The Lets Read Podcast - 90: Episode 080 | Home Invasion & Skinwalker Stories | 24 True Scary Horror Stories
Episode Date: January 26, 2021Welcome to the eightieth 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 s...tories about Home Invasions, Skinwalker & People Who Barely Escaped With Their Lives... 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 Update Description
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TreadExperts.ca As of late, I've seen a fair amount of posts from the perspective of criminals. These posts have inspired me to share a story about a scary incident I had as a kid and how I became a better man because of it.
I realize I'm a tad bit older than most of the members here on Reddit so I wanted to use my
experience to show this younger breed of criminals that it's never too late to turn your life around.
Pay close attention please. Between 10 and 16 I spent more time inside
of juvie than I did in school. I had been born into a world of petty crime. All of those around
me including my own townsfolk had been in the penitentiary at least once and I never really
had known any other life. My friends and I had a little gang we called the Breakers. As you
can probably tell from the name we specialized in burglary and we thought we were the princes of
crime. Stupid and cringeworthy when you look back on it but no one dared challenge the idea.
Depending on the location and the size of the job we often worked in two or three man teams. On one break-in in
particular, we had received information from a girl we knew very well that a family was going
to be out of town for the weekend. From what the couple had told her, the husband was and had been
for a long time a rabid gun collector. Now any crook you talk to can tell you guns are a good source of quick cash so we did a short casing of the place and chose that weekend for the robbery
unfortunately the other two guys I was planning to work with got really sick
and I was left alone to get as much as I could in the amount of time we had allotted for the job
I'd even considered going in a second night in a row
but circumstances you will soon see put
the kibosh on that idea. Two nights later the moment had arrived to go in. I slipped in through
the back sliding door and the steady rainstorm that evening kept a nosy neighbor inside.
The only thing I didn't know was the location of the guns. I figured a guy that's serious about firearms would have at least one safe so I kept my eyes open for one. One by one I rummaged through
each room I came to. No doors were closed making it all the easier. Frankly I was surprised at the
lack of any real valuables and focused on the search for guns. Finally, I discovered an upright safe and to my
great joy found that it was unlocked. I was counting the money in my head, but that was as
far as I'd ever get. To my right in the hallway, I heard a sound no burglar hopes to ever hear.
The racking of a shotgun. I froze the second I realized what it was. Now, I was counting my last few seconds alive
rather than money. The racking was quickly followed by an older gentleman's voice saying,
Stop right there, kid. If you move, I will kill you. I had no doubt he would have too.
Look at me, son. I'm going to give you one chance. Someone did the same for
me once and I'm doing the same for you. However, if I see you again in this house uninvited,
you're not leaving alive. I wasn't sure whether I was more terrified or shocked by what he said.
As I stared into his weathered eyes I got the feeling that he'd seen his share
of hard times as a kid and may have been in the exact position I was now at one point.
Do you understand me? His words were crystal clear. The overwhelming feeling I was being
given an opportunity many in my trade were not given poured over me. I simply nodded to him, but was
still too terrified to move, and he had to urge me to leave. Well, get... That was all I needed.
I ran as fast as possible out of the house and to my car down the block. The fear that he was
about to shoot me in the back was there the entire time, but I had to take the chance.
While I sat there in my car, I juggled the importance of the scene around my head.
I had just been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity most would not have been given.
I feared that if I squandered it, my punishment for doing so may be terrible.
Although I'd never been a religious kid kid and still ain't for that matter,
I knew some higher power had to have just stepped in and handed my life back to me.
I've never questioned who he was or what he was doing there. From that night forward I resolved
to change my life for the better. To be honest with you it was a hard path to follow when you know nothing other than doing bad
doing good is twice as hard those around me were in no way happy to hear of my epiphany and
i got a lot of grief for it i eventually realized that i was never going to achieve what i wanted
to if i stayed where i was so i took the little bit of cash I had saved and moved on. I drove
halfway across the country looking for a place I liked and finally landed in Colorado. The utter
beauty of the place was unlike anywhere I'd seen and I've been here ever since. While I never became
a wealthy man, I did find a legit way to make money and hope to retire in the next 10 years.
If anyone is wondering why I'm
sharing this it's not because I want people to think I'm some great guy for turning my back on
crime. Actually a lot of great fellows I knew were crooks but most were lowlifes that wasted
their lives in jail. My real purpose is to impress upon the younger members of life that you can
change it for the better. Your past and your upbringing don't dictate your future, and not every square citizen has written
you off. If you want to turn your life around, do it, and if someone offers you a lifeline,
take it. You'll not regret it. Good luck to you all, and don't be afraid to believe in yourself.
I believe I was nine years old at the time.
My little brother had just been born and since my folks already had their hands full with him,
I was shipped off to my grandparents' place for spring break. I guess my aunt and uncle were so in love with that idea they sent my two cousins to them also. I can't say I was overjoyed to see them there when I arrived. They'd always been spoiled
and their behavior showed it. However, I was a good little girl so I did what I was told and
played nicely with them. My grandparents were
living in a small town in the north of Louisiana at the time. Most of the lots around them were
empty because of a past tornado, so the house was somewhat isolated from the rest of the neighborhood.
We didn't mind. It gave us plenty of room to play baseball and run around unhindered.
One of my cousin's birthdays had occurred a week before and he had received a kite as a gift. That day we spent flying it around and fighting over who
got to hold the string. After supper our grandmother pulled out the Monopoly board
and taught us how to play. The game greatly appealed to my cousins and they did all they
could, whether within the rules or not to accumulate more money than
anyone else. I quickly grew tired of this and snuck off to our bedroom to read my new book.
The first Harry Potter had just come out the year before and my parents had bought it for me for
Christmas. I must have fallen asleep reading and was awakened by my cousins coming into the room
for the night. It wasn't long until I was back asleep but something else would wake me up soon after. If I recall correctly, about 2.15 that morning,
a loud banging sound woke me up. The banging was coming from the front door it turned out.
My grandfather peeked out of his window and saw a pair of guys in hoods
smashing themselves against the door.
It wasn't until much later in life I'd learned that a group of men,
with which these were associated with,
had been committing home invasions in the area and my grandparents were their targets that night.
The banging had also awakened my cousins,
and although they were a few years older than me,
they were crying in fear.
I'm not going to be arrogant and claim that I
wasn't just as afraid as them, and I've never seen the point in crying about it. I suppose I could
have been considered a tomboy back then, and maybe I was just trying to look tough. Anyhow, unaware of
what was going on at the time, I went out into the hall to find out from my grandfather. He and my grandmother were talking
quietly to each other. Rather than answer my question he told me to go back into my room and
close the door. I noticed that he was holding a shotgun when he said this and the look on his face
was very serious. I did what he said and locked the door behind me just to be safe. Now I was
really beginning to get scared.
I'd never seen him with a gun before that night. I knew he owned them but I was still a little too
young to shoot so they were kept locked up. I was sitting with my cousins doing my best to keep them
calm. This entire time the banging was still going on and it was becoming even more unsettling.
Then I heard my grandfather yell out that he had
a gun and he would shoot if they didn't go away. They, unfortunately, continued and right after,
I heard a loud crunching noise in the hall, quickly followed by two shots.
The house went completely silent for a moment, minus the quiet sobbing of my cousins.
Not long after, I could see the lights
from police cars coming through the curtains. The voices of different adults could be heard
through the door. I didn't remember anything specific, but sometime around dawn, my grandmother
knocked on the door and I let her in. She was there to let us know everything was okay and
we could come out if we wanted to. She cooked
everyone breakfast and as we ate nobody said much. From my seat at the table I could see the front
door. It had the two giant holes in it and the edge was splintered and broken. The screen door
was the only thing stopping the wind from blowing in. I tried to stay awake for a while but was forced to take a nap
after lunch. I woke up a few hours later to a brand new door and life as usual. My folks were
as upset as you'd expect and came and got me that evening. I was happy to get away from my snotty
cousins and was eager to meet my new little brother anyway. It took some time before we
could stay the night there again and for the reminder of their time on earth, I can't remember
that night ever being spoken of by either of them. I had to get most of my legal information from my
parents and what they said was my grandfather had killed one of the intruders the second the door
gave way. The other got away but was picked
up by the cops later that morning at the ER getting his wounds treated. That guy was still
in prison the last I heard, probably on another unrelated crime. The best thing that came out of
the incident was the ending of the home invasions in the area. No charges were ever filed against
my grandfather for the shooting. There was briefly talk about the family of the dead guy suing my grandparents,
but once it was determined that two old people living on social security had nothing to get,
the suit quietly faded away. As a child, any situation involving a group of adults trying to harm them or being perceived to harm them can be terrifying.
I was about 13 when I had an encounter with a pair of men attempting to break into our home.
While I can in no way prove they meant me any harm that day, I was nonetheless scared out of my mind while it was happening.
I had been forced to stay home from school that day because of the flu and had slept most of the morning.
The chills, among other far more terrible symptoms, had yet to subside, but I hadn't eaten anything for almost 24 hours at this point and couldn't avoid it any longer. From experience,
I knew the only thing I could usually keep down when sick were saltines. I was down in the kitchen
rummaging through the cabinets when I heard a loud bang at the front door. Not knowing what
had caused it, I ran to the front hallway just in time to hear it again. I sprinted into the room
next to the door and looked out the window.
When I did, I had a clear view of two men standing directly in front of it.
It wasn't ten seconds later that I witnessed one of them kick it. I'd barely had enough time to process the threat and become scared before the man kicked the door, driving me into a whole new
level of terrified. There was a phone on the desk next to me and I
called 911 for help. I could only imagine how hard it was to speak to me at that moment,
yelling every bit of information I could, as quickly as I could. Another bang came soon after.
Why that door held up so well I have no idea. As far as I know it was your run-of-the-mill door.
Certainly nothing special, but it held long run of the mill door. Certainly nothing special
but it held long enough for the cops to show up. I continued to wait on the phone while they were
en route to the house. From my viewpoint I got to watch the two a-holes run for their lives when
they saw the police pull up. Even though I was terrified and felt horrible, for that brief moment I was able to laugh at them getting their comeuppance.
They scattered and were pursued.
However, another group of three or four officers knocked on the door and identified themselves.
I let them in and once they were sure I was okay, we discussed what had happened.
A few remained inside, making sure there were no other people creeping around the property.
We hadn't even had the chance to say hello before it came over the radio one of the men had already been caught.
The police had to search for about an hour until the other burglar was sniffed out by one of their dogs.
Now that they were in custody, I was able to at least attempt getting over the whole mess.
I believe because of all the excitement, I barfed twice more that day, but a few crackers did manage to calm my stomach somewhat. Yes, I did finally have my
saltines, only four hours after I first intended. My parents were understandably upset about what
happened. They were, however, happy to hear the scumbags were caught Because they had already quite a long record
Both men were sentenced to several years in prison
I was a little shook up by the experience for a few months
But was eventually able to put it behind me
Looking back on it, I'm amazed by how well I handled the situation
After all, I was only just becoming a teenager
Just a few years prior, I had been playing with Barbie dolls. Many of the girls I knew back then who were around my same age probably would have panicked, but for some reason, maybe because able to handle a similar situation if one, unfortunately, presents itself.
I've been carrying this around on my shoulders for quite some time and I feel today is the day to tell my story.
I will, however, be using a throwaway to tell it.
The reasons are many.
Among the most important are the legalities behind what I was doing there that night more than what I saw.
Before I begin, I want everyone to know that I'm not writing this down to better myself in some way.
I'm a criminal.
I have been for most of my life and will likely die one. However, as hard as this may be to believe,
I do have a conscience and if I would have been in such a situation, I would like my family to
know what really occurred. And because of this, the guilt I've carried around since that night
has become a weight far too heavy to bear.
With that all out of the way, the time has come to tell the story.
For this job, I had made the choice to go in alone.
It wasn't a larger home and the people living there weren't considered wealthy.
Word on the street, however, was that the wife had a lot of inherited jewelry.
I cased the house for a week and got to know the easiest places to enter undetected. That Saturday night I sat in the house in hopes they would go
out for the evening and a short time after 7.30 they did just that. I could judge from the way
that they were dressed that they were probably going out for dinner in the least. If that was
all they had planned I would still have more than enough time to get in the least. If that was all they had planned, I would still have more than enough
time to get in and out. After waiting my customary five minutes just to be safe, I slipped around
back and into the house. I'd rather not say how I did, but suffice to say it wasn't hard to do.
This night I went straight for the bedroom. That's where most folks keep their jewelry after all. It took a few
minutes to locate it but it proved to be worth it. I'm not a jeweler so I wasn't sure which piece was
real or not. That's the job of a fence. Just by amount I was likely to have at least a few good
things. The rest of the house was next but before I could get out of the room I heard the front door open and some people come in.
I couldn't tell who it was but since they were arguing loudly between each other it was probably the homeowners.
Thinking they possibly may have forgotten something and would be leaving again soon after I hid in the closet.
My heart was beating so loud I'm surprised they couldn't hear.
I'd never been in the situation before in my 15 years of doing this and I was surprised how terrified I was.
While I peeked out through the slats on the door I watched them come into the room yelling and cursing at one another.
From what I could gather the wife had some kind of ailment that caused them to leave the restaurant before they could eat.
This meant they were not leaving again and that meant that I was in some big trouble. I wasn't beyond fighting to get away but it wasn't
something I was looking forward to doing. The argument continued and the wife stood up and
shook her finger in the husband's face over and over. I could tell what was coming before she did
but I didn't expect the outcome. Something about the finger wagging really got to the husband.
Can't say I blame him.
He reared back and backhanded the wife with all the power he had.
She flew back into the dresser behind her and you could hear the crack as her head smashed into it.
She slumped instantly to the floor.
I had to stifle my urge to yell out.
The panic began to grow
across his face and you could see the gears begin to turn in his head. A new problem had now
introduced itself to the situation. If this dude found me in his closet, he'd more than likely try
to kill me because I was the only witness. I wasn't a murderer and I wasn't sure I could kill
the guy even if I was in self-defense.
