27 True Scary Horror Stories | The Lets Read Podcast Episode 033

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during university I had a slew of creepy encounters this is stuck with me the most it started during my first class one day a group of us were walking together along campus and slowly members began branching off they ended up is just myself from the guy who I was not inclined to befriend only knew his name but I didn't want to be rude and not keep walking along with him he asked me where I was going and I tell him I normally take a nap between classes and was going into my dorms yes if he can see my suite normally this would be a no-brainer red flag but my particular building was renowned for being fancy and others frequently asked to see inside I say sure not wanting to be mean and thinking this guy will take a quick look around and give the typical jealous comments and then leave we go inside and I show him the basics doing so in a way that we ended back up at the entrance of the suite in this whole time he's not saying much and I'm only announcing things dryly so I was confident when I said a quick it's pretty nice see you around and then he was going to take his leave I turned around and went to my room did not show him any rooms or say where anyone stayed a few minutes later as I'm sitting my stuff down I turn around and he's there in the doorway he's silent I don't say anything because I do not want to invite him in I want him to go I just look at him then start picking up stuff and moving it around trying to look busy he slowly walks a couple of steps into the room and asks have you done the coursework yet I tell him no by this time I assume he is trying to hang out and tell him again that I'm planning on napping he doesn't even skip a beat and says that's okay I can watch you sleep and help you with it after I smile no tone then silence again I immediately tell him he needs to leave and follow him until he actually went out the locking doors and I know he can't follow me back in I told a lot of our friends about this and they were heavily creeped out and made a point not to leave us alone again ever we finished the year out and I haven't thought about this guy in a long time I did not know anything about him at all still only knew his name flash forward a year and some change to the next summer when I'm taking a bus ride home from a different part of campus so it is not my normal route we get to one of the points where the bus stops and waits until a certain time before it can leave again then everyone else that had been on the bus gets off at this stop at this point the driver starts talking to me asking me a lot of questions I did not think anything weird at first and answer what I thought were idle chat questions so which apartment are you in and what classes are you taking then as more and more questions just kept coming I started to feel uneasy with his mannerisms and became extremely vague in my answers I still don't know if he always intended to tell me this but he then stopped peppering me with questions and began spilling a story of how his son was in my math class the previous year and he knew all about me and started giving me a lot of family details it's at this point that I realized his son is the guy who wanted to watch me sleep all the details fit but I had to know for sure so I asked him if his son was named what his name was he smiles and says yes he then mentioned that he would like to start riding bikes with me and what I ride bikes with him and his son I was gathering my stuff by this point and had decided to get off the bus there are two doors one at the front and one halfway which was closest to me the doors stay open while the bus is at these stops so people can hop off and on and the driver normally gets off and takes a break as I'm getting my stuff and getting up the halfway door shuts I look again at the driver an older man but much larger than my petite frame and build he is now standing facing me but the front door is still open yes again will you ride bikes with us I want off the bus and think the only way is to pacify him I say yes and make my way to the front door not knowing how to get around him he looks pleased but asked where I'm going I try and tell him I've decided to walk home but he still blocks my way and tries to talk me out of it I'm firm and that's I want to walk from here but he will not move I'm standing in front of him wishing to move but my body is frozen in place slowly he decides give me your number and I'll let you go I really really don't want to do this but I also want off this bus immediately my first thought is to give a fake but I'm also glad I didn't as he immediately dials the number it was a test seeing my phone ring and watching me save his contact he moves enough that I slide by and make it off the bus after making it home I go to block his number and already have multiple missed calls and a voicemail of just him breathing the situation was reported and I did not see him on route for a long time but around a year later I was getting on another bus and notice he was back I never covered my face and backed off a public transit faster [Music] this is from my sophomore year of high school take in mind that some of the reasons why the whole scenario lasted so long was because I was extremely shy and was having problems with extreme anxiety this whole experience has helped me learn to speak up for myself and it was the beginning of the school year and I had a gym class as my first period I went to class normally for a few days but I had noticed that some girl had been staring at me off and on I didn't think it was anything to worry about and big mistake on my part one day before class started we were all hanging out in one corner of the gym listening to our teachers story of how he tripped and fell in a huge puddle of mud I was sitting on a pile of yoga mats staring off into space but still paying attention but then heard a girls voice say teacher I have a story to tell too I finally have found my best friend that I haven't seen in years she doesn't even recognize me I was snapped out of my staring spell and looked towards the voice to find that she was pointing directly at me I foolishly said oh no I remember you and read off the name that was written across her gym shirt Ellie because I didn't want to seem like a jerk for not remembering her Ellie instantly brightened up that day remembered her and then proceeded to lift herself up off the yoga mats and sit uncomfortably close to me enough that our entire bodies were squished together I didn't say anything because I didn't feel it was necessary to cause a huge problem out of this because there was obviously something up with her mentally and I didn't want to be rude about it the class went on and Ellie and I were not in the same group so I didn't have any problem with her that day the next few days we didn't have any assigned class groups so Ellie was trailing behind me like a dog she was starting to get extremely protective and forceful with me I don't get cold very easily but she insisted that I wear her jacket and would not leave me alone until I finally wore it she also started to say things about hurting my actual friends which was the final straw for me and do whatever you want to me but as soon as you bring my friends into it I'm going to do something about it I was finally going to bring it up to our principal putting that whole thing behind our class today had the option of either volleyball or walking around the perimeter of the room I decided to just walk around the room and had been doing that for around 15 minutes until I sat on the ground by the bleachers to tie my shoes Ellie dropped down to the ground - and watched me with extreme interest all of a sudden she grabbed my wrist and held our forearms together we have the same veins you want to know why because we were in the womb together I used to hug you when you were scared in the womb she said this line freaked me out a lot at the time because one our veins look nothing alike she had one visible vein while mine branch out into multiple and - we look nothing like and she was a year older than me I decided to run off to the bathroom before I really freaked out and stayed in there for almost the rest of the class I returned later for the end of class roll call and left to go to the locker room Ellie got dressed quickly and was just staring at me half-naked getting dressed and made me really uncomfortable aya lied and told her that I had to leave quickly because I had to meet with my boss at Olive Garden and hightailed it out of there into my next class my next class teacher who I trust dearly had called me up to talk to her privately in her class and she said that Ellie has been talking about me non-stop in the class that she has her in she recommended me to go to the police as soon as possible and she'll talk to the principal it was scared the life out of me what in the absolute god did my teacher know about Ellie that she would tell me to go the police of all people I called my mom and skipped the rest of the day I stayed home the next day and went to the police station with my mom they brought us into a room and I started off with just telling them the basic story of what was going on I didn't even say her name the guy that was talking to us said Ellie Smith I was dumbfounded how did he know exactly who I was talking about he went on talking about how she's in the police station a lot but couldn't go into specifics because she was a minor and this didn't help with my anxiety what did she do to be in the police station multiple times the police couldn't really do anything so the only thing I could do was switch my class I was angry because I hadn't made a few good friends in that gym class and I had to restart with a whole new class but at least I was away from Ali the new class went fine but over the course of the year I would always run into Ellie in the halls my friend even saw her turn around and look at me with one of the most terrifying faces she had ever seen in real life she would always yell things along the lines of I'm going to get you which was extremely unnerving for me I didn't want her near me or my friends so I began stepping up and telling the vice principal himself whenever one of these instances occurred this kept happening over the course of my sophomore year I was hoping that she would forget about me because I had figured out that we had never actually met before that gym class I never hung out with anyone other than my friend Paige in the time Ellie said we were best friends and I even checked all my yearbooks not one thing even mentioned Ellie Smith the morning of the first day of junior year and I ran into her before I even started my first class I tried not to make eye contact later that day the principal called me in and told me that Ellie said I flipped her off which I didn't I didn't even look at her this whole game with threats and random incoherence screeches continued on through my junior year as well and I feel like part of the whole high school experience was taken from me because I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out how to avoid her she graduated in thankfully was gone during my senior year this whole experience has honestly both traumatized me and helped me grow as a person I learned how to assert myself more than I ever had done before but I still swear I see her out of the corner of my eye it's caused some paranoia that still hasn't gone completely away [Music] there was a girl that's been stalking and harassing me since October of 2018 we were in the same class at high school six years ago she was super shy in her spoken class and barely had any friends I can't remember speaking to her more than once or twice through all of high school to me she didn't even exist then all of a sudden many months ago I woke up to a message in my facebook inbox that read F white people she is Asian from what country I do not know I thought this was really strange so I replied back what's going on she had blocked my messages I decided to just ignore it and go on with my life about a month had passed and I woke up to yet another message in my inbox she had sent me a screenshot of an Instagram account in my name no posts her followers just an empty account with my name I kind of freaked out a little and tried to reply but yet again she had blocked my messages I tried to find the account on Instagram but couldn't my name is very uncommon so the possibilities that this was another guy's account was very slim it certainly wasn't my account I was very confused and kind of scared that she had created an account