The Lets Read Podcast - 94: Episode 084 | Retail & Hitchhiking Stories | 22 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Welcome to the eighty-fourth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Retail, Hitchhiking, & Abduction Stories... 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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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. This story didn't actually happen to me. It happened to my uncle. He works at a local Walmart in our small town and actually has a pretty solid thing going on over there. I know Walmart might not seem like the best place to work, but they actually pay their staff pretty well, all things considered. He's been working there for about 10 years now and I think he's the assistant manager

or something like that. I do know that he has seen a lot of weird stuff during his time working at Walmart. Everyone knows about how weird the general public can be especially at places like Walmart. He's told me a couple of stories that I thought were either really funny or downright creepy but I think this one has to top them all because ever since I heard it I haven't gone back to this Walmart. I don't want to after knowing this. What do I do when I have to buy stuff from Walmart? I drive to the one in the next town over and I'm not even kidding. You could literally ask anyone that knows me. I actually do it. I know my uncle wasn't trying to scare me when he told me but I can't unsee this entire event taking place and I'm pretty sure the only reason he actually told

me in the first place is because he thought I was into horror stories or whatever. Maybe I was before this entire thing but not really anymore. So he started off by telling me that he was trying to climb the corporate ladder at Walmart he wants to eventually become the manager for this local store in due time but that means putting in more work and more effort than everyone else for a very long time and hoping that your energy is rewarded one of the things he regularly had to sacrifice was a normal sleep schedule they don't force you to work night shift but one of the best ways to climb that corporate ladder, at least at the local store, was to

volunteer for the night shift. I think you made a few dollars more an hour but it was never worth it. You can't really have a life outside of work when you work from sundown to sunup. This story took place on one of those night shifts a couple of years back. It was a warm summer night, humid as you could imagine, and as you might imagine, there isn't much going on at Walmart late at night. The only reason it's even open is because if it wasn't, there wouldn't be any other stores in our town open at that time. He was the senior most person on site that night, so if something went wrong it was his responsibility and if he couldn't handle it he would have to call the store manager which is

never a good idea if you want to be on their good side. Well one of the other workers had just brought in a few shopping carts but they noticed something weird in the parking lot. There were seven or eight vehicles parked on the far side of the parking lot and it looks like people were doing something. This other worker never specified what that was but they were concerned enough that they asked my uncle to look into it and so he did. I remember him telling me that it was really unusual to have people there at such a late time. He said it had to have been anywhere from 3.30 or 5 in the morning. He stepped outside and looked over. There were definitely a couple of people doing

something over there but he couldn't make it out from the store entrance. He started walking toward the crowd of people and all of a sudden they all started their cars at the same time. It was like they were waiting for someone to come out and confront them or something. Now he was out in the middle of this parking lot and all of those cars started driving toward him and it wasn't like a casual drive either. He said they must have floored it going straight for him. At least a few cars too so he couldn't jump anywhere. He said that he braced himself for impact and closed his eyes. A few seconds went by before he noticed that the cars had stopped on a dime in front of him. He had no idea what to do at that point. He was just standing there looking into the dark

tinted windows of these mysterious cars in the Walmart parking lot being driven by who the heck knows who. He said that it was at this point that one of them rolled down the window and threw something at him. It hit him on his leg and he was trying to determine whether or not he wanted to run back to the store or try to fight for his life. He was really expecting them all to get out of the car to attack him. Thankfully that attack never came. He stood there for another few seconds before they all sped off into the night. When he looked down to analyze the object that they had thrown at him, he was mortified. It was actually a decapitated head. And even worse,

they had no skin. You just have to imagine the way a human head looks without any skin. He threw up and fell to the floor. I'm sure it was in complete shock. He picked up his Walmart radio and screamed for help. And it wasn't very long before he ran back into the store and phoned the police. He spent a lot of time trying to remember license plates and what the vehicles look like. Unfortunately, I don't think it helped the police very much. I'm pretty sure the case is still unsolved to this day, but...

Wait, it gets even scarier than that. Walmart, as you might imagine, has security cameras at their store and in their parking lot. Everyone was sure that the security camera footage would reveal exactly what had happened that night, but it didn't. The entire ordeal happened just out of frame, and this led the police to believe that whoever had done this had very intricate knowledge of Walmart security cameras. Of course, the implication there is that whoever had done this was someone who works or had previously worked at this local Walmart and it's not like everyone uses the security cameras all the time so that narrows

down the number of potential suspects even further. But it never turned up anything meaningful. The severed head was the weirdest part apparently. It was male but its teeth were removed and I heard DNA analysis with further forensics was unable to pull up any identity from around here or any missing person reports. Last I heard is that they were working with authorities across the border to cross-reference any information. Apparently every single person had a solid alibi with Pruth And what makes the entire situation even weirder Is the fact that it just seems like such a random crime to commit I mean, what did they actually accomplish here? It just seems like a lot of planning and effort to do something really stupid

But I'll never understand gang activity or really who was involved After this incident, rumors spread across town I'll never understand gang activity or really who was involved. After this incident, rumors spread across town and everyone became a little anxious about going to this Walmart. I'm not the only one that feels this way. For a small border community like ours, something like this happening is... a little unthinkable. It really changes the way you view your neighbors and the people that live in your area. Who would do this? And we don't know who, you just feel more anxious and suspicious of anyone that you meet. My family has told me that it seems like there are less people who go to local events like parades and such anymore after this incident and I can't blame them. But yeah, that was my uncle's horrifying

Walmart story that I still regularly think about. The reason I don't ever go to our local Walmart and probably never will ever again. The worst experience of my life happened on June 20th, 2019. I was working at a local store. It's kind of a chain in this region of America and I don't want to give out the name because it will make it obvious who I am. This story did get some media coverage and as much as I want to share my story with the world in an honest way, I also want to remain as anonymous as possible. I don't want the rest of my life to forever be associated with this event, but this is how it went. My family's been struggling since 2015. My grandma got cancer and we did our best to put her through chemotherapy. It didn't work out and she tragically passed away that year.

For some kind of legal reason, the financial burden of my grandmother's chemotherapy fell on my father. It just put a serious economic strain on him. I mean, could you imagine someone wants you to pay over $100,000 for medical treatment that didn't even save your family member? I don't understand why the system does this to people but I'll keep politics out of this. It didn't ruin our family but it did mean that our middle class lifestyle was now going to be extremely difficult to maintain. There was a lot less food in the house, we weren't able to go on vacation anymore and making ends meet was generally a struggle. I remember my parents having a lot of fights over money and I

think it put a real strain on our relationship. Well, I was in high school at the time and I did my best not to notice. It's tough being a high school girl and not being able to afford nice clothes or makeup especially when you were not born naturally beautiful. I remember some of the wealthier popular girls making fun of me for dressing like a bag lady but sometimes a sweatshirt was the only thing that I had without any holes. I was an only child so thankfully I was the only person that had to suffer along with my parents. High school went by and don't get me wrong, it wasn't pleasant but I got through it and my family survived on too. As time went on, we just found

ways to cope without having money. I knew that I was going to have to start getting a part-time job in school, which I was honestly kind of looking forward to. My parents told me that they would let me use my money on whatever I wanted, which I had been looking forward to for months, and that's when I got an after-school job at this local chain store. It's kind of hard to explain. It's a weird combination of a deli, a gas station, and a convenience store all nicely wrapped into one with a very strange name that is almost notorious in this region. While I was enjoying my time, especially because this was the summer between junior and senior year of high school. I was excited to graduate because I had really good grades and I was already receiving scholarship opportunities, some of

them full rise to very nice colleges in my state. My parents were really proud of me and as hard as it had been, we were ultimately a happy family at the end of the day. So I pretty much worked as much as I could over the summer. I was still kind of a loner by this point and I wanted to turn as much of my time into money as possible. So it didn't really matter if I spent 80 hours a week working because I didn't really have that much to do outside of work especially with school being out for the summer. I remember there being a particular night that my manager asked me to work a little bit over. I normally started my shift at 6am and went home at 4pm. This was a pretty nice schedule honestly and work was easy enough that I really didn't mind. Sure during the rush hours it could get a little hectic but all the time in between

was pretty chill. Well my manager wanted me to stay until 10pm that night. That was a lot later than I was used to and I wouldn't have said yes but I wasn't working the next day so I figured why not. I also got double time for working which made it even better. You see the way this place works is that after 8pm most of the bakery closes down and there are a lot less people on site. Normally, this time from 8 and well into the night, it's normally just enough people to run the register and get people to pay for gas. It normally means about two people working at a time. Me and this one guy I really didn't care for had to work this together. His name was Jeremy. He gave me really weird vibes and had made inappropriate comments. He wasn't dirty or

perverted or anything but he was just extremely offensive and never held back a nasty insult whenever he felt like throwing one at you. Me and him had a couple of instances where we argued but by this point we both knew where we stood. We didn't like each other but both of us wanted to do our job and get paid without too much of a hassle so we were at least in a functional working relationship for the sake of our jobs. This was a weekday night and it just happened to be particularly slow. I never really worked there later shifts so I had no idea what to really expect and then my memory goes blank for hours. I had no idea what had happened. I just remember waking up in the middle of the store and getting up and feeling really sick. I was dizzy and confused and it took me a

few minutes to realize where I was or what had happened. I remembered as I walked across the tiled floor, I heard a deep crunching noise beneath my feet. I didn't look down. I was too dazed but I assumed that they were M&M's or some kind of candy. After walking outside I got even more confused than I already was. I went back inside and saw blood. I looked down at my shoes and noticed that I was covered in a thick dark red liquid. I started hyperventilating and called 911. They were there within minutes. I was rushed to the hospital and that was that. It was only a couple of days after explaining everything to the police that I pieced together what had happened. When I was at the

hospital, they found drugs in my system. This surprised me because I didn't even smoke cigarettes. The drugs they found in my system were likely the kind that you find in roofies or whatever, and the police had a theory that it went something like this. Jeremy was a mentally unstable individual. He decided that he wanted to end his own life. He was kind of obsessed with becoming infamous. He even ran a whole bunch of social media accounts where he was desperately attempting to become a celebrity. Well, he figured the only way he was ever going to become truly famous was if he committed some kind of horrible crime in some terrible fashion that shocked the world, and he decided that it was going to be

that night with me there. The police believed that as crazy as he may have been, he wasn't a fundamentally violent person, so he couldn't bring himself to hurt me or anything else like that, but he did have a plan. He slipped a roofie or some kind of drug into my monster that I'd been drinking during that shift. After I passed out, he shot himself in the head staring at the security camera. He even set up his smartphone on a tripod to capture it and hope that it would be used as footage on the news. I'm pretty sure they did actually use it. And when I had woken up, the crunchy stuff on the floor or fragments was his skull. This all had been really traumatic and I don't know what to do anymore. I quit my job and I've just been hanging out at my house over the summer

waiting for school to start back up, kind of staring into space. My parents have been really understanding but they have no idea how to help me. Despite our bad financial situation they scraped together enough money to send me to therapy. I haven't had a whole lot of time to recover from this whole situation but I do feel like I've made some progress. Some days I feel extremely apathetic. There's a big part of me that doesn't know what to do with my life now. I feel so different after having gone through this experience, especially because I still get contacted by the occasional journalist wanting to do another story on this. But I think this will be the final and last time that I have to relive this. My name is Jason. I work in a local clothing store. We basically sell stuff that people think

is really fancy, but it's basically the same stuff you can find at any clothing store, even places like Walmart or Goodwill sometimes. I've had this job for about two years now, and while it isn't the greatest, a job is a job. I get to earn enough money to be able to have some independence from my parents which is really nice. This story took place in the winter of last year. It was a good while after Christmas but I don't remember exactly when it happened. I just remember there being snow on the ground the next morning after it all went down. So I work pretty usual hours for a college student. I know I'm technically a full-time student but it doesn't feel like I have a whole

lot of classes. Maybe I picked an easy major or maybe I'm a genius, who knows. But I don't really study and I barely do the homework and I still manage to get pretty good grades. I remember there being a very strange looking man that started coming into the store. He didn't seem like the usual kind of customer that we would get. Most of the people that shop at this store are at least upper middle class. I don't mean to say that they were rich or anything but if you had enough money to buy expensive clothes, I'm talking like $50 for a t-shirt, then you're probably doing pretty well for yourself. But not this guy. This guy looked like he was two steps away from being homeless. He had this really pale hair. Most of

it was covered under a dingy black hat that he wore on his head, and you could only see this white hair as it stuck out from a few places from under the hat. He was an older guy, but not too old, probably 50 years old or something like that but judging by how much of a weirdo he was I guess I can't really be all that sure. He started coming in every single day and he always bought something. It was not always something big, sometimes it was a $70 pair of pants, other times it was a really expensive watch. However, with as much stuff as he bought, he never seemed to wear any of it though, at least not for many of the times I'd

ever seen him. He always dressed in a baggy sweatshirt or really old worn out overalls with a denim jacket on top, and the denim jacket had cuts and holes and it looked really weird because his overalls would be denim too. I don't know if he thought it went well as an outfit, but I wasn't about to tell this guy he dressed stupidly. After all, I did get a commission for everything that was sold in the store. However much of a creep he may have been, I will gladly welcome his business. I know the really weird thing I noticed about him was that he never actually tried on the clothes that he was buying, like ever. He would spend 40 minutes analyzing a pair of pants, hold it in front of himself in the mirror, feel the texture and try to look at it from different

points of view but he would never actually go into the dressing room and try them on. I thought that was the weirdest thing of all. I also remember the couple of times he wouldn't buy the item that he had been looking at and there would always be this really musky smell to them. I know this may sound weird but out of morbid curiosity I would smell clothes after people tried them on after the store had closed. I can't really smell much otherwise like I had seen this guy at least 20 different times and I never got a smell of him. But whenever I smelled those clothes that he had been looking at, I could smell some strange combination of body odor and smoke. I got really curious about what he does when he isn't randomly buying clothes in an expensive and overpriced store like this one.