I was doing my best to hide my breathing.
I was probably as panicked as him, but I continued to watch, getting ready to fight back if caught.
I didn't have to, however.
An idea popped into his head and a small grin appeared on his face.
I don't know what, but whatever it was, needed him to leave the house. I knew this was
my chance to get away, and the second I heard the door slam shut, I ran as fast as possible and
slipped silently out of the back door. Instead of going out the same way I came in, I hopped the
fence and made a big loop around in my car. I tried not to think about what I'd just seen until
I got home. There was no way I could call the cops and report it
The question of what I was doing there would most certainly come up
I could make an anonymous tip but the longer I thought about it the more I started to feel like a snitch
Maybe that wife was a relentless shrew and made that dude's life unbearable
He clearly had a problem with her finger wagging
However then,
I began thinking of her family and the sadness they were going to feel. I had an aunt who died
when I was younger and I watched it tear at my family. The decision to wait and see was made and
it wasn't long before my conscience started weighing on me. I kept hoping I would see a report
in the news of the husband turning himself in,
but nothing showed up, not even a report of a missing woman. Today makes the three-month mark
and I've still not heard a blip about it. It's common knowledge of this community's
dog determination to discover the truth behind unsolved crimes and disappearances,
so I've come up with an idea. As I said, the knowledge I carry
around has become a heavy weight on me. However, since I've been raised that it's wrong to snitch,
I see this as the best resolution to my problem. What I'm saying is that I'm passing this on to
all of you to investigate. If nothing is discovered, it's probably been handled in some
way and is no longer a problem, but if a series of red flags pop up, this might be a chance to
solve an important puzzle. I wish everyone good luck and please know that telling this story has
done not only myself a world of good, but others, and I'm thankful for at least you listening.
Around this time I was off work from an injury I had received and had taken up the habit of
sleeping all day and stalking the internet at night. I unfortunately had no partner at the time, therefore all my time was my own.
Unable to work during that period, I was inventing things to occupy me.
One particular boring night I had decided to clean my closet and sell the things I didn't want to keep.
I didn't have many clothes back then, so the organizing part didn't take long. For the next
part I had to bring the clothes I was listing into the living room to measure and take pictures.
I'd stack these on my couch and walked over to my computer desk to get my phone.
I just happened to hear a car door closing right outside the window I was standing next to.
I suppose I was being nosy but my curiosity compelled me to
look out to see what was up. I looked out just in time to see a young man I didn't recognize
closing my neighbor's car door. My attention was now peaked and as I continued to watch,
I caught sight of another strange young man attempting to open the doors of some other's
cars across the parking lot. It was now apparent to me that the two guys were looking for stuff to steal,
so I dialed 911 as fast as possible.
I gave the dispatcher the lowdown and she asked if the two dudes were still at my location.
When I looked again, I couldn't see them anymore.
So without thinking, I told her to hold on and I ran out my rear sliding
door to look for them. I know how stupid this was, but I was trying to be as helpful as I could and
acted more on impulse than logical thought. The two of them did finally come back into view,
just in time for me to realize how close they actually were. This was when my heart began to pound. I'd been so eager
to help I darn near ran into them face to face. In truth they were probably a good 25 yards away
but it was the middle of the night and I was within spitting distance of a pair of criminals.
I was truly scared out of my shorts now. I guess I was in some kind of fog because I had forgotten
I was still on the phone with 911.
The lady had to say hello a couple of times to get my attention.
When I did finally answer her, I told her that they were indeed still in the parking lot.
However, I left out the part where I ran outside and was now in a very close vicinity to them.
Up to this point, they had not noticed noticed my presence but that would soon change.
The bigger looking of the two must have heard me talking. He looked up from the car he was attempting to get info and we made eye contact with one another. He stayed where he was and
watched me for a while. I was still talking to the dispatcher during this time praying the cops
would get there before I was killed.
Finally, the big guy began to approach me and he didn't look pleased. He stopped a few yards away and asked me what I was doing. I was too scared to answer at first, but when he began walking
closer, I told him I was talking to the cops. This got his attention. He stopped in his tracks and
gave me a skeptical look.
This look would quickly disappear when I noticed a cop car entering the complex and pointed to it.
He looked back and I heard him curse under his breath. Slowly he slipped away, going in the opposite direction and watching the cops the whole time. An officer eventually noticed me and asked
if I was the one who called. I said yes and pointed in the direction the big guy escaped.
He thanked me and took off with another car in that direction.
The second cop had caught the other guy very quickly.
I remember I still had the dispatcher on the phone and thanked her for her help.
We hung up and I went back inside my apartment.
For the remainder of the night until dawn I watched out for the big guy to return.
Soon after I went back inside my place, it dawned on me that they may come back to get revenge on me for snitching.
My lookouts for him continued for several more weeks until things took priority.
However, actually I could never feel comfortable or safe until I moved
to a new apartment complex which I eventually did about a year later. I never heard whether
he was picked up by the cops or anything else pertaining to the case whatsoever.
From time to time when I'm thinking back to that night, I wondered if the big guy ever returned to
the apartment after I left. For the
sake of the new tenant I pray not. I like to tell myself the police swept him up within minutes of
leaving and he's still in jail on other charges never to be released but the fact is he was
probably never caught and he's moved on with his life. Hopefully I never cross his mind again.
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I'd had my eye on this place for a month or two and was hoping for better weather to come around.
However, circumstances forced my hand and I had to go in sooner than I planned.
The homeowners posted up a for sale sign and with the market being the way it was at the time,
I assumed I didn't have much time before it sold.
The house caught my attention in the first place just after Christmas. I happened to be driving by after casing another
place and noticed all the boxes stacked up next to their trash cans. Among the best things they'd
received was a pair of LED computer monitors and one of those 40-inch LED smart TVs. Mind you, at this time, stuff like this was still
fairly expensive. There were also a laptop and PlayStation 3 box in the pile. All this cool new
stuff made me jealous. I know I may joke, but leaving out all these boxes is an open invitation
to thieves. The best thing to do is break them down and put them inside
your garbage cans. The term out of sight out of mind applies great in this kind of situation.
There was a couple of other places on my list before this one but the day the sign went up I
knew I needed to act fast. So just after lunch I climbed through a window in the garage and snuck into the house.
Most of the afternoon at least until 3 p.m. was mine to browse. Their comings and goings were very familiar to me by then and I was confident I had plenty of time to work. Inside of the house
everything was top quality and the air smelled clean and fresh. I can't say I expected anything
less. The home itself was modest but just from their cars
it was clear they were well healed. I did a cursory glance through the living area before
I moved on to the bedrooms. There wasn't much to grab and I continued on to the first floor.
As I opened it I was smacked in the face by a wall of stench. It could only be feces but wasn't obvious until I
looked down and saw the dog kennels. They must lock their dogs up while they're gone and the
dogs must have crapped in the kennels. I couldn't help but feel bad for the poor beasts. There were
better ways to keep your dogs from damaging your home. Then the size of the kennel struck me they were massive I mean Great Dane size boxes I thought
about letting them out I leaned down to talk to one of them yes I talked to dogs so what and what
I saw shocked me to my core I put my shirt over my nose and leaned over to see how bad these poor
creatures conditions really were. But instead of
a dog, the face that looked back at me was a child's. It appeared to be a girl and she didn't
look to be more than five years old. I became furious instantly. I quickly looked over to the
other can of wounds met face to face by another girl that looked identical. I was biting my lips so hard the taste of blood soon filled my mouth.
Why in the effing world were there a pair of twin little girls locked up in boxes, forced
to wallow in their own feces?
These were normal looking beautiful children, no valid reason came to me.
I realized I was becoming so wound up, tears had started pouring down my face.
I couldn't think of anything other than getting them out of that house. The idea of stealing
having long left my thoughts. Right before I opened the first kennel, I stopped myself.
Hold it right there, I thought. I was going to have to do this right or my future,
in addition to theirs theirs would be screwed.
It only took a moment before I figured it out.
I leaned over and made a promise to them I was going to get them out of their prison
and soon.
The terrified sets of blue eyes that looked back at me almost made me change my mind but
I held to my purpose and rapidly slipped out of the house. In spite of the rage I felt coursing
through me I continued on in my car and dialed 911. This was almost opposite to everything I'd
ever believed but it was no longer just about me. When the operator came on I told her I wanted to
stay anonymous but my son had recently been in the home and saw the cages with the two children.
He was very upset as well as myself and saw the cages with the two children. He was very upset
as well as myself and I demanded the cops check it out. She sounded a little skeptical but she'd
pass it on nonetheless. I wasn't totally sure the cops were going to believe me so I also called the
crime stoppers number and told them the same story. I was so furious by now I didn't need to act upset to get my point across.
This operator seemed much more interested in what I had to say but even then I still had no guarantee
that anything would be done. I wasn't going to be able to think of anything else so I sat a few
blocks away and waited and waited and waited and waited. The hours drug by so slowly.
I must have smoked two packs of cigarettes in that time.
The mother came home a few hours in and I prayed like never before that the girls wouldn't say anything about my visit.
Not too much later a pair of cop cars pulled up in front of the house.
My first thought was that they had said something.
However, the longer I thought on it, I realized that there was no way she was going to call the cops over a burglary. She'd be screwed the second she told the story. I knew then that the cops were
there to look around. A few more cars and a pair of ambulances showed up soon after and that was
when I was sure that they were safe. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried like a little girl.
When the cops brought that rotten woman out in cuffs, I could finally relax and go home.
According to the news, both parents were convicted of a whole slew of crimes and sentenced for
up to 15 to 30 year stretches.
Not long enough as far as I'm concerned, but
I was pleased to know those poor girls were far from those awful people.
When it comes to the twins, not much is out there. Because of their age, there's no names
or information of where they landed. All I can say is that they went into the system.
Now being a product of the system
I can't guarantee their future will be great
regardless of that
I'm positive it will be better
than it was before
now that my wife and I are no longer together, and I'm sure she'll never see this,
I'm eager to share a terrible episode she went through about four years into our marriage.
I was out of town when this happened, and most of what I know is second-hand.
However, I believe you'll still get the feeling of fear she felt while it was happening.
For the story, we'll call her Sarah.
Sarah left the house that morning like normal people for work.
Since it was a Friday, her office closed early and she agreed to go out for drinks with some of the girls.
This wasn't something she would normally do, but because I was gone and our daughter was with me,
she took the opportunity to go out and have a good time.
She let time get away from her and ended up getting a bit more intoxicated than she expected.
Dinner was ordered and her next few hours were spent sobering up.
Around midnight, she said she was finally confident enough to drive home.
Just to be safe, she took her time and drove on the back roads to our house. Just before 1am,
she made it home safe and sound. Unfortunately, she wasn't paying attention and as the garage
door closed, two men slept in and stuck a gun in her back. From what I know about her, she probably
peed herself, but she left that part out of her recollection. These guys didn't seem to be
pros at this and would make several mistakes that would come back to hurt them. She said one burglar
told the other to get her phone while the other tied her up. Instead of searching for it, the
idiot grabbed our house phone that looked similar to one of those old flip phones and put it in his
pocket. She did nothing to correct this. Once the guy was
satisfied she was tied well, he threw her into a closet and locked her in. Her first thought was
that she was going to be killed. They hadn't bothered to put a mask on her and she figured
this was because there was no intent for her to live. She knew her phone was still in her pocket
and 911 was her only hope. So for the next few minutes, she fought with ropes until she managed to get one hand free.
911 was quickly dialed and she whispered as quietly as she could to the operator.
She stopped once in a while and listened for footsteps and then would go back to the operator.
He told her not to talk unless she needed to but
to not hang up. Those next few minutes stretched for what seemed like hours until the operator
told her the police were pulling up outside. Her hope was that the cops would get to them before
they came for her and that's just what happened. The shouts of the police filled her with relief
and finally, after the longest 15 minutes of her life, the door opened and she was greeted by the comforting face of an officer.
The burglars were being let out of the house at that same time. Their heads were hanging in shame and neither had the guts to look at her.
After the paramedics checked her out and the police left, she called me.
I was freaked out of course, but I was also very proud of her in such a terrifying predicament.
There wasn't a trial, fortunately.
The idiots took a plea and became wards of the state for the next five years or so.
Sarah appeared to be handling things well at first, but when the panic attacks and nightmares started we had to get her help.
As far as I know she may still be attending counseling. Our manager would begin to implode
after a few years and although she claimed the incident hadn't changed her things were truly
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charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I live near a very large, very popular national park.
Locals here like myself are pretty aware of the goings on near here.
Strange sounds, strange creatures and strange disappearances.
I have dealt with these myself in the past on hikes and even just relaxing in the park.
Here's one that still freaks me out to this day. I was at my grandma's house that's deep in the
boonies. The only road there is a gravel road that is pretty much washed away so without a good car you're not getting out there anyways.
My cousins lived in a trailer with their mom right below my grandma's.
We played all sorts of games which mainly involved me getting chased since I was the youngest.
My grandma was in the hospital with my aunt so our older cousin, who I'll name D, had to watch us.
D was and still is the only cousin that's older than us that
we still hold in high regards. He would mess with us and play around but actually cared about us.
The whole day we spent playing around but we would usually play more at night like hide and seek and
tag etc. We had been playing pretty far away from the house and it was starting to get dark we decided to go back to the house and grab flashlights and play manhunt
of course I was the one being hunted again
I ran pretty far into the woods on the other side of the property and hid behind a log
I heard my cousins getting close so I ran and they saw me
we ended up running to the very back of the property
almost a mile from the house and we saw me. We ended up running to the very back of the property, almost a mile from the
house and we saw my cousin D. He looked at us and kind of growled and we all ran from him,
thinking it was a game. We ran back onto the gravel road and we saw him walk out of the tree
line but he did it in a sort of weird kind of gloatingly kind of way. We ran into the house and decided to barricade the door to play a prank on him.
