me that action from corporate was coming. About two months after the original complaint I had decided on taking a vacation to Texas to visit my mother. I said bye to everyone at work for a whole two weeks and had so much fun hanging out with my mom, easily the break I needed from the work environment. Not too long after I get back from my vacation I come back to work and just after a few shifts I realize that Elliot isn't there anymore. I figured that Steven had fired him for standing up and I was livid. In my anger I started talking to my co-workers about the crap and they all look confused and baffled

by what I was saying. After stopping mid-sentence and asking them why they were looking at me like that, a co-worker corrected me and told me that that's not why he got fired. Elliot had been caught keeping two 8-year-old boys in his basement. Elliot was arrested and that's why he was fired. Apparently, he also had been caught in the past for publicly urinating on a seven-year-old and beating his own children who had gotten taken away from him permanently when he went to prison the first time. Both boys were safely returned to their parents, but they'd been there for at least two months, from what I remember. So when I was around seven years old, we moved into this big house that was split into three different apartments. It was a light blue shade, so everyone called it the big blue house. I had a sister a year younger as well.

We lived in the upstairs apartment. There were two apartments on the ground floor. In the front apartment lived a couple with their teenage son and my parents knew them very well and had actually known them most of their life. They lived in the apartment for a long time. But the third apartment is where people seem to come and go. I still remember a certain tenant who was a lady in her 40s that had a daughter around the age of four years old. She would scream at her daughter that it wasn't her fault. Her father decided to go be

with some woman. So even at the age of seven, I knew that this was very odd to tell such a young kid that her father was dating someone terrible. The little girl would even tell me sometimes, my dad is with that woman again. But this story is about the tenant who moved in after she left. He was just a single guy in his 40s as well. He was very friendly. Now my mom was an addict and would take off for weeks at a time and my dad had to work full time to care for us so we were left alone often. If not with the teenage son of the couple who lived on the front apartment. He would babysit us sometimes but half the time we took care of ourselves. I remember hanging out inside the apartment of the couple with the teenager often.

My parents loved them and they were good people and we hung out inside their apartment a lot. Well sometimes when all of us kids and adults were there they would invite the man next door to come over and hang out. This man carried a camera with him at all times. He loved taking our photos and since we were young girls we loved having our photos taken. So he would take a ton of pictures of us in full view of the adults and tell us he would print them and give them to us when they were ready. I don't recall this man ever asking us to enter his apartment or take photos alone but he was overly friendly and seemed to enjoy taking our photos a little too much.

He would also photograph our older cousin who was a 16 year old girl at the time. If I remember correctly this lasted about a month. The next thing I know my dad is telling me to never go into that guy's apartment or speak to him at all. After listening in on the adult's talk I find out that someone entered his apartment though I don't know if it was a landlord or friend, and discovered that he was developing our photos and cutting our faces from them and pasting our faces onto the bodies of models on other pictures. He had them plastered all over his walls, seven-year-old girl faces on these model bodies. He moved out within days. I'll never forget hearing about that, since I have no idea

if the cops were called or what happened to the guy in the photos afterwards. So even to this day, I don't even know if this creep may still have my childhood photographs somewhere. My family moved into a small house in northeast Ohio when I was about five years old. I had a bedroom on the first floor for a few years and everything went fine. The entire upstairs attic was my parents' bedroom since it was just one giant room. When I was about 12, I switched rooms with them so I could have the big room. The attic always gave me a strange feeling but nothing horribly off-putting. Sometimes I would be sitting at my desk alone and I would manage to spook myself out with what I thought was just my wild imagination. I just never felt completely alone for some reason.

A few months after staying in the attic a young boy started to appear in my dreams, probably about six years old. He was almost blue in color, had short dark hair, and he wore little shorts and a button-down shirt, almost like a 1960s-type school uniform. He always had a neutral expression on his face. He never spoke to me in my dreams. He was just there. He would occasionally point to things or just stare at me.