There was also this one time that he came into the store and specifically asked for me. I thought that was pretty weird considering that he had never really struck up a conversation with me or anything. Of all the times that I had interacted with him, it was always on a very formal basis and we both said the very bare minimum necessary. It was obvious that he didn't like coming to the store and I found myself drawing a blank coming up with reasons as to why he kept on doing it. I didn't think too much of it though. I was a college student and anything outside of chilling with my friends and getting my assignments done didn't really matter at all that much to me. I remember this one night that I was doing laundry. I normally hate doing laundry as you might imagine

but I specifically remember putting my clothes into the washing machine. I got a whiff of one of my sweatshirts that I thought smelled really weird. I smelt my sweatshirt again and it reminded me of the smell of the clothes from this one freaky guy at my job. Well the next day I was working my shift as usual and here came in the same old dude. This time he was checking out a pair of shoes, literally a pair of Crocs. I didn't even understand why we had Crocs at the store in the first place. They were exactly the same as the ones you can get at Walmart, except for the fact that we charged $60 for them instead of $15. This guy spent about 45 minutes looking at this pair of Crocs before he decided it was time

to head out. He came up to my register and took an unusually long period of time to pay for his Crocs and it was while he was reaching for his wallet and paying that I remembered something. I totally forgot that I don't wear my sweatshirt at work. It's against the rules. You have to dress kind of nice which normally meant a polo shirt or a decent dress shirt. Something you could throw a vest over and look like a halfway decently dressed representative of a fashion store. It got me on this whole train of thought that made me realize that my sweatshirt didn't smell that way because I was spending too much time with this weird guy. He must have somehow gotten a hold of my sweatshirt on his

own accord. I remember my heart falling to the pit of my stomach when I made the realization. I felt myself turn red and started to sweat. However, freaked out as I became, he took no notice, just kept paying for his goofy pair of green Crocs. If you would ever smell the smell you would understand just how distinct it really was. I mean there was nothing in the world like it and the more I thought about it the more I realized that there was a good possibility that this guy was creeping on me somehow, maybe even getting into my house. I quit my job that day on the spot. I didn't want to put myself in jeopardy for a goofy retail job, especially because that guy showed no sign of ever slowing down.

He was there every single day I worked. A couple of weeks after the incident, I asked some of my former co-workers if he was still showing up on a regular basis. They told me they didn't remember exactly when, but he stopped coming in right around the time I stopped working there. This only made me more paranoid about the whole situation. I've developed a couple of possible theories as to what exactly was going on with this guy but none of them really make any sense. I've tried telling a couple of my family members about it but they all think I'm trolling them To this day I still haven't figured out exactly what happened And I'm honestly kind of worried that I never will know what this creepy guy at the retail store was doing there every day

Or why he stopped going after I quit. I'd been working at a clothing store in the mall for about five weeks. I was your typical high school graduate who wasn't sure if they wanted to go to college or not. I was just kind of working because I didn't really have anything else to do. A little background on me, I'm a pretty large guy. I'm 6 feet tall and I'm not some kind of gym freak but I do consider myself more fit than most. I probably work out 3 or 4 times a week and this has honestly been really cool kind of being seen as the tough guy I suppose. The day this happened there were a lot more people than usual. I remember there being customers everywhere and it just felt like there was no ending the day. I remember me and my co-workers rushing around and having

this feeling of, wow, we don't have enough staff for this. It eventually slowed down as the day came to an end and it was always nice because you kind of get a cool down. That is if you work the entire day like I do. This happened during that slow. When it was somewhere between the late afternoon and night, it probably had to have been about 6 or 7, the sun was still out seeing as it was still summertime. A man who was even taller than I was walked into the store and from the second he stepped foot on the premises I knew that he had bad intentions. His body language was sending out a lot of freaky signals and I started getting ready for some kind of confrontation.

As much as I hated these kind of things I knew that everyone was going to look at me to save the day considering most of my other co-workers were female and the only other guy was kind of small. The ominous man that had walked into the store was wearing a black sweatshirt and a dark pair of jeans. I at least remember that much. He walked over one of the clothing racks and literally threw it to the floor. Everyone in the store turned and looked at him and he just kind of stood there for a second. I yelled and started walking over to him and I saw him reach into his pocket. I'm not sure what kind of pistol he pulled out, I just remember him firing at me multiple times. I looked out and was only hit once in the arm, at least at first.

I managed to get behind the register area to take cover. For some reason he believed that he could fire through the counter and so he tried, but the bullets started ricocheting. A couple of them hit some of the other co-workers and they were all desperately trying to find cover and one of them even ran away from the scene entirely. I knew this was going to be a bad situation because I remember having a conversation with one of the mall cops one time. They weren't allowed to carry guns, so if someone managed to get a gun inside of the mall cops one time. They weren't allowed to carry guns, so if someone managed to get a gun inside of the mall and started opening fire, we were all going to have to wait for the actual police to show up. I knew the next 15-30 minutes was going to determine if I lived or

not. I stayed behind the counter for as long as I could, but I heard him coming towards me, my heart pounding in my chest faster than I never felt it before. I was mortified, terrified that I was about to die and for no good reason at that, some random guy with a gun decides to shoot up a clothing store in a mall. A few minutes have gone by and he hadn't fired another bullet. I wasn't sure if he had been reloading or if he ran out of bullets or maybe he was saving a few. I had no idea how many he had in a clip. I just remember the sound of footsteps running towards my direction. I knew he was coming my way and I wasn't sure what I was even capable of doing at that point. My fight or flight response kicked in

and I figured the best chance I had was waiting for him to get on this other side of the counter where he could see me and then I was going to have to tackle him. I knew that wasn't the best option but I'm not sure what the other options I had. For some reason he jumped over the counter. He'd landed right next to me and this was perfect for me. He was close enough that we could get into a scuffle now and maybe I had a chance of surviving this. I remember grabbing his leg and bringing him to the floor. He kicked me in the head and man that hurt. Almost knocked me out altogether but I managed to keep going probably only because the adrenaline my body was releasing. Once I got him onto the

floor I saw that he had dropped his gun. Considering the fact that he hadn't fired I figured that he had been out of ammo and too hyped up to reload in the middle of a shooting. We fought on the floor for a good few minutes before someone else decided to join. I don't know why no one else joined sooner. I really could have used the help. It was just me and this deranged psychotic killer fighting on the floor of this mall for a good while. He wasn't the strongest guy in the world, but I was also fighting with a bullet wound in my arm, so he had an extreme advantage over me. He probably would have killed me with his bare hands had someone else not joined in and helped

me. We managed to knock him unconscious, get the gun further away from him, and waited for the police to arrive. I remember this little experience being the talk of the area for many, many weeks. There were quite a few newspaper articles written about it all. I even got interviewed in one of them, and a journalist even called me a hero. And to be honest, nothing made me happier or more sadder in the world to read those words. It was just such a traumatic event. The guy was arrested, prosecuted and I'm pretty sure he got life in prison. People started treating me like a real hero after this. In all honesty, I kind of felt like one.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had not been there to take that guy on. There was no way any of my co-workers would have been able to fight with this guy, and if he had complete control of the situation, he could have taken a hostage or done something much worse. The bullet was removed from my arm and unfortunately it did shatter a part of my humerus. I'm still recovering from that. But ever since this experience I haven't viewed my physical strength as something that makes me cool or better than anyone. I view it as a way that I can protect people. I think this may have been the experience I needed because I think I might want to become a police officer after all this is said and done. Treads worn down or you need a new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts.

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please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. So my mom's workplace was shot up a couple of weeks ago. It was a really traumatic experience for her even though she wasn't physically injured or anything. The entire thing went on for about two hours and I could just imagine how horrible it must have been. She works in some kind of logistics business. She's an assistant manager and to be honest I don't really know what they do. I just know that my mom works at this place and they do something with shipping and exporting. But that's the extent of my knowledge. So what happened, at least from what my mom told me, it had been a normal work day just like any other. And around 2pm, after

everyone had already had their lunch break and was getting back into the grind of working, people started hearing gunshots. There was an assembly line on the premises. Everyone just kind of assumed that those noises were machines of some kind that people had been working with. I guess hearing loud noises like that were fairly common, which is why no one expected anything. We now know that almost all of the production line workers had been murdered by the gunmen. No one knew what was going on there and quite a few of the guys had noise cancelling headphones in anyway. From the gunman's perspective, that was the first and most logical place to start. After he had done this on the production line, he made his way to the main office.

And to understand the route he took, you need to understand a little bit about the layout of it all. You see, he had to make his way through the regular offices where all the normal workers were. The typical data entry positions and things like that were in front of the main management building. The management building, for lack of a better term, was where the higher-up workers were located. This included the marketing department, IT and other businessmen and stuff like that. The guy's aim was to get to that management building and eliminate as many people from there as he could. This is where my mom and some of the other workers in the main building lucked out. Someone had just happened to be walking inside of the regular building out front and they'd been taken hostage. He used this hostage

to make his way out into the management building and didn't harm anyone as he passed through. Everyone got really stressed out I'm sure but he didn't hurt any of them. He just warned that if he heard any alarms going off that he was going to murder that person. It was made worse by the fact that it was a younger woman and most of the office knew that she was pregnant It wasn't obvious that she was but my mom and other co-workers had spoken to her and she had taken the test and had been confirmed pregnant Everyone complied with his orders and let him get through pretty easily When he got inside of the management building he had everyone organized into one small office There were maybe 30 people in the management building he had everyone organized into one small office.

There were maybe 30 people in the management building. After about 15 minutes the pregnant girl was released and she was seen crying and running away from the building. What followed was a horrible massacre where he literally killed every single person in the higher management of the company. There were only two employees in higher management that happened to be out sick that day. All of the rest of them had their life ended in that moment. Someone had managed to call the police and they arrived shortly after the incident. I guess the gunman had shot himself after he killed everyone in the management building. I guess in his mind the mission was accomplished. Now this happened a good little while ago and the reason I'm only writing it now is because we recently found out the backstory as to why this guy did what he did and the story goes like this. He had been working on the production line a

couple of months back. Working on the line is tough and as you might imagine there's kind of a rough and gruff kind of people that work on that line. So I guess this guy was deemed too much of a pansy or something like that. They started bullying him, giving him a hard time every day, I guess that's what you call it. It sounds weird to say that about adults, but I don't know what the other word you would even use. He didn't handle the bullying very well and as time went on, the other guys on the production line started messing with his work Like they would mess with the work that he had finished A lot of the guys claimed that it started out as good fun but it just got out of hand

Well I guess they went so far that this guy eventually got written up And not just once but quite a few times He'd gotten written up enough that he was eventually fired, and it wasn't for any good reason either. From all accounts, he was an otherwise functional and productive worker who did his job and did it well. He just couldn't take a joke from some of the other guys on the line. Well, I guess he had a family to take care of. He had a newborn baby at home, and he had just been married to his wife for about two years. He had a hard time keeping a job and this was supposed to be his stable job.