with my name and would post things pretending to be me I contacted one of her high school friends and asked if she could deliver a message for me since I had no way of reaching her to my surprise they weren't friends anymore and hadn't spoken in months I told my closest friends about what had been happening and they told me that they had received some strange messages too I was seriously confused by this point this one girl who nobody talked to or had any kind of relationship with was sending pictures of Instagram accounts weird memes and three words sentences that made zero sense to me and many of my friends I tried to think of why she did this and had we treated her badly at some point but I couldn't think of anything that we had done I remember giving her a piece of gum one day but that's about as close as any communication happened between us I decided I would just try to ignore her and hope she wouldn't send me any more messages but then around Christmastime I woke up to my Facebook exploding with notifications and messages I think I had around a good hundred plus notifications she had been sharing all of my profile pictures and posts I'm seriously freaking out at this point and opened my messages I've received 50 to 60 messages that all read and your life I tried to message her again but surprise surprise she had blocked my messages I was becoming really angry at this point I clicked on her Facebook profile to block her and get rid of her for good before I went to block her I scrolled down her wall she had been sharing literally hundreds of posts and pictures of me my friends and some other people had no idea who they were I did some detective work and found her sisters Facebook profile and decided to send her a message I took screenshots of everything she had done and sent it to her asking why she was doing this she freaked out when she saw what her crazy stalker sister had done and the stalker had deleted her sister on Facebook because of an argument they had had around October when this all started so she hadn't seen anything she had done she promised me she would talk to her crazy stalker sister and make her stop I received a message from her sister a few hours later that she had talked to the stalker and promised she would stop and she apologized I was so happy this finally would be over and I thanked her another few months passes and we are now in February of 2019 I hadn't received any messages since I talked to her sister and I had honestly forgot about everything that had happened two days ago I was playing some games with my friends on my PC and talking on discord my phone was on the table and I saw it light up once and I had received a notification I wouldn't bother to check it before the game was done a few seconds after I get another one and another one I could see my phone in the corner of my eye notifications came swarming in then I remember the crazy stalker girl and got a really awful feeling of my stomach praying this wasn't her again I stopped playing and picked up my phone notifications still coming in the stalker was sharing my pictures and posts yet again and all had a caption like and your life and I hope you die I instantly blocked her a few minutes later it happened again someone with another username was sharing my pictures I blocked that account instantly she had created almost 10 accounts and I was desperately blocking all of them as fast as I could as soon as I saw a notification I sent her sister a message again and told her I was going to report this to the police if she wouldn't stop she told me she would talk to her angry confused and kind of scared I went back to the gaming session talking to my friends about it went to sleep a few hours later I woke up late the next day it was hard to sleep after thinking about all that was happening my cousin had received some messages from my crazy stalker she had told him that I owed her money I kept my calm and told him about everything and said that he should just go with it I wanted to see where this was going she thought my cousin was my father he is a lot older than me and I could see why she would think that she had a long conversation where she claimed that I had both stolen and hacked her phone and lent money from her and that I was the reason she lost her scholarship and had to move she said I owed her ten thousand dollars which later became fifty thousand and then again she raised the amount to a hundred thousand later in the conversation all of this of course is some crazy lie I'm so confused as to why she is doing this to me I have no idea what I've done to her and I'm going to report this to the police tomorrow I'm really scared of what she might accuse me up next or as she is going to show up on my door six years after the last time I saw her so update I just came back home after talking with the police they told me I had a straw case an could press charges if I wanted to I decided not to do it for now I don't want to make it harder than it has to be and we'll give her one last chance to stop it we'll call her today and tell her to stop or face charges and he further contact with me or my family will cause her to see consequences either way I'm pretty much guaranteed to get her restraining order if she doesn't comply I would also like to add that I do not think she's a violent person she's never threatened my life directly nor have I ever feared for my life this plays a huge part of why I didn't press charges I firmly believe that something terrible has happened to her within the last year and that she is really sick and in need of help her family knows about the situation and it's up to them or the authorities to make sure she gets the help that she needs it what bothered me the most about this whole situation was the false accusations and not the sharing of pictures and messages itself I'm happy with my decision and I hope I made the right call [Music] this is my mom and dad's story it was their honeymoon they married in August 1980 in Australia and they were driving along the Bruce Highway into a city called Rockhampton Queensland it was late at night around 8:00 p.m. ish and they had been driving most of the day there was a very long stretch of road before you come into the city that is just Bush kilometers of it at night the bush can be very scary they had not passed cars for some time probably an hour or two out of nowhere headlights appeared a long way behind them in their rearview mirror and that's fine whatever they keep driving as normal then the headlights start getting closer and closer dad is driving and says something like what a bloody turkey how fast he's driving the car comes right up to them with their high beams on and follows him for about five minutes like that mum and dad have a conversation about why can't the person just overtake them then the car completely backs off like slows right down almost to a complete stop hangs back about one to two kilometres away for a good 10 to 15 minutes mum and dad both think that was super weird and creepy but whatever they just keep driving and then the car speeds up again tailgating high beams and sort of swerving into the other lane as if to overtake them this goes on for another five ish minutes mum and dad are both really scared now remember this is the days before mobiles and cell phones and besides there would have been no reception in that area to call for help even if they had them it's not over yet the car backs off again but as far as before the car hangs back there for about a minute before hitting the gas and absolutely flying past mum and dad and finally overtaking them there appeared to be one person in the car but they couldn't really see what they look like there was also no number plate on the car to identify it and I know dad had told me heaps of times before I actually can't remember what sort of car was now I feel like it was a sort of sedan thing definitely white and the car disappears up the road as if it were never there mum and dad are shaken to their core but pleased it was seemingly over not done yet the road now becomes a bit more windy previously was almost straight mum and dad come round the corner in the cars parked in the middle of the road facing them high beams on both the driver and passenger doors wide open and the man they could now see it was a man standing in front of the car with his arms spread wide spread as if to make them stop the car mum was screaming at dad just hit him don't stop just hit him and my dad being the bloody hero that he is did not stop and drove around the man's car on the right-hand side of it which be the passenger's side as it was parked facing them the man tried to get in front of dad I assumed to stop him from driving off as he made this maneuver but couldn't quite get there in time he was very close to the car and dad nearly hit him that absolutely floored it he said he was doing around 130 to 140 km/h to get away from the man and they aren't sure how long they drove like that for but they didn't slow back to the speed limit and till they started to come into the city limits they made it to their hotel and parked the car at the back of the hotel so that you couldn't see it from the road because it was on the side of the highway and passing traffic could see the cars parked there mum was quite hysterical and told the reception lady what had happened they called the police and reported it but they never found the car or the driver fast forward many years later mum was watching the news and Ivan Milat had just been arrested mum screamed and called dad into the lounge room they both agreed it was the man they saw they were absolutely adamant I can't find evidence to suggest Ivan Milat was active in Queensland during that time but I certainly won't call mom and dad Liars because of what they saw I imagine it was another creepy hillbilly who looked very similar to the backpack murderer a few years ago I was watching a movie at my mom's place though at the time she was staying on site at an animal rescue the rescue was a house on a couple of acres that have been converted into a rescue the house itself more or less functioned as a normal home with the exception of a few rooms that have been converted it into kitten nurseries or to keep hutches in but the backyard criss-crossed with pens for the rescue animals that were surrounding properties but it was kilometres away from the nearest station and very difficult to reach without a car it was about 9:00 p.m. post dinner and all manner of creatures were sleeping soundly in their beds most notably two dingo healer crossbreeds these two dogs belonged to the owner and had the run of the property sleeping on kennels on the veranda they were little darlings once he got to know them but quite intimidating when he first met Grouse and all opening onto the same veranda was laundry that functioned as a second kitchen as this laundry opened from the backyard and the rescue staff kept the food dishes and utensils for the animals meals in the laundry rather than tracking muck through the house on their way to the kitchen we were watching the movie on my laptop about 15 to 20 minutes into you are next when someone knocked at the front door my mom immediately told me not to answer it but when I asked why she had no explanation my mum has pretty great intuition but since the dogs weren't going off I answered anyways I swung open the wood paneled door but left the flyscreen locked as a concession to her a soft male voice came out of the dark the porch lights apparently needed replacing I could make out his height five nine body shape thin as heck a beard and not much else he asked for someone whose name I had never heard when I told him there was no one here by that name he said he was waiting for a taxi but then he said he needed a taxi and asked to come inside to call one his speech was meandering by this time my mom had joined me by the door pointing at the window the door was one of those single panels with glass windows from door to ceiling beside it as we had the lights on inside and it was pitch-black night outside we couldn't see the caller but he had had all the time in the world to see us worried she gave the caller directions to a payphone down the street the caller insisted he needed to come inside to call a taxi I insisted he used the pay phone instead it became quite angry and demanded we let him in afraid about being the only ones home that evening my mom finally snapped and told him she'd call the police if he didn't go away already dialing triple zero on tear mobile eventually he stopped arguing in the prolonged silence suggested he was gone not wanting to return to the couch which