I never once felt like he was evil or malicious. I think he just wanted to be seen by me. I would always wake up feeling like I was being watched after seeing him in my dreams. One night, I had a dream that he was standing by my bed staring at me and when I woke up, I felt an overwhelming presence close to my bed. I felt sick, like something was horribly wrong, but I still didn't feel like the boy was evil, just sad and lonely maybe, like maybe he was having nightmares and wanted to be by me. I started to recognize his presence whenever I would feel like I wasn't alone in my room. Fast forward to when I was 16. I hadn't seen the boy

in my dreams for quite some time until my grandmother passed away. I fell asleep the night before her awake and saw the boy in my dream. I was in a field and he was standing at the top of a hill with his back turned toward me. Keep in mind I have been dreaming about him for about four years and he has never spoke to me before. He turns around and looks at me and in a soft slow voice he says, you know, her feet are cold. Then I woke up. I felt strange because he literally has never spoken to me before but then he randomly tells me that someone's feet are cold so I went to my grandma's open casket wake that day and my mom started to throw a fit because along with my grandma's favorite

belongings that were placed on her body in the casket there was a pair of her favorite slippers on top my mom wanted the slippers put on my was a pair of her favorite slippers on top. My mom wanted the slippers put on my grandma's feet because her feet were always cold when she was alive. She wanted to make sure my grandma's feet would be warm in the afterlife. I had no idea that my mom even asked the funeral home to put the slippers on her. I realized that the boy who often visited me in my dreams was letting me know that my grandma's feet were cold. Although I still saw him in my dreams and felt his presence, he never spoke to me again after this. I always felt a special appreciation for him. I felt more connected and at ease when he appeared

in my dreams or when I felt his presence. He was like a guardian of some sort. I grew to love him. I don't live with my parents anymore and ever since I moved out, he stopped appearing in my dreams. I miss him every now and then and I'll go into my old bedroom and sit on the floor just so he can see me, so he knows that I'm okay and I still think about him. This is a real experience of mine and I've been wanting to share it with people for years. Maybe I'm crazy, but I know what I felt and I know what I saw. It was the summer of 2010 during the World Cup. I was chilling with my older brother at home and my uncle calls us and

asks if we could sleep at their house for one night because their door lock was broken and my uncle and their family had to go to a nearby town for a quick vacation. My brother reluctantly agrees and we go to their house, taking the keys, even though the lock's broken, and begin our duty. After we finished our dinner, we were sitting on their couch in the living room waiting for World Cup matches and suddenly, around midnight, I hear a quiet footstep closing on us from the bedroom. I was scared and I asked my brother if he heard that too. He becomes silent and we both concentrate on the approaching sound. As we listen to it breathlessly, the footstep made a turn and went into the kitchen and soon we heard some noises from the cupboard

as if someone was searching for something. I was frozen but my brother regains his mind and, suspicious that it might be a burglar, runs into the kitchen, however there was no sign of any trespassers. We were very freaked out and we continued the night in fear and alarm. After we came back home, several other people noticed the sound. Our uncle experienced a lot of sleep paralysis and eventually decided to move out and contacted the previous owner and asked if they knew anything abnormal about the house. The previous owner said that the apartment was rented by a young couple. The husband worked for long hours and came home really late and the wife always prepared his dinner at night. Presumably during one such night the poor woman slipped in the kitchen and fell and hit her head.

When the man came home he found his wife deceased and moved out after a while with much grief. The owner said that since then the apartment became haunted and those footsteps and the noise in the kitchen were undoubtedly a repetition of what happened that night of her death. I don't know how it happened. I'm over 40 and recently had my tonsils taken out. If anyone knows, it's a lot harder for adults to recover from that quickly. Anyway, I live with my sister and in January 2018, my sister's cat died. While she has several cats cats she was really torn up about losing this one as it only has three legs after a car accident. In February after getting

laid off I had my surgery and stayed with my girlfriend and then at my mother's as I recovered. I had to go to the emergency room twice for excessive bleeding. The second time I went to the emergency room they were able to chemically cauterize it using afrin nasal bleeding. The second time I went to the emergency room they were able to chemically cauterize it using afrin nasal spray. The ER doc sprayed tons of it in the back of my throat. After a few hours I was able to come home as the bleeding began to stop. I got home at about 2am and tried to go to sleep. About an hour later I began spitting up blood again profusely. My mom and brothers went to bed. I didn't want to wake them as I had already put them through the ER.

In the bathroom mirror I noticed that I looked really pale. I started to get afraid that I might die as I read so many things about bad tonsillectomy experiences. I know it sounds silly to some but when you've seen so much blood coming out of you, you might think that too. I got the bottle of Afrin the ER doc gave me, which the ER bill was 800 bucks, and I'm still mad about that. I sprayed probably half the bottle down my throat, and this is where the strangeness happens. I remember praying to the universe that if I die, please just put me in another parallel universe close to mine. I don't want to leave yet. I then fell asleep almost automatically. When I woke up near morning I ran to the bathroom and huge gelatinous blob of blood clot came out of me. It was about the size