When he was fired, he tried to explain the situation to his wife, but she didn't believe him. I guess it was enough that she decided to leave him and take the baby with her. She moved across the country and moved back with her parents and even got a restraining order on the guy in the following weeks. He blamed his co-workers for making his life what it was and in management for not believing him that he was doing his job right and especially for firing him. It was honestly a really sad situation and on some level, I kind of get why he did what he did. This guy literally lost his baby, his wife, and his entire life because some guys on the production line took

a practical joke a little bit too far. The worst part is that my mom had actually spoken to him a few times while he had worked there. She said he was the nicest guy from the production line because he didn't curse or talk down to women. I know that she didn't know him well, but the fact that this guy was at least a halfway polite person in normal situations makes me even more sad about the entire situation as a whole. As you might imagine, the company is shutting down this location. They haven't been able to find enough people to replace all the management positions that they tragically lost that day. And it makes sense. Even if you could find qualified people to go there

who wants to go and work in the location that literally just got shot up by an insane gunman? Since this whole experience my mom has started working in a library. She said that she hopes that it will be a more stable work environment and hopes to never live through a traumatic event like that ever again. So I have this friend. They're a little bit off the walls. One of those conspiracy theorists, very much into the paranormal types of people. I'm talking about the kind of person that watches the X-Files and thinks it's probably true. Of course, she dresses up like she's just playing around and doesn't actually believe in it wholeheartedly, but I'm smart enough to know

that she uses humor as a way to distance herself from what she actually believes. I think some of the crazy stuff that she says she actually thinks. No, this isn't to disparage her or anything like that. She's an otherwise really nice person and she only starts talking about this kind of stuff once you get her going. Sometimes we can go days without ever talking about ghosts or aliens or anything else like that, but if someone starts talking about feeling a spirit in the room, that's the end of it for the night. I just wanted to give you that background because I feel it's very pertinent to the story. This particular friend happens to work at Walmart.

There have been a lot of recent changes lately and what happened is that she got stuck on the night shift. I'm sure you can imagine how this went. He puts someone that's into paranormal stuff on night shift and the next thing you know, they have a million and one different stories about ghosts and monsters and everything else. That's kind of how it went for the first few weeks. Every time I hung out with her, she would talk about how horrible it was to be working on night shift and then she would start talking about all of the monsters and creatures that she would see out of the corner of her eye. I just remember thinking to myself multiple times if she actually believes that she sees stuff while she's at work. Well as time went on she became much more mild with the stories. I guess she had

gotten used to working the night shift at Walmart and then I remember there being one party that we went to. It was me, her and a bunch of other people from our friend group. It wasn't one of those crazy alcohol filled adventures as you see in movies or anything like that. It was much more of a bunch of friends getting together and hanging out. I mean we're all adults and everything. The person whose house we're hanging out at owned the home, but I don't know what else we could have called it other than a party. Anyway, my one perceptive friend had a little bit too much to drink this night, and she started going on about her job like usual. And then all of a sudden, things took a turn for the worse. She started talking about seeing a dead

person walking around the store. I remember her talking about the exact details of how he died. She claimed that he had shot himself in the heart, and she saw him walking around Walmart late at night when no one else was around. Some of our other friends were less hesitant to call her out on this nonsense And she started getting really offended She left that night after and in retrospect I probably should have stopped her from driving home considering that she was extremely intoxicated If I'm going to be honest with you, that didn't even cross my mind until the next morning This guy that ended his life by shooting himself in the heart Became the only thing she

ever talked about when it came to the ghosts and whatnot of her night shift job at Walmart. I found it really strange. It was one of the less believable stories that she would tell us about. I mean, she would always talk about there being a pack of wolves in the forest on the other side of the Walmart parking lot, but it just didn't have the same glamour that that story about the guy did. The thought of there being some zombie walking around Walmart at night that only she could see seemed ridiculous as it sounds and I just kind of chalked it up to her own mental problems for it all. Well a couple of months went by, she was still on this you know guy shooting himself in the heart guy kick, even after all this time. I decided to do some research on this specific Walmart to prove her

that no one had ever died or near the premises, especially in that way. I remember getting my laptop out one night and googling this local Walmart's address. I'm going to spare any identifying details for obvious reasons. I read about every single death that had occurred on this premise since the place was built in the 1980s. I read about one guy who accidentally died of a stroke in 1985. I read about there being a terrible accident with a forklift about 7 years ago, and I didn't see anything about some guy shooting himself in the heart or anything of that nature. I was just about to be done with my research, and I was in that post-research phase where I just kind of was reading about random information aimlessly, and that's when I came across the news archives that I couldn't believe. It had been written during this time that the Walmart

was being built, and the story went like this. One of the crew members who was responsible for building the Walmart had some serious problems. His only son died at 10 years old and I guess this guy never really recovered after that. He had taken his own life after working the graveyard shift one night. The article talked about him being the only person that was willing to work all the way to 12am and sometimes later, as this was apparently before 24 hour Walmarts. He had a shotgun in his truck and then he ended his own life right in the forest nearby. And here's the crazy part. He shot himself in the chest exactly the way my friend had described.

I hadn't told my friend about this. I know I would never hear the end of it. But I just find it so strange that her weird goofy little interest in the paranormal somehow uncovered something like this. Now every time she talks about ghosts or the paranormal I make sure to start listening for something that might be true. Don't get me wrong, I try to filter out the obvious hoopla but now that I've seen her get something unbelievably right once, I'm just waiting for her to do it again. This is a somewhat horrifying but also hilarious story that happened to my best friend. Me and him were sports players together when we were younger and have always been close ever since.

His name is Brian and we were about 20 years old when the story happened. He had just gotten a job at GameStop. He was really excited about being able to get discounts on games and to even be able to play games a few days early in some cases with the new releases. Me and him both loved playing video games together and it was probably a dream job in a lot of ways. Now my friend Brian is a great guy but he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer if you catch my drift. On the football field or the basketball field or even in Call of Duty is probably the best. But when it came to reading a book or passing the test, well, let's just say that he would be on the bench if he could for all that kind of stuff. Things started out one day when we both decided that we wanted to start playing horror games.

I had watched a Let's Play of Resident Evil. I thought it would be a really fun idea. He wasn't a big fan of horror but he was willing to play whatever games we could get especially because he got such a nice employee discount at GameStop. We had spent one Friday night playing Resident Evil until 4 o'clock in the morning. I didn't even have anywhere to be the next day and he wasn't working until 12 so we figured that there was no harm no foul. Now before I go any further, I would just like to say that your brain is like a sponge. You absorb information and stimuli and process it in various ways.

Sometimes your brain can process information in a way that you might not expect it to do. Sometimes things can really stick with you. They can really play a role in your psyche and I think Resident Evil did that for my friend Brian. So he worked that shift the next day and when I talked to him that night when he got off of work he started telling me that he thought someone had been murdered at GameStop. Again, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I started asking him more about the details and the only evidence that he found was some random pile of blood It was located out of the store on the side of the building where most people usually don't go He started telling me that he thought his manager had murdered someone I jokingly told him that we shouldn't play Resident Evil anymore

We decided for a different game that night and I didn't ask him to play Resident Evil again and he never asked me to do so either. So whatever psychological change happened to my friend, it took place over the course of playing Resident Evil one time for a couple of hours. Weeks literally went by and he was still talking about the pile of blood that he saw outside of GameStop. It would only happen on random occasions according to him. I tried telling him that there must have been some kind of explanation for it. I mean, maybe someone was dumping sauce or something from the nearby stores. There was a pizza place in the same strip mall. He didn't buy it though.

He was thoroughly convinced that someone had been murdered and the murderer was draining out a small amount of blood and then putting it in this one spot outside of GameStop. He sounded really serious when he talked about it and he never called the police or anything. He told me he asked his manager once about it and his manager told him not to worry about it. It just didn't seem like that big of a deal. But I remember this one time we had been playing Call of Duty for about three hours one night. He started to talk about in detail and how much it freaked him out. He told me that he was having nightmares regularly and that he didn't like working at that GameStop anymore. I tried telling him that this wasn't a big situation and that he was just being wildly paranoid but he wouldn't listen to me. It wasn't very long before he decided to quit that job at GameStop.

It was really sad because he no longer got any of the perks of being an employee. This also meant that I didn't get any of the perks of being a friend of an employee which also sucked. But Brian was very insistent that something was going on there and he didn't want to end up getting murdered for knowing too much of some kind of criminal activity. A couple of days later my curiosity got the better of me and I just had to know where this pile of blood was coming from. It turned out that one of the other GameStop employees had been someone I went to high school with and I messaged them on Facebook. I asked them about this mysterious pile of blood and everything and then he told me this.

The truck driver who occasionally delivers the games and merchandise to this GameStop had a truck that isn't the greatest. It isn't that large or anything and it's the same one that always makes deliveries to the specific GameStop for some kind of logistical reason. The truck gets a certain amount of rust for some reason and the truck driver cleans the truck off in this one particular spot every time he delivers there. When I found that out I laughed uncontrollably for about one hour. Brian literally found a pile of rust and thought it was blood. As much as I love that guy like a brother and respect him as a person, things like this are why I have such a hard time taking him seriously. I only just messaged this guy on Facebook a day ago and I haven't spoken to Brian since. He works at a restaurant now and has been really busy there. I'm not sure if I

should even tell him though. A part of me really wants to tell him and make fun of him but I don't want to hurt his feelings too bad. I might low-key send him a link to a video about Rust and see if he connects the dots. And that's the story about my friend Brian who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and how he was convinced that people were being murdered and their blood was being dumped outside of GameStop, but it was actually just a pile of rust. Wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there.

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Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. It was early summer 2010. I only remember because my 21st birthday had just passed and was finally legal to hit the bars. It was a Friday night and I was up having a drink at a bar that my cousin David was the bartender at. It was a small town bar that outside of an event like a band or other entertainment, usually it stayed pretty quiet. It was very early in the evening and I had just gotten out of work for the night working at a

McDonald's in another small town less than 10 miles from the small town I lived in. I was on only my second drink of the evening when my phone rang. On the other end was a friend of mine from my childhood, James. He was calling asking if I wanted to come over to his brother's house to join them for a night of poker, smoking, and drinking. It sounded like a good time in my book, and since I was literally only one sip into my second gin and tonic, I agreed to make the drive into Toledo. Most people know where Toledo is, but for those who don't, it's a city in the northwest region of Ohio about an hour south of Detroit. It was about a 20 minute drive from my small town and figured it'd be a good time. I stopped at home to grab some cash. I only ever about took 10 to 20 bucks with me to the bar to make sure if I ever got caught up having a good time drinking I didn't screw up and have too good of a time and end up closing

down the bar that evening. I left my house at 11.05pm. I remember that distinctly because I had called James to tell him I was on my way as they were going to wait for me and start the poker game at 11.30. We always played a tournament style of poker game where we all put our money in at once, got equal amounts of chips, and played until there was only one person left with any chips who then got to keep all of the money. I took my usual route over to my brother Eddie's house as I had done so many times before. We had all gotten together, a group of anywhere about four to six of us, and would play poker in Eddie's basement at least twice a month,

usually more. I had just gotten to the corner of Oakdale Street and East Broadway. I was sitting at a red light in an area that's nothing but residential housing outside of the elementary school that sat at that exact corner. I'm sitting up looking at the red light waiting for it to change, which always seemed to take absolutely forever coming from this direction, when I noticed something in the sky that from my vantage point was partially hidden directly behind the red light. It was a very bright white light that seemed to be pointing straight down, almost like it was a helicopter using a spotlight to identify something but much much brighter at the point of origin. I heard absolutely nothing after rolling down my windows and knew this could not possibly be a helicopter or I'd absolutely be

able to hear it. Wanting a better view I pulled into the parking lot of an ice cream shop that sat directly across the road from the school I was nearby and got out of my car to try and figure out what this thing was. When I got out of the car I stared up into the sky and immediately found it again. It couldn't have been a plane because it didn't have the right shape. It was more oval than anything. Most stories you hear like this say it's circular but it was definitely an oval shape. I almost thought perhaps it was a blimp given the shape but it seemed far too large to be a blimp given the shape, but it seemed far too large to be a blimp even by the measurements of some everyone knows about like the Goodyear blimp,

plus it had no decals or identifying marks, either silverish or greyish. After what felt to me about 30 seconds or so of looking at this thing my eyes started to burn, not burn in the sense of extreme burning or anything like that but almost like that feeling of when a bug flies into your eyes and causes them to water up. I closed my eyes and began to rub them. My eyes are closed at this point so obviously all I see is black. After finally getting my eyes to stop bothering me I tried to look up again and find only for it to be gone. I looked all around but couldn't see it anymore.

This is a very densely populated neighborhood with houses, trees, etc. able to obscure any view of things you'd look up into the sky to see. After a little less than a minute, I decided, oh well, time to go play poker. I get over to Eddie's house which is about 4 blocks from where this had taken place and knock on the basement door. A few moments go by and no one answers. I decide to go to the front door and knock. Figured maybe since I'm probably 5 or 10 minutes early maybe they were upstairs on the playstation. I knock on the door but still no answer.