was in full view of the doors glass windows as well as from the veranda the back wall was floor-to-ceiling glass panels we occupied our time in the kitchen waiting we heard another knock on the door nervous we peered through the glass until we could make out blue and red flashing lights we opened the door to two officers and started relaying the story suddenly the officer closest to the door asked is this yours we peered around the doorframe a knife lay on the windowsill a knife my mother immediately recognized as being used for the rescue animals meal prep the officers said the description reminded them of a local homeless man who was known for drinking far too much and sleeping it off in people's sheds as such they were quick to dismiss it as a serious threat but afterwards my mother and I kept making creepy realizations that knife came from the laundry in the backyard how did the stranger get it without setting off the dogs without setting off any of the rescue animals how long had even hanging around the backyard at getting to know the animals had he been watching us - what exactly did he plan to do with that knife if we had opened the door [Music] I've encountered a person that I'll call window man but has really messed me up this happened in the summer of 2018 so about eight months ago some background story to help better understand the situation I was in and the layout of the apartment my mom and I moved into this one-room apartment with one of my mom's colleagues all females for a short period of time about three months to be able to save up some money for another apartment that we currently live in so the apartment had a small bathroom and shower a kitchen merged with the living room a small room separated by a sliding door and a window balcony we lived on the first floor and even I being the short five foot four girl managed to climb up into the window when I forgot my keys at home since the colleague needed some privacy she chose to live in the small room my mom would sleep on the couch in the living room and I'd sleep on the balcony on a mattress now when I would lay on my mattress from my point of view I'd see the living room and the couch on my right and the windows on my left though there were some behind me that I wasn't really able to see now the actual story we moved in and everything was going great the first month or so I felt quite safe even though I was very suspicious from the very start of the windows since we lived on the first floor and I should mention that I've never experienced anything paranormal nor have I had sleep paralysis before so one night I wake up or at least I think so I can't move I can only blink my eyes and move my head I look over to the windows and see what looks like a third of a man's head and a hand peeking through the window I tried to scream and get up but I couldn't move or do anything I was so terrified I saw the man slowly closing the window as if he was trying to not make any sound and lower his head as if he were leaving I was freaking out but still couldn't move I saw my mom on my right sleeping on the couch and on my left my hand was hanging off the mattress and Mike was head-butting it as if he was trying to wake me up I tried to scream again a few times but it doesn't work I'm hysterical at this point and I feel tears welling up in my eyes suddenly I wake up I shoot up from my bed my cat still next to the mattress and my mom still in the couch sleeping in the same position I've seen her in I look out the window panicking and it's locked from the inside just like I left it before going to sleep I unlocked it and opened it making sure that there's nobody outside I closed and locked the window and lay back down sobbing I just cried myself to sleep that night a few days later I've decided to tell my mom about the dream I didn't want to at first because I thought that she wouldn't pay much attention to it but since it had me so on edge I told her and just as I expected she told me that I've been listening to too many horror stories and didn't take me too seriously after maybe a week I forgot about the dream and moved on and then one evening everything was going fine I was preparing myself for the next day since I had to do a big presentation in front of the whole class and I wanted to look my best it was about half past midnight I took a shower brush my teeth and went to sleep as usual my mom was still up on her phone but about to go to sleep I doze off peacefully but suddenly I wake up for no reason and have the massive urge to look behind me at the windows to my horror I saw a tall man in my window about halfway in with one leg almost on the floor I panicked and thought that I was dreaming again but quickly realized that I can move so no I wasn't dreaming still being in a state of fear and confusion I whispered oh my god and did my complete horror the man looked up all dark but eyes shining in the moonlight put on the creepiest ear-to-ear grin but a finger to his lips and said Shh in the most menacing way ever I had no idea what to do so I said louder oh my god and then I jumped and screamed and started screaming like a banshee the guy got startled and almost fell back so I took the opportunity enclosed and locked the window just as he was about to try to get back in my screaming woke my mom up and she ran up asking what had happened I started nervously explaining all that had happened and then we saw the dude climb up to our window again but the one right next to me trying to open it as I saw that I screamed even louder and as he was opening it I pushed him and he fell down calling me every name under the Sun he then tried to make up some terrible excuse but in my panic state I started yelling at him at the top of my lungs to get out I kept on yelling for about 5 minutes like a total crazy person until the guy finally said something along the lines of fine then almost as if I was obliged to let him in and started walking away I slammed all the windows shut and locked them sat down on my mattress and proceeded to sob loudly as my mom was next to me trying to calm me down we thought that was it but a few minutes later I saw him again climbing up our balcony and I started screaming again open one of the windows and yelled so loud that I almost lost my voice I closed and locked the windows and my mom and I went to the guard to tell him what had happened I described the man to him as best that I could but since it was dark I couldn't say much about his appearance he told us to just go home and stay calm that he'll handle the situation when we were going back we saw about eight neighbors of ours standing outside wondering what had happened they all gave us sympathetic look says we went back home my mom gave me some medicine to help me calm down and I was crying and shaking vigorously for about an hour until I was finally so exhausted that I just went to sleep with her since I didn't want to sleep on the balcony anymore the next day I showed up to school looking like trash and when I told someone what happened the other didn't believe me or would brush it off saying it's fine you're all right now after a few days my mom confronted me about it and said she was sorry that she didn't take my dream seriously though I wasn't mad at all just shocked she said that she was just about to fall asleep but woke up to me screaming she told me that my screams were the most blood-curdling one she had ever heard in her life but the scariest part is that I woke up for no reason I just had the massive urge to look back there was absolutely no noise when the man opened the window and was climbing in I even asked my mother if she had heard anything and she said that no it was absolutely silent who knows what the man would have done if I hadn't have woken up though I'm glad I didn't have to find out the fact that also really shook me is that I had a dream of something similar happening about three weeks before it actually happened in real life though sadly I don't know what happened to that man if he was arrested or not we never saw him again but either way I'm just glad that we moved out of an apartment soon later [Music] so one day about six years ago on a youtube comment section which I am convinced comprises the bowels of the Internet there was some guy posting full of bravado and self praise about everything under the Sun while putting other people down in the fashion that I found unacceptable even though he did have excellent grammatical and linguistic skills in particular he was singing his praises about his chess playing abilities which he clearly took much pride in being the snarky booger that I am I called him out on it since he was definitely over the top and it sounded like a load of garbage I mean the guy stated that he was one of the top chess players in the world and went on and on about it which I highly doubt was true really it was nothing more than the typical playful banner of noise and nastiness that his youtube comment sections this guy however had narcissistic personality disorder during the few comments we exchanged he admitted as much but thought it was one of his biggest strengths rather than weaknesses and saw no reason to get help for it from my understanding of NPD's this is not uncommon anyways having angered this guy he made it his mission for about four weeks to research me extensively by extensively I mean that he probably made me his full-time job I try to keep my social media accounts quite separate by using different usernames and posting few details about myself but within the first week this guy managed to locate most of my accounts and spent hours and hours posting insulting nasty comments in response to my YouTube videos my tweets my comments at Facebook comments etc he doxed me finding my PhD math thesis posting it online repeatedly in criticizing my methodology which was ridiculous my PhD thesis was nominated for awards and laid out the foundation of a new area of combinatorics I mean this means that the dude read my PhD thesis several hundred pages just to criticize me given that it's in math that alone is incredibly creepy he responded to every YouTube video I had posted taunting me with nasty comments and replied to hundreds of my posts even 5 plus years old attacking me Lynn every detail of anything I said we were talking small typos to some unintentional grammatical errors and a few bursts of outrage I'm a gay man on many LGBT rights websites it's hard to sometimes not be frustrated I mean this guy must have spent hundreds of hours researching me and posting in response to me from fairly old posts while nobody else seemed to care it was terrifying to me to get daily notifications from him posting my full name everywhere with detailed information about my location and life fortunately I live in a different continent than he did even though he made some threats to come visit me I figured it was best to ignore him but they went on for as I said about four weeks until some woman online and a very talented chess player made the mistake of insulting him about his grandiose delusions of being a master chess player at which point he thankfully shifted sites to her I messaged her privately and warned her about this unstable guy but he still stalked her for several months daxing her end demanding that she play him games of chess online at the threat of more daxing telling her that she would play him on such a server at such-and-such a time or else she would forfeit and be scorned much of the time she said she had never heard of the obscure servers he mentioned but he demanded that she comply I finally lost track of him but his posts remained online containing all my personal information which is disturbing seeing as I try to keep my social media accounts and my real life as separate as I can manage I'm not ashamed of anything I say online but I want the division and some reasonable level of anonymity all the same so to the crazy dude proud of his narcissistic personality disorder I hope we never meet again and I hope that others remain safe from you I have since learned to be much more careful about my online interactions and to not push buttons just for the sake of doing so because sometimes it just isn't safe [Music] this happened in 2006 in Provo Utah two childhood friends and I had just moved from a small town to start college there are two colleges in the area one in Brigham Young University predominantly Mormon population and the other was a small state college at the time it's now a University of course us non-mormon boys end up finding an amazing old house for rent rights in the epicenter of zoobi Ville a term used by non BYU kids referring to students at BYU it's