We moved a couple of things in front of the door, but decided to move the big coffee table in front of it too.
As we loudly scooted the table across the floor, D came into the living room from the master bedroom, rubbing his eyes.
We'd obviously woke him from all the movement
and he was mad. We told him about seeing him chase us and he got wide-eyed. He told us to go to our
bedroom and stay there. We sat in the bedroom for about 20 minutes and he came in and told us not
to worry, that it was just him scaring us and we went on with the night.
It wasn't until about three years later when I was 13 that he told me the truth. It was a
skinwalker. He told me that he had dealt with it when he was our age and told me his story,
and this is how it went. This happened around the mid-90s. D, much like me and my cousin, spent his childhood around my mama's property with his brother C and his cousin K.
They would play manhunt and tag and such like we did.
When this story took place, it was in the middle of the summer and he was around 12.
He and C and K were playing at a treehouse that is no longer standing.
They had just pulled a prank on K and were hiding from him in the treehouse.
D and C stayed in the treehouse until K stopped looking.
C left and went back to our mama's house and left D alone.
D stayed up in the treehouse and read some comics.
The treehouse was about a half a mile from the house and was on a
hill so that you could still see the house from it but it was still in the woods. At the time my
papa was still alive but was in Georgia on a retreat so he was not there which let the three
boys do whatever they wanted. Papa would holler for them to come in when it started to get dark
because there was and still is a large number of
coyotes and bears around the property. Dee decided to read comics all day, something he still enjoys
and eventually fell asleep. He woke up and it was dusk. He heard our mama yelling for him and he
began to get ready to leave. As he went down the ladder he heard a coyote yip and he climbed back up.
At this point he began to get a little upset when telling me this story.
He began to explain what the coyote looked like and I realized it was the same one that me and
my cousins had seen growing up as well. It looked like it had mange. It had a large tuft of fur
missing on its right side and you could see the bare pale skin and it had human-like eyes.
It snarled at him and bore its teeth.
He was taken aback by this and he just sat back down in the treehouse.
The coyote sat at the base of the ladder and just looked up at him.
He told me he sat there for about 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do. He remembered he
had a slingshot and decided the best course of action would be to try to scare it off with that.
He said he shot at it and it just growled more. My cousin was and still is a very good shot with
a slingshot. I had a couple of bruises to prove it. He reared back and decided to aim at its eye
because he didn't like the way it stared at him. He reared back and decided to aim at its eye because he didn't like the way it
stared at him. He reared back and got it right in its left eye and it ran away yowling. D got a
little more emotional now as he told me this. He told me he climbed down the ladder and made a mad
dash toward the house. About halfway to the house there is a large dip in the land where there are a
bunch of bushes and small trees.
When he was about there he told me that he heard coyote yips all around him and swore that a whole pack had come upon him.
He just ran from it and while he was on his way up the other side of the dip he tripped and hurt his leg.
Dee started to get upset and had to stop a few times at this point. He told me he got up
and started to limp towards the house and this is the part that gave me chills. He told me that he
turned and looked behind him and saw not a coyote anymore but a human person and it looked like it
had a face. He said it started to walk towards him in an odd way but luckily C and K started
yelling for him and as quickly as it appeared it disappeared. D told C and K but they didn't
believe him and they told him it was just a trick of the night. Something that he still tries to
believe in. As soon as he told me this he kindly asked me not to ask him about it anymore as when
he thinks about it he thinks he sees that coyote outside. D is a very religious and reliable man
so when he says weird stuff is happening I usually believe him. The coyote he saw that night me and
my cousins have seen before as well along with the stag. Since the night me and my cousins have seen before as well, along with a stag. Since the night me and my
cousins saw it, I've had two more encounters, the latest one being last year. I'll also share those
in time. One of my cousins who was there with me that night has a reddit and may soon tell his
perception of the events. I have some more stories that happened to me in the park than on family
land that I'm going to share soon
Several of my friends have had creepy encounters as well and if they're willing I may share theirs as well
I just come to find it so strange that weird things happen out here in these remote areas. I've held on to this story for over a decade and I've flirted with posting it here but
just kept talking myself out of it. I can't sleep and it all popped in my head again and
just don't care and want to share so here it goes. I moved into a recently
renovated house with two friends when we were in our 20s. We were each professionals in our
respective fields and found this great house at a great price and agreed it made sense to move in
together for the year's lease and save up money during that time. Now to make it simple for any
mental visual just know it was a ranch style
and there was one hallway with the first bedroom immediately on the left,
second on the right near a bathroom and my room at the very end of the hall.
That said, let's move on to the things that we all agreed we wouldn't talk about
because people would think we're crazy.
The first day we moved in, we were going over the random spots around the
house. We didn't when we checked it out prior to signing the lease. I was looking at a bookshelf
that was built into a wall and noticed that the trim around it was in a way covering something
white, red and blue. I reached in and grabbed a plastic Virgin Mary with water in it and called
my buddies over. We look at it and on the bottom
was a sticker that said Holy Water with a local church's name. The three of us laughed at it and
after some jokes threw it away and just moved on. Within a few weeks one of my friends brought up
his girlfriend, now wife, moving in with us and we agreed it'd be fine because, hey, more money saved for each of
us, and we had plenty of space. Right when she moved in, things got weird for each of us.
The first weird thing to happen was, I noticed that in every room but my bedroom, and later
verified my roommate's rooms, there were piles of swept dust in from each door, kitchen, and living
room. I thought it odd, but none of
my friends did it, and we all agreed it was odd. Maybe two weeks later, let's say roommate one's
wife and I were home and were in our rooms and heard banging coming from the living room and
kitchen and ran out to see what it was. Once we got out halfway and could see the kitchen, our jaws dropped as we found all the cabinets were open.
Every cabinet door, top and bottom, open.
Needless to say, we were all shocked and confused.
We closed the cabinets, made coffee, and sat in silence.
This became a reoccurring occurrence that everyone experienced over the year.
Now being about two months into
the lease I would start waking up in the morning or from naps gasping for air and feeling like I
had been strangled which began to terrify me as it continued to happen until I moved out.
During that time with things happening we were all getting on without any issues.
One day when friend one and his wife had gone out to dinner I was
walking down the hall to my room and heard a woman's laugh come from their room which immediately
made the hair on my neck stand up. I leaned into friend two's room and verified they had left and
he confirmed it but I still knocked and opened their door to find the room empty. With these
things having happened I began wondering what was going on
but couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Moving forward I had my computer desk directly against the wall
where I would sit with my back to the door.
I started to hear footsteps coming down the hall behind me almost daily
to the point where I both moved my desk and began shutting my door
so I wouldn't hear it or get
creeped out. Unfortunately even with the desk moved if the door was open I would hear the footsteps.
Five months in I asked my roommates if my girlfriend could move in as well and again
no resistance from them so in she came. Right before she moved in, everyone in the house started losing things for lack of a better term.
CDs would disappear.
TV remotes from bedrooms would go missing and need to be replaced.
Even a pair of shoes at one point.
This started to make all of us start questioning if someone was stealing, which didn't make the situation better.
One night shortly after my girlfriend moved in at around 7pm,
with everyone home there was a commotion in the kitchen and glass shattering. We all ran to find
that the coffee pot had somehow flown off the coffee maker and smashed on the ground a solid
10 feet from the coffee maker. This was when we all started to get very, very creeped out.
Seven months in, friend two's girlfriend moved in and things seemed to go back to normal.
I decided with all the previous things having happened, I wanted to find all the lost items and began digging around the house.
I was in the garage one day and found a near hidden hatch to what turned out to be a small attic, short in height, that wasn't finished but ran almost the entire length of the house. I grabbed a ladder and climbed up
and had a heck of a time opening the hatch but finally got it open and climbed in.
I crawled through and in the very back of the space I found every item that had gone missing.
I backed out and got my friends to go in one by one to see what I
found as they didn't believe me. Both went in and both came out white as a sheet. I ended up going
back up and getting everything that was up there and when I came back down went out to buy a lock
and hinge for it just to give myself a false sense of security, knowing how hard the hatch had
been to open in the first place. Things like the cupboards opening and closing continued and became
something we all refused to talk about. We met a neighbor our age one day chatting while grabbing
the mail and told him to pop by for a beer when he had a chance as he had grown up literally next
door and said he used to mow the lawn for the previous owner as a kid. He came by a few weeks later and when he walked in his first
words were, wow this place looks completely different. Over a few beers we asked him what
the place used to look like and got some odd responses. He started by saying when he was a kid, mowing the lawn,
the owners were in their late 70s and very, very religious. He pointed to one wall and simply said,
that wall was literally floor to ceiling, pictures of Jesus, Mary, and crosses.
He continued to tell us that they were from somewhere in the Caribbean, possibly Cuban,
and would use goat's
blood, or at least that's what they said it was, to draw symbols on the windows during specific
parts of the year. When I asked why they did, they just said to keep bad spirits out. Bingo.
We had found the source of our crazy, but are still very unnerved as I think anyone would be.
There were plenty of other things I wasn't experiencing, but one friend in particular was.
He has two brand new TVs, CRT to give an idea of the general time frame.
On top of that, he had two freshly built PCs up and die on him, even with pet wiring being brand new,
and him having UPS that should have
stopped any surges. These are just a few. I had a co-worker whose wife worked in real estate and
for local government who, after hearing the stories I told her husband, got the history of the house.
I found out that the, let's call them crazy old owners, bought the house right when it was built and they both died
there. After the house was sold, none of the owners after stayed more than two years before
selling the house until the then current owner bought it. Interesting, right? To use the phrase
again, shortly after this information got to me, I did something I would never have expected myself
to do, which was try to talk to them. Since
I got home before the others I asked the two that had died in the house by name to stop messing with
us and that we aren't there to make a mess nor will we be there much longer. I felt crazy but
when you feel crazy sometimes you just have to do crazy things. This one-way conversation did nothing. I began waking up in the morning to
find things that had been typed, no joke, on my computer while I slept. I asked my girlfriend,
who was a very light sleeper, if I had been waking up at night and she gave me a solid no.
The typing was gibberish and just added to my already rattled nerves.
Around the same time, the same thing happened to one of my friends who then started to get very creeped out himself.
One night I got into some ridiculous argument with my girlfriend and she opted to sleep on the couch.
After about ten minutes I started hearing scratching going up the wall behind my headboard. And I began getting unnerved for the thousandth time when
my door opened and in walked my girlfriend, silent, aside from the words move over.
The scratching stopped immediately and I asked her why she had came back in.
She then said something I couldn't quite understand but was told that while she was on the couch,
the two of us being the only ones home
with the roommates gone for the weekend, she heard two people talking in the kitchen. I couldn't hear
what they were saying, it just sounded like people talking in whispers and gibberish.
Fantastic, now they're talking. Maybe a month later we're home alone again or on the couch when
I turn the TV off as she's asleep
and I can tell I'll be there shortly when I hear the voices myself.
When I say I was legitimately terrified it would be an understatement.
The voices were clear as crystal and just as she said,
If you've ever watched anything where there are ghosts and they are talking in an odd backwards whisper and in unintelligible gibberish, that's exactly what it sounded like.
I looked right where they should be and nothing. No one there and they kept talking.
This went on for at least ten minutes. I say this because I literally willed myself to sleep.
A few days later there was a heavy snowstorm and the guy that had a dad garage band across the street was shoveling and as I had just finished I decided to ask him if he wanted a hand and he said yes.
We began chatting and I asked if he knew anything about our house.
He then started to tell me things that explained more than enough to get me to talk
to my girlfriend and then my roommates, letting them know we'd be moving out early. He said that
the room at the end of the house, my room, was where the old man died. He had emphysema and COPD
and would sit in an armchair in the room and smoke. One day he was doing just that and began to cough and couldn't stop. After
a short time he ended up basically choking to death in his chair and his wife was shopping at
the time to come home and find him dead. A few years later the old woman was in the room I had
previously heard laughing coming from which was apparently her knitting and sewing room where she ended up sitting in
a rocking chair when she needed to rest and fell asleep and didn't wake up. I'm sure I've forgotten
a lot and this has been long-winded and possibly boring to most of you but I've only shared this
with a few friends and wanted to write it out for some reason.
I have experienced things throughout my life ever since I was a child.
I think I'm sensitive to these things.
However, here are just a few stories out of all that have left me terrified.
And I'm also curious about yours.
Number one.
Me and my mom moved to a flat and an old lady had died there before us.
My mom cleaned up the place and we moved in.
No offense, but it was a typical elderly house.
And the thing is, all her stuff was left there.
So we moved into her setup. The rug, tables, beds,
personal paintings, etc. all stayed. One night I slept in my room, the smaller one. I had a terrible nightmare about the man in the painting in my room. Everything hand painted and personal,
probably someone close to the lady. As I had this nightmare I sat up straight in a cold
sweat and as I did the painting fell from the wall and the glass in the frame broke causing a huge
noise. I started crying like there was no tomorrow and refused to sleep or spend time in that room
from that day on. I started to live in the living room. Every other part of the house had a really eerie dark vibe to it.
So as I live there now, in the living room, me and my mother watch TV but then she decides
to go sleep because she was tired.
I say goodnight and she goes.
I stay up and continue to watch TV.
Now this living room had a kind of door that's glass but not clear. It's kind of like a blurred mosaic.
I'm sure you know what I mean. I just don't have the word for it. Hours pass and I see my mom
through the door messing with the hanger in front of the living room door. I figured she woke up and
probably was just looking for something. It got a little weird because she's been standing there
for two minutes now. Note that at this point it
didn't hit me. She wore one of those green tees they use at work and as I was about to walk over
and ask if everything's fine because I thought she felt sick or something she just went back to bed
in my room that I had the nightmare in. I didn't think too much of it until morning. As we had our coffee in the kitchen, I mentioned the night before and she just looked at me, pale.