of my palm cupped. A few minutes after I stopped bleeding and began to recover very quickly and everything seemed normal. Two days later I was able to eat noodles and near normal food except for crunchy stuff. So about a week later I came home and everything seemed normal. I went to the kitchen and guess who's there? My sister's dead cat, alive again. Since then I have noticed things many of which are covered in the Mandela Effect videos and some things with friends and family that are somewhat different but more explicitly I've had several revelations come to me in regards to this reality. What happens when we die? I believe that

if we live in a simulation so like any other game we are given a few choices when our avatar dies. Extra life, we get an extra life and respawn in a similar point in the game. Start the game from the beginning. Reincarnation and selection of a new avatar, I think the light tunnel we see at the end is the birth canal. End the game. Heaven and rejoin others that have ended the game. Purpose of the simulation. I believe that we might be from the future and because of great wars and destruction, the human race has created a learning machine controlled by artificial intelligence we created. As children, we were put into this matrix so that we can learn and grow.

Hopefully to live a better, more fulfilled life in the baseline reality. So I'll start with the beginning of things. It started when my mother was around 17 years old. She spent a lot of time outside, mostly at night. One night she was outside on her front porch when she could only describe a distorted galloping. She honestly thought it was just some horse that got loose, but there was nothing. Just the sound. It was coming closer and closer and yet nothing. She decided to go inside for the night and for a long time. So she would still spend her time outside, though, in the daytime, and she eventually heard it again.

It was basically the same thing that happened last time, but now just during the day. The third account is more interesting. She was on the way home from work. She worked late, it was around 1 in the morning when this happened. She stopped at a stoplight and she had the windows down for god knows what reason. She heard the noise yet again. It was moving towards her car and it went in front of her car. But this time she could see it.

She described it to be like a very hairy brown dog that could walk on two legs if it wanted to. It ran across the road and disappeared. My mom sped home and wouldn't get out of her car until her father walked her into the house. The final account happened last year. I was on the way home from school with my mom and my brothers. We were approaching a bridge when, in the distance, me and my mother both saw it. It was exactly like her description. Hairy brown dog that looked like it could stand on two legs. It crossed the road and disappeared. I've been spending a lot of time trying to find out what this is or find it again with no luck. If anyone knows what this could be or needs any more details let me know and thank you for taking the time to read this.

I'm 25 now and I've been experiencing a lot of stuff that I can't really explain. This is going to be a long post since I want to share as much as possible with you. Not going to write down everything though. So a couple of years ago I lived in an old house with my family. I was at home in my room sitting on my bed while reading a book. All of a sudden I felt this really strong presence and that someone was staring at me from a corner in my room. I got this super uneasy feeling. My whole body was screaming at me that something wasn't right and that I needed to get out of there. It was a really uncomfortable feeling and I felt like I wasn't welcomed in my own room. But I tried not to think about it. Thought it was only my mind playing a trick on me or something.

But then out of nowhere our dog, a German Shepherd who usually is calm and friendly, ran into my room to that corner and suddenly went crazy, raging and started barking like he was super angry. I got terrified and ran out of my room. Another day in the same house I was in my room watching TV. It was on one of those old TVs, thick and heavy you know, and I felt this uneasy feeling again. Then the TV started to shake and wobble, like a lot, back and forth, literally wobbling like someone was grabbing it with a lot of force. That really freaked me out and I ran away from there as fast as I could. One late evening I was up watching TV with my mom and dad in the living room. We had this drawer where we

kept some old mobile phones. They were all out of charge since we hadn't used them for a long time but all of a sudden one of the phones started ringing. We all got kind of surprised. I looked at the phone and it said unknown number. I answered but no one was there. Only a white noise. Then it just turned off after like 30 seconds. My grandma had just passed away a few days prior. Maybe she tried to reach out to us. I don't know but it sure was weird to say the least. Later we moved to our current house. Now I don't have this eerie feeling of being watched as frequently anymore. Sometimes I feel it, but I try to ignore it. One time, I really couldn't ignore it though, and I felt that I couldn't be in my own room.

I'm usually not that easily scared, but I really had to run out of my room. I tried to stay and ignore it as long as possible, but I really couldn't stay. It was like I was forced to leave. That night I slept on the couch downstairs. Haven't really felt this kind of threatening feeling again after that incident. But I used to have a lot of nightmares where I dreamed that I'm not welcome in my own room and that something is chasing me out of there. But one night I was in my bed reading stuff on my phone.