loosely based on the premise that at one time the students weren't allowed to leave the campus therefore they were trapped there like zoo animals knowing that we are technically in the territory for approval housing for BYU standards we figured we were in a pretty alright area Bazaar area but nothing crazy we literally were the only party house I knew of within a few square miles one day during our first weekend at the house we hear someone speak loudly in front of her house so naturally we investigate we find a man I'd say in his early 40s doing pull-ups from a limb of her tree he sees us looking out the open door and yells for us to come introduce ourselves since we were his new neighbors this guy was ripped not just for a 40-something year old I'm saying you can see every fiber of his muscles as we approach I reach out my hand and introduce myself he quickly smacks my hand away and firmly says never touch a black man's hand I gave a short-lived giggle as I realized he was dead serious to clarify he was african-american he then introduces himself as Sherrod the gatekeeper of heaven but his real name is Allen I've been sent there by God himself to keep anyone but the almighty white man out of heaven he tells us he is in Jesus's original body but he has adapted it to be fit for defending heaven that his arms are his rifle stocks when I asked him where he lives sure enough he points to the very next house great I never felt threatened by the guy but also always kept my wits about me when he was around I didn't know the volatility of his mental state weeks go by with small interactions him doing push-ups in our grass pull-ups from our tree while sharing ridiculous stories about his past he explained to us that you must put your heart against Mother Earth to live a long healthy life and that if he doesn't do it bad things will happen this leads to when things starts going from comical to creepy we hadn't noticed that we hadn't seen him in our yard for a few days so when we saw him walking out of his house my buddy yelled at him I haven't seen you working out you better get on it or bad things will start to happen sherrod visibly starts limping over explains that he was riding his bike back from shooting pool Jesus also taught him how to play pool and helped him fight off a motorcycle gang while he was there and some woman the Antichrist had seen him coming and stuck her foot into his spokes and sent him flying and he landed on his heart so he needs to give it time to heal and the way he told this story was hilarious he didn't mean it to be but it took everything we had not to bust up laughing well as bad random fortune would have it Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter died of a freak accident the following day my buddy and I were getting home from work right at the same time the following day when Sherrod comes running over you knew pointing right at my friend you knew that I wasn't putting my heart to the ground that something bad was going to happen we didn't know about Irwin's death so we're both thinking how what happened what has he done mother earth couldn't feel my heartbeat so she had to take a person of nature to remind me that I could never stop she took that crocodile hunter the Crocodile Hunter this is when he decided we were more than just neighbors we were prophets he named my friend peep sight because he can see the future he named me honcho he said I was very special and him the equivalent of God on earth and that everyone including him and peep sites must worship me okay weird but this guy clearly is mentally unstable I have an aunt with paranoid schizophrenia so I'm thinking with super qualified medical knowledge that he suffers from the same thing this is exactly something she would say but instead of me being God it would be Axl Rose as weird as things are getting with the guy we have no reason to fear him he is always very energetic and happy to see us I mean he would never do anything bad to a God or prophet right but he did get weirder by the day the day after Sherrod gave us our new titles I hear peep sites yell for me in a nervous tone to come to the back door and there they stood Sherrod is opening a bottle of olive oil and telling my buddy to take his shirt off he's telling us he needs to anoint us I got a bless those wings he said at this point I'm thinking this whole thing has run its course and is now just plain annoying we both tell him no one absolutely not not taking our shirts off so you can rub oil on us we settle on letting him rub a drop on our foreheads hoping that will make him leave us alone he gave me the bottle of olive oil and said I can now start blessing those who deserve it and told my friend that he needs to protect the house and to make everyone who comes over say praise Jesus if they can't or won't say it it's because they're demons they knocked on our door the very next day and nassif he could come in friend yelled let me hear you say praise Jesus he swore and walked away guess that wasn't weird at all weeks go by with the average interactions we've all been pretty disengaging with him as like I said the hilarity of the situation is worn off one afternoon while loading my suitcase into my car when he pops up out of nowhere where are you going and this is where the weirdest stuff happened was Sherrod and the only time I felt nervous that something might go down he pulls out a bag of razor blades and asked if I can do him a favor he tells me that Jesus ordered him to save all his razors he uses the shave his head and that one day someone important will come along that can take them and dump them into the ocean for him yeah not gonna happen I tell him there's no way I will be getting a bag of razors past security and I would never dump anything into the ocean let alone razor blades he tells me that Jesus will make sure security won't find the bag and nothing bad will happen if they are in the ocean I'm adamant that this is not going to happen and with every no I can see him get a little angrier a little more intense this was the anger from desperation and you know the saying desperate times call for desperate measures so this put me on high alert I mean he literally has hundreds of razor blades in his hand God knows what kind of disease you could get if one of those cut you he truly believed this is how the story was supposed to go after what seemed like an hour-long discussion / argument it was probably 10 minutes in reality he was defeated he stormed off muttering beneath his breath that I couldn't make out turned and screamed obscenities at me multiple times but that was the end of the conversation after spending a week in Hawaii a week without dealing with the crazy neighbor anxiety of having to deal with him hit while on my way home however luck was on my side while I was gone sherrod was arrested I can't remember the exact charges but it was bad I want to say some form of assault and various drug charges as well we also found out this wasn't the first time and that the house next door was a halfway house so this happened about six months ago I'm originally from a town in the north of the UK but now was living in a different part of the country at the time for university I was just going into my second year so I had moved from student accommodations like halls to a house share with four other girls we were in a pretty nice house in a small dead-end street and all the shops and bars were at the end of our street I was in a bedroom that was on the bottom floor and at the front of the house it had originally been a living room but had been changed into a bedroom for student housing because it used to be a living room the window was a huge bay window that took up the entire length of the front wall the house had a big driveway in a front garden both with fences around this meant that you couldn't walk past the front of the house without intending to be there you would have to walk up the driveway I have been living in the house for about two weeks when this happened on this particular night there was only two of us and as our other three roommates had gone home for the weekend the other girl that was in had a second-floor bedroom also on the front of the house it was around 2:00 a.m. and I was sat in bed watching Netflix I didn't usually stay up this late but I was talking to a new boy at the time and I would often stay up late just to talk to him sad I know but new relationships are exciting I remember wanting to go to sleep at about 12:30 and deciding to stay up for a bit longer to talk to him and now I'm so glad that I did at this time I was quite naive and didn't really think much about the dangers of not locking doors and leaving windows open I grew up in a very nice area where we didn't even really to lock our doors and so I still wasn't out of this mindset this experience has definitely changed that because of this I had one of my windows slightly open and my curtains were open the curtains didn't matter too much because the way the house was built the garden and trees were right in front of my window meaning no one could see in unless they stood directly in front of it being naive I didn't think there was a possibility that anyone would try to I was half lying down half sitting up in bed with my laptop in front of me I didn't have my laptop on too high of volume as although she was upstairs there was another girl in the house and I wanted to be respectful all of a sudden I saw shadow go past my window like a person walking past I immediately froze like I mentioned earlier there was no way someone could just walk past and unless they walked down my driveway and were specifically coming to my house I thought maybe someone had walked down the wrong driveway or was possibly cutting through and was going to jump the fence to another house something didn't sit right about this at all however so I left my laptop running and just looked at the window for a second I couldn't see out the window at all since it was so dark outside but I could make out shadows on the wall just next to it for a second there was nothing then a shadow of a man went past in the shadow of another man about two seconds afterwards at this point I knew something was wrong and I shut my laptop immediately in the hope that if they looked in the window they wouldn't see me a bit of time went past maybe like a minute or two and I just sat in the pitch-black waiting to see if I saw anything else after this bit of time went by another shadow of a man went past my window in the opposite direction as if they had both walked in front of my window into the back of the house but only one came back I was certain at this point that they were doing something wrong but for some reason I could not move my brain was trying to process a million things at once and I was so scared that I froze I felt like if I moved then they would know I was there and I had no idea whether this was a good thing or a bad thing for all I knew they could have been hoping for a young 19 year old girl to be inside and I didn't want to run the risk of letting them know that there was I was also completely naked under my covers and it definitely crossed my mind that if I got up and they could see in the windows they would see me after what felt like an eternity of just sitting waiting I heard a loud bang on my window it sounded like someone had hit something such as a rock off the window with force I assumed they were trying to break the window and panicked hugely but still couldn't move I can't explain what was going through my mind but it was almost like I was waiting for a completely definitive thing to happen before I got up as if I was being overdramatic or something after the loud noise I would say maybe thirty Seconds when passed and then all of a sudden my curtain started moving and I see a hand come round the side of them to get them out of the way they were big curtains and my open Abul windows were on either side of the big window meaning they were slightly blocked even by the open curtains I then looked over to the curtains and see a figure of a man climbing through my window he was halfway through my window with the top half of his body inside my room this is when my mind finally decided that this was a fight or flight situation and I shot up and ran towards my door on the other side of the room it was locked so I had to fumble for the key turn it and then open the door and run all the while making a huge amount of noise I ran up the stairs and knocked on my roommates room still completely naked I should add so the image she must have gotten when she opened the door is quite amusing to think about she opened the door almost immediately