My mom said, yesterday after I fell asleep I didn't get up.
I slept through the night.
And I definitely didn't wear that green shirt, I wore a pink one.
Needless to say, my blood turned into ice.
Number 2
It was a class trip in high school.
We went to a small lake and had a little party the first night.
At the time, I was having problems with one of my classmates.
I had a huge crush on him and it wasn't mutual so I wanted to get away from the crowd a bit.
Yes, I did drink some but just really lightly since I never loved alcohol too much and I just hate the crowd a bit. Yes, I did drink some, but just really lightly since I
never loved alcohol too much and I just hate the taste of it. You could walk around the whole lake,
but that required you to approach it from another guest residency because the path was cut into
three parts to separate them. Let me explain. The apartment we rented only had one third of this
path because that was the one it owned. At the end a really deep around
two to three meter pit and on the other side of that a fence. So as I walk I see one of my
classmates Lily standing at the end of the path facing the pit. She wears white and just stands
there. As I get really close like 30 meters away she suddenly flips around looks at me with a horrifying appearance that burned in my mind and jumped into the pit facing me.
I ran there in horror but couldn't see anything.
I started screaming out of my mind and started running back to get help.
Two of my classmates saw that and as I started to tell them what's going on they got a hold of me and started
dragging me back towards the house. As I told them I wanted to run back there so we could help but
they held me. At this point I was screaming and crying at the top of my lungs and thinking why
won't they understand that we need help. I saw her jump. It really was a scene.
Next thing I know they're telling me,
what are you talking about?
Lily's back there drinking and she wears red.
I honestly didn't see this faint figure or anything ghostly.
It legitimately looked like a whole person.
Flesh and blood had thrust themselves into the pit.
My daughter was seven years old when she discovered her uncle on the living room sofa dead from
a drug overdose.
The death was ruled that he ended his own life but there are still a lot of questions
that will never be answered.
He was 27, in perfect health, showed no warning signs but most of all none of us believe that he would ever do such a thing if there was the slightest chance his niece would discover him.
He adored her from the moment she was born and I can't imagine he would ever want to cause her such emotional trauma. There are a lot of circumstances that point to the fact that he didn't end his life
but that someone else would be happy to have him out of the way. We suspect one person in particular
but this isn't the place to discuss that especially with no proof. Any one morning more details of this, feel free to message me,
but again, this isn't the place for further discussion on that matter. On the night following
his funeral, which wasn't held for ten days after his death because they took so long on the autopsy,
my daughter woke in the middle of the night and told me Uncle Dusty was in her room and wanted
to talk to me. I followed her across the hall to find
an empty room lit only by her Tinkerbell nightlight. She wasn't a bit frightened and was more puzzled
that he was nowhere in sight and claimed that he came out of her closet, that the door opening was
what woke her up. The closet door was still open as a matter of fact she said that he kept pointing towards his temple then pointing across the hall to the room which is why she assumed he wanted her to go get me
but the oddest thing was that she said he was talking the entire time but she couldn't hear a word he was saying his mouth was moving like he was speaking quickly but she heard nothing. I dismissed it as a little girl's
bad dream after such a terrible experience, especially seeing as how we had buried him that
very day, it was bound to be on her mind. Heck, an adult would have a hard time coping much less a
little girl. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I was heading to the kitchen around 1-2am for a glass of water.
I drank my water and walked down the hall to return to bed.
And as I passed her room opposite mine I glanced in out of habit and froze in my tracks.
I saw Uncle Dusty standing at her bedside.
I was wide awake and knew what I was seeing.
I saw him in detailed profile right down to the baseball cap he always wore.
He was standing with one hand on his heart and the other on her forehead while she was sound asleep.
Here's what was so strange though, and I never heard of anyone experiencing such a thing.
He seemed to be made of swirling glitter. He was emitting his own light and his entire body
was shimmering. I was stunned and as I stood there he never moved, never looked at me or
acknowledged me in any way. I backed away after a few minutes and went back to my own bed.
It might sound silly to some but I kind of felt I was intruding on a private moment with his beloved niece.
No other major events occurred until nine years later when my daughter, then sixteen, was diagnosed with a large tumor that had already taken over much of her liver.
Of course it had to be removed immediately so after she was recovering from an emergency six-hour surgery at her local children's hospital,
I took a walk a few blocks away from the hospital property to smoke a cigarette,
because, as we all know, smoking near a hospital was a no-no.
It was quite late at night in a fairly large city, so I was a bit apprehensive being out alone,
seeing as how I'm a small female and an easy target for anyone looking to cause trouble.
I'm sitting on a bench puffing away and I see a tall thin man wearing a baseball cap standing motionless across the street just watching me.
His face was in shadows so I couldn't see him clearly but oddly enough I felt no sense of menace. I finish my smoke and begin walking back and he falls into step behind me keeping far enough away that I still
can't make out his features. As I reach the entrance to the hospital I look back and he's gone
nowhere to be seen. He couldn't have disappeared that quickly upon reaching my daughter's room
the first thing she said when she awoke was that uncle dusty came to see her in her dream
then it struck me that maybe just maybe he was watching over me as i took my midnight stroll
to make sure no harm came to me alone at night in the middle of the city. Now the latest visit also comes at a special time.
My daughter is now expecting her own baby. She called me this morning in tears and said that
she was in the bathroom doing her usual business of washing her face, brushing her teeth and so on
and said that as she straightened up from the sink, she saw behind her in the mirror her uncle Dusty just for a split
second over her shoulder. She said he was smiling from ear to ear but by the time she spun around
he was gone. This last experience happened just this morning so I decided to post about it.
A happy experience with a lost loved one is such a boost to any day.
In 2017 my family moved to an older house. It was in rough shape but the landlord promised to fix it
up. We didn't have a lot of money and it was in our budget so we took it out of desperation.
The house sat on a hill by itself fenced in with a huge hill and clubhouse.
Each room only had one or two wall lights and none from the ceiling.
Strange things started happening shortly after we moved in. First, my kids discovered multiple
angel figurines in a circle inside the clubhouse. It was odd, but I chalked it up to the previous
tenant's kids doing weird stuff. The basement to the house was weird. We had to walk around
the outside of the house along the side porch to a small door, it led to the basement. The basement was basically
like someone had dug underneath the house and had no floors or lights, just a person-sized space
where you could walk around about a hundred feet in front and that's it. When my teenage daughter
and myself went to have a look inside, there was old funeral flowers and arrangements. Shortly after moving in, a heaviness set in.
The air was always heavy and filled with dread.
My once happy family went to depression and not speaking.
My marriage started to suffer.
It felt like no matter what, we couldn't be happy while inside.
We had four dogs, a German Shepherd, a Pit Bull, a Chihuahua,
and a Terrier mix. All four dogs followed me wherever I went and made a circle around my feet.
If I went to the kitchen, they were there. The dining room, eating, the dogs lay at my feet even
if I went to the bathroom, the dogs would make a circle around me in the toilet. They stood at my side and refused to move.
Then the electrical problems started. We would hear zaps and buzzing coming from the breaker box,
multiple calls to the landlord. She would send someone out to fix it but that didn't last very
long. We had to leave one weekend because the problem was so bad my husband feared we were going to die in an electrical fire.
Around Christmas time our oldest son ran into the bedroom scared and crying because he saw a lady in a nightgown staring at him through the living room window.
My husband and I checked the entire property but found no woman or any evidence of her.
A few months before my family moved I started having nightmares.
I would dream of setting the house on fire and dying with it, just sitting on the bed
while the flames burnt me.
I couldn't sleep at night because of them.
My husband started having the same thoughts and we both just wanted to die in the house.
My father-in-law started having hallucinations. He would scream
that the rooms were on fire. He would watch a funeral take place in our front yard when there
wasn't one. He would talk to himself and poured bleach in a pot of soup beans that I was cooking.
It got so bad I took all the knives and hid them in my purse while myself, my husband and our four kids slept in one bedroom
with the door locked, scared of him. We honestly believed that he was going to kill us.
Every passing day things were getting worse. The ideas of ending my own life grew stronger and
finally we couldn't take it. We found a new place to rent and walking away from that house was like a weight lifting
Every step got easier to breathe and I started to smile more
A month after we had moved my cousin sent me a Facebook message
It was a post from one of the old neighbors
That house was on fire and the picture was taken from the back bedroom
My children's room where the breaker box was No one set the fire and no one was taken from the back bedroom, my children's room where the breaker box was.
No one set the fire and no one was living in it. I truly believe that house was evil and
wanted to burn. Since moving, my dogs no longer surround me,
my marriage has improved and my father-in-law no longer has hallucinations.
My husband and I met in college.
I won't name names for the sake of privacy, but we went to one of our region's oldest
colleges, over 200 years old, and it is known to be very haunted. We started dating our
freshman year and we pretty much started living together right away. I was a commuter so I would
stay over in his dorm often. In our junior year, my husband, boyfriend at the time, Jay, landed a
sweet living situation where he was able to have a bedroom to himself in a larger suite with only two guys suite mates. This was the ideal situation for us because it meant I could basically live with him
during the school year since he didn't have a person sharing a bedroom with him. This living
situation was obviously incredibly beneficial for me and I loved it. Aside from having to share a
twin XL bed with a 6 foot 2 250 pound linebacker it was pretty awesome
it didn't take me long at all to realize how haunted the building was
I have a ton of stories about my experiences in the building and on the campus in general
but explaining them all in this post will be way too long I'll discuss a few big ones so that there's a bit of context. Jay was a resident
assistant and had a lot of work to prepare the suites for all the other students who would be
moving in soon. Because of this, he was able to move in about a week before anybody else.
On the day that we were moving Jay's things into the building, I had multiple sightings of a tall
black shadowy figure. I would always catch
it out of the corner of my eye and it would quickly dart out of sight every time I did a
double take or tried to look at it more closely. I saw this figure probably four to five times on
move-in day and didn't think much of it until I remembered that the building was basically empty
except for Jay and me.
Other experiences included hearing voices, hearing scratching, banging, thumping at times when it could not be explained, a very creepy night alone on campus during a holiday break when a major
storm hit and all of the power went out and more. We had a lot of creepy experiences but my least
favorite part of living in this building
was honestly just the feeling I got being there alone. If I was ever alone in any part of the
room I immediately would feel a presence enter the space I was in. It felt intense and loud and scary.
The best way I can explain it is that it felt like someone was standing beside me and screaming in my face, but there was no sound.
We lived with this weird presence the entire time we were in the building, and we honestly were fine for months.
But then something weird started happening.
Jay would start waking up in the middle of the night by speaking a different language.
I know saying speaking in
tongues sounds ridiculous, but I honestly don't know how else to describe it. I swear he sounded
like he was speaking a foreign language, but it was a language that I couldn't identify and had
never heard before. He always sounded really intense and had an almost aggressive tone to
his garbled words, whatever he was saying. He woke me up by talking
in his sleep like this every night for months. It creeped me out, but I never said anything about
it until one night. It scared me so terribly that I had no other choice. I woke up one night to find
Jay on top of me. Remember, we shared a twin XL bed and he's a huge guy. I was on my back and he was
straddling me with his palms flat on the bed on either side of my head. His eyes were wide open
and he was bent down and staring right into my face. I was immediately spooked but played it
off by saying something like, uh hi, you good? Is everything okay?
No response. Jay continued to stare through me and didn't move. I kept this up for a minute or two,
thinking he was potentially just being silly or was groggy from sleep and couldn't form his words.
We stayed like that for what felt like forever, but what was really like three to four minutes
he then got off of me climbed over to get out of bed and stood still in the room for a few seconds
after that he turned sharply to look at the desk and chair in the bedroom he pulled the chair out
from the desk turn it around 180 degrees so that it was facing him, walked around the chair three times in a
circle, and then stood back to face the chair directly. He stood staring at the seat of the
chair for about a minute, and then got back into bed with me and went immediately to sleep.
The entire time this was happening, I was watching with my mouth wide open.
I know that I tried to call to him, get his attention a few times to see what
he was doing but at a certain point all I could do was watch in bewilderment. This was the strangest
thing that ever happened to me. I told Jay all about it and what he did the next morning and he
was very upset because it scared him so badly. He is not and has never been a sleepwalker or sleeptalker.
Shortly after this event I decided to cleanse the place with some help from a friend.
We did and things really quieted down afterward. Jay continued to talk in his sleep every now and
again for the rest of that school year and even here and there for the next school year.
We've been married and living in our own
place since we graduated almost two years ago and I haven't heard Jay sleep talk or seen him
sleepwalk a single time since we left living on campus. I know that building was haunted
and I really believe that whatever it was attached to Jay for some reason and tried to speak through him.
I'm 30 now. When I was in my teens and early 20s, I was really into weird stuff. There's a few local
shops that sell unusual oddities and antiques, like art made from
dead animals, skulls, pickled specimens, things like that. I started pickling my own specimens
around age 20 when I figured out it wasn't that hard. I had some articulated skeletons, but
stuff I was really interested in was supposedly cursed stuff. I bought things people claimed were cursed on eBay and even drove to different states to buy things from people they claimed were haunted.
I bought three different Dybbuk boxes supposedly cursed from eBay.
I bought numerous haunted dolls, whatever I could find.
I had some weird taxidermy items too, like a couple two-headed baby chickens, a snake with two heads, etc.
I had a few things I wasn't supposed to have either, but I won't get into that.
Long story short, nothing weird ever happened. Not a thing.
I never had one unusual creepy experience with any of this stuff.