It was quiet and everyone was asleep. I begin to play guitar so I have my guitars hanging on my wall on the other side of the room. Then I hear the strings of the guitar being played on. Imagine if you swipe your finger across all the strings one time. That's how it sounded but there was no one in my room. That didn't feel scary though, it just felt like someone was visiting and wanted me to know about it. I live in a small town in northern Florida. There's a place nearby that has been a hotbed of strange activity. Locals to the area have talked for a long time about many of these things,

and a friend of mine whose family used to occupy the area has told me a few stories his family passed down to him. The rundown in the area. There's a creek in the area that a monster supposedly inhabits. There is a graveyard not far from the creek that is very active with spirit activity, and there is a road that goes for miles through the woods. It's not uncommon for people to go to this particular part of the woods to end their own lives, and often people will park their cars on the road and go into the woods here and never return. The monster is just called the name of the town monster. He supposedly inhabits the creek primarily but wanders the woods mostly during the day,

maybe to hide from people who live in the area. He's very tall, about 7 feet. He's similar to Bigfoot or maybe Swamp Thing from what people have said and I have observed. My friend told me his grandfather had passed down a story where he heard about his animals freaking out one night. He went out to check it out, bringing along his revolver. He saw the monster and yelled at it, thinking maybe it was a very large person as it was dark outside. He said it came at him making loud noises that were most definitely not human. He shot it once and it stopped momentarily before proceeding towards him, so he shot it twice more quickly and it turned and ran. I myself have been to the creek a few times at night. I one time heard

some very odd noises ranging from animal noises that sounded almost like the animals were hurt or afraid to screaming and loud grunting. I sat and listened to these noises with my friends for a moment before we went to check out the graveyard. On our way back we stopped on the other side of the creek. This time the noises weren't as loud but we heard something moving around. It sounded as though it came towards us, staying out of sight, then moved away, then we saw something big running at us through the creek. I later went back with my mom and sister who wanted to see the area after hearing the story. So we stopped where my friends and I did and I'm showing my mom the spot and recounting the story again. Then we noticed something large lurking in the

back of the creek. We decided to leave when we see it noticed us. The graveyard. This cemetery had been around for a long time. Some of the dead have been there since the late 1800s. It contains a grave that somehow glows at night as if it were emitting a bright light. My friend's father and uncle supposedly went in there and touched the glowing grave at 3am and had a flock of crows descend onto the cemetery. When my friends and I went to check it out, we felt very much like we were in the company of others. I could see people wandering the area out of the corner of my eyes. As we entered, I made note of a deer statue at one of

the graves. We walked towards the back until we could spot the glowing grave. As we approached it my friends and I all saw the same thing. A large apparition that seemed to be a bright almost fiery orange that made us feel threatened. We walked back. On our way out I noticed the deer statue was now at the front fence, rather than positioned where I had originally seen it. The Road in the Woods As I said earlier, the creepiest thing about this area is people ending their lives and going missing. It's not uncommon to find an empty car parked on the side of the road. More often than

not, it will be there a few days later until the county comes and gets it. These things are the only objective truths I can put forth in all of this. In my experience with this road, I have noted catching glimpses of odd creatures in the woods as we drove, but what really got me was a sense of lost time. It feels as if though time passes slowly on this road. I recall my friends and I listening to the radio, telling stories, talking about different experiences we've had and just all in all having a good time with a part of our look-see of this area that didn't involve being out in a graveyard or a creek at night. We heard at least a good 7 to 10 songs

on the radio as we drove but as we neared the, we noticed that we had only driven for 10 minutes. We stopped out on the road at night a few weeks later and it was overall a strange experience. Nothing very noteworthy aside from odd noises and just an overall weird feeling from the place. That's about all I have heard and experienced in this area. I know a lot of it can be attributed to me seeing things wrong, my imagination and many other things. I don't claim any of it to be objectively 100% true but I felt the need to share my story and I'm curious if anybody who knows the area may have experienced the same thing. My sister and I both had very similar unexplained experiences 10-15 years ago while we were still

living in our parents' house. We grew up in a small gated community in the woods of New Jersey with only a handful of other residents. A few of them were very elderly. It first happened to my sister when she was about 15 years old and I was 11 or 12. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of her bedroom door opening. She rushed out and went toward our parents' room, calling their names. I sat up in my bed and tried to listen as she woke them up, but I couldn't make out exactly what they were saying. All I could hear was that my sister was breathing heavily and very upset. This went on for a while until I eventually went back to sleep. In the morning, I went into the kitchen where my parents were sitting at the table with serious looks on their faces. They explained that in the middle of the night our next door neighbor, an elderly man in his 70s, had died in his sleep. I can't remember if they explained exactly what happened but