which I found odd for it being 2 a.m. but I was thankful nonetheless I told her what had happened and we locked her door and started panicking neither of us knew what to do as we had never been in a situation like this before being stupid and young I decided to ring my mum completely not helpful to the situation but I wasn't thinking straight and she told me to ring the police immediately so we rang the police and because we didn't know if the men were in the house or not they arrived within two minutes and as if it may have been an act of burglary I left my laptop and all my possessions in my room other than my phone because it happened to be in my hand when I ran so if they were in my room and they would have plenty to take the police arrived and we threw down some keys from the top window to them so they could let themselves in they searched the whole house top to bottom and found no one I went down when they assured us it was safe and checked my room and nothing had been taken I knew for sure they mustn't have even come into my room at all as my laptop was clear as day on my bed and would have been the first thing they had seen if they had the police agreed that I must have scared them off by getting up as they mustn't have been expecting anyone to be in they must have thought the room was a living room as it made sense for it to be and have been expecting to rob the house why everyone was to sleep upstairs I had this crazy thought process through all of this where I started wondering if I had seen what I thought I had and started doubting myself and wondering if I was just insane but when I went down to check my room my window had been completely open to his fullest extent I had opened it only a crack at most and this just confirmed that what I had seen was completely real I learned a valuable lesson about leaving windows open that day for sure while the police were there they actually got radioed about an attempted robbery just a couple of streets along for mine and they suspected it was the same two men nothing ever came back about that dough so they mustn't have caught them unfortunately they told us that if they did catch anybody engaging in any similar crime they would get back in touch but to this day they haven't so either they had been caught and not connected to my case or they and caught it all CSI came the next day and actually managed to get a fingerprint from the window but they said the person must have been sweating or something as the fingerprint was too smudged to get anything from I'm so glad I decided to stay up later as if I hadn't been awake for this they would have physically been in my room by the time I noticed that they were there or they noticed me the thought of waking up the two men in my room is terrifying and I'm not sure what they would have done if they had got into the room before realizing as there was then no easy escape for them that would have had to have climb out the tiny window again or unlock my bedroom door and then the front door to get out this might have led to a violent and nasty situation and if they had realized they were stuck in a room with an eyewitness and it doesn't bear thinking about also my roommate told me after the police left that she had actually woken up for some reason about five minutes before I came flying up the stairs and she said she heard the loud bang on my window when she was already awake she started to get a bad feeling after that dan had waited up for a bit sitting on the end of her bed next to the door just in case I came running up it's very interesting that she woke up during this as the men were not allowed at any point other than when they hit the window maybe that says a lot about the body's ability to detect danger I unfortunately ended up not being able to sleep in that room after that without having all the lights on and soon after decided to move back home for University because I felt so uneasy living down there I have so many experiences that belong here now this happened when I had just turned 18 about five years ago so some details are hazy but most are still extremely clear it was my first job just as a convenience store cashier in a pretty low traffic Plaza within walking distance from my house and I was pretty good at working there my managers liked me because I followed the rules due to a fear I've always had about getting in trouble unfortunately my managers also did not do anything when I was harassed which happened pretty much three or more times a week now I was 18 but I looked about 14 and I constantly got asked and still five years later if I was even old enough to be working so when I got hit on by much much older men it wasn't just creepy it was bordering on predatory behavior a 30 year old man charmed me into giving him my number once send when I told him how old I was he said wow I thought you were a lot younger huh that's good so he thought I was younger than 18 and still wanted to date me and the conversation ended there at this point though besides the weekly guys hitting on me and at that time I was threatened by an old guy on what had to have been hardcore meth to kill me with his chicken wing bone while eating it nothing really crazy had happened I hoped it wouldn't because again no one ever did anything even when I complained 9:57 one night before closing at 10:00 a younger looking kid comes in probably mid-20s patchy beard that looks like when a 15 year old tries to grow on looks like he still lives in mommy's basement playing video games you know that kind of guy he comes in alone gets a drink and messes around the store until we make the announcement that we were closing in one minute then he comes up to the counter gives me a really creepy grin and starts chatting from the get-go I had this weirdly bad vibe about this dude and my managers in the office doing closing stuff so I'm checking him out but by myself he's just being really creepy when the register opens to give him his change he starts chuckling and saying well that's a lot walk and can I have some and leaning over the counter I actually thought he was gonna rob me but I'm a nervous person with anxiety so I was stammering and laughing nervously and pretending it was normal and he leans even closer and says huh you just want to go home don't you you just want to go home right you really just want to go home and the creepiest voice that I imagine a kidnapper would use to taunt his victim that's literally what it sounded like it was terrifying then he leaves and we close I was scared to drive home and felt like I was being followed or watched I don't see him for a few days and then he comes in again pretty close to closing time with his girlfriend who later I realized always had this weird look on her face like maybe deep inside she didn't want to be there or around him but was still affectionate to him all that so I said oh thank god maybe he won't be creepy to me and sure in that time it was a little bit better he was still incredibly weird but she was nice and it was easier to talk then there was a third time about a week or so later he came in with the girlfriend again but she walked out as he came to pay again it was close to closing and there was really no one there again a manager wasn't around and this is the part that isn't hazy at all because it was just so creepy and the conversation went like this so I talked to my girlfriend she likes you if you wanted to you know get together with us she'd be down after staring at him for about 15 seconds straight what him smiling creepily yeah would you be down hmm I literally can't believe this is happening at this point I'm like nervously laughing and shaking my head and saying no no thank you Thanks no and then he gets all close and looks me dead in the eye with the smile and lowers his voice and says you could be my girl just like her how does that sound he could be so happy with us with me you could quit this job he won't have to work at all I pay the rent for her clothes everything anything she wants I get anything you want I get you too what about that mm-hmm it'll be so good and as he's saying this he keeps leaning further over the counter and I just said no like no no then he grabbed his stuff because during all of this Simon awkwardly checking out his stuff and winks at me and says if you ever change your mind and walks out then next time I see him come in some checking out another guy and I mutters something along the lines of God this guy again turns out I was checking out his brother and apparently they were also with their mother who proceeds to tell this creep I said that about him and creep comes up and all of course creepily says do you not like me I heard he didn't want to talk to me hurt my feelings why are you saying is that stuff about me and I was just nervously brushing it off and didn't know what to do and then he left and I never saw him or his girlfriend again my manager and didn't do anything just laughed about it and said what what what the heck and went about her business only one newer supervisor said that was unacceptable and she would tell him to leave if he ever came in again but thankfully they didn't [Music] growing up in a Boston suburb during the 80s was rough I came up in a neighborhood that was rife with shady activity it was the kind of place that changed when the Sun went down sketchy streets and arterial alleyways that look sinister when shrouded in darkness my dad was an introverted workaholic and the subsequent loneliness driving my mom to the bottle I was rebellious angry and without income it was the perfect storm naturally I fell into petty crime school was a joke a glorified daycare for hopeless kids with no future in anything but prison or the morgue we were extremely disrespectful to the faculty on more than one occasion a member of the teaching staff was assaulted by a student but there was one teacher who seemed to be an exception he was someone who the kids never talked back to someone who had that natural air of authority about him his name was mr. Metzger a few teachers at her school were a mess fresh college graduates who were only maybe a year older than the kids in our class a couple of functioning alcoholics who smelled like vodka at 8:30 each morning shirt buttons undone with loose tacky walmart ties complete with 5-day stubble but not mr. Metzger he was always clean-shaven his thinning gray hair combed over a bald patch on the crown of his head he commanded respect when Friday evening my buddies and I were smoking cigarettes cruising in a battered old Ford when the subject of mr. Metzger came up you know he's a war veteran right dude was marine or some crap got a Silver Star for killing like ten enemy soldiers in the ambush or something once said I called BS the other retorted not everyone who served with some stone-cold killer my uncle was in the army motor pool said he never fired a shot nah man massacres hardcore I heard he broke a kid's jaw breaking up a fight a few years back that kids jaw was already broken and if mr. Metzger was in the Marines he certainly never talked about it later that night we pulled up to a small stucco house on the outskirts of Jamaica Plain it was pretty unassuming not the usual middle-class housing we targeted for burglaries but my buddy in the backseat insisted you sure this is the right place dude for the last time yes the guy buys and sells auto parts is always a buttload of cash stashed inside I'm telling you this would be a huge score for us we parked around the block scanning the area before we approach the house pulling out bandanas and balaclavas we used them to obscure our faces from any potential witnesses it was quiet out almost pitch-black if it wasn't for the dim fluorescent glow orange street lamps breaking into the garage was easy the rotting wood of a side door gave way from around the old rusty lock and just like that we were inside but the interior of the damp dark garage held no car parts no sign of any mechanical work at all I shot our insistent friend a scornful look we should have just left right then and there but we were young foolish and arrogant we didn't want to walk away empty-handed at the door to the main house we listened for any sign of activity inside and it was silent I gulped took hold of the door handle and pulled a short corridor led to a side room which was evidently serving as a kind of office space with books and paperwork piled on an old desk I crept inside while my buddies searched the rest of the ground-floor for valuables it was searching the office that I began and notice a few things about the person who lived here despite being time-worn and dilapidated the room was incredibly