I should start this off by saying I've never really believed in the paranormal or
supernatural. Like I wouldn't say I'm a skeptic because I think to use that term you have to go
into something deciding it isn't real and operate from that perspective. I'm fine with saying I have
no idea what this is. I can't explain it. I won't say I don't believe in ghosts because I don't
really know what a ghost is supposed to be. I've always been into aliens and was really obsessed with them when I was
younger but still never fully believed in them. I just kind of like the idea of them. I'd never
seen one or seen any real proof of one despite poring over documentary and late night history
channel binges. So on the subject of all things paranormal you
could say I'm a fox molder and I want to believe but never really did. Needless to say after the
following series of events my mind is quite a bit more open though I won't pretend I can tell you
exactly what was going on. So I'm like 21 years old and I'm working at a Walmart at the time. We had these steps that
we would smoke on that were outside the tire shop that led up to another parking lot for a different
building. I went out to smoke one day and was by myself and sat at the top of the stairs.
As I was smoking I noticed a paper bag sitting kind of underneath one of the bushes that was there. I don't know
why but I looked in it. I was expecting to find some empty beer bottles or something but inside
of the bag was a porcelain lamp. It wasn't particularly creepy looking to be honest.
It didn't have bleeding eyes or whatever. It just looked like something that would be on your
grandma's shelf. It had a red ribbon around
its neck and looked really new. When I picked it up there was a note underneath it in the bag.
The note said, take me home. I'm a good little girl, I promise. No really, I know you're already
about to stop reading because that sounds incredibly corny, and it does, but that's literally what it said.
It was written in red ink and looked like female handwriting. Really neat. It was written on a piece of torn standard notebook paper. Again, I know how stupid and cliche that note sounds,
but that's actually what it said. So of course, being me, I brought the thing inside Walmart and stashed it under a
register because I was totally going to take that home. I showed it to my friend who was working
there and was kind of like, dude, look what I found outside. Look at this note. And he was like,
you should definitely not take that home. But of course I was going to take it home.
I live for stuff like this.
Anyway, as soon as I set it down, I realized it was a music box.
Because I jarred it enough, I guess it made it start playing.
I looked at the bottom of it, and it had one of those metal twist pins you wind up and it plays a tune.
So I turned it, and it was the least intimidating melody ever.
It wasn't creepy at all. I was actually getting legit disappointed because if you wanted to pull
a prank on someone with some scary object this thing was doing it all wrong. I don't know what
the melody was, I'd never heard it before but it was in no way ominous. Fast forward to the end of the work day, I get in my car, come home and show my then girlfriend.
She was into all the same weird stuff I was so she was equally excited about this weird find.
We cleared a space on her dresser for it and from then on we just referred to it as the lamb.
Things started to go down immediately like the next day.
Me and my ex didn't have a great relationship and I spent most of my time in the living room.
She hung out in the bedroom. I'd work until around 11 at night and get home and stay on my computer
playing games until about 3 a.m. Then once she was asleep I'd go in the bedroom and go to sleep. This way we
didn't really spend that much time together and we both quietly preferred it that way.
So the very next day I'm sitting in the living room and I hear a rustling sound coming from the
kitchen. I could see the entire kitchen from where my computer was and assumed it was one of our two
cats messing with something but both cats were actually on the floor staring at the kitchen, just as confused as I was. The sound seemed like it was coming from on top of
the fridge, and it sounded like something was rustling around the cereal boxes and bags of
chips and such that were up there. I assumed it was a mouse because we'd found a mouse in the
house before, the first specimen I'd ever pickled myself actually
and went over to the kitchen to check for a mouse. I turned on the light and as I walked in the
kitchen I heard the grudge noise. I've only seen the grudge once because it was one of the only
films that ever actually scared me. I'm not easily frightened and I generally don't care for horror movies but
something about the long frog croak sound of the grudge freaked me out when I was younger
and the only similar thing that scared me recently was the screaming bear in Annihilation.
I started walking toward the fridge and I'm totally hearing the grudge noise.
This is only impactful because this is literally one of the only things I'm totally hearing the grudge noise. This is only impactful because
this is literally one of the only things I've ever been afraid of and it was coming directly
from the top of the fridge where the rustling sound had been. I froze dead in place and so did
my cats. They didn't want to go anywhere near there either. I had no idea what to do. I was
literally on the verge of passing out, so I tried to articulate
this in my head and I decided that the fridge must be broken and that a fan or something in
it must be grinding. I crammed that thought into my head and sat back down at my chair and put on
my headphones. I did leave the light on, I'll admit. Normally I sat in the total dark. In my
head I was really trying to convince myself the
fridge was making that noise but I was finding it really hard to do. But I also was in panic mode and
I was like, what do movies and ghost shows and stuff say? Don't acknowledge it exists.
So I became the dad in every horror film and just said, fridge is broken, and went back to playing WoW while on the verge of jumping out of my own skin and using my headphones to drown out the noise.
I actually sat there for way longer than I normally played WoW because I was generally terrified as soon as I removed my headphones, I would hear the noise like right next to my ear and turn and some old woman would eat my face or something.
I have no idea how long the noise went on or when it stopped.
So I literally sat there until sunrise.
I never went to sleep and I used an Elvis playlist and chatting to my guildmates and wow to distract me as best as I could.
But I literally just sat there frozen in terror the entire night until the sun came up and my girlfriend woke up. She came in the living room at about 8am and was mad at me because I never went
to bed. She complained I played games too much, even though we both knew she didn't want me around
any more than I wanted to be around her. But our relationship issues aside, she was badgering me about being on the computer all night and I just said,
I don't want to talk about it.
And she kind of let it go.
She softened up quite a bit, looked a little confused, but I think she could tell I was freaked out.
Then she proceeded to freak me out even further.
She showed me her arm and said, that the cat scratched me up last night. And she indeed had what appeared to be a cat scratch down the length of her forearm. Problem was she kept the bedroom door closed and like I said both of the cats were in the living room with me and I hadn't moved from that chair. No one left the cat in the bathroom. They were in the
living room with me the entire night. In fact when sunrise finally came they were still almost in the
exact same spot staring at the kitchen that they had been when I went back to playing WoW. I didn't
say anything about it I just said oh dang and I felt like I was going to be sick. Since I hadn't slept I called into work that
day even though in reality I just really wanted to leave. So I did an unusual thing and me and
my girlfriend went bowling for the day, then to a movie, then dinner. I was clearly acting weird
because we never really did anything together and I was clearly trying to avoid the house. I actually asked if she wanted to go night fishing and she finally asked me what was going on.
I didn't tell her though. I didn't want to talk about it. She declined my generous offer to fish
in the dark and we ended up going home. We started our nightly ritual. She retired to the bedroom to
watch TV and I stayed in the living room. The grudge noise
started within an hour of me sitting down. This time as soon as it started I willed my completely
stiff and fear body to get up and walk down the hall to the bedroom. I left my computer running
and wow open and said I felt like watching TV. My girlfriend again remarked that I was acting weird and I again
declined to talk about it. I couldn't hear the grudge noise from the bedroom. I took some Benadryl
and went to sleep when she did which was hours before I normally went to sleep. The next day I
went to work and at around 9pm she called me. I was the manager of the toys department and had a bit of a leeway in using my
phone since no one really supervised me. So I answered and she was on the phone freaking out.
She was screaming into the phone and I could hear knocking in the background and couldn't really
make out what she was saying. Finally I made out a sentence. She was saying there's banging, someone's trying to get in
through the walls. I left work and drove home and stayed on the phone with her the whole time
and at some point on my drive home she left the house and started running down the street.
I picked her up in her pajamas as I was driving back and she said someone was trying to break
through the walls. She heard banging on all the walls of the bedroom.
By this point I was pretty certain I knew exactly what she was hearing but I still didn't want to
say anything about it. I wanted to calm her down and told her that it was squirrels. I said I'd
seen some squirrels going into a hole in the side of the wall and was afraid we might have them in
our walls. This was entirely made up
but it did actually calm her down. She didn't know squirrels could live in our walls and I convinced
her this was the case and I told her I'd call an exterminator in the morning and have them come out
and check it out. We went back to the house much to my despair. My squirrel story had calmed her
down but that was short-lived. The way our house was set
up we had a bathroom that was connected to our bedroom but not by a door just by the wall. So
you had to leave our bedroom and the bathroom was the next room on the right so the bathroom wall
and our bedroom wall were the same wall. Anyway we got inside she went to the bathroom and
immediately started screaming again.
I came into the bathroom to see what the screaming was about and it looked like a tiger had been clawing at the bathroom wall.
The one that connected to our wall.
The wallpaper, who wallpapers a bathroom anyway, was torn off about six feet high and there were large gashes in the drywall beneath it. Reminder this is all like
about four days into having this freaking lamb. At this point we got in the car and I told her
about the grudge noise. Her initial reaction was that we needed to get rid of that lamb
but something told me I couldn't. She wanted to just donate it to a thrift shop or something but I had this weird
sense of unease about doing it. I felt like we couldn't get rid of it that way. I felt like
someone had to know what it was and want to take it from us. I can't explain why I felt that way,
I just did. So at this point we did what you would probably not expect and we actually just live with it. Like this went on
every day. We had rules about it. The first rule was to never talk about it in the house.
We never even mentioned it. We pretended the lamb didn't exist. It was like that episode of Family
Guy where they had a giant octopus living in the house and just no one wanted to talk about it.
When we had something to say about it,
we would always say, let's go for a drive and we would know what it meant. The clawing at the
bathroom wall was getting deeper all the time. Eventually there was a huge hole in the drywall.
It was starting to claw through the drywall that was connected to our bedroom.
That was when I really started to freak out. For about a year we lived with
everything. We just ignored and pretended it didn't happen. Every night I sat with the grudge
noise. Things would fly off the shelves. Doors would slam. Straight up paranormal activity stuff
every day. One of the worst ones was one of our pickled specimen jars exploded.
It was a bird we'd had for a while and the mason jar exploded on the mantle in the living room.
Glass went everywhere and it took hours to find it all.
The bird itself also completely exploded, sending parts splattering around the living room.
And I had a few friends I would tell about it every day when I came into work, like they'd ask for updates on what the lamb had been doing,
and I'd tell them whatever freaky story we had from the previous day.
It was literally a daily occurrence at this point.
But then it got to a point we couldn't ignore anymore.
My girlfriend was waking up with bruises and scratches almost every day,
to the point it started to look like she was self-harming. She had a lot of piercings and tattoos so she wasn't too troubled by the pain
but didn't really enjoy having to wash blood out of the sheets every day. When it got too much was
when I was sitting in the bathroom browsing my phone and I heard a female voice say,
hey come here. So I finished my business and walked in the
bedroom and said, did you call me? And she replied with, I was really hoping that was you.
This is about six months in. At this point, it started talking, like literally speaking.
It had a little girl's voice.
I know again that's so cliche and stupid sounding, but it would occasionally speak and we could hear it.
We never responded to it.
Everything we'd read on the subject told us to never, ever respond.
We'd hear it at our door every night, say things like,
Hey, can I come in, please? Please let me in.
At this point, you probably tune this out and chalk this up to some kind of excessively long,
poorly written creepypasta, but I promise you, it isn't. Her whole family knew about it as well.
All my friends did. Everyone knew about this thing. When we had friends come over they'd ask about certain stuff the lamb had destroyed like what's up with the bathroom wall and we'd just respond
by shaking our heads and they got the message. Eventually no one came to our place anymore.
Everyone said it freaked them out to be there and they were terrified just to walk in. Even
her parents stopped coming over. Her mother wouldn't
even drive down our street. Still, we ignored it as best we could until one night I'm sitting on
my computer and a voice right up behind me says, hey, I thought it was my girlfriend. So without
turning around, I said, yeah, what's up? And the voice responded, nothing. Then I realized it wasn't
her voice and I spun around and nothing was there. I just broke the cardinal rule and I talked to it.
Grabbed my girlfriend and told her what I did while we drove around in the car.
She proceeded to call me an idiot for an hour and asked what we were going to do now.
So finally I decided to google local paranormal investigators.
I contacted a local paranormal investigator agency
and sent them an email with a more condensed version of everything I've just told you.
They responded in a few hours and asked me to send them a picture of the lamb.
That was the first time since the day we set it down That I'd ever touched it again
Also, I should note, it didn't collect dust
I put it in the middle of the kitchen table, grabbed my camera and took some pictures of it
I sent the pics away in an email and nothing
Until this point, these people had been responding to me in a matter of hours,
and now suddenly a day had gone by.
Then two days.
In those two days, everything had escalated tenfold.
The house was never quiet now.
The grudge noise could be heard outside of the house, and it never stopped.
Half the electronics didn't work.
The TV barely worked.
It would flicker on and off. The power would go on and off. The taps would start running and then
close. The garbage disposal would turn on. The doors were slamming and opening non-stop.
It was completely out of control and we couldn't stay in the house anymore. Mind you, I wasn't rich. I'm living on a Walmart salary here, but
we got a hotel room. I brought a laptop and I emailed the paranormal investigators again.
They replied to me this time and told me the lady who answers the emails was also there like
medium or whatever and that's when I sent her the pictures. She locked herself in her house and had
refused to come out for the past two days. They told me they were very sorry and whatever I had was out of their league.
So, great, right? My house is possessed and now it's gone insane because I talked to it
and the paranormal investigators don't even want to mess with it. I contemplated calling a priest or something, but I'm not religious,
and I didn't know if I would have to have faith in the Lord Jesus or whatever for it to work.
I contacted another paranormal investigator's company in the area and sent them the same pics and basically begged them for help.
This time they actually responded and were helpful and they drove down from about two
hours away to help us. When they showed up at our house nothing was happening. It was quiet and
everything looked normal. The doors were all closed, no sounds, nothing. Worse yet, they busted out all
these gadgets that I'm not going to pretend I knew what they did or what they were for.
Some had lights, some made beeps, some buzzed.
One made little lasers all over the house.
They had recorders, microphone equipment.
They saged the house, walked around waggling electronics at various locations.
I don't know exactly what they were doing but I at least appreciated that they seemed
to be trying. They weren't getting anything though. Nothing was happening. I even recorded
bits of it on my camera. Then all of a sudden stuff did happen. My camera kept working out of
nowhere. The battery just KO'd. All their noisy equipment started making noise and something was over 9,000.