I believe it might have been a heart attack. At the time I didn't make any connection between our neighbor's death and my sister getting up that night. I wasn't even really sure what happened to my sister and didn't ask her about it directly. A few years later, I had what I would eventually find out was an almost identical experience to hers. I shot up at my bed around 3am one night. I remember feeling confused, wondering what it was that woke me up. After a moment, my heart started racing and I turned the light on. Sitting at the edge of the bed I started feeling an overwhelming sense of dread like something was very wrong. My breathing became heavy and I started to sweat. In retrospect I

think it's safe to say that I was having a panic attack. I remember feeling restless yet unable to move from my bed. Eventually I calmed down and went back to sleep. In the morning I went into the kitchen where my dad was sitting at the table crying. He explained to me that a man from our community who he was very close with had passed away in the middle of the night somewhat suddenly. He was really shaken up about it. At the time I didn't tell anyone about what happened to me the night before but a few days later I remember the experience my sister had. It wasn't until a year or two later that I actually brought it up to her. I told her about the experience I had waking up in the middle of the night and how we found out about our dad's

friend the next morning. She immediately seemed creeped out and told me about what happened to her the night that our neighbor died. Our experiences were nearly identical, both waking up in the night with overwhelming feelings of fear and panic. After that, we never really spoke about it again, but I think about it frequently. I've told this story to a number of people who've found it pretty unsettling. I've never heard of anyone having a similar experience to ours. I don't have a definitive explanation for these events but I really do believe that it's more than just coincidence. I believe that something about the energy these two people emitted,

either at the moment or just before they died, is what woke me and my sister up. Please feel free to discuss and let me know if you or someone you know has had a similar experience, and thanks for listening. So when I was little, maybe six, my older sister, eight at the time, would wake me up screaming a lot in the middle of the night. This continued until she was in high school. No one really told me details, just that she was having night terrors, so I never thought much of it. Well, when I was about 18, I took my sister's old room when she moved out. It was a big room, so I was about 18, I took my sister's old room when she moved out. It was a big room, so I was excited. Nothing major really happened to me, until a few months afterward, I had my nieces stay over.

That night I woke up at around maybe 3 to 4 AM. My nieces were sleeping on my floor, we made a bed up for them. I can't explain the feeling I had or why I didn't freak out, but there was just some dude leaning against my dresser, watching my nieces. I just laid there watching him until I fell back asleep. He looked very old-timey, but maybe in his twenties. I didn't feel scared when I saw him. When I woke up the next day I was pretty confused. I'm positive I saw him. I remember exactly what he looked like. Everything. I mentioned this to my sister and she began to describe the man detail for detail. Apparently growing up she would wake up and see this guy at the foot of her

bed just watching her. That's why she'd wake up screaming. So that was pretty eerie. We decided not to mention it to my parents because my father's a pastor and they usually don't listen to me about that stuff. They just tell me to pray it away and being a kid, I was like, okay, fine. Well, about two weeks after this incident, I was woken up to the sound of my dad downstairs praying at about 4 to 5 a.m. He usually prays in his room but for some reason he was pacing the whole downstairs praying really loud. When I woke up the next day I asked him what it was all about and he told me that he was watching TV. He worked thirds as well at this time. He said he saw some guy looking at him from the stairs. He said he just sat and watched this guy very calmly walk down the stairs, past the living room, and evaporated

into the kitchen. My dad said from there he jumped up and just started praying, blessing the house. I asked my dad what the man looked like and he described the same man my sister and I saw. A few nights later, things got real. I had a friend over and my older sister was upstairs with us as well. So it was me, my friend, my mom and sister. At around fourish, we were woken up by what I can only describe as something absolutely destroying our kitchen. We could hear plates smashing, things breaking. It even sounded like they turned over our fridge. It was terrifying. The scariest part was that we could hear our dog screaming and whining like crazy. After a while we thought it was a wild animal or something so we called my sister's boyfriend to

come over and kill it. He had guns so I guess that was our line of thinking. I don't know. This is the weird part. So we're still hearing our kitchen just get ruined and what sounds like our dog dying. But when Kyle got there, he said it sounded like the house was being destroyed. Him and his friend grabbed their guns, rushed to the door, and the second he unlocked the door, silence. There was no noise, no smashing, nothing. Everything just stopped the second we heard the door open. He waited a few minutes

until he came upstairs to get us and at first he was angry. He thought we were pulling some stuff on him. When we went downstairs, everything was fine. No plates were smashed, nothing was out of place. But her dog, she was in the corner crying and peeing herself. She wouldn't get out of the corner for a long time. She was terrified and we were incredibly confused. To this day, we can't explain it and nothing has happened ever since. That was my weird paranormal story. I think about that man a lot and sometimes I wake up feeling watched but nothing's happened since. Sometimes a light will be on when I know I just turned it off.