orderly in neat the contents of shelves were immaculately arranged with one wall displaying a ragged looking flag red and blue with the yellow star in the center I had no idea what country it was from but I did get a feeling I'd seen it before somewhere a section of wall was decorated with frame newspaper clippings and they were almost impossible to read in the darkness but a shaft of pale moonlight creeping in through a grimy window drew my I'd one word in particular Vietnam our late night burglaries were always heart-pounding affairs but an unfamiliar terror began to claw at my guts as I quietly slid open one of the desk drawers there sat next to the doll metal of a colt 45 was some kind of necklace bumpy wrinkled shapes haphazardly strung together with a piece of cord I squinted in the darkness reaching inside to run to fingertip along one of the furrowed clumps they felt textured desiccated I had a solid lump of fear in my throat the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end by the time I realized what they were there were human ears I started to back out of the room feeling the raw palms sweating terror coursing through me as my mind began to race we need to get out of here we need to get out of here right now I could hear the creak of old floorboards growing closer to me by the time I saw something rush past the window I stopped peering into the streets outside in time to see another shape hurtling past the grubby pane of glass at full sprint it was my buddies I was alone alone with whoever was creeping up on me in the corridor behind I turned in time to see him standing in a threshold blocking my escape I'll never forget the sound of the rhythmic inhale and exhale of air through his nostrils the breath sound 'add ragged almost shaky relying the absolute fury and contempt that the figure felt for me he stepped forward his face momentarily bathed in the dim moonlight features that were twisted by Wrath pale blue eyes that seethe with a predatory glare it was mr. Metzger he lunched I was fast but he was faster stronger and possibly so we struggled grunting and growling as his rough calloused hands tried to wrap themselves around my neck it was a practiced maneuver it seemed instinctual to him to my absolute horror the black bandana that disguised me began to loosen slipping down a little as we fought if he sees my face I'm dead blind panic set in I threw myself forward in my forehead smashing into one of his eye sockets his grip loosened I thrashed and kicked as he cried out in pain freeing myself just enough to be able to pull myself away from him and make a dash for the garage I burst out of the house tearing down the streets as fast as my legs could carry me any second now any second now he's going to aim that Colt 45 and blow my head off I couldn't bring myself to look back I didn't want to see him fire the shot that would end me dude was a marine killed 10 people I'm gonna be the eleventh oh god help me I'm gonna be the eleventh the shot never came somehow I managed to reach the end of the street ducking into one of the garbage strewn alleys that meandered through the neighborhood like rat runts I almost punched my cowardly friends when I finally caught up with them they left me alone with that maniac left me alone to die are you kidding me you saw was inside the house we got out at the moment we saw what was in there one said attempting to defend himself he could have warned me man you just up and left me there alone thing in the TV room it was made of hair human hair my other buddy finally spoke up his cigarette burned until the hanging ash seemed to defy gravity shut up that was not human hair we don't know what it was then tell him about the other thing dude go ahead tell him my other buddies sounded almost distraught at this point I don't want to talk about that it almost sounded childlike his cynicism and bravado stripped away they never did talk about what they saw the botched burglary was never mentioned again I dropped out of high school shortly after following my buddies deeper into a life of criminality until an arrest for grand theft so got me six months in prison after my release I turned my life around I got a job earn my GED and attended a local community college to study home improvement I led a quiet life now I'm a father and a husband I eat my wife's cooking I watch the Red Sox I go to bed at 11:00 I'm a different person now it was just last weekend the Home Depot over near Southie I thought it recognized an elderly man shuffling among the aisles I followed curiously for a minute or two keeping my distance until the man turned and locked eyes with me uh-uh I know you he said unsmiling you won my old high school students yeah JB high class 86 he taught history right I felt that old familiar dread permeating my guts that's right he said his cold blue eyes studying me intently you look like you landed on your feet not bad for a dropout yeah I've got myself together in the end teenagers right I forced a weak smile right a solemn look on his face as his tone dropped a little everyone deserves a second chance even if they did bad things in their youth there was a weight behind his words my palms grew damp against the plastic push bar of the cart well I see you again mr. Metzger I'm kind of amazed even recognize me I said beginning to wheel my cart away trying to hide my anxiety oh he replied and almost wolfish grin on his withered old face as I saw the same predatory glare in his eyes that I did 30 years ago I never forget a face the education system here in the UK is a little different than the US you see we don't have a middle school and we don't have that kind of social buffer that separates children from young adults so when you're 11 years old you're suddenly dropped into a campus that includes larger intimidating teenagers as bad as it sounds leaving the nurturing environment of primary school and entering the unforgiving hormone saturated world of secondary school is daunting to say the least granted I was quite a shy child but seeing all these spotty faced deep-voiced hairy miscreants dragging their knuckles to the corridors it was terrifying they were like monsters I didn't understand things they did nor the things they said I remember just trying to keep my head down try not to get noticed by any potential bullies and so that's where this story begins with myself as a frightened quiet boy in a place that made me dread having to wake up in the morning homework being popular avoiding trouble I thought that was as bad as it was going to get for me I was wrong the headmaster of the school was named dr. Sylvester he wasn't a medical doctor he had earned the title in some lesser field but he went by doctor nonetheless he struck me as a cold man his welcoming speech to the Year 7s made secondary schools seem like an ordeal we had to endure than an experience that would enrich us the speech was emotionless with subordinate teachers lining the old school hall like prison camp guards the man was somewhat of a mystery to me but then everything at the tender age of eleven is mystery every little aspect of life threatens and frightens I remember feeling an immense pressure at the time pressure to succeed pressure to conform I was told not to question things that adults always had her best interests at heart if only that were true I recall it being a brisk autumn morning leafless skeletal trees and piles of rotting leaf litter lined the pavements we had French class at first period by far the most loath of the subjects I took not because I dislike the language and I was actually pretty good at it the problem was the woman who taught the class at the time I had the notion that she simply disliked me that I had offended her in some way that it was in my interest to correct but in retrospect it was clear she hated her job the dreadful scenario of having broken free from an institution like school only to find herself right back in one trapped I understand why she was so contemptuous maybe she had a dream once something she longed for only to find that it was late that she was too busy just another one of life's little tragedies during the middle of the period as I watched the hands of the classroom clock moving painfully slowly the dull silence of the room was interrupted by a shrill piercing sound it was the fire Bell some of the children jumped nervously whispering to each other as they awaited the instruction of the teacher fire drill the French teachers voice was a flat drone everybody line up outside the building there was a touch of excitement in the air by then the fire drill broke up the monotony of the long boring school day we gathered our belongings filing out of the classroom as the teacher to the monotone murmur of a single file as you can imagine other classes were also doing the same so before long there was quite a number of children all walking down one long locker lined corridor I had been in fire drills before obviously so that was no stranger to the actual but there was something different about this one something which wafted through the corridors towards and washed over the already nervous children we could smell smoke something was actually burning the most terrifying memory of the event wasn't the fire itself it wasn't the ominous smell of burning plastic or the cries of frightened students who were beginning to panic it was the look on the presiding teachers faces when they realized the very real danger we were in at that age adults seemed invincible like they can solve every problem and then some I had never in my short life seen a look of terror so pure on a grownups face it chilled me to the bone with anxious voices the teachers herded us to the nearest exit the intensity of the smoke increases as we moved pouring out of the building we could see the far wing of the school building as it burned wild fires dancing among thick black smoke then the screams began children turned in the direction of the buildings burning section pointing and screeching as a figure emerge from the conflagration it was engulfed in flame a walking inferno whose cries of pains were burned up before they could leave charred lips then there were sirens flashing blue lights and men that wore fluorescent uniforms paramedics tried to stifle the blaze on the Burning Man the site of his charge smoking corpse had children and tears as teachers barked at them to look away we're looking away didn't help even when I close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears I could still smell it I could still smell the burning flesh the school actually closed down for a week while the damage could be assessed local authorities offered to pay for trauma counseling for the entire teaching staff and student body our class along with our respective parents attended a group session at a nearby a community center I didn't understand any of it I didn't understand why we would want to all sit around and talk about something so terrible why we all weren't just at home trying to be happy trying to forget it's terrible to say so but and I considered the time off as a sort of a special I was allowed to play video games for as long as I wanted my parents even bought me a new game I could tell they thought I was upset that they were trying to be good parents I just didn't question any of it like I said I just thought it was better to try to forget why would I want to remember the sight of that burning man climbing from the debris what would anyone want to remember that after a few days the school sent a letter out to all the families involved the cause of the fire was said to be an electrical fault a freak surge that shorted a kitchen power outlet and set fire to a broken refrigerator however I did notice something about my parents around that time when I was out of the room I would hear them talking in hushed tones they were discussing something they didn't want me to hear something secret I was a curious kid sure but I had no desire to eavesdrop I was acutely aware that there were things in the world I really didn't want to know about some things are better left to Secrets it took 10 years for the truth to come out one evening whilst sitting down for a home-cooked family meal we started to discuss my school days it was nothing in particular at first but somehow the subject for the fire came up just a passing comment nothing shocking or abrasive yet my parents reacted rather strangely my dad put down his cutlery and cleared his throat giving my mom a long serious look she did the same sign before she turned to me and spoke Alex you remember that fire at your school right I nodded of course I did the school held a service for