There were three people and they started talking to it like, if you're here, give me a sign.
And then they asked to knock on stuff. And this all went on for like two hours.
Eventually they wrapped up and the woman who was with them said that she believed the thing
inhabiting our lamb wasn't a spirit. She said it wasn't even a person and it was something else. She said it was
pretending to be a little girl to try and trick us and the fact that we weren't being tricked was
angering it. They left and told me that she'd call me the next day. She said that she knew someone
who might be willing to take it. I couldn't fathom who would want this thing, but my girlfriend and I spent the night in the hotel again and I did indeed get a call from the woman the next day.
She said that she had spoken with someone named John Zaffis and that he was excited and wanted the item.
I didn't know who that was at the time.
She told me that he was the haunted collector, but that meant nothing to me.
They said he had a paranormal museum.
They came back to the house, got the lamb, and mailed the thing off to him.
Later, I realized that the dude had a TV show and was the nephew of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
And that's basically the end.
Once this Zafis dude had agreed to take it, everything had stopped.
We never had another weird incident again. I never fixed the bathroom wall though.
We moved out when we split up and left it like that for the people we sold the house to.
So on a side note, I recently, in the last six months, watched The Conjuring movies.
In the very short scene in, I believe, The Conjuring 2,
there's a shot of the Warren's daughter sleeping in her bed, when her nightstand is an identical
lamp to the one that I had. When I saw it, I almost started crying in horror. Though the one
in the film has a blue bow around its neck, and the one I had I'm pretty sure was red. The one in the film
also doesn't appear to be a music box. Before anyone asks yes I do actually still have the
picture of it that I sent to the original paranormal team. I will post them here but
I'd rather not touch the memory card that contains it.
I'm originally from a town called San Juan Caspastrano.
I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with it or currently live there.
Anyway, I attended Marco Forster Middle School.
I remember we all went to the auditorium because we were having a guest speaker talk about a book he was coming out with soon.
The book had to do with the kid that got abducted by aliens and how he was able to control the
crafts and travel in the alien ship's computer system. I remember him telling us about his own
experience. He looked at us all as his eyes shone with excitement.
He went on to tell us how when he was a young boy he was out playing by a big log with his
younger brother. At the time he had been living by a forest. He told us about how they went along
playing till this bully showed up. Forgive me I can't remember the exact details as this happened
12 years ago but I
remember him telling us how the bully pushed him and he fell off of the log and when he turned to
get himself up he spotted something under the log that he had been playing on. He said he was so
shocked and confused from what he was seeing that even the bully and his younger brother went to
take a look and what they saw was a large
light brown almost wood looking deceased humanoid figure. He explained how it had long skinny arms
and fingers and how it wore what seemed like a long darkish purple cloak with metallic engravings.
His bully who was petrified with fear started to cry. Our speaker went on to say how he took a piece of
it and headed back home with his younger brother. He told us he had stored it in a jar knowing what
he had found was otherworldly. A few days later he went back again to the same spot but the figure
was gone. He then told us after he had graduated school he moved away and took the jar with him.
He had decided to send a piece of the clothing to get tested because he was unsure if what he had
seen was real. He said that he had gotten a letter saying that he had to submit everything he had,
where he replied that that was it, of which he lied of course. He told us that that confirmed
that what he had seen as a kid was real.
He hid his jar under the floorboards knowing that the people he sent a sample to probably
weren't going to believe him and he really didn't want them to take away the only proof he had of
them of what was possibly extraterrestrial. A few days later he had come home from work to his house
being trashed. Not trashed as if though someone was trying to rob him but as if someone was looking for something.
He immediately checked under his floorboards and saw his jar was still there with the object inside.
As he finished his story he told us all to line up as he reached into a black bag that he had on stage.
With a smile he pulled out a large jar. Of course
I could have told the kids I was terrified of aliens but I didn't want to be called any names
or taunted. I remember walking up to him and looking in the jar and seeing the old purple
material he described with metallic symbols. Now trust me when I say I got a chill. Sitting under the purple material was what seemed
to be an extremely skinny hand. It seemed almost like wrinkly wood. It looked preserved. We were
so amazed even the teachers went to take a look. Before he ended his visit he told us once again
the name of his book and his own name. I even wrote the name down in my notebook and waited
for it to come out, but it seemed like it never did. In high school, I googled searched his book,
but nothing came up. I googled his name and nothing came. I found it strange since his book was
supposed to come out the month after his visit to my middle school. He even had sequels ready and
showed us the book covers. After I graduated high school,
I again Google searched it and nothing was there from him. I got a nasty feeling that maybe someone
at my school said something and reported him because there's nothing on him. And it bothers
me to this day because I remember him telling us that we can look online to see where we can find
his book and I truly hope that he's okay.
I'm nearly 20 and I'm still not a fan of the dark.
When I was little, following behind my dad as he went to turn on the lights for me,
he'd always say the same thing. You're not afraid of the dark, you're afraid of what's in it.
I think it was supposed to be reassuring and although I don't remember much of my childhood,
I remember the trouble my sister would get in for even suggesting anything horror related.
I'd be up every night having my parents check every crevice
in my room, pouting out to the living room sobbing about the shadowy figures standing over me.
Of course when you're older you learn to accept that those images were probably your mind playing
tricks on you, trying to make sense of the formless space around you. Well Jobin showed up about a
year ago. He didn't say that was his name, but
I hoped calling him something goofy would make him seem less frightening.
I wouldn't say it worked, but it makes things more convenient. Jobin is almost seven feet tall,
his body is impossibly thin, and from what I can tell he consists only of shadows. His fingers resemble elongated sewing
needles. He wraps one hand around the corner when he peers at me. I think once I've seen him try to
wrap those needle fingers to cover my eyes. He even has eyes like a cat in the dark, just like
a slight gleam to tip you off that he's there and watching you.
Jobin doesn't necessarily restrict himself to when you're alone or when it's dark.
He'll pop up anytime, anywhere.
Although I've never heard him speak
he is occasionally accompanied by voices that are simultaneously a scream in your ears
and barely audible.
Sometimes I would quietly hear someone calling my name from the
closet in my room or just around my shoulder, progressively getting louder as I whipped my
head around to find the source. For three months straight I had my father check inside my closet
because I was convinced someone had been living in there, watching and calling me. Professionals
tell me these are simple hallucinations,
that with enough medication and treatment they'll go away. Jobin is persistent. I occasionally try
to ignore him, but then conveniently imaginary bugs will crawl across the wall in the corner
of my eye and force me to turn my head. If I'm lucky, he's usually around a corner across the
room or standing flat against the wall.
The worst nights are when I wake startled in bed and turn to see him taking slow, staggering steps further into the room.
Usually he stops moving once I see him and never gets too close.
I force down some sleeping pills and repeatedly try to rationalize the delusion.
However, last night his elongated body stood over my bed,
small gleaming pupils locked to me before he crept back away.
I'm afraid of what he'll try, tonight. I was contacted by an old friend recently.
It was a very surprising call as he contacted me to do a house clearing and blessing for him.
This guy is a tough nut, not easily scared.
He listed off the crazy events that led to him contacting me.
Lots of unexplained electrical problems, strange noises, animals acting freaked out.
The list goes on.
As we spoke, I started to get impressions about the situation and asked him of the home's history.
Interestingly enough, the original homestead had burnt down and the existing dwelling was moved from another property. He had recently dug down to expand the crawlspace
into a functional height basement and discovered an old burnt brick foundation. I went and cleared
the home. I also acknowledged the spirits in the basement but also told them they couldn't stay.
I always ask for kids and dogs to not be in the home when I work as they get underfoot and
distract me. As I sent the spirits out the door both his dogs just froze in the home when I work as they get underfoot and distract me. As I sent the spirits
out the door both his dogs just froze in the porch and their gaze followed whatever they were seeing
upwards. I'm happy to say it's been a few weeks and he has had no problems since all activity
ceased. I sense that a couple and one child died in the fire. He is trying to research it, and I'm looking forward to what he finds out.
Seems often when we disturb things
that have been at rest a long time,
it can trigger activity.
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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, I came over from Serbia at age 13 with my mother.
My older brother who was 15 years older than me had lived in America for a few years and he sent for us.
My mom wouldn't be staying although at the time I wasn't aware of that.
Anyway we landed in New York City and the plan was my brother would come get us.
However my niece decided to come early and my brother's wife went into labor shortly before we landed. My brother couldn't leave his wife so he asked a
co-worker of his, they drove cabs, to pick us up in New York City and drive us to New Jersey where
him and my sister-in-law lived. When we got to New York City we waited in customs for what seemed
like forever. We looked for my brother but didn't see him. This was the
early 90s and cell phones weren't as commonplace and even if they were my mom and I didn't have one.
We panicked a bit not seeing my brother or my sister-in-law. Suddenly we heard our names being
called and saw a tall man. He introduced himself in perfect Serbian and explained he was a good
friend of my brother's and then told us about the baby.
He said he'd be driving us the two hours from the airport to my brother's home.
My mom relaxed and they happily began to converse about the baby and my brother in America.
I however just felt off.
This guy gave me bad vibes and regardless of my brother's friendship with him I felt distrustful of him.
We drove for a good hour and a half when he announced he was going to take us for breakfast.
We hadn't eaten in over 15 hours so we were starving by then.
We pulled up to a house and my mom and I were confused.
He insisted cheerfully that his wife was cooking us breakfast and after we'd drive the rest of the way to the hospital to see my family.
My mom shushed me when I whispered something didn't feel right and told me that we needed to be grateful for the hospitality.
We were led up into the house.
It was dark and dank and dirty.
Suddenly I think my mom finally got a bit nervous and started insisting he take us to my brother.
Suddenly the guy grabbed my mom by the wrist.
He told her that he needed a wife to take care of him and his house
and when he heard my brother tell the others at work she'd be coming to stay,
he knew he'd found a wife.
I at the time was a scrawny little scamp of a kid and I tried pushing him off my mom
but he hit me so hard I saw stars.
At this point we were terrified. Neither of us spoke English. We only knew my brother's home
number and he was at the hospital. Also in Serbia you don't dial 911 so even if I could I didn't
know that's how you'd call the police. Anyway he tells my mom she's to clean and cook for him and he takes me to the basement
where I was locked in what I now know as the laundry room.
I banged and cried and yelled but it was so far down in the basement everything was muffled.
For a week we were kept in his home.
He'd lock us up in the basement after my mom cooked him breakfast and he'd let us out when
he'd come home at four. If we had to use the restroom there was a bathroom but that was it, just a bathroom and
laundry room. It was freezing cold down there and even us huddling together under a blanket did
nothing. One morning I discovered a small window by climbing on some boxes. I managed to open it and my mother insisted I squeeze
through it. I didn't want to leave her and besides how would I get help? I couldn't read nor speak
the language. However I didn't want to live this way the rest of my life so I did as she asked.
I ran once I got out and I'm sure I was a sight. A scrawny boy with no shoes, only wearing shorts and a t-shirt in the
middle of November. However, that is what saved us as several concerned neighbors tried to get me to
come to them and I wouldn't. I was terrified. I kept trying to get them to follow me. The police
were called and a very nice policeman tried to get me to go into his car. Then I saw the man who kidnapped us
drive up in his taxi. He saw the cops and took off. That's when I made a run for his house to
get my mom. Needless to say, the cop and his partner ran after me and my mother was rescued.
It took another four hours for them to find someone who spoke our language for us to tell
them what happened. A warrant was issued for the man.
My brother was contacted. His friend had told him we never showed and my brother had been
frantically calling back home to Serbia to find us. He drove up to get us and to give the cops
information on his supposed friend so they could find him. They never did. Back then before 9-11 it was easy for someone to disappear.
However it made me distrustful for a long time of people and their intentions.
My mom grew homesick and she ended up going back to Serbia. I stayed and finished school. I ended
up becoming a cop in the military thanks to the nice officer that helped me all those years ago.
I think of that guy who kept us prisoner every now and then,
and honestly, I wouldn't mind meeting him now.
This all happened when I was 19. I'm not the best looking dude so I've never had much luck with women and I ended up on Tinder.
I wasn't having much luck there either until like the third month of using it when a blonde woman named Katie messaged me.
She was pretty enough that I just dismissed her as a bot.
It wasn't until three days later that she messaged me again
which was odd because bots almost never message more than once. I clicked on her chat and replied
then looked at her profile. What I saw was pretty generic but definitely wasn't a bot's profile.
We had been talking for like a month when she proposed the idea that I come see her.
I was pretty reluctant as she lived
nearly 8 hours from me by car but I had to admit I really did like her quite a bit and I've been
thinking about asking her if I could come see her for a while now. After a bit more badgering from
her I finally said that I would take the drive to go see her. At this point, I had no reason to doubt that she was who she said she was.
We had video chatted every other week, called most days, I just assumed I got really lucky.
Things did get a little weird on their way there though. She kept messaging me, asking me where I
was and making sure I was still coming. At some points, when I took more than 30 minutes to respond, she sent me a slew of annoyed
texts.
Admittedly, I had chalked this all up to her being nervous about me coming to see her.
I was pretty nervous too, so I couldn't blame her.
I had a hard time finding the house at first.
The directions she gave me were pretty confusing and it was back through a series of gravel
and dirt roads and a large thicket of trees. It was still about midday when I came onto an old looking house. A window on the
second floor was boarded up but it didn't look abandoned, just worse for the wear. Katie's red
buggy that she liked to talk about was parked in front of the garage. I took a look at my phone
and texted her that I was here. She only sent a
smiley face in return. When I got out of my car to go knock on the door, I noticed someone was
looking at me from one of the second floor windows. I found it a little creepy but figured it was just
her father or something. She had told me that he comes to stay with her every now and again,
so I ignored it and knocked on her door
She answered with a smile and even gave me a kiss which surprised me and I followed her inside
We sat down on her couch and started talking about our plans when I asked her about her dad
You didn't tell me your dad was here
I said
Was that going to be a surprise or
Katie looked confused and told me that her dad wasn't here I said, was that going to be a surprise or...