Little things like that. Has anything like that happened to anyone else? I felt no fear when I was watching him. I didn't feel anything. Does that mean something? Maybe it somehow means he's not dangerous. I don't know. I think about it constantly and I just wish I had answers.

My house isn't even that old, I don't think. Skinwalkers are not some mystical fantasy creatures. They are evil witches who like to cause pain and misfortune on others, and who may even cause death. In order to get their powers, they have to sacrifice someone they most love. The more they sacrifice, the more powers they get. This is an old story that happened in the 40s or the 50s about a man who lived alone with his sheep and his dog in the middle of nowhere in his Hogan. For weeks he heard and saw strange things happening around him, like a black shadow running, knocking on his house, a man man's cough and his sheep missing and later found dead and mutilated until he found his dog dead tired and afraid of this he went to a medicine man he told the medicine man what he was experiencing he blessed the man and told himself to cover

himself with ash leave no part uncovered and to sit outside his house with a rifle and wait for it to come to him and when you see it, and you'll know when you see it, you shoot at it and it will leave you alone. So the man did as he asked and waited in the dark for a long time before he heard it. Something was coming towards his house. When he looked to his left he saw a dog or a coyote. He knew it then for what it was. He slowly raised the rifle and aimed it at the dog creature and shot at it. The scary part was when the bullet hit, instead of a dog cry, the creature let out a scream

of a man who was just shot and the dog creature immediately turned and ran away. After that the man didn't see any strange things again. He even got a new dog. He fought with a skinwalker and won. I will start off with my very first paranormal experience. I was three or four and living in a small village in western Germany during the mid-80s. My family lived in a quaint little two-story farmhouse while we waited to get housing on base. My dad was in the military. My life was pretty normal. I have two brothers, one older and one younger than me, but that really isn't relevant to the story.

I love that house and remember helping the little old lady that lived across the street snap peas, played outside with my brothers and had a happy childhood for the most part. There was however one place in the house I refused to go. This is going to sound cliche but it was the basement. The door to the basement was in the tiny kitchen. I would be in there helping my mom make cookies or something and I remember getting an uneasy feeling just from the door to the basement. My dad would go down the stairs to the basement without a problem but I refused to go with him. I mean I would immediately start crying at the thought of going down there. It wasn't that it was dark and creepy.

In fact it was well lit and didn't have any blind corners or anything. The reason I wouldn't go down there was because an old man that it seems only I could see. I would tell my mom and she would tell me I don't see anything. I would get the same response from all my family members but there was an angry German man down there and he didn't like me. It went as far as I would have nightmares in that house, vivid and graphic nightmares. It is very telling that I remember these horror visions after 30 plus years like I had them last night but I'm getting ahead of myself a little. These nightmares were the same every single night. Now remember, I'm at most four years old and have not seen a scary movie yet. Every night I would fall asleep without an issue and have a few happy dreams and then it would

start. In my nightmare I would see the stairs that led up to the top floor of the house where the bedrooms are. I saw the stairs like I was at the bottom of them looking up but it wasn't me. I would see things through someone else's eyes. I know even in my dreams I was sleeping upstairs comfy in my bed but as I start to go up the stairs I would start to see the plaster on the walls crack and the thin boards beneath it start to splinter. The further upper I go the worse it gets like the whole house is going to crumble. Then I start to see dismembered body parts come out of the wall, the stairs go up. They are decaying and smell horrible. I can see bone and raw darkening meat around the jagged cuts on each part. First it's the hands and feet, then the arms and legs. Finally the head with half its face bloated and green,

with the other side sloughing skin so I can see the empty eye socket, and the hole where the nose had rotted away. These body parts would hurl themselves at me like they mean to eat me. I would wake up just as the head starts to talk, but I don't know what it is trying to say to me as its torn, shrivelveled lips move but there is no sound. I would wake screaming. My mom would comfort me and get me back to sleep. I would have normal dreams the rest of the night.