the burn janitor when he passed over from his injuries well we didn't tell you the truth back then about the fire we're sorry we hope you understand that we did what we thought was best at the time I stayed silent my eyes darting between my parents simply waiting for whatever it was they had to say the thing is son my dad took over taking my mom's hand in his and giving it a loving squeeze that fire was no accident someone set fire to the school tried to burn it down with all the children inside mom interjected she brought her hand to her mouth and her voice began to crack fresh tears twinkling in the corner of her eyes my dad just hushed her comforting her softly before he continued you see mr. Sylvester the head teacher that wasn't his name at all before then he never held the teaching position in his life his name was Bernard Lee Bernard Lee began an affair with a woman and wanted to escape his family he wanted a new life he wanted to clean slate so one night while his wife and children were sleeping he doused their home in petrol and set it ablaze my mom was sobbing at this point tears rolling down her cheeks which he still managed a few final words but unlike you son who was so lucky to have those children never escaped they never escaped we all broke down at this point embracing as a family counting our blessings that my class was able to escape from a similar fate as those poor unwanted children of Bernard Lee later on in life shortly before I actually decided to commit this piece of memory to paper I thought back to that time in my life when I was young and frightened when everything was so big and scary when the vast possibility of life terrified instead of inspired when I thought I was walking among monsters how could I have possibly known back then that it was right [Music] it's been a long time since I graduated high school so long that it feels says if it's all an event that occurred in another person's life it feels like something that I read about or imagined something in losery that I've inserted myself into they say the human body replaces all its living cells every seven years so I suppose that physically I am a different person than the one that existed a decade ago but the final conversation I had with an old history teacher mr. Cole is one that feels like it occurred just yesterday for almost 15 years I had replayed the interaction in my mind over and over again it's something I don't think I'll ever forget he was standing on a site from the main crowd around a corner of the main school building he wore a sandy brown hair in a rough ponytail facial hair raggedly fashioned into a handlebar mustache a cigarette burned between his fingers adding to the brown nicotine stains that colored the tips something struck me about the way he looked at me as I took out my own pack of smokes and asked him for a light he didn't see me as a student anymore there was a coldness in his gaze something else too a kind of pity or disgust in his eyes half of me expected him to scold me for feeding such a filthy habit but he didn't he didn't say a word as he reached into the pocket of his worn faded jeans and pulled out an old Zippo we talked about growing up about how I was ready to go out into the world and find myself as a person I asked him how long it took for him to do the same I used to think about it a lot he said looking off into the near distance will you reach a certain age and you know who you are I live in a little condo near a bar just on the edge of town work 9:00 to 5:00 then in between I drink and there ain't nobody there to stop me I know who I am and after all these years there's a kind of victory in that I've never heard him talk this way before never in this tone he wasn't the mr. Kaul that kept his history class gripped with tales of your passionate speeches about life and liberty that had him greatly respected around campus he seemed defeated he seemed broken mr. Cole wore a wedding band but it occurred to me that he never mentioned anything about a family I chose not to ask we talked about what I had learned at my time attending the school he listened he nodded but I got the impression he was uninterested somehow unimpressed this irritated me a little sure my answer was full of cliches and platitudes but to dismiss my experience in just a glance graded against me I asked him what he had learned in his time teaching there some days I wish I didn't ask some people in this town act like they're not even aware that the outside world exists and might as well be living in a cave this place is a gutter when giant trailer park just floating through the universe somehow apart from it but that doesn't mean they can't be happy it doesn't mean they don't have value I mean there's no shame in being consciously happy while being unconsciously ignorant let's just it kid they're consciously ignorant he replied crushing the burned up remnants of his cigarettes under his boot before are lighting up another I think human consciousness is a tragic mistake in the history of our evolution he let the thoughts sink in and he took in a lung full of smoke exhaling lazily as his gaze remained pinned to the distant horizon we became too sentient too self-aware whatever drives the universe forced the creation of an element separation from itself we humans are creatures that have no right to exist by natural law we are things that operate under the false pretenses of having a self this chaotic mess of senses and feelings all somehow totally assured that we are each somebody when in fact we're all just nobody so I'm guessing you're not a religious man I said feeling rather accomplished as he chuckled at my response religion man now there's a thing there was a faint smile on his face as if the very thought of its amused him a transfer of fear and self-loathing to a figure of divine authority I can understand the catharsis God soaks up their doubts and pain with his perfect Star Wars narrative I don't know sir sounds like you could do with a little old-time religion I replied to finishing my own cigarette but not hearty enough to immediately begin another unlike mr. Cole if it's good enough for Grandma right he smiled again at least I'm not rushing towards a cosmic stop sign it was about this time that I confessed to mr. Cole that I was shocked to hear him talk this way that nothing about his classes indicated he had such a pessimistic worldview I was building up to the question but he gave me a look which said that he knew well what I was about to ask do you want to know what made me this way right he asked with that same faint smile on his withered lips a lot of people want to know that I'm mostly telling the buzz off but you he cut himself for a moment shaking his head with that look of pity and disgust in his eyes my wife god rest her soul she and I well we lost our daughter when she was real young all the emotion seemed to drain out of him while he spoke he was clinical in his confession I think about her every so often my daughter and what she was spared during the better moments I feel sort of grateful for it doctor said she didn't feel a thing that the drunk driver sent her straight into a coma and after a few weeks of sleepless tear-stained nights somewhere in that dark room she was locked in she slipped off into another deeper kind of sleep I'm sorry it was all I could think to say he heard my voice quiver with sadness no don't be it's a beautiful way to go out painless happy innocent trouble with dying later is that it's too late the damage is done he had an odd way of reassuring me you want kids he asked I shrugged I had never really given it any thought don't he responded almost contemptuously I think of how arrogant and cruel it is to force a soul out from the ether into the sack of rotting flesh to condemn a life to walk blindly in this meat grinder sometimes I think I should go thank that drunk for getting behind the wheel after one too many they spared me the sin of being a father I confided in him that I believed there was more to life than just soul-crushing pain and grinding worthlessness that now more than ever people can act in ways that can change the world for the better he disagreed you see this is what I'm talking about he said evidently growing a little frustrated as he threw down his second cigarette and repeated the action of stamping it out sure there are broader ideas in play mainly what is shared between us as a species for our mutual illusions never seen a dead body he asked me I nodded slowly and he'll know you look in their eyes even in the picture he can still read them you know what I see I see that they welcomed it when it finally came not at first but right there in the final moment its relief they were afraid and now they see for the very first time how easy it was to just let it all go and those last few seconds of life they saw what they were what they had always been you me them this whole comic tragedy was never more than thrown together presumptions and stupid blind will and what you need to do is just let go to finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight to realize that all your life all your love all your hate all your memories all your heartache it was all just the same thing it was all the same dream a dream that you had inside a locked room a dream about being person mr. Cole started to walk away the keys to his truck jangling as he pulled them from his pocket good luck kid you're gonna need it I moved out of town now to a coastal city where the people aren't like those stuck in small Arizona towns sometimes I think mr. Cole was wrong but there is a brighter side to existence that he neglected a touch upon but sometimes in darker moments as I'm lying in bed after long days spent working in a cramped sterile office space mr. Cole's words run through my mind they bounced off the walls of my skull refusing to relinquish my fierce beating for my doubts it's in those moments that I know mr. Cole was right [Music] mr. Shenko was the toughest teacher in her high school he was a six-foot-something bear of a man who marched around campus with a look on his face that even the most unruly of students found daunting having emigrated from Eastern Europe after the collapse of the old Soviet Union he spoke with a heavy accent but his English was perfect he taught physics in an emotionless stereo manner on his bad days his tone of his voice could be described as a bark one day during an unusually interesting class mr. Cervenka was going over the different types of radiation that existed a studious pupil in the front row raised a hand to ask him how he knew so much about the subject I did some work for a power plant on my home country he replied dryly turning to the chalkboard and beginning a crudely drawn diagram one of the jocks who was known for being somewhat of a bully made a comment about how it was probably the one that blew up mr. shebang cows chalk sticks snapped the hand that gripped the broken piece trembled as he lowered it to a side with an audible sigh the teacher turned back around his eyes fixed on the disrespectful bully have you ever seen your friends die mister Schwank OS softly it was the first time any of us had ever heard him talk in a way that didn't make us flinch but somehow his tone was even more frightening than before the jock didn't respond I asked you a question boy the jock remained silent his cheeks turned a shade of crimson as mr. shengo's beady brown eyes bore into him with the same flat facial expression the furious teacher walked towards the classrooms door the room shifted as he locked it new lesson today close your books um mr. Schwank Oh sir a nervous looking girl and glasses raised her hand she was unable to hide the raw fear in her voice I don't feel comfortable you thank the boy with big mouth later this is a collective punishment mr. spank Oh hist taking a seat at his desk we waited the tension thick in the air as we dreaded to think when mr. Shuang Co had in store for us we'd never seen him as angry as he was now some people even said they'd smelled alcohol on his breath some days I felt a knot of fear in my guts as I pictured the morbid newspaper headlines that might follow the next day the most important time of life happened before any of you were even born mr. Shenker began it was the 25th of April 1986 the day the entire world ended for my town I had recently returned from Moscow after studying nuclear physics at the University there I was glad to be home it was the start of a new life for me I had a girlfriend I hope to marry one say I found work prypiat was a beautiful place forests nearby streams for fishing we were happy there that evening was warm