Katie looked confused and told me that her dad wasn't here.
I still thought she was keeping up the act and I told her that she didn't have to keep pretending
and that I had seen him looking at me through the upstairs window.
Katie went pale and said that we had to get out of there now.
We both ran out to our cars and when I questioned Katie,
she informed me
that her dad wasn't there and that she had been home alone until I showed up. I called the police
and while I was on the phone giving the address Katie gasped and pointed to the window where I
had seen the guy last. He was looking at us from out the window again. I got a better look at him
and he seemed older and frail, almost like he hadn't
eaten anything in a while. He left the window after he saw that we saw him. The police took
half an hour to show up and the whole time Katie was crying and mumbling about how she was an idiot
for not keeping her doors locked. When the police finally did show up, one started asking me and
Katie questions and the other
two searched the house.
They came back out a little later and told me and Katie that while they didn't find anyone,
they did find that the back door was hanging open.
Whoever it was had ran out into the woods but the cops were sure that the house was
currently empty.
After the cops left Katie asked me to stay the night because she was too
scared to be in her house alone right now. I gladly did and we slept downstairs on the couch
as Katie's bed was the room next to the one the man had been in. Katie had also brought out the
shotgun that her father had given her but she never used. I told her it was fine, the man's
gone but she insisted saying she'd feel safer if we had it out
And I'm glad she did
Later that night I was still wide awake watching TV
Katie had somehow managed to fall asleep
And from the kitchen I heard the sound of the doorknob being turned
At this point I wasn't even scared, I was just angry
I flipped on the light in the kitchen and pointed the gun at the kitchen door
And there he was
The guy that had been in the house before was standing on the other side of the glass door
He looked shocked and I'm glad we had locked the door
The man unfroze and yet again ran into the woods
I woke up Katie and told her what happened and called the police yet again ran into the woods. I woke up Katie and told her what happened and called the police yet
again. When they arrived, they did a sweep of the woods and found no one. They told Katie and me
that it'd probably be a good idea to stay somewhere else for the night. Me and Katie said our goodbyes.
She was going to stay at a friend's house and I was just going to head home.
I left a little after Katie did. I was on the phone with
my brother telling him about what happened. My headlights were on. As I was talking something
caught my eye. That same man was standing at the corner of the house just watching me.
I just gunned it out of there and didn't even bother calling the police again
but I did text Katie and she said she was going to call
them again. I don't think Katie ever went back to that house alone.
I dated and fell in love with a sociopath. This is a hard story for me to tell so please bear with me.
I'm hoping that by sharing it'll help myself heal and maybe some other victims.
You are not alone.
The night we met.
This was supposed to be the night I ended up ending my life.
It was a cool fall evening just warm enough for a light jacket. I was at a horse sale that I
went to every month. Per usual my friend and I checked out the tack lots and horses that were
up for auction. Throughout the past few months I had dealt with a lot of pain and hardship.
My heart was as broken as it could be. All of my passion for the things I enjoyed was gone.
The girl that I once knew wasn't there anymore.
I walked a long dark road of depression.
Alone.
I had no self esteem anymore.
I felt like I was worth nothing.
I planned to end it all after the sale.
I was watching horses in the outdoor ring when one caught my eye.
My friend was looking for a horse and it seemed like it might be a match for
her. I slipped into the ring to talk to the owner. When he turned around and looked at me it was like
the world stopped turning. The horses around me were in slow motion. Our eyes met and every bone
in my body went cold. I asked to try the horse out and he let me. Fast forward, my friend bought the horse.
In the end, the horse didn't work out but that's another story for another time.
The owner was supposed to deliver the horse to them the next day.
I didn't catch his name and I couldn't sleep that night but the fact was I was still here.
I had to find out who that guy was.
The next day I was out fishing on a river with my brother when
my friend texted me his name, Matt. She had written a check out to him so it all worked out.
It wasn't long before I had found him on Facebook and it wasn't long before he messaged me and asked
me on a date. I'll never forget that day. I spent the next week or so house sitting for a high
school friend. I invited him over for a dinner towards the end of the week. I spent the next week or so house sitting for a high school friend. I invited him over for
a dinner towards the end of the week. I'd never been so nervous in my life. I had no idea what
I was getting myself into. I made shrimp pasta and vodka sauce that night. We clicked. He ended
up letting me take his truck for a spin. When we got back to the house we were sitting in the dark talking when he pulled
me in for our first kiss. My heart melted. I remember my eyes filling with tears because it
all felt so right. I swore for so long that it was right. He stayed with me until 5am.
He was allergic to cats otherwise he would have just stayed the night.
The next few months seemed like pure bliss.
The intimacy was phenomenal. The money he blew on me spoiling me was crazy.
I got everything I ever could want. His family was loaded and he wasn't afraid to show it.
It wasn't until the honeymoon phase was over that I started noticing things.
An ex-girlfriend reportedly texted him and told him that he had given her an STD.
He then gave it to me.
I was never skinny enough.
My hair was never the right color.
I didn't have tattoos.
I only had a few piercings.
I was a waitress.
I drove a truck.
I posted too many selfies.
I texted him too much.
I couldn't satisfy him anymore.
He began dropping me off at the gym to work out
while he ran errands just about every day. He became even more obsessed with lewd pictures
of girls online, more than normal. A tumblr blog, the whole nine yards. He killed all of my hopes
and dreams one by one. If we were to be together I could never ride racehorses for a living like
I had wanted to my whole life.
He started spending hours on end playing video games when I came over.
He'd use me for what he needed and he was done with me.
He taught himself how to build computers.
He started building guns in his basement and fabricating and 3D printing some of his own parts for them.
This should have been a red flag. About a month went by of him ignoring me, him telling me I wasn't enough and showing
me pictures and videos of girls that he wanted.
He told me that my family hated me, everyone hated me.
I became depressed again.
I started working more and more hours just to keep myself from thinking.
One night I finally had a mental breakdown.
I told him about the night we met, what I was supposed to have done that night, how
he saved me, how much I loved him.
His answer...
He left me.
The next morning he woke up and texted me saying he had no feelings for me and I could
come get my things.
My world fell apart around me.
I lost 25 pounds, I didn't eat for weeks, my parents became very concerned and didn't
let me close my door.
My dad got me a job riding racehorses.
It started to look up.
About a month later I landed myself in the ICU with a severe concussion.
When I woke up I thought Matt and I were still together. I got on
my phone to tell him I was hurt when I saw the messages from the breakup, and I fell apart again.
An entire year passed. I remained single, Matt had a few girlfriends. Somehow I managed to keep
myself together. At least I had made it look like that. I worked myself to death, bought a new car and moved out at 20.
I worked two jobs and about 75 hours a week. I kept myself very busy. I had my own Adderall,
alcohol, smoke cocktail that kept myself afloat. I'll be the first to admit that the drinking did start to get a bit out of hand. I was at my parents' visiting when I got a friend request
from Matt on Facebook. I must have refreshed the page 10 times. I couldn't believe what I was at my parents' visiting when I got a friend request from Matt on Facebook.
I must have refreshed the page ten times.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Despite my best interest, I accepted it.
He messaged me a little while later.
He had made it through the police department and was now a county sheriff.
He gave me a pretty lame apology, but I accepted it.
I knew in my heart I wasn't over him.
Not one bit. He took me to dinner I wasn't over him, not one bit.
He took me to dinner that night and spent the night at my apartment. He actually made some good points about why he ended it with me and I started to forgive him. I shed a lot of tears that
night. We started hanging out like old times again but the same problems started to rise.
Once again I wasn't good enough but there was something
different about him this time. He became obsessed with picking locks. We'd be laying in bed watching
a movie and he'd be on his phone watching lock picking videos. He complained about my dog a lot.
He always joked that he'd go missing one day. A few more weeks went by and it seemed like every
once in a while his mask would vanish,
but just for a second. I should have known that something was off when he sent me a text
complaining about somebody dying in his arms at work. The body stunk, he said.
He started driving like a nut. I vividly remember us going 163 miles per hour on a back road in his
Mustang. He watched my reactions the whole time. He hardly
looked at the road. We went to New York City for a few days and he took a gun into the One World
Trade Center and got us kicked out. We got into a fight over the phone one night because he called
me an explicit name. The next day we met up to talk. During my drive to the meeting place I was
overwhelmed with a feeling of dread.
I knew it was the end of us, but it was more than that. I wasn't sad. I was frustrated.
We talked for about 20 minutes and I don't think his eyes ever wandered from my face.
His two dark brown eyes shot through me like bullets.
He started talking through his teeth, telling me that no one would ever love me,
that he was in cahoots with my friends and that they hated me too. I was going nowhere in life.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. His eyes were completely dead. It's something I can
never unsee. The way he was looking at me gave me chills. The voice in my head started talking,
''Steph, get out of the car.
Get out of the car now.''
I trusted my gut and got out.
I hurried to my car, jumped in and immediately locked it.
I saw him staring at me in the rearview mirror.
I drove straight to my parents' house bawling.
They were terrified.
The next day my boss told me that Matt had
apparently been driving back and forth past my work, going outrageous speeds, almost like he
was showing off. But the fact was, he lived almost an hour from there and had no reason to be there.
I reported him to his precinct, who said that they would take care of it.
I didn't hear from Matt for a very long time. I started to move
on and feel like I was myself again, finally. I started dating my current boyfriend. For the
record, he is the best and most loving man I'd ever met in my life. Matt drunk texted me one
night. I told him to leave me alone. I had since moved an hour away since we broke up,
and I had started to feel safe again.
Tonight my boyfriend was on his way over when he called to tell me that somebody had been
tailgating him for 30 minutes. It was Matt. He made it almost to my house before he finally
turned off. I want to start by saying I'm a stay-at-home mom.
A very stay-at-home loner mom, and with my family so far away, it doesn't feel right to have them worry.
I just want to tell my story. Whether someone reads it or not doesn't really matter.
I am not a writer by any means.
These are just my thoughts and a recap of my night.
Tonight I tucked my oldest kid into bed and on my way out to my new nightly ritual of feeding my neighbor's cat,
my husband made a joke about wanting corn dogs from 7-Eleven. I don't get out much and don't mind so I said we needed milk anyways and went on my way. The neighbors were uneventful, except their one cat hooked her nail into my middle finger when
I was giving her treats, and because of this I left earlier than usual and headed straight to
the store. It's just after 9pm and I pulled up to the 7-Eleven, parking alongside of the building,
unobstructed windows spanning the entire length of the
building and it's well lit.
I immediately noticed a gentleman in blue standing up on the sidewalk.
I pay no mind but start gathering my things.
My fingers still really hurt so I'm taking my time and cursing that gorgeous cat when
I hear a man's voice mumble something.
My window is partially open but my windshield is already fogging up,
and when I look up, I see he is walking towards my passenger side.
He starts trying to open the door, but thank god my kids broke that door handle and it won't open.
I immediately step out of the car, and with me standing in my open door,
looking out across the windshield, I say,
Excuse me, what are you doing?
And he starts saying over and over,
Are you yellow cab? Are you yellow cab?
I say again,
I don't know you and I'm not letting you in my car.
He realizes he can't get in and people are watching so he starts walking away from my car and I run inside.
I'm a little shaken but I try
to sum it up to mistaken identity. We live in a small town and our cabs are just random cars.
I'm walking around and trying to make sure he isn't near my car and at one point I see him
looking like he's walking away. I call my husband and I tell him a little bit about what happened
just to hear him say it's probably nothing. Cornndogs in hand, I walk out and head towards my car.
Visions of this guy in my backseat flashing through my head.
I see him walking away from my car but now he has a backpack.
Something flashes on the side of the pack and it hits me.
I didn't lock my doors when I ran inside.
This mother lover has my 5-year-old son's backpack.
I don't know what I was thinking, but I walked maybe two feet from my car and yelled,
Hey, that's my son's backpack!
I thought he might bolt, but he started walking back towards me instead.
I yelled it again, and he again starts saying,
Are you Yellow Cow? Are you yellow cab?
I yell louder that that's my son's backpack and to give it back. For a millisecond I even consider
the fact that this might not be my son's backpack and I begin to panic but I'm convinced the moment
I see the bus pass. This man is still going on about a yellow cab and I looked at him, furious, the momma bear in me coming out.
I take an extra long look at what he was wearing, hospital blue pajama pants and a deep but vibrant blue hoodie with a WOT logo and the O has some hemisphere lines of something on it. All of this happens in a few seconds and I just remember looking at him, furious and telling
him he's effed for stealing a little kid's backpack and to get out of here. Maybe it's
because I live in Canada or maybe it was because I didn't leave the area where I could be seen but
he started walking away. I went inside immediately and told the clerks but I don't think any of us knew what to do.
For a second I was going to call the cops, it's just a backpack, but I just couldn't
help but think about him trying to get into my car with me in it.
I called the police.
I started telling them what was happening and then I saw the guy again.
I followed him while on the phone and I parked way ahead of him.
Time passes quickly when you're on the phone with the cops and the guy passes my car.
He turns back and sees it's me and he turns around.
I haven't turned off my phone so I panic but I shift into drive and start driving away.
This man was not scared.
He was actually walking back to my car.
As I'm driving away I tell the officer,
what the F was I thinking? This is so dangerous. I gave you his description and his general
location. I'm going home. We finished the conversation on the way and I gave them all
the info I had. I don't know why I followed him. I follow a lot of true crime and I guess I just
could not report a man trying to get into my car.
I told the police the same. We got off the phone and I went inside.
My husband is good at pointing out people's hardships and it is clear this man had mental health issues and I suspect some addiction issues as well. He was rather thin with large
scabs on his face. He kind of dumbed down how I feel about it and I think that's why I wanted
to write this. What happened, it scared me. I don't know why I did what I did, all of it seems
so stupid. I approached the guy, I drove after him. God, I'm ridiculously slow sometimes. I did
get the backpack back but it was stupid. I received a phone call five minutes before I started writing this and the police got him.