Finally I start knocking very loudly on the door, almost pounding. Eddie finally answers the door and says, man why are you knocking on my door this late? I look at him, honestly confused and said, well your brother said to come over and come play cards with you guys. He stares me for what felt like an eternity and finally responds. Yeah, yeah man, I know he did. He called you like five or six hours ago, man. It's 4.30 in the morning. How late did you think we would be playing? This scared me a bit, as from what I had remembered, at this moment it could not possibly be any later than 1125 to 1130 at most. I attempted to play it off and say, I guess I must have lost track of

time. Can I use your bathroom before I head back home? He agrees and tells me I should splash some water on my face as I look like I'm either drunk or haven't slept in a week. I walk into his bathroom and my eyes are absolutely bloodshot and it almost looks like I have two black eyes. To this day I have absolutely no idea what happened to me that night. I have no explanation for the lost hours worth of time. How I could not have possibly noticed that much time being passed or how on earth something that felt like my eyes was being irritated by a mosquito or something similar flying into my eyes. I don't want to pretend to know what it was and explain it or even assume that whatever it was that I saw that evening had anything to do with it. But it's creeped me out ever since.

In my whole 24 years of life, I have never been on a train. Roller coasters, most definitely, but an actual train? No way. From the time I was little when my grandma and mom would take me to Six Flags in St. Louis in the summers, I was beyond excited by the time I got there, simply from the sleepless night tossing and turning, from pure excitement of what I got to do the next day. But I always did what every kid between the ages of 7 to 12 does. I had a blast at the park, then was asleep as soon as I hopped in the back seat of the truck when we left, not to wake up until we pulled into the driveway. I was never scared of roller coasters, not even the ones with a loop. I was always the one leading whoever was with us down the long path of the line you'd go to to go through to get up to the ride.

One by one and coaster after coaster I always knew that usually about halfway through our visit I'd be too chicken for a certain ride that still to this day I've never had the balls to get on. The freaking train that takes you around the park. That's right, the choo-choo train. Why? I can't tell you for the life of me a single reason or even possibility as to why I'm so terrified of trains. Now fast forward around a decade to the time I'm 20 years old. I live in a small town in southeast Missouri and my mom lives in the house right next door. Every so often I go next door and watch TV with her and my baby sister if I get bored. She also finally came to terms with the fact that I smoke quite often and when my sister is visiting my grandparents across town

I'll sometime come share a blunt with my mom. But this time in particular was all three of us. I'm laying on the couch, my sister is at her princess table in the corner playing with something, and mom just came in from the kitchen with the plates of taco salad she just whipped up for us. She sits down and I randomly had it on that show, I shouldn't be alive. About 15 minutes into it, after she sits down, she said this, you know this reminds me of what you told me when you were about three years old. Thinking she was talking to my sister, I turned my head from the TV and she was looking at me. I said, huh?

She then went on to tell me that when I was three years old, I randomly started talking about my other family. Apparently from what she told me, me, my two sisters, my mom, aunt, and our cat were all headed somewhere and we had all died in a train crash. At first I was laughing hysterically, that's hilarious thinking that maybe she was messing with me, but then she swore to god that I randomly said that when I was about three years old. In that moment something made sense that I've never in my life been able to find reasoning for. My fear of trains. Now can someone help me with this? Could she be serious? I'll be 25 this year and still think about this pretty often and I truly have no explanation for any of it. From the moment I started speaking, I would tell my parents about Dodd.

I was obsessed with him. I would tell everyone about him, I would talk to him, I'd play with him. My parents assumed it was just an imaginary friend. Lots of kids have them and considering I'm the youngest of four boys, they guessed my brothers didn't want to hang out with little kids so I made my own friend. It began to escalate when my mom would find me, two or three years old, sitting alone in my room having conversations with thin air and responding as if someone had said something, nodding, listening, laughing as if he told a joke. I treated Dodd like he was a real person and I really genuinely believed he was.

Part of me still does. I would demand Dodd have his own seat and his own plate of food every single day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Anytime we left the house, I'd scream and cry if they forgot Dodd in the house. He'd have to have his own seat. He ended up having his entire toddler car seat because I was so scared of him getting hurt, and he had to be picked up, set in his seat, and buckled in just like they did to me. My parents had to talk to Dodd the way they talk to me or I'd get upset that they are ignoring him. I have memories of Dodd, genuinely seeing Dodd with my own eyes. I'd swear on my life that he was really there to this day. He was about a foot or so tall, the size of a small child like I was, but he was a pure white, mostly featureless bipedal bear.

He had no face. He had an outward bump where a muzzle would be and two indents where he should have had eyes. He didn't wear clothes and didn't have real paws or hands. He almost looked like a gummy bear with round tapered hands and feet and no details whatsoever, but he was solid white and not transparent. He didn't speak verbally, it was more like I just knew what he was saying. I also don't remember him walking anywhere or moving at all really, but I'd look away and look back and he'd be in a different place. I'd swear on my life, on everything I know, that he in some sense was real. I don't know how old I was exactly, I'd guess maybe around four or five. I went outside with Dodd because he wanted to show me something. He led me around the back of the house to a square

panel of sorts that I had never seen before. It was like a tiny door held with a simple hook latch. I opened it and inside was a concrete floor, a really low ceiling and a dusty old red tricycle, the classic little one you're probably imagining. It was full of cobwebs and I couldn't see anything other than a tiny bit of the concrete and the tricycle because the sun was adjacent from where I was. I climbed in the little cubbyhole and just sat there with my knees to my chest and I can still vividly remember seeing Dodd standing just outside of the door facing me. I didn't know this spot existed. I had no reason to. Who tells their toddler about a spooky concrete hole in the back of the house that's only access from the outside.

Recently I told my parents about that memory a few months ago and they said they purposely didn't tell me or my brothers about it because if you go inside that area, about two feet in, the concrete drops off into open pipes, wires, and insulation and since there's no access from the inside, it'd be really hard to find us if one of us fell in. I didn't forget about Dodd for a single day for six years. I never let one of his meals go by. I never ignored him for a whole day. I never let us go on a car ride without him for six years. But eventually we had to move houses. I had lived in the same house this whole time and it was the final day we'd ever be at that house and we were getting into the car to go to the new house. My mom picked me up and put me in the car and then turned to pick up Dodd and bring him

too. When she did, I immediately started crying and angrily said, Dodd's not coming. I apparently stopped talking about Dodd altogether that day and for years I'd get extremely upset and angry if someone mentioned him around me. My mom told me she researched the house we had lived in and apparently there was a little boy years before us that had died when a gas pipe bursted directly in his face. And as scary and weirdly fitting for my faceless friend as that sounds, I don't know if I buy into it personally. I was never afraid of Dodd, and I don't think of him as scary now. I think it's extremely strange, obviously, especially considering that he appeared as a featureless bear and he stuck with me for six years, much longer than most imaginary friends. I think it's mind-boggling that he brought me to a place in the house that I had never been in and that the knowledge of it was deliberately kept from me. Sure, it could absolutely be some absurd psychological thing, or it could be some strange kind of ghost or spirit.

But either way, I believe in and after the birth of my second daughter. From the start, there were strange goings on. My living room door handle would rattle every night, but because it was next to fall asleep when I watched a monk walk into my room, round it and out through a wall. I was shaking my husband awake shouting, Look, look, there's a monk! But he was too late to see it and said I was dreaming. We argued about it. Six weeks later I'm home with just my two kids and again I go to bed

and the monk appears again reading me the last rites. At least that's what I thought. I shouted that I'm not Catholic and he disappears instantly. Then my eldest daughter said to me one day, I like that old lady. I asked her which old lady and she responds, the old lady that comes in my room to read to me every night. My husband said she was just dreaming and we left it at that until I heard her quietly speaking one night. She was sat up in bed, eyes wide open with her arm held out like she was holding someone's hand and looked directly at someone. I asked what she was doing and she just put her arm back down, laid back down and went to sleep. I thought yeah she's dreaming. When she mentioned the old lady again I asked her to describe her. She said she had gray hair and

round glasses. Anyway we never really talked about it again and I knew if there was a problem my daughter would tell me. Three years later I had my son so I moved my girls to another bedroom I'd previously used as a junk room that had always given me the creeps as once I heard a woman laughing hysterically in there and when I opened the door there was no one there but the rocking chair was rocking by itself. I just closed the door and thought, fine, whoever it is is having fun. Then the real activities started. My youngest girl would tell me about a man who would stop her from coming to my room at night and made her go back to bed. She swears to this day over 30 years after it happened. Then one night I heard my youngest

girl shouting for me over and over so I run upstairs to go into her room and I stop dead in my tracks. My girl is stood up out of bed having a tug of war with her quilt with something. The quilt is in the air with nothing at one side holding it up and it's being tugged by my daughter and by whatever else is hold of it on the other end. I think I was in disbelief and say typical mom stuff like what on earth is going on? My daughter says he won't let me have my quilt. At this point I realize I'm not imagining this and neither is my daughter so I shout get out of my child's room and do not ever bother her ever again. You're not welcome. Then what I can only describe as three lines of light wish so fast it was a split second went over my shoulder and out the room.

I put my daughter back to bed and told her to shout if she needed me. I look back and so many paranormal things have happened and are still happening in this house. I can't believe the lack of money and a mortgage. I bought this house after two years of living here, have managed to keep me here for 34 years and keep so calm about the stuff that's happened. I put the experience down with the monk as dreaming like I said because even if I thought it was true it's ludicrous. Why would a monk be in my room? Until two years ago I started researching my area and found out the land my house was out on a birthday bar crawl on the Lower East Side. We were all getting a bit bored with the crowd and decided to go back to one of our friend's apartments to take a breather, listen to music, and decide what to move on to next.

Cut to me realizing I had ten missed calls from various members of my family. My uncle had been rushed to the hospital and didn't make it. My uncle was the youngest of my mom's siblings and was more like an older teenage brother to me than an uncle. We grew up together in a very close family. I don't think I realized how quickly grief hits when you get news like this. The sound of my father's voice cracking and straining to get the words he didn't make it out of his mouth was more than I could handle. I crumbled into a pile of tears right in the middle of the kitchen. In a daze I made my way back up to Harlem, trying to pull myself together and figure out what to do.

I couldn't get anyone in the city on the phone. I couldn't get myself to call anyone in my family so I needed to suck it up and get home that night. Mission accomplished. Flight change, bags packed with the help of my neighbor and a couple of Klonopin to get me home. All of this to get to the point of the story. I'm barely able to keep myself together as I wait on the subway platform. The change of tickets and my lack of savings just wouldn't allow for a taxi ride to the airport. Just as I feel like I'm about to completely break down again, I notice a man in a lightly colored, absolutely beautiful suit. He had blonde bobbing curls on top and shortly buzzed on the side.

I turned to take a bit more notice then saw his face. Strange to say but I can't recall anything about it now. It's a blank space and a very detailed memory. The only thing I can remember about his appearance was that it absolutely took my breath away. It wasn't in a oh my god this man is beautiful kind of way, it was sheer admiration for the absolutely perfect and symmetrical face. So here we are, the only two people waiting at the stop on 145th. The man seems to be almost giddy with joy as if he was seeing the world for the very first time. Not a crazed forced happiness, he seemed as genuine as a child in Disney World seeing the Magic Kingdom for the first time. When we boarded the subway, he sat mirrored to me. I was in a far left seat and he on the opposite side of the train

to the right. It was quite crowded but I looked up at some point before the 125th stopped to see that he was staring directly at me. It wasn't scary, it was as though he was waiting for me to finally notice him. All he did was look me in the eyes, nod his head in confirmation, and wink at me. It gives me chills to remember it, the comfort that washed over me felt like a warm embrace. I felt the security of a child who had scraped their knee, that feeling of mom making it all better. I was able to get myself home, head held high and without the help of Klonopin. I'm not a religious person. I have scuffed about God and I've felt resentful when anyone brings up their beliefs I don't know how to explain it

but I have this deep feeling that I saw an angel that day all alone and navigating through intense emotions I truly feel this man was sent to me to give me comfort and strength to get home it It almost feels embarrassing to type this out, but I have no other explanation. The story I'm about to tell you happened in the summer of 2012 in my country, Portugal. At the time, I was living in the north with my parents and my brother, and had extended family from my mother's side living in the south, namely my grandparents, uncle and three cousins. Two girls and a boy who was 17 at the time and five years older than me. Let's call this cousin George. George was a regular teenager. He was outgoing, practiced sports, was a talkative person, a good student and got along pretty well with me and my family in said summer we went to my grandparents house in the south to pass our time with our

relatives living there everything was normal at the start whenever possible my uncle and cousins went there to visit us usually having lunch with us spending the afternoon at the house and having dinner. George was his typical self in the first week or two, being very talkative, playing cards and playstation with me and my brother, going for walks with us, basically a very normal behavior. At some point in the summer, George went on a trip to a city in the countryside of England to go meet a couple of friends, two sisters around his age who lived there with their parents and who he had met in Portugal when they were there for vacation. His stay there was supposed to be like a couple of weeks however at the end of the first week

something happened. My uncle received a phone call from the girl's parents. They were asking my uncle to go meet them as soon as possible and go pick up my cousin because he wasn't feeling well at all and was showing a strange behavior, which led them to believe that he wasn't mentally able to come back on his own, hence the need of my uncle to go there. So my uncle went to England the next day and brought George back immediately. When me and my family met with George again, we were stunned. He wasn't the same person who had left just a week earlier and who we had known for all of our lives. The altercation wasn't physical, it was psychological. I'm not talking about a teenage mood change, the behavior he was displaying was deeply upsetting. If I could describe it in a word, although an understatement,

would be apathetic. George didn't talk, didn't move, didn't show any feelings and his eyes were dead. The only sign of life he would give would be an occasional groan when we would try to talk to him. It was obvious that he was needing medical help. The days that followed his return consisted of trips to the hospital. My uncle took him on an appointment to a psychologist which showed ineffective. He then took him to neurologists and psychiatrists who were also baffled with his state. George had his blood sampled since his behavior could be explained by having been drugged while in England, but nope, the results didn't show anything out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, he was prescribed a series of medications. First week had passed and no signs of altercation. Second week, more pills,

more appointments, more blood tests, and same results. George's days kept consisting of him sitting in a chair not talking to anyone moaning and sometimes crying softly my family is Christian and my grandmother was particularly very religious she started suspecting that his behavior couldn't be explained by science nor was it a result of some hormonal change or an obscured neurological disease and frankly so was I. I knew my cousin and that wasn't him. I know it sounds ridiculous but when all the scientific explanations and treatments went out the window we started believing he was being in a situation similar to a possession even though he wasn't speaking in different languages, crawling on the walls, spinning his head or levitating, like what happens in certain movies, but it was very telling.