This happened every night for the four or five months we lived in that house. When we finally moved, neither the nightmare or the man ever plagued me again, but I still remember it very vividly. As I grew older and developed a love for the sciences, especially anatomy, I realized that in my dream, the body parts were anatomically correct. I wish I could actually draw and then I could sketch a picture to show you how horrifying it was. I'll post another story later, thank you for reading this. Even if most of you will believe I made this up, it's nice to get it off my chest. I've been carrying this

around for 33 years. I used to live in a small town in Texas. My town was so small that it wasn't so much a town as it was just a really big neighborhood with one gas station. My town wasn't completely finished. A lot of the streets had empty lots and woods, even though the town was 60 years old. It was possible to walk onto a lot, head to the woods, and get lost if you didn't know exactly where you were going. And since we had deer and wild animals running around, it wasn't a good idea to go wandering. Know what I mean? My house was in the oldest part of this town. I lived on a circle. Yeah, a circle. My street was an actual circle that you could drive all the way around. And what was weird about it was that my street

had houses on all of the lots, but the houses on the inside of the circle, including mine, were the perimeter to about two acres of free woods, and it was so packed that you couldn't see through. It was just something everyone knew about but didn't talk about. My school had a media class that you could take, the kind where they tell you to make short films and stuff. A bunch of my friends from the neighborhood and I were grouped together for one of these short film projects. Like idiots, we decided to do a short horror film based off the Blair Witch Project movie. It had been out by that time for a couple of years, so we thought it would be a cool idea since found footage films hadn't really become a thing

yet and we thought since our neighborhood known for being creepy at the best of times had a forest in it we could shoot our project there. So my friends Genesis, Hunter, Tyler, Cass and I decided to try to shoot our short film in one evening and night and you guessed it we decided to shoot in the woods right behind my house. My parents were cool with it because they'd be able to hear me yell if something happened and we didn't have curfews so we're like cool we'll shoot it on Saturday. Saturday rolls around and the first five hours are fine nothing spooky happens so we go back to my house, eat, and decide to shoot the last couple of shots. This is when things go south. We come out of my house, jump the backyard fence, and head back

into the woods. The second we hit the tree line, we all feel like something's off. It just doesn't feel right. The air is sticky and heavy. Yes, it's Texas, and that's a Texas spring for you, but this was different. It felt like walking through water or tar or mud. It was hard to just move forward. But the feeling goes away. We get through a couple more shots and then it's time to shoot the last scene. It's simple. Get Genesis walking through the woods and into a clearing. That's it. Like I said, this area is about two acres total. We'd been all over the woods by this point, getting different shots, but at night? At night it felt like the woods we were in wasn't the same woods from that afternoon. The boulders weren't in the right place.

The trees weren't in the right place. There was a clearing where there shouldn't have been one. It was really weird. In my mind I'm thinking, alright, you just got turned around. Happens all the time, right? It's a sizable area and just because you've been walking around it for five hours doesn't mean you know it like the back of your hand. I can accept that. What I can't accept is the fact that there was now a shed in the middle of the clearing that we decided to shoot our last scene in. What I mean is, when we scouted the place three days before shooting, when we went in there to check sound earlier that day, and even right

before we went back to my house, there was no shed in that woods. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. There were no buildings, no construction supplies, not even a football in that woods. And yet here was the shed, in the middle of the clearing. We were all getting vibes from this thing. Like we weren't supposed to find it, or we were unwelcome in its presence, or that we were somehow intruding on its alone time. So the guys tell us to hang tight. They're going to go investigate. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I remember them coming back and telling us that we had to check it out. I went up to the shed and I realized that it was old.

Very old. The wood was warped and the walls bowed inwards. The wood from the shed didn't look like any of the trees from that part of Texas. It wasn't mesquite. My best guess would be maybe maple. I was walking around the edge of the shed and we were trying to figure out where this thing came from, or if it had always been there, how we managed to miss it. We were close enough to my house that I could hear my dad talking on the phone in the backyard. In fact, all we had to do was walk forward for a minute or two and we'd hit the backyard fence.

That's when I realized that this shed had no windows or doors. I told my friends and we looked for trap doors or latches. Tarlia even got on the roof of the shed to check for a way. Not that we wanted in, but at this point I was curious because it didn't feel like the shed should be there. We didn't find any way into the shed so we tried to figure out what to do. The shed was in the middle of the shot but none of us wanted to shoot, especially not Genesis. She wasn't having any of it. We were in the middle of deciding to shoot some other time because we were all creeped out when we hear it. A laugh. A long,

low, guttural laugh from the shed. And then we heard thud, thud, thud. We were close enough to the shed that we could see the wall shake and we booked it out of there. It took us less than two minutes to get back to my backyard. At this point, you're probably thinking this either belongs in no sleep or we were on something. I don't blame you. I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't been there. But I told my dad when we got back who, back then, didn't believe in the paranormal. It was still pretty early, about 10pm, so my dad goes into the house, gets his shotgun, and goes to get our neighbor, a cop who also has his shotgun, tells us to get inside and they go into the woods with flashlights and everything. He was gone for 10 minutes. When