He's going to the station for the night because he is extremely intoxicated.
The officer's words were, we pulled up with our lights on and he asked if we were yellow cab.
A part of me feels like maybe he is just drunk or something but a part of me thinks this guy was using that as an excuse to why he would be thinking to get in my car.
Definitely had an adrenaline rush, now I'm just tired.
Thanks for reading, it was a weird night. I was 18, living in college dorms several hours from home and working as a waitress at an upscale bar and restaurant.
I'm short, barely 5 foot so I'm used to people being creepy and trying to intimidate me now.
But as an 18 year old whose father had tried to protect her from the world and had been raised in a tiny
friendly town, it never occurred to me to be scared of people who lurk in the dark.
We had plenty of regulars, several of whom I became close with during my years working there
and a few of the frequent diners learned my name and general facts about me since I'm generally
pretty open about who I am. One such man was tall, lanky, and several decades
older, appeared to be in his mid-fifties, Joe. Joe was kind, a good man with a generous nature
who owned a local shoe shop. The second time I was his waitress, he gifted me a pair of slightly
worn work shoes, insisted that I accept them. Because of his kindness and the way he carried
himself, people of all types flocked to him, and one of them became the first man outside of my
family that I feared. Joe came in with his younger brother, about the same height, slightly bulkier
build and not unattractive as I recall, but his eyes unsettled me. In high school I fancied myself a bit of a writer, but nothing in
my vocabulary then or now could help me describe how unsettling his gaze was. It seemed dead,
lifeless, but I assumed I was simply nervous. Joe was a good man, his brother was probably just less
carefree, more intense. The two dined together a few times in the coming weeks but
while Joe would normally request me as a server, he asked our host to assign one of the other
servers to his table after the first time. Then one night, Joe's brother came in alone and requested
me by name and I was happy to oblige. For the first time he seemed relaxed, energetic, charismatic. He was interesting,
with a quick wit and a story for every topic I could throw at him. By the end of my shift I
assumed he just had a hard time relaxing with his brother, and that may have been true, but through
the laughter and charisma his eyes never once seemed kind. They remained through it all, lifeless. Eventually it was time for me to leave,
but he was still there, still expecting service. My manager offered to take over the table,
he'd make sure I got the tip, but it was common knowledge I had an early morning class and likely
had to do my homework. I jumped at the chance, but went to finish some closing duties and asked the man, my last table, if he needed anything else.
He seemed off.
As soon as I said I was heading home he seemed to harden.
His voice was clipped and reminded me of my controlling ex-stepdad which immediately put me on edge.
I'd heard the same time often enough as a little girl right before being hit.
I left immediately. I'd heard the same time often enough as a little girl right before being hit.
I left immediately.
I called my best friend and offered to buy him dinner if he'd meet me at a diner between
the dorms and my work.
I don't know why I did, I just felt that I needed someone to meet me sooner rather than
later.
Joe's brother hadn't in any way seemed dangerous outside of the terseness in his voice before
I left, but I knew that for
most of my walk, which would have been poorly lit, I would be safer with a companion.
We met at the diner, we ate and laughed and headed back to the dorms, a good 25 minute walk,
but only 15 or so in, the hairs on the back of my neck seemed to burn.
Something was terrifying me and I didn't know why.
I told my friend who brushed it off until he looked behind me and yelled.
I turned and saw him. Joe's brother, only a few yards behind us, holding a metal bar. I don't know what they're called but you can see them at construction sites, usually for reinforcement when
pouring concrete, and he was holding it hard enough that his knuckles
were white. It terrified me to the core and I screamed. My friend grabbed my arm and we ran
and even though my heart was in my throat and I couldn't hear anything past the blood
roaring in my eyes I swear I could hear his footsteps behind us. We ran to the dorms and
I told security who had us wait in
the office while he looked at cameras in the lot and called the police. Cops showed but did nothing
since all he did was spook us. After they left the security man asked a few more questions and
made a comment about a man standing at the entrance door for a bit before walking away. It was assumed he
was homeless but my blood ran cold. I called in for a few days and when I went back to work,
Joe was in. I told him what had happened and he nodded, didn't even seem to question the
validity of what I said. His brother, it turned out, had done some time for stalking and sometimes
attacking young women and had even been sent to trial for assaulting one and hospitalizing her.
Somehow he managed to avoid jail time for the assault but Joe said it was only a matter of
time before he killed someone. I didn't see Joe often after that and I never saw his brother
after that. The owner of the restaurant was angry for a long time,
accused me of running off a regular who spent a lot of money when he came in.
It took a few more scary encounters to make me a little more cynical,
but to Joe's brother, please, never come back. When I was 18 I started working at a local restaurant fairly close to my house.
I don't drive because of my claustrophobia and fear of loss of control so it was nice
working at a place where I could walk to in less than 15 minutes.
About a month into the job I I was working late one night,
and a middle-aged man comes in, and since the restaurant was practically empty,
I thought it'd be harmless to talk to him about his day.
He sat at the bar and only drank a Bud Light,
and didn't even touch his chips and salsa.
I don't know why I remembered this detail.
He went on about how his week was rough.
His mom had died recently, leaving him
and his brothers parentless since his dad had died a few years back. Clearly he had a lot on his mind
and I'm a very empathetic person so I just listened. His brothers somehow managed to get
all of the life insurance and their parents will, leaving him nothing. He was super broken up about it and I really felt
for the guy. All he had was his job at Pizza Hut. Closing time came and the guy left, thanking me
for his hospitality. I didn't think anything of it. The next week I was working late again.
He comes in and drinks his usual Bud Light and chats with me. Our conversations got deeper and since I figured he didn't have anyone else to talk to,
I listened to his problems.
I tried not to talk about myself to the customers but he was asking questions about me so I answered them.
He asked about my hobbies, home life, school, etc.
I told him I liked doing art and he showed me some of the wood etchings that he had done.
They were really impressive so I told him that. Then he asked to see my art and I showed him some pictures on my
phone. Again I thought all of this was harmless so I didn't think much of it. Closing time came
again and he left. He showed up a few times a week after that and we had our usual discussions.
I started noticing that when I had to close the
restaurant he would stay until the minute we closed. I started to feel uneasy about it but
I figured I was just paranoid because of my anxiety. I brushed it off until my co-workers
were closing at night when I was off and he came in asking for me. They said I wasn't working and
he demanded them to tell me when I was working next.
They lied and said they didn't know. He seemed angry. They said he didn't stay to drink and
just left after that. Now I was kind of freaked out. He started coming into the restaurant every
day. He even came in on Christmas Eve and again stayed till close. I was trying to be cautious
around him and didn't say much. Then he mentioned he wanted to bring me some art supplies because he had a bunch he
didn't know how to use and didn't want them to go to waste. I said that I was okay and didn't know
how to use them either. He insisted. Then what he said next really freaked me out. He told me,
I can come by your house and drop it off. It's too
heavy to carry while you walk home. I had never told him I walk home. My mind was running a mile
a minute. Had he been watching me? Had he been following me? Did he know where I live? I told
him I was fine and didn't need the supplies. I repeated that over and over again until he seemed to get the point.
Later I told my manager about it and he understood why I was so freaked out around him.
He told me that I could hide when he came in so he thought I wasn't there.
He said he couldn't really kick him out of the restaurant because he hadn't done anything to harm anyone,
but he was willing to protect me from potential harm.
I worked for a few weeks,
the guy came in often and saw I wasn't there and left. Until one busy Friday night we were slammed
and I couldn't hide. We were so busy I had no idea he was even there. My coworker let me know
and said that he had been watching me like a hawk all night. I avoided going around the bar where
he sat so he wouldn't try to say
anything to me. Until one moment where I had to maneuver around a family that was getting up to
leave. He put his hand around my arm and asked for me to listen to him for just a second.
I told him I was very busy and had to get back to work. He just handed me a slip of paper with
his name and number on it and told me to call him whenever I wanted the art supplies.
I told him that it was inappropriate. He told me that he was just being friendly. I told my manager and he told me I could go home. But I was scared to walk home
because I thought he would follow me. I called my dad and he came into the restaurant and made
sure the guy saw me leave with him. He had stopped showing up after that. I thought I had seen the
last of him until one afternoon he came in and I didn't have time to hide because I was cleaning a
table. He sat at the bar and my co-worker was taking care of him. I thought he decided to leave
me alone at that point so I let my guard down. Wrong move. I was cleaning a table with my back
facing the bar and suddenly he had me cornered in the booth. He told me to stay. I was cleaning a table with my back facing the bar and suddenly he had me cornered in
the booth. He told me to stay where I was and that he had something for me in his car. He left and I
ran to my manager's office and told him everything. He told me to hide in the kitchen and when the man
came in he asked him to leave and to not come back and that he had made me and other workers very
uncomfortable with his actions. I peeked out of the kitchen and saw him leave. He was livid with
a huge bag of god knows what. He saw me and stopped but decided it wasn't worth it and left for good.
It's been a year since that happened but I still get scared anytime I walk past the local pizza hut or whenever a middle-aged man sits at the bar. I can't interact with customers like I used to
out of fear that they'll be like him.
This happened about three years ago.
At the time, I was around 15 and I had lived in New York City for my entire life,
and I liked to think I could handle myself in any situation because I'd seen it all.
It was a Friday night and I was meeting my friend for a 9 o'clock showing of some movie near Times Square.
The subways were only half full when I got on so I wasn't complaining. I was sitting on the 6 train heading up to Times Square. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt which wasn't very
revealing at all, no makeup and my hair was kind of a mess because I figured I was just going to
sit in a dark movie theater for a few hours with one of my best friends and I didn't really care
what other people thought. I was on my phone with my earbuds friends and I didn't really care what other people thought.
I was on my phone with my earbuds in and I noticed a guy across from me just staring at me with this blank expression on his face. I made eye contact with him, smiled politely and looked back at my
phone because I was sitting across from him and I thought he must have just zoned out.
Five minutes later I looked back and he was still staring at me, this time smiling a frankly
creepy smile.
I smiled again politely and looked back at my phone, hoping he got the hint and stopped
staring at me.
Two stops passed and he was still staring at me.
Finally the man stood up and I calmed down a bit.
By now the train had gotten pretty crowded since we were approaching Times Square and
there were people in front of me blocking the man from view.
Next thing I knew however, the man was standing directly in front of me with the hand on the
pole above me.
I was getting pretty paranoid at this point but the man was on his phone and I thought
I was just exaggerating the situation and that I shouldn't overreact. My stop came and I excused myself, pushed past the man without
looking at him and shoved my way through the doors. Even though I thought it was nothing at
this point I was still freaked out at the proximity of this man and his creepy gaze
and something just felt very wrong about the whole situation. So I booked it out of the subway
car. I thought I heard a wait behind me but I ignored it because it could have been anybody
and kept speedwalking. The 42nd street station is pretty big and complicated and usually very
crowded. I consider myself lucky it was as crowded as it was that day and as I was a pretty skinny
girl and very used to dodging tourists in loud crowds since I lived in a very popular touristy area I started weaving through the massive crowd faster than I had before.
I stepped onto the first escalator a bit less nervous and pulled out my phone when a man walked up and stopped on the stair directly behind me.
He was so close I could feel him breathing down
my neck and I glanced behind me to see that it was the same man from the subway. How he managed
to catch up to me I have no idea but that was when I really started to freak out. At the top of the
escalator I broke into the fastest walk I've ever walked trying to get out of there as fast as I
could without looking too distressed. I made it up a few flights of stairs and out of the huge mob of people and started to
calm down, thinking again that I was definitely overreacting and that I should just calm down
because it was probably nothing. Soon enough I found a small back exit that consisted of only
one turnstile and nearly no tourists and for some reason I thought that was the perfect
place to go instead of somewhere where I would be protected by tons of people. As I was walking up
the stairs, laughing at myself for overreacting at a man just looking at me on a packed subway,
someone grabbed my arm very tightly. I froze halfway up the stairs and whipped around.
It was the man, panting, squeezing my bicep like his life depended on it.
I was too shocked to say anything and just stared him down.
Hey, he said eventually, not taking my obvious fear into consideration.
You're very beautiful.
Thanks, I managed to say eventually and tried to rip my arm from his grip but he just held on
tighter at this point i was starting to panic i looked around and found that because i had chosen
the quiet exit it led to a pretty empty side street and there were only a few people walking
around can i have your number keep in mind that this man looked around 35 with a graying beard and nice business clothes on
and while I wasn't short or young looking I was very obviously a teenage girl.
I stared at him and then just said,
No, as firmly as I could.
I retched my arm from his grip and started to walk up the stairs trying to stay calm.
The man followed me and when I made it to the top step he grabbed me again,
this time so hard I winced.
Come on sweetie, why not? You're so pretty.
I said thanks again because I guess I was too polite not to but firmly shook my head and told him,
no, you can't.
Why not? He asked and i stupidly said
because i'm 15 this was my attempt to give this man the benefit of the doubt maybe he thought i
was some 20 something and genuinely just wanted to give me his number right instead the man just smiled wider, his grip tightening and said,
So?
That's illegal.
So?
So no!
I was thoroughly terrified at this point and I pushed him off of me and bolted out of there, down towards the more populated area. Behind me this man was shouting at me to come back and that we could have a good time but I just kept running and eventually lost him in the thick crowds of Times Square.
Once or twice I looked back and the first few times I noticed his head popping up and down as
he tried to shove past Taurus and I eventually lost him in the crowd. I made it to the movie
safely but took a huge detour to get to the theater so I could stay
in the streets crowded with people. Once in the movie theater I took the time to roll my sleeve
up and noticed that the man had squeezed my arm so hard that he had left light bruises on my bicep.
I don't know if that man's intentions were innocent or what he was thinking chasing a
clearly terrified girl out of the subway,
but I hope I never meet him or anyone like him again.
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