So, one morning on the third week since George's return, my grandma managed to get holy water from the priest of our local village. That same day in the afternoon, when I was in the living room with my cousin, I saw my grandma coming in with the holy water with her and positioning behind him while he was sitting on his chair. My grandma started sprinkling him with the holy water and saying silently some prayers to no opposition from him, just with his now typical soft groans. My 12-year-old self was quietly watching this with knowledge of what this ritual was about, hoping it would be effective. After about 10 minutes, my grandma was done. Peter still showed no apparent change. Later in the afternoon, my brother, now in the living room with us and a couple of more family

members, displayed a chess board on the table and asked if someone wanted to play chess with him. I can play. We were shocked. It was our cousin. He got up and went to play with my brother. It was a stunning sight to behold and we couldn't believe it. Not only was he speaking, he was also actively interacting with someone after almost a month. In a matter of a day or two, George went back to being his older self. Since then, no one has ever talked about this with him and to this day, I don't know if he was actually a recipient of the state he was in and of what my grandma did to him, but I don't believe I'll ever ask. From time to time I still

think about what happened in that summer of 2012. It definitely changed the way I view certain things, mostly on a spiritual level, and made me truly believe that there are many things that are comprehension this happened to me when I was about 11 years old it was the 90s I lived my whole life in El Paso Texas the culture is rich in folklore and religious beliefs many Hispanic families have stories the paranormal one legend popular is the legend of the Weeping Woman, a.k.a. La Llorona. The legend of La Llorona, Spanish for the Weeping Woman, had been a part of Hispanic culture in the Southwest since the days of the conquistadors. The tall, thin spirit is said to be blessed with natural beauty and long flowing black hair wearing a white gown she roams the rivers and creeks wailing into the night and searching for children to drag screaming to a watery grave no one really knows when the legend of la llorona began or from where

it originated though the tales vary from source to source. The one common thread is that she is the spirit of a doomed mother who drowned her children and now spends eternity searching for them in rivers and lakes. One night, just like any other night, I lived in a trailer with my mom and dad. My youngest brother was staying with my aunt this night. I fell asleep watching Jay Leno as usual and when I woke up, I was on the sofa in my living room. The time was 4am which illuminated from the stove in the kitchen. The television was off and normally I had a light on but this time it was pitch black. I woke up and I heard a horrible screaming that was coming from far in the distance. The screaming was coming from a ditch that was a few feet away from my home. I heard it and thought it was hearing things. I asked myself,

am I dreaming? Then I started to hear the animals outside howling and whimpering. These animals that I speak of are cats and dogs. As the screaming got closer the animals continued to cry the screaming was something I have never experienced ever before it sounded like I was in a big hallway and a woman was screaming her guts out down that hallway then and all the screaming I started to make out words those words being said by whoever this was at 4 a.mam screaming their guts out shocked me. The woman was saying in Spanish, oh my children. In a huge panic I quickly got up from the sofa and ran to the kitchen which was right next to where I was asleep. I turned on the closest light and looked around. The screaming didn't stop. In fact the screaming only got louder and closer. I questioned my sanity at

that moment. Was I going crazy or hearing things? Then I thought to myself, this is real and the animals are responding to it in a negative way. So I did what any other 11-year-old boy would do in a moment like this. I ran to my mom and dad's room. I reached for my mom and shook her awake wildly. She woke up slowly and to my amazement the screaming faded away as she woke up. I started asking myself what the heck is going on and then I told my mother, mom do you hear that screaming? The crying lady. My mom was half asleep as she said, go back to sleep, it's just your imagination. I told her, no, this is real, please listen, don't you hear it? My mom quickly just said, you're dreaming, go back to sleep, it's gonna be okay.

By then the screaming had faded long away like if whoever was screaming knew that an adult was awake. I was terrified as I returned to the living room and quickly turned on the television as I left most of the lights on as well. I didn't go back to sleep until the sun came up. I couldn't believe what I heard and witnessed. I was treated like a crazy person whenever I told my story. It got so bad that I kept my experience to myself. To this day, I don't care what people think of my experience. I know I heard what I heard.

A couple of years later, it happened to me again. This story takes place after the first incident with a woman known as La Llorona. Not much happened after the first time I heard her. An incident occurred with my aunt about a year after the encounter. According to my aunt, they were sleeping and suddenly there was a horrible sound coming from the ditch located in front of their house. There is a street in between the ditch and the house, but her house and the ditch are really close to one another. It was about 2.30am when my aunt was awoken by a screaming of a woman coming from that ditch. She figured maybe somebody had

been hurt or was being attacked. She walked out to the front yard looking towards the ditch and saw that there was no woman. My cousin, her daughter, walked out the front as well asking her what was happening. My aunt of course had no idea as the screaming grew closer. Then they saw her, a woman in a white dress. The only thing that shook them to the bone was that the woman had no feet and was clearly floating. One other feature that threw them off was that this woman had no face. They both just turned after seeing that and ran inside their house.

My aunt locked the door and called the police. The police showed up minutes later and took their claim seriously. El Paso PD was soon looking at the area where this woman was seen and heard screaming. The police soon returned and said that there was no evidence that a woman was there. They looked at the area where the woman had been seen walking and not even footprints were found. One of the police officers even asked if maybe my aunt was dreaming everything that happened. The next day is when I went over to visit and I saw my cousin like I had never seen her before. She had black bags

under her eyes and she hadn't slept since the incident. I asked her what happened and she said she saw what my aunt saw. The screaming woman with no feet and no face. It took her a while to sleep normal again. She never heard or saw La Llorona again, but to this day she won't deny that she had witnessed something that she couldn't explain. Unlike my cousin, I don't have the luck of avoiding La Llorona. It was in the early 2000s when I worked here in El Paso, Texas at a local supermarket named Big 8. One of the shifts that I worked was from 3am to 12pm The store was located in the lower valley of El Paso In the back of the store is a small ditch

One early morning at about 4am I had the back doors open And I was taking the empty milk crates outside in the back I was working with two other guys at the time of the incident One of the guys' names was R, thought it would be funny to close the back doors and lock me outside as a joke. When I heard the doors closed shut, I knew he was just messing around. I thought to myself, I'll just stay quiet and wait for him to open the doors again. I wasn't going to give in to his joke or trying to scare me. I stood by the door smiling and thinking to myself, he's not going to scare me.

I could hear R laughing on the other side of the door. I thought to myself, well, the joke's on him because I'm not scared. About one minute later in the far distance, I heard screaming. Just a complete guttural screech. And I thought to myself, it's the same screaming that I heard when I was 11 years old The screaming got louder and closer to me I felt a chill down my spine and I felt that I was being watched by some unseen force I felt a sense of hopelessness

It was a feeling unlike any other I started pounding on the door. I yelled for him to let me in. There's somebody out here. I pounded my fist and started kicking the door, screaming for him to let me in. I could still hear R laughing on the other side of the door. I started to kick the door harder. The screaming was now coming from right behind me just then r opened the door and said what is that just then i ran inside and locked the warehouse door r asked why was that lady screaming did she need help i told him that i don't think that was a lady i told him what had happened to me when i was younger r R told me,

Jay, don't you think maybe you're cursed or do you think maybe she's following you? I stayed quiet when he told me that. I couldn't work my shift normally after that and it took me a few hours to get over what happened. I admit I was scared and maybe R was right. What if she was following me? There was one more incident that took place after. In 2015, I started working as a custodian at Cedar Grove Elementary. Behind the school is the border highway, then the Rio Grande of course, covered by a huge metal fence that separates Mexico from El Paso. I worked the night shift from 2.30pm to 11pm. One night, I was stuck working with another custodian until midnight. Right when we were about to leave, we do a walkthrough of the school to make sure all

the doors are locked on the outside. I worked with another custodian named C. C always told me that he had never believed in ghosts. Until that night, I can say. We walked to our cars and just as I was about to leave, I saw that C had opened his hood of his car. Then he asked me, hey Jay, can you give me a jump? My car battery's dead. I told him yes, of course. Just as I stepped out of my car a loud screaming came from the Rio Grande. All of the animals in the nearby neighborhood started howling and crying. Once again the screaming resembled a woman screaming her guts out in the hallway as it echoed all over. C looked at me and said,

My god is that a demon? I told him, No C, that's La Llorona. He looked right at me and said, no way, she can't be real. Then I said, I've heard it before. Then C responded, hurry please, let's get out of here. I gave him a jump and just then we saw a border patrol jeep speeding towards the screaming woman and just then I thought to myself I can record this and share it with the world

I took my phone out and just as I hit record the screaming faded away C and I looked at each other and he said what in the world Jay. I'm leaving before that evil witch comes back to get us. We both left and the very next day, C was telling everybody at work how we had heard the witch crying the night before. That was the last time I encountered her. I don't think it's the last as I feel that she may choose who hears her or sees her. I have other paranormal stories as I was part of a group here in El Paso, Texas. We've investigated many historical locations. I also got the chance to investigate with Amy Bruni and other celebrities that have visited El Paso. This is a whole other story for another day, but thanks for listening and in time,

I may have more stories to post about La Llorona. For background, I am a 15 year old Irish fella called Ross. I come to school in Ireland, I am now in third year. At the start of second year, I knew a fellow who joined the school. I was in charge of showing him around and we've been good friends ever since. He is Portuguese and his name is Diego. I'll call him T for this story. His school bag is fairly small, bright red. He is a bit shorter than me. His hair is quite short and brown in color and this will become important momentarily. One day I was upstairs in my school. It was break time and I was going to my group's usual spot.

I turned a corner and saw T walking along the hallway. This was weird because at the distance I was from him, I would have seen him come up the stairs. I didn't think much of it at the time. I sped up to catch up to him. There was another corner coming up. He rounded and I followed suit, except he wasn't there. There was a staircase going back down in two bedrooms, one for the lads and one for the lassies, but no tea. Considering how close I was behind him, he would have had to have sprinted towards and then jumped down the stairs or jog into the bathroom. If he went for the stairs, I would have heard. He must be in the bathroom, I thought. I sat at the bench and waited.

T was the first other person in the group to arrive. He rounded the corner and left his bag down. The realization hit me hard. He wasn't in the bathroom. I asked him if he had already been up there to which he answered that he hadn't he had no reason to lie now I know what you're all thinking it was probably someone else first of all the person I saw looked exactly the same as my friend from the back second no one else in the school has that bag to my knowledge. I haven't seen anyone else with it, that is, and third, the only place the person

could have gone without sprinting down the stairs, which I would have probably caught a glimpse of anyways, would be the bathroom. No one came out of the bathroom that I didn't see enter already. Finally, my friend is a fairly distinct character. Not many people have the same body build as him. I know this may not be terrifying, but I truly do wonder if this was some sort of glitch in the matrix. Potentially me seeing him moving in the future. Hi Reddit, my name is Rory Bonet. I'm just outside of Edinburgh and I once hitchhiked across America from Savannah and Georgia to Los Angeles out in California. This was back in the late 90s just after I'd graduated from uni, but long before I'd

settled on any kind of career path. It was honestly one of the best, most enriching experiences of my life. I met people I stay in touch with, even to this day, but it also happened to include one of the most terrifying events I'd ever endured. And although it didn't quite put me off to hitchhiking, it certainly made me think twice about whose car I would or wouldn't be climbing into on some lonely stretch of road. Like I said, I started off on the Georgia coast, making my way through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. I had a heck of a time in Texas, Austin in particular was much more bohemian than I'd ever thought possible for the Lone Star State, but eventually I found myself in the state of Arizona, which is where my story takes place. I remember I had thumbed a lift with a friendly truck driver

who was taking the I-10 from Tucson to Phoenix, but since the road I wanted was the I-8, which would take me into California, we had to part ways just after Arizona City. But as it turned out, Arizona City is anything but an actual city. With a population of only 10,000 and with a main street that consisted of little more than 5 stores. No offense to anyone who lived or lives there, but it was not the teeming metropolis I had imagined. So I decided to just bite the bullet and get back on the road again. The sooner I made it out to San Diego, the sooner I could be soaking up the sun of golden sand beaches. Only that was a huge mistake. The sun was beginning to set as I walked up towards I-8 in preparation to thumb a lift.