he got back, he told me that I'm not allowed to go back there anymore and that we'd have to figure something else out for the final scene. It was years before he told me what happened in the woods but he finally did. He and our neighbor found the shed, couldn't find a door and heard the laughing. Then they heard growling go from inside the shed to outside of the shed. Then they saw something huge and human-like come out of the wall of the shed, go down on all fours, turn black and growl at them. These two grown men, both with significant military experience, nearly crapped themselves

trying to get back to the house. My dad petitioned the town to get the shed removed and it was knocked down a week later we never talked about again but here's where it gets weird again my little sister still lives at home she moved back in because she got into med school and needed to save money she called me a few days ago to tell me that one of the dogs got loose this afternoon and headed for the woods when she went in there she saw a dark wood shed. The dog saw it too and was barking and growling. Then she and the dog heard a growl and the dog backed up like it was scared and went home. My little sister didn't know about the shed unless my dad told her.

I never told her about it because she's younger than me and a bunch of weird stuff had already happened. My sister told my dad who went back out to see it. He said it was the same shed. He won't say anything else, but I know he's probably panicking. I don't know what to think about all of this. I mean, it's just one of the many weird things that happened in that neighborhood when I was a kid, but it always stuck out as being ominous. Is it possible we had collective hysteria?

Sure, we were kids and we were making a short horror film. Is it possible that we just missed the shed? Absolutely. The woods can get confusing even when it's broad daylight. Is it possible that a wild animal was closer to us than we thought and that's what we heard instead of a weird scream. Of course, it's Texas and we were known to have big cats running around. But what I can't explain is how the shed my dad had torn down years ago shows back up again and my sister's the one to find it. That's what I'm having trouble with. My dad had the fire department come to take the shed down. They said it was a fire hazard so they got rid of it. My sister's safe, my family's safe, and I'm happy to hear that but why a shed with no windows or doors? I posted this on another subreddit but it wasn't helpful

so I'm here now hoping someone has had some similar things happen to them. I don't want to be the only one dealing with something like this. Some interesting things have been going down on this house for months now. At first I chalked it up to Ambien or Lunesta or even Lithium or just an episode. However, after recent conversations with my dad, I'm not sure this is the case. So last year I started hearing very audible voices. It would happen once or twice. Sometimes it was hard to tell what they were saying. Other times they were clear. I would hear a very heavy vibrating sound here and there as well.

My phone is always on silent, my parents phone is always on a loud ring and would feel like something is there with me and my door would even move on its own. So anyways one day I just set out loud to screw off and it just sort of died down. Cut to this year, a few months earlier I heard a very clear male voice say, she's right there and my bed had started to shake. Okay so I get up and I go to sleep on the couch. After that I started having a cat sleep with me for comfort and the shaking stopped. When we put down one of my cats I would hear her meow sometimes and the click click click of her claws and just over a month ago I started to hear the sound of feet crunching on gravel. At first I brushed it off as an animal, could be a

coyote or a deer but it dawned on me that that would sound different. This sounded like shoes on gravel but whenever I would go look outside there was nobody there. At times I'd hear the sound of my car door opening and closing but I always lock my doors. A month and a half ago one of my cats was outside and I heard him audibly cry out in pain and I panicked. I ran out the garage door and called for him and he comes dashing in but there's nothing out there. No owls, coyotes, other cats or people. He was unharmed. Last summer he was coming home with injuries. I assumed cats fight but some of these look like someone was hurting him because they look like burns more than scratches. For some reason now, my cats hate being in the garage. They used to love it, but now they're afraid of it.

About three weeks ago, the part where I put my key in started to fall out. Turns out, the thing that latches in and keeps it in place somehow broke. Metal broke. Dad says there's no possible way that could have happened. Dad's gun, checkbook, truck keys, coffee cup, and mom's ring have all gone missing within the past three months. And tonight, when I got up to let my dog out, I saw a light shine into the window. I live in the middle of nowhere. Back to the lights though. I go back into my room. One cat is out of the room and using the litter box and the other is sleeping with me. The third cat is outside probably torturing mice or something. I hear the sound of a computer starting up but that would be impossible because my parents are fast asleep. Mom's laptop is dead and dad is out in his little hut. A few minutes after I hear the

startup noise, I hear the cat that's outside my room hiss and then she starts to meow to be let back into my room. I poke my head out and there's nobody in the living room, hallway, or laundry room. The dog is sleeping peacefully on the couch. I need to convince Dad to get security cameras. are Let's Read official and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear it featured here on the channel. And if you want to support the page even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt.com, links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns

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