As normally happens when hitchhiking, a fair few cars drove past me without so much as a look, but eventually my patience was rewarded and someone slow to a stop just passed me. Now a little side note here, I've found myself in some despicably unclean vehicles before now. On many an occasion, I've jumped into the passenger side of a truck or van only to discover that the interior is filthy, stinking, or both. It's not pleasant, but it's just one of those things you have to put up with if you choose to hitchhike. Only this particular car that stopped at the edge of the road for me was gleaming. As I approached the car's rear, I could tell it was either brand

new or the owner took a great deal of pride in its appearance. Either way, I was pretty excited at the prospect of luxury transportation, especially since I'd previously ridden in some real stinkers. Hey man, need a ride? The driver asked as I drew level with the window. Two sharply dressed men occupied the driver's and passenger seat, not usually the kind of people that stop for hitchhikers, but you weren't about to catch me complaining. I told them yes, opened the car's rear door, and climbed in before they drove away. The first thing the driver brought up was my accent, asking where I was from. I told him I was from Scotland, traveling the southern US as part of my gap year. You ever been to Mexico? He then asked me. I told him no, but that

I'd always wanted to visit, that maybe if I found a job in California, I could pop over the border for a day or two. It's a beautiful country, he told me. My people are from down there. Beautiful place, but crazy, you know? He and his passenger gave a knowing laugh, one I found a little unnerving. It was around then that the two guys in front of me began to speak Spanish. It hit me pretty fast that they were talking in Spanish under the assumption that I didn't speak any, but that simply was not the case. I'd done a few years of basic Spanish in secondary school, and although my grasp of the Mexican dialect wasn't concrete, I could still make out a few words here and there. But it was only when I heard the words, Podemos Osarlo, that I began

to get seriously nervous. That phrase means something along the lines of, we can use it. The it in this situation was of course me. I couldn't work out whether or not they were using Mexican slang to suggest that they were going to rob me or whatever, but then I got another phrase that really clued me in to what they had in mind. Mulo Ciego, one of them said in passing. Blind mule. I had seen enough banged up abroad to know just what they had in mind for me. In all likelihood they were planning on taking me down to Mexico before hiding drugs on me and driving me back so they could retrieve them safely.

But then they said something that sent a chill down my spine. Comienza a acto estupido, Matalo, the passenger said, basically saying if I started kicking off, they'd shoot me. Actually, funny you should mention wanting to go. We're headed across the border to see some family if you want to join us. One of them said, confirming my fears. I remember telling them I was good, how I only wanted to be taken as far towards Cali as they could take me, but they were insistent, intimidatingly so. I soon realized that if I wanted to get out of there safely, I would have to think fast,

and think I did. I began to rub my stomach, making a few queasy noises and generally feigning discomfort until one of the guys in front of me asked me if I was okay. I had a few tacos back in Arizona City. I lied. I don't think they're sitting right with me. The two guys exchanged a few quiet words in Spanish and decided to ramp it up. Uh, could you guys pull over? I think I'm going to be sick. Don't you puke on my upholstery. The driver shouted, not so friendly anymore.

It was an Oscar winning performance if I do say so myself and I began to dry retch so hard that the driver practically slammed on his brakes in order to pull over and let me out. When they finally did, I ran off the road and down an embankment, out of the sight of the two guys before I began to make the loudest, most dramatic vomiting sounds you could imagine. The act crossed over into reality as I somehow managed to force up some stomach lining, and although I'm not proud of this, I actually smeared some of my face and shirt to make the whole thing look super authentic. The next part is something I'm extremely proud of though. As the two guys appeared at the top of the embankment and looked down on me in disgust, I held my legs together and kind of shuffled towards them. I'm so sorry, I think I just... I think I just... I didn't say it.

I just pointed to the seat of my pants, suggesting a little of the fictional tacos I'd eaten had come out of the other end. Dito asqueroso, one of the guys spat, disgusting, wincing as he rushed back towards his car. They didn't say a word to me as they hopped back in and sped off along the highway. Few times in my life have I felt that relieved and I actually danced along that dark stretch of highway for a while once the car was well and truly out of sight. The moral of the story, be bloody careful whose car you get into at the side of a highway. Sometimes it's best just to man up and find that flea-bitten motel than risk your life with members of a cartel.

I've seen a few posts in this forum about how it's dangerous to carry a can of gas in your trunk. First of all, that's just nonsense. Unless someone rear-ends you while they're on fire, there's much more risk of an explosion or fire from the gas that's already in your tank. Secondly, the dangers you're putting yourself in by not carrying spare gas far, far outweigh the apparent dangers of doing so. And now I'll tell you why. I used to drive around the country a ton as part of a traveling salesman job. Before my retirement, I was an aluminum siding salesman,

and although it was a tough job that kept me away from my family for weeks at a time, it was incredibly financially rewarding, especially the northern states like Nebraska where winter temperatures could drop to dangerous levels. So as you might have guessed, I ended up stuck by the side of the highway one rough winter when I discovered I'd totally forgotten to top my gas can up before my journey. I was furious with myself, but also pretty frightened. The weather was making a turn for the worse, and it would be very risky to go looking for a gas station. So I was forced to hitchhike.

The thing about the Midwest is that people can be much, much friendlier than out on the East Coast. Maybe it's those rural sensibilities, but I was on the side of that highway for a lot less time than I had expected when a car pulled over to the verge and a driver enthusiastically invited me to hop in. He told me his name was Conald, a name I'd never heard before, nor since, and the vehicle he was driving was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. He'd basically turned the thing into a mobile home and the car looked extremely lived in. There were laptop and phone chargers running on battery attachments, all kinds of garbage dumped in the footwells, even a loudspeaker grafted onto the top of the car. I mean, it almost looked like a police cruiser from some post-apocalyptic future.

Anyway, I've climbed into this guy's car and I've explained that I need him to drive me to the nearest gas station and back so I can get back on the road. In a raspily gravelly voice he agrees to help me out and we're on our way. But as soon as we're back on the highway he starts asking me all kinds of probing questions about my life and my job. When I tell him I'm an aluminum siding salesman he starts accusing me of trying to trick sweet old ladies out of their pensions for paneling that would have them freezing to death in the winter. Now obviously I took serious offense to this. I wasn't some vulture who preyed on the weak. I took pride in my work, even if it wasn't what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. Connell backed off a little at this point and actually grumbled an apology

through his gritted teeth. He told me that he met a lot of bad people in his life, how he didn't mean anything by it, how he was glad I was one of the good guys. We just dodged this conversational bullet when a gas station finally came into view. Connell pulled off the road where I'd hopped out and headed over to grab a spare can of gas. At first I figured he might just drive off on me and I

silently prepared myself for that to be the case. Only he didn't. He stayed, just as he said he would. Yet as I'm walking back to the Conald's vehicle, something catches my eye that has my heart racing. I can see a flame inside the car, small enough to be from some kind of cigarette lighter, but still alarming given that he's using a lighter in a freaking gas station. You want to talk about serious dangers, there's one right there. I crack the car door and I'm about to ask him what he's thinking when I see just exactly what he's doing with the lighter. Conald was burning his own hair.

What are you doing, man? I remember asking him in total and utter confusion. Saves money on haircuts, he replied. Here's the thing. I could hear the pain in his voice as the flames reached his scalp and fizzled out. Besides, you gotta get it nice and hot when you're feathering it, brother. I was completely at a loss for words. He was literally using a cigarette lighter to style his hair. I asked him again just what he thought he was doing using a lighter at a freaking

gas station. He snapped back at me, but I asserted that I was holding a gas canister in my hand and he should put the thing away before I got back in. But that's not even the weirdest thing he did. On the drive back to my car, Connell began to complain about a pain in his tooth. I sympathized a great deal. My daughter had some dental work done that previous year and it had cost us a fortune. That and tooth pain can be terrible at times. I can relate to the story of my daughter's ordeal to him when he began to growl and pull over to the side of the road. He seemed furious and at first I was worried he was going to try and kick me out of the car, right there at the side of the freezing highway. But I

never, ever could have anticipated what he did next. Conald reached under the driver's seat and pulled out the biggest hunting knife I'd ever seen in my life. He looked at me, holding the thing tight in his grip, and gave me a wolfish grin. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I was absolutely terrified. The guy was obviously not playing with a full deck if you catch my meaning and I slowly prepared to throw myself out of the passenger side if he went for me with the blade, but he didn't. Instead, Conald put the blade into his mouth and I heard the sharp edge grind against one of his teeth as he bit down on it. I remember desperately wanting to ask him what

he was thinking, but the words just wouldn't come out. All I could do was watch as a few drops of blood bubbled up from between his lips and ran down his chin. He was ripping his own freaking tooth out with the blade of the knife. It was horrific, and in the end I couldn't bring myself to watch as he grunted and growled, his raspy voice grinding in agony as he dislodged a tooth with a sickening crunch. Like I said, I wasn't watching, but I listened as he spat the broken tooth out into his palm, rolled down the window, then tossed it out onto the highway. You could have saved a few dollars on your daughter like that, brother, he said in between spitting out mouthfuls of blood through the open driver's

window. Again, I couldn't say a word. I was in utter disbelief at what I'd just seen. Luckily, we rolled up to my gasless car not long after and, as promised, Conald slowed to a stop and let me out, having helped me get back on the road. I thanked him, genuinely, and all he did was let out this horrifyingly gravelly laugh. It was truly evil sounding, but honestly, I don't think that guy meant me any harm at all. He was just manic. I still think about Conald sometimes and I wonder how he's doing, if he's still living in that car and performing self-surgery. But on the off chance he comes across this post somewhere, thank you Conald. Just please, get some help. My name is Linda Van Nguyen, and I used to be a hippie.

Well, I still am hippie, I suppose, but back in the day, I used to be a real hippie. The kind that at 18, packed up their belongings and took a trip on a magic bus all the way out to India. I spent the years after that doing a lot of hitchhiking all over Europe and the Middle East, back when it was relatively safe if you can believe that. So naturally, I have a lot of affection for hitchhikers and those that are dangerous enough to give them a ride, and I never failed to stop for those with their thumbs out. This led me to picking up a hitchhiker on a Massachusetts highway one night A decision I would later come to regret in a huge way So as I said, I was cruising out of Boston one evening

Heading back towards Salem Probably the hippiest place in all of Massachusetts And where I currently call home There on the side of the highway was a tall man in a long black coat holding out a thumb. I slowed to a stop, called out a friendly greeting from an open window, then invited him in to ask him where he was headed. He told me Maine, but he'd be grateful for as far as I could take him, even if that was only towards Salem. It was then I noticed the bag he had with him. It was one of those leather bowling bags, the semi-circular kind with two thin straps

Not unusual on its own, but the way he was holding it a little too tightly did attract my attention But those delicate observations were soon overcome by the outrageous smell that seemed to come off the guy He absolutely reeked of something rotten And I was soon glad that I had only promised to take him as far as Salem. I'm not one to judge, I had met plenty of unwashed travelers back in my heyday, but I think he saw the look on my face, or the wrinkling of my nose, and opted to say something. He told me he was sorry about the smell, and that he'd been on the road a few days and didn't have

enough money to pay for a motel room or anywhere else to get washed for that matter. I told him not to worry that I'd been in similar situations myself and it wasn't anything an open window wouldn't remedy. But even with a crack driver's window the stench persisted until I'd pretty much resigned myself to mouth breathing for the rest of the short journey. At one point, I got pretty concerned about the man's well-being. Certain kinds of infections, such as gangrene, can cause hideous odors as they rot away at whatever flesh it has purchase of. If he was a drug user and he'd picked up something like that from sharing needles, he had to be in some sort of pain.

But when I threw out a vague question inquiring about his health, he seemed confused. He told me he was a picture of health, how maybe he could do with putting on a few pounds, but other than that, he was peachy keen. I was almost certain I'd saw him limping a little as he climbed into the passenger side but still I decided not to press the issue. Offending your passenger does not make for a pleasant journey. Anyway we arrive in Salem and as much as I try not to show it I was over the moon that we were parting ways but the rotten smell seemed to cling to my car's upholstery. No matter how much Febreze I pumped in there, and I actually ended up spending the majority of that evening scrubbing the passenger side with a mix of disinfectant and hand soap.

It was the first time I'd ever actually felt regret about picking up a hitchhiker, and it was deeply confusing for me. I hated feeling like a Grinch who was angry she'd been generous enough to help out another human being But all of those emotions paled in comparison to the next morning When I told my partner what had happened the previous evening I knew something was wrong the moment I mentioned picking up a hitchhiker My partner gave me this look One I'd only ever seen once or twice throughout our entire relationship

It was one of pure fear. I started asking her why she was looking at me like that, what she knew that I didn't. All she did was flick through the newspaper she was reading over breakfast, pointing out a certain article that consisted of no more than one or two paragraphs. It detailed a story of a prisoner escape down in New York State, how a tall, boyish prisoner had managed to slip through the cracks thanks to some kind of paroling error. New York State troopers had urged members of the public to keep an eye out for a tall, thin man who walked with a limp.

The article went on to say that the prisoner was most likely headed up to the Canadian border in a bid to escape justice. I had given that prisoner a ride. My partner immediately called the cops while I called into work to let them know I might be a little late that day. A pair of uniformed officers arrived at our home with lightning speed, desperate to write down as many details as I could remember. What he was wearing, what he was carrying, where I dropped him off, where he said he was going. I could only answer so many of their questions, but I had a few of my own. I told them about the terrible smell, the stench that had clung to my upholstery and was likely still lingering. I wanted to know what would make a man smell that terrible,

if he had some kind of disease he hadn't mentioned. Honestly, I was terrified that if he did, it would be contagious. After all, I'd spent the better part of an hour in a car with this guy. They told me no, that he wasn't sick, but that they could explain the smell, although it might be something that I didn't want to know. I told them of course I wanted to know what it was. I'd been in a car with a murderer and lived to tell the tale. It was with this horrible look in the officer's eyes that he told me that bad smell could well have come from the fact that the escapee had visited someone in Buffalo, New York before he made it into Massachusetts. Someone that he'd taken a trophy from.

Potentially their bloody, severed head. I am never hitchhiking again. I mean it. As long as I live, I will never, ever get into a car with a stranger that hasn't got an Uber or Lyft tag on the passenger door. The moment I decided to try to hitch, I knew it was a bad idea. I told myself I shouldn't be doing it and, hey, what do you know, I was right. I think that's why I've been beating myself up so bad about it. I knew it was a terrible idea, I've been beating myself up so bad about it. I knew it was a terrible idea, I knew the risks, and I did it anyway. So please read my story and remember it every time you think you can save a few dollars on a taxi by thumbing a lift. So every night when I finished my waitressing shift, I had to catch a bus out of downtown

Detroit all the way out to Royal Oak where I live with my mom. Sometimes, depending on how late I finish, I have to catch the last bus. I mean the very last bus on the line. It's either that, spend my tips on an Uber, fat chance, or walk. And there's no walking anywhere in Detroit come winter time. So, I'm on the bus one night, the very last bus, pleased to be headed back to a nice warm bed after a long hard shift. I have my headphones on, listening to some murder podcast when I hear like a pop behind me, muffled by the sounds of the

podcaster's chatter. I turn to see the seats behind me covered in broken safety glass with a football-sized hole in the bus's window. Some total idiot had thrown a rock through the bus window. Some people were just animals and sure it was kind of scary, but not nearly as scary as what was about to happen with our bus driver. A few hundred meters further down the road, the bus pulls over to another stop. Only I see the driver say something to the passenger who wants to embark, something that makes the passenger shake his head in frustration before walking away. I suspect the worst, pulling out a headphone to hear my suspicions confirmed. Sorry, I can't go any further, I heard him say.

It's a safety issue, can't go any further. I heard him say, It's a safety issue. Can't go any further. Sorry. I'm beyond furious at this point. As I'm walking to get off the bus, wondering what I'm going to do about getting home, the driver starts trying to explain the same thing to me. I just nod, staying polite. I knew it wasn't his fault, but still, I was angry. I pull my phone out, order an Uber, which gets immediately cancelled by the driver. I have no idea why, I have an almost perfect rating. So I try again and again and again and realize this might be the only night ever where I was unable to get a freaking taxi. It was about then that the idea of hitching occurred to me.

I'd freeze my boobs off if I just stood there at that last bus shelter, gambling on an Uber deciding it wasn't worth braving the freezing temperatures for what was little more than a $10 fare. So I did it. I stuck my thumb out, staring down, approaching headlights in the hope that somehow, someone would find it in their heart to stop for me. Eventually someone did and to my infinite relief, he looked perfectly normal and was an exceptionally well-mannered individual. Hi there, everything alright? The man asked through the open window of his car. He wore glasses and a steel gray shirt and tie combo. He looked like the most unthreatening person in the history of unthreatening people. Yeah, but my ride,

I said and pointed mournfully towards the bus that was now flashing its hazard lights. I think I was too shy to ask at first, but when the guy just opened the passenger door for me and flashed a smile, I thought I was saved. But I couldn't have been more wrong. The guy was nice enough at first. He asked how my day was, asked what I did for a living, you know, small talk. Yet he seemed to take issue with the fact my waitressing shifts seemed to end so late. Funny, I don't know any waitressing jobs that finish so late, he said, skeptically at one point. I was confused, I mean, plenty of restaurants finish late, some are open 24 hours. I had absolutely no idea where this guy was getting the idea from, but there was no way I was about to call him dumb or ignorant. He had, after all, been nice enough to pull over for me when I was in need.

Well, you don't strike me as ever having been a waitress, no offense. I said, deciding on a pretty weak dad joke to lighten the mood. But it didn't work. In fact, it only seemed to make him agitated. I'd never been a waitress, no, but I'm definitely not dumb, young lady. Instantly his tone changes and my skin crawls when he calls me young lady. I suddenly begin to realize that he didn't pull over out of the kindness of his heart. He pulled over out of some sense of possessiveness, and I didn't like that at all. Admit it, he continued. You're not a waitress, and you weren't like that at all. Admit it, he continued. You're not a waitress,

and you weren't on that bus. Excuse me? I know your game, and I'm not going to let you rob me. He seemed to growl, and after that, he began to drive faster. I swore on my grandma I wasn't out to rob anyone. I even pointed frantically at my waitressing uniform pleading with him to calm and slow down, but he didn't. He just kept speeding up until soon he was driving so fast that he had to weave in and out of traffic to keep going. Other cars were honking at him, obviously disturbed by such dangerous driving, but that paled in comparison to what I was feeling. The raw terror had tears pulling in my eyes. Please, I'm not going to rob anyone. I just want to go home, I sobbed. You got a gun in that purse, don't you? Don't you? All I could do was cry and shake my head. Every muscle in my body

was tensed, braced for the deadly impact I felt would come at any moment. Will you just try it, missy? I'll crash this car and kill us both. You hear me? I'll kill us both before you take a single cent off of me. I have never, ever been so completely relieved to see red and blue lights flashing behind me. It was just nuts. The guy actually pulled over and told the traffic cop that he was just trying to stop himself from being robbed. When the cop asked who was trying to rob him and the psycho points to the weeping waitress on the passenger side, i.e. me, the cop looks horrified and tells him to get out of the car. What should have been a 40 minute journey home turned into three full

hours of terror, confusion, and finally a police interview. The cops wanted to press kidnapping charges on the guy which I feel like he kind of deserved, but since I admitted to getting in the car on my own free will, all I could stick on him was a dangerous driving charge. But the damage has been done, and I hope you'll learn from my mistake. Always, always take your Ubers. In February of 2013, Jessup Reisbeck, an employee of Fox News Fresno affiliate KMPH, found himself at the scene of an automobile accident. There, he and his cameraman found themselves interviewing a young man who had been at the center of the incident. Sporting long hair, along with a red jumper and gray bandana, the young man, who gave his name as Kai, described in some detail the horrific events that unfolded

as he'd been hitchhiking. Kai told the news crew how he'd been hitchhiking through California when he was picked up by a man named Jet Simmons McBride. At first, conversation had remained neutral, but Kai was soon disturbed to discover that Jet Simmons McBride referred to himself as the incarnation of Jesus Christ And that he could do anything he wanted to Needless to say, Kai suddenly felt very unsafe in the passenger seat As he was evidently someone with some serious mental health issues What's more, McBride would not be easily overpowered if it came to a struggle As he was a 300-pound behemoth.

However, things went from bad to worse when McBride made a frank admission to Kai. McBride told the young hitchhiker that he was a businessman who regularly traveled the globe to ply his trade. He told him that he had been to places where the US dollar could buy you things that were categorically unavailable back home in America Things like underage girls Kai was forced to listen as McBride told him the tale of how he had his way with a 14-year-old girl while staying in the Virgin Islands He gleefully explained that the girl was hesitant to lay with him But that he'd gotten what he'd paid for in the end. Yet as McBride reveled in revealing such awful details to the young hitchhiker, he became distracted and took his eyes off the road.

That's when the traffic accident occurred. McBride's vehicle struck another, sending it careening into the path of an unsuspecting pedestrian who was violently pinned against a truck. KMPH later discovered that McBride deliberately targeted the pinned pedestrian because he was black. Screams of agony rang out as Kai jumped into action. He threw himself out of McBride's crashed vehicle with the intention of helping the pinned pedestrian. Other bystanders also sprang into action, rushing over to the scene of the crash in order to help save lives. However, when one smaller woman arrived on the scene and attempted to dial 911 on her cell phone,

a crazed Jet Simmons McBride burst from the driver's side, grabbed hold of the woman in a bear hug, and began to suffocate her. Kai later described hearing the woman gasping for breath, meekly fighting back against McBride who was no doubt attempting to kill her. He could have snapped her neck like a pencil stick, he later says to the camera. Kai knew he had to do something. He unshouldered his backpack and took out a hatchet he kept for self-defense. With the handle tight in his grip, Kai began to strike McBride repeatedly in the back of the head with the axe blade.

Over and over and over again, he sent the blunt blade into the back of McBride's skull until eventually he let go of the woman he was in the process of suffocating and began to stagger away with blood pouring from the back of his head. Yet unbelievably, the 300-pound Jet Simmons McBride was still able to stagger away from the scene despite the immense amount of blood loss he had suffered. There was no doubt that he was in the middle of some kind of psychotic episode as he was later found pleasuring himself at a nearby middle school before being taken into custody by local police. About the same time the video footage of Kai describing the attack goes viral, he is also

taken into custody by police. Yet after a brief interrogation, Kai is released and hailed as a hero by the general public. Hundreds of thousands are endeared to him as they watch him frantically describe his defense of the near-suffocated woman. I was like smash, he explains, describing himself hitting McBride with his hatchet. Smash, smash, smash. Kai's brush with fame led to brief meetings with Jimmy Kimmel, who actually featured Kai himself on his show, telling his audience, you should never pick up hitchhikers except for that one. Yet in the midst of the otherwise comical footage that was seen by possibly millions of people, there are a few details that in hindsight shed a little light

on just who was being interviewed. When asked what his second name was, Kai replies, don't have one, I don't have anything. When asked where he was from, Kai replies, Sophia, West Virginia. When asked how old he is, Kai replies, can't call it. Why would a person be so reluctant to reveal such personal details but so willing to tell people where he's from? That's because Kai was not, in fact, from Sophia, West Virginia. That was a bold-faced lie. He is actually from Canada. Yet there are many more inconsistencies in Kai's life than merely his distorted version of his origins. In May of 2013, an entire continent away from Fresno, California, a New Jersey lawyer was murdered in his home, brutally beaten to death with a blunt

object. New Jersey police released details regarding a person of interest related to the case. Those that saw the viral video a few months prior would have been astounded when they saw the face of who was now wanted for such a hideous crime. It was the face of Kai, the hitchhiker. Kai was arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks after a barista recognized him from his wanted poster. The public then became painfully aware of Kai's lies when it was revealed that he was being detained at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Facility after authorities determined he was in the U.S. illegally. Kai maintained he fought against the New Jersey lawyer Joseph Golfi in self-defense. According to statements he'd given to police, Golfi attempted

to force himself upon him after offering Kai a place to stay for the night. Kai stated that the police claimed that the encounter was consensual and the murder premeditated. However, Kai said that after the viral video on California, he had no need to be with men like Galfi, who Kai described as unattractive, stating, Do you know how many hot chicks? Never mind. Even if I was gay, do you know how many hot guys wanted to screw me after that stuff in California, I'm not even being vain. It's just a fact, like, no offense, but he was not a looker. After the murder charges, the video's views increased substantially, increasing its viral reach. Fans of the video, who considered Kai an innocent hero for saving the woman back in Fresno, began to crowdfund his illegal fees. But when the jury was asked to decide on charges

of self-defense or murder, evidence presented to them overwhelmingly pointed towards outright murder. Kai took to the stand in his own defense and was combative during cross-examination. He made an outburst during his defense lawyer's closing arguments nearly leading to expulsion from the courtroom. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to 57 years in prison. He will serve 85% of that term before the possibility of parole, with the judge telling Kai, or his real name, Caleb Lawrence McGilvery, when you become eligible for parole, you will still be younger than Mr. Golfy was when you murdered him, who was 73 at the time. Kai's story goes to show you just how a person can go from hero to villain,

all in the swing of an axe. Sonoma County, California is one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the entire country. It produces a huge amount of hops, grapes, prunes, apples, dairy, and poultry products every single year. This is down to the vast swaths of fertile land in addition to the abundance of high-quality irrigation water. In addition to the vineyards and wineries that call Sonoma home, one might mistake the county for being a little slice of paradise. But during the early 1970s, a series of horrifying events in the hills around Sonoma's largest city, Santa Rosa, would make this heavenly place seem more like a circle of hell. On February 4th, 1972, two middle school

friends were returning from a visit to the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Maureen Louise Sterling and Yvonne Lisa Weber, both 12 years old, were last seen around 9pm hitchhiking on Guernaville Road, northeast of Santa Rosa. Neither of the girls arrived home that night. Their parents begged local authorities to find their girls, and find them they did. Their bodies were found December 28th, just a few miles north of Franz Valley Road. A single earring, orange beads, and a 14-karat gold necklace with cross were found at the scene. The cause of death could not be determined from the skeletal remains.

Then just a month later, 19-year-old art student Kim Wendy Allen was given a ride by two men on the evening of March 4th, 1972. They last saw her at approximately 5.20 p.m., hitchhiking to school and carrying a large wooden soy barrel with red Chinese characters on it. Her body was found the following day down an embankment in a creek bed. The two men who gave her a ride, one of whom was given and passed a polygraph test, were ruled out as suspects. This pattern of hitchhiker murders was repeated over and over again as the years went by, but only a handful had modus operandi that matched the previous murders. One in particular had an extremely disturbing additional detail that may shed some light on who the murderer or murderers were. Carolyn Nadine Davis, 14 years old, ran away from her home outside Anderson and Shasta County on February 6th, 1973 But disappeared July 15th after being dropped off by her grandmother at the Garberville post office

She was last seen hitchhiking that afternoon near the highway in Garberville Her body was discovered on July 31st just meters from where the remains of Sterling and Weber had been recovered seven months prior. However, this time, the cause of death could be determined and coroners stated that it was an obvious case of strychnine poisoning, 10 to 14 days before the body was discovered. A witchcraft symbol meaning carrier of spirits was found by her body. As was previously mentioned, an additional eight unsolved murders of female victims have been linked to the unknown murderer, yet not a single conviction had been handed down in connection with any of them. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't a few prevailing theories on the

murderer's true identity. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., the Hillside Stranglers of Los Angeles, were seriously considered as suspects at one point. The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of three escorts who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles between October and early November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not escorts, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods that the media attention and subsequent hillside strangler moniker came to prominence. However, there was insufficient evidence to link either Bianchi or Buono to the Sonoma County murders, so we must

look elsewhere for conclusive proof. Another suspect in the case was Frederick Manali, a 41-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College creative writing instructor. In August of 1976, Manali was involved in a fatal head-on collision on Highway 12. A CHP officer cleared the scene, but they discovered something extremely disturbing. In addition to a large amount of creative writing work Manali had in his possession, police discovered that the instructor cultivated another form of creativity, drawing. But these weren't still life or landscape drawings, they were scenes depicting sadomasochistic acts committed on a young woman. Investigators were easily able to identify the woman in question from the quality of the sketches.

It was Kim Wendy Allen, the second victim in the series of murders. Yet despite searches of Manali's home, investigators were unable to find a credible link between the sketches and murders themselves. Another suspect in the case was none other than the subject of a recent Netflix-made movie, Ted Bundy. After the prolific murderer's capture of similar crimes in Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, Ted Bundy was heavily suspected as the Sonoma County hitchhiker killer. The links between the naked bodies and the Sonoma victims and the extreme venereal nature of Bundy's crimes were obvious. It turned out that Bundy had indeed spent time in the neighboring Marin County, but was ruled out by a Sonoma County detective in the 1970s and again in 1989. This was down to detailed credit card records that revealed Bundy was all

the way up the coast in Washington state on the dates of some of the disappearances. An additional suspect in the murders is another famous name, the Zodiac Killer. Investigators were forced to consider the Zodiac Killer as a possible perpetrator due to similarities between an unknown symbol on his January 29, 1974, exorcist letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he claims 37 victims, and the Chinese characters on the missing soy barrel carried by Kim Allen. Also, the Zodiac had written a letter delivered to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 9th, 1969. In it, he stated an intention to vary his modus operandi in an attempt to confuse detectives and thus evade capture. I shall no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders. They shall look like

routine robberies, killings of anger, plus a few fake accidents, etc. Naturally, the consideration of the Zodiac Killer leads us to one Arthur Lee Allen. Allen owned a mobile home at Sunset Trailer Park in Santa Rosa at the time of the murders. He had also been fired from his Valley Springs Elementary School teaching position for suspected inappropriate touching of children in 1968. Allen was arrested on September 27, 1974 by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office for that exact charge in an unrelated case involving another young boy. He pleaded guilty on March 14, 1975 and was in prison at Atascadero State Hospital until late 1977. This would indeed match the time period for some of the murders.

What's more, Robert Grace Smith, in his book Zodiac Unmasked, claims that a Sonoma County sheriff revealed that chipmunk hairs were found on all of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker's victims and that Allen had been collecting and studying the same species. It would be possible that since the bodies were dumped outdoors that a few chipmunk hairs might be present on one or two of them, but all of them seems like far more than just a coincidence. Alan was the main suspect in the Zodiac case for more than 30 years, until his DNA was compared to a partial DNA profile obtained from saliva recovered on the underside of a postage stamp and envelopes from verified Zodiac letters.

Results were a conclusive non-match. Fingerprints and blood recovered from the taxicab of Zodiac murder victim Paul Stein, a writer's palm print found on the Zodiac letter of January 29th, 1974, and handwriting examples fail to identify Allen as the Zodiac. In practice, this evidence would have exonerated Allen should he had ever stood trial for the charges, so we are essentially forced to look elsewhere for clues to the murderer's identity, but given that almost 50 years later, each murder remains distinctly clear, just who was murdering hitchhikers in the hills around Santa Rosa? One of the worst nights of my life was December 28th, 2013.

To put it bluntly and in as few words as possible, a tough Christmas had been rough on my mental health. Then a straight up shouting match with my mom just kind of finished me off. I stormed out of our family home, screaming profanity and swearing that they'd never see me again. Yep, I was that petulant teenager. Sure, I'd forgotten my phone and wallet, but was I way too proud to go back and get them? You bet I was. So in my fit of only partially warranted rage, I somehow decided it would be a good idea to try to hitchhike to my friend's house so I could stay the night there. I'd never hitchhiked before. I don't think I'd even held my thumb out for a cab at this point in my life. But there I was, stood on a stretch of Florida highway trying to catch the attention of a passing driver.

To my surprise, someone actually pulled over pretty quickly, and not the hippie bus rust bucket I'd been visualizing either. It was one of those high-end Chevys, I'm not sure which model, and the guy behind the wheel looked like he had a few dollars. I mean, he was the archetypical rich dad type, absolutely nothing to indicate that he was anything but nice and well-meaning. Hop in, he calls out from the open passenger window. I couldn't believe my luck. Like, not only was I about to actually hitchhike for the first time, which felt pretty cool, not gonna lie, but I was about to do it in style. I can't tell the difference between faux leather and the real deal, but when you're in an air conditioned sedan that still has that new car smell at 17, who cares? You feel as grown up as you can.

So the guy asked me why I'm hitchhiking and I'll be honest, I may have given him a totally hopped up version of events which totally made me out to be the victim. Abuse of parents, poor me, blah blah blah. Naturally he takes this as gospel and starts telling me how his father was an alcoholic, how he sympathized with my situation. I asked him to take me as far down the road as he could, and that I had a friend that lived about 30 minutes drive away. He says cool and down the highway we go. As he's driving, we talk a lot more about family.

He pops the glove box and boom, there's a picture of his kids. As I'm looking at his little girls, he starts telling me how important he thinks family is, especially to those of us that come from less than stable backgrounds. Then he said something that seemed completely out of character. We're pulling into a gas station after he mentions needing to fill up, continuing the family convo in segments if that makes any sense. One minute he'll stop talking because he needs to focus on a turn or a lane switch, then he carries on.

So it was almost out of nowhere when he says something like, we have to protect our families from our true natures. I didn't know what to say to that. Not in the moment, so I just kind of stayed quiet as he gets out of the car and starts filling up the tank. I had a few minutes to process those words, and the more I thought about them, the more I realized that hitchhiking might not have been such a good idea. When he gets back in after paying for the gas, there's a few moments of quiet as I'm still trying to work out just what

he meant by his last statement. So I just asked. I straight up asked him what he meant by something so ominous. It'll be easier if I show you. Ever wonder what it would feel like to tuck and roll out of a moving vehicle? Ever try to imagine it because you're literally about to do it and you're pretty sure it'd kill you at the speed you're traveling? Probably not. I hadn't. Not until that moment right there. But somehow I convinced myself that I was just being overly dramatic. Too little too late, huh? So I just stayed in the car. I didn't even ask for him to pull over or anything. Christ, looking back at it, I wasn't even ask for him to pull over or anything. Christ, looking back at

it, I wasn't sure what was going through my head at all. Just that I really, really didn't want to be around this guy anymore. He'd gone from nice and normal to moody and creepy in light speed. You know, everyone has secrets. He says after pulling into a dark commercial lot and shutting the engine off So imagine that line spoken as creepily as you can imagine Then double it, and that's what this guy sounded like I kept my tone polite up until that point Like I needed this dude to get to my friend's house But I was all out of cool by then And I'm literally about to ask him what he's talking about

When he puts his hand on my thigh. Doesn't just put it there, he puts his hand there and squeezes. Little side note here, I am not in the least bit homophobic. An older cousin of mine came out as gay long before this ever happened and aside from a great uncle whose mentality seems to be firmly rooted in the 1920s, everyone in the family just accepted him for who he is. So this isn't me like, oh god it was scary cause a gay dude touched me, because really I don't think this guy was even gay. Like I said, he had pictures of his kid, mentioned his wife, even complained about his in-laws a little during our little family talk. Not that that rules out him being in the closet. Look,

what I'm trying to say is, he did what he did because he was a predator. He saw someone vulnerable, he apparently had a rough childhood or family background, and saw someone he could manipulate. It was the look in his eyes, man. Not this vulnerable I like you look. It was like a hunger. That's the only way I can describe it. Like an excitement before a feast. I just hit him. I'm not some tough guy. I don't do MMA. I don't think I've even landed the punch properly, but I threw it hard enough to let him know that he was not about to have his way with me in a dark parking lot in the middle of winter. Then I tried to undo my seatbelt. Tried being the operative word.

I pushed a little red button and absolutely nothing happened. No clicking or catching of mechanisms. Nothing. You should have seen this guy smile when that happened. I will never, ever forget that look in his eye. Pure predator. I'm not even ashamed to admit that I started screaming for help like a little kid. But ever have a nightmare where you try to scream but your voice keeps kind of catching in your throat? It's so scary because it can literally happen. And it happened to me, right there in that dark parking lot. I'm not even entirely sure what happened next I remember slamming my fist into the glass window and it popping all over me I know I must have gotten the door open somehow too There were headlights behind us, someone shouting as they intervened

The predatory driver reached under his seat and I thought for a moment that he was about to pull out a gun or something But then the seatbelt felt kind of loose So I just kind of rolled out of the car as it sped away. In retrospect, I think the guy had a way to unbuckle it, like jury-rigged under his seat, if that makes any sense. I mean, it was incredibly tight, and then it just wasn't. Then the cops are there. My rescuer must have called, and I'm just numb. Not only because I couldn't believe I'd almost gotten myself kidnapped or whatever. I mean, I have no idea what that guy was planning

for me other than it wasn't good or innocent. But it was the fact that my own foolish pride, my own self pity and lies could have been the things really responsible for what could have easily happened. An untimely death. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, rletsreadofficial, and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And join my discord to interact with me and other listeners directly. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for

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