with a clear cloudless sky above prypiat was a ceiling of stars a blanket of celestial bodies that you could lose yourself in for hours but that same night an accident that occurred near our town changed my life forever an accident that occurred at I knew what he was going to say before he said it the words were my lips before he even uttered them the Chernobyl nuclear power plant there was a saying in my homeland we pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us the class could see the sadness and our teachers eyes as he spoke it was like that back then communism had destroyed people's desire to better themselves leaders of incompetence and corruption meant that there was a design flaw on one of the new reactors when the safety test began the reactor was like a loaded gun just waiting to go off so when the control rods were removed to raise power again he calmly looked over to the disrespectful jock narrowing his eyes as he leaned into his desk bull mr. Shuang cows roar sent the jock reeling in a seat the rest of our class didn't fare too well either we were gripped hanging on to our teachers every word but what no one knew thanks to years of error and coverup was that there was a fatal flaw in the reactor design that made it unstable at low power levels as power levels were lowered in preparation for the test they dropped to low and the reactor ground to a halt meanwhile unseen a dangerous hot spot was built in deep in the reactor two huge explosions that shook the earth beneath our feet every man woman and child in Pripet heard the banks would we had no idea what it was some of the off duty workers feared the worst but none of us could have fathomed that what was about to unfold was the worst nuclear disaster in history I felt the shock wave as I looked towards at the power station a pillar of smoke rose up in the clear night sky and though the inky blackness of the night I made out twinkles of flame in the distance some of the people in my apartment block thought war had broken out then myself and the people of prypiat watched in awe in terror as the huge stream of ionizing radiation shot into the heavens lighting up the night with a hideous blue glow without the world was ending for us it certainly was people were terrified beyond belief but I must admit I found myself smiling as I looked out into the night it was Titanic like looking at the face of God a gargantuan mass of pure energy it was it was beautiful the melancholic look never left mr. Franco's eyes even if a small nostalgic grin did curl his lips but that it was only the start of it what came after both as a result of the accident and of the government's mishandling of it was much more horrific the teacher never took his eyes off the jock as if every single word was directed at him it must have been torturous it certainly was for the rest of us we were forced to listen and we had no escape did you know that they bust a troupe of entertainers to keep some of the nearer villagers calm as they died of radiation poisoning let me describe to you one such performance mr. Shenker began relishing the disturbed looks on our faces a beautiful ballerina dancing her final dance strands of her blonde hair floated to the floor as she twirled I saw blood leaking from her nostrils down her cheeks as it seeped from her ears when she finished the children ran to her with flowers the hair and teeth already starting to fall out the generator stalled and for several months we were plunged into darkness to my complete and utter horror I saw the flowers and the children glowing in the dark there were a few gasp around the room one of the girls in the back row was sobbing quietly into a sleeve of her sweater the cleanup involved the work of 30,000 people continued the teacher there are less people in this town think of that 30,000 people they called them Liquidators a disgusting euphemism coined by a man too cowardly to call them what they were the condemned do you know what it's like boy have you had to look a friend in the eye and tell him to walk towards his own painful death mm-hmm banco ground towards the jock he looked at me like you would have no problem as long as it would have saved your own skin four million people suffered today from something that happened 30 years ago four million they stood up walking slowly towards the desk that's at the now terrified jock and do you think this is funny yes the jock shook his head violently still too terrified to speak his eyes begged for mercy yes you left you think that seeing children being burned from the inside out dying the most painful death imaginable never knowing why or how they were being murdered by something they couldn't even see you think this is a joke don't you no sir mr. Schwank Oh towered over the boys desk eyes wide and full of fury we waited for him to snap for him to beat the life out of this kid but he just turned walked towards the door and unlocked it class dismissed he murmured sinking back into a seat I've never seen a classroom of kids move so quickly in my life not even on the last day of school did we tear out of the building like that but on the way out I slowed stopping near mr. Franco's desk and feeling the anxiety build mr. Schwank oh he looked up at me but same sadness filling his eyes as I spoke I'm sorry he just nodded and without another word I departed I went to a good high school one nestled in a leafy green suburb it was selectively exclusive and we rarely had any trouble among the students the PTAs idea of drama was if two moms brought the same cake to a bake sale scandal just wasn't a word in our lexicon but I do remember one event that caused shockwaves among the parents and teachers one that had terrified parents up in arms about the house such a strange and worrying occurrence was even allowed to unfold good morning class a strange silence fell over the classroom the man who just walked in the room wasn't our regular teacher in fact none of us had ever laid eyes on him in our lives you can call me mr. wits bold I am to be your substitute teacher for the next two hours mr. wits bold said writing his name and big block capitals in the chalkboard he was well-groomed but there was something off about him like he possessed only an appearance of dapper Ness like there was something deeply wrong below the surface today we'll be studying a little biology perhaps the most fascinating of all the sciences uh mister wits boat sir a studious looking boy in the front row raised his hand this is English class shouldn't we the boy cut himself off and lowering his hand nervously as the teacher stared unblinkingly at him he didn't say a word but we all felt the weight of that stare crushed the talkative young student as I was saying the teacher continued today will be studying biology and I promise not a single one of you will find today's lesson boring the respiratory system is perhaps one of the most complex the body possesses mr. Witt spoke began drawing a rough diagram of some lungs on the chalkboard its function is to transfer extraneous oxygen to the body cells via hemoglobin in the blood can a new student tell me how long the body can survive without oxygen in the substitute teacher turn and face the class now the smile on his face somehow too wide and we shifted silently in our seats three minutes continue mr. wits bold it takes just three minutes for the body to experience what is known as hypoxia should oxygen delivery to cells become insufficient over a prolonged period of time the subjects brain shuts down into a comatose state in order to preserve oxygen if a ready supply is not returned well complete self shutdown occurs however time until expirations is even less in the vacuum of space back in 1971 the Soviet cosmonauts died when a system's fault caused their spacecraft to depressurize shortly before re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere the crew died within 30 to 40 seconds as air pressure is required to deliver oxygen to the brain isn't that fascinating it wasn't the morbidly academic descriptions that disturbed us it was mr. wits bolds delivery he seemed fascinated by such murrow's information like it gave him great joy to educate us on it I find the human body to be enthralling you see the thin sickly looking teacher wandered back and forth before the class as he spoke so durable it's so fragile our spirits can leave an indelible mark upon the world yet our bodies are mere shadows and dust for example mankind has mastered every terrain planet Earth has to offer take the hardy Bedouins of the Arabian deserts or the resilient Eskimo of the Arctic Circle yet can anyone here tell me how much body temperature is required to drop before ill-effects or felt again the class was silent some fidgeted nervously in their seats feeling the tension hanging in the air is mr. wits bold stopped the rows of deaths just two degrees if core temperatures falls by a trivial two degrees hypothermia begins to set in low temperatures change the speed of different chemical reactions that the body needs to continue functioning slowing them throws delicate systems out of balance the person will start to lose consciousness the heart will then lose its rhythm secession of vital signs follows at about 24 degrees when the heart stops the mousy girl who sat in front of me visibly shuddered a similar miniscule rise in body temperature can also be catastrophic to a person's health at temperatures higher than forty 1.5 degrees a person may begin to suffer from cambodians irreversible brain damage can occur at temperatures above forty two point five degrees blood thickens and slows the kidneys stopped working the heart muscle can be damaged and skeletal muscles start breaking down essentially this is what we call and described as a multi-organ failure but more specifically it's when the brain begins to cook you stand mr. wits bold pointed towards the shy mousy girl sitting in front of me she sat up in her chair horrified that she was being selected for anything by such an eerie individual mr. wits bolt slid the chair from behind the teacher's desk and placed it at the head of the class sit he commanded his tone still warm and friendly as smile stole far too wide slowly the shy girl rose from her seat treading carefully up the aisle of desks with the terrified look in her eyes she was practically catatonic by the time she sat down in the teacher's chair beyond mortified no despite being so incredibly fragile the human body is in many ways immensely durable mr. wits bold was standing behind the shy girl now standing perhaps just a little too close for example if I were to take a large sharpened implement and remove this promising young woman's head the nervous system would actually continue to function if only for a short while electrical energy trapped between synapses might swell cause her decapitated body to stand and take a few panic steps before crumpling while the eyes continue to send images to the visual cortex in all likelihood she would be able to watch the entire fascinating performance unfold isn't that something the shy mousy girl hoping that mr. wits boats from McCobb demonstration was over began to rise from the teacher's desk to her absolute horror she found his hands on her shoulders forcing her back down into the chair where do you think you're going my dear he asked with a wolfish grin I'm not done with you yet now those of you that think decapitation to be a particularly grim form of demise I must inform you that you're sadly mistaken there are many many worse ways to expire mr. wits bold kept his hands on the shy girls shoulders scoff ISM sometimes known as the boats was a method of execution designed by the ancient Persians to cause as much suffering as possible before death he began the class was on tender hooks now hanging on to his every word the only accurate descriptions that we have are from the person's oldest rivals and mortal enemies the Greeks the victim would be trapped inside a bath or hollowed-out tree trunk with just their head hands and feet protruding the subject would be force-fed milk and honey to the point at which they developed horrendous diarrhea at this point more milk and honey would be poured all over them particularly the hands and face the class was utterly dumbstruck unable to quite believe what they were hearing the idea was that as the boats filled with the aforementioned milk and honey budding and burrowing insects would overwhelm the subject inflicting a horrendous kind of torture the swarm would simply drive the victim mad as this combined with whatever injuries were inflicted the torture was dragged out for as long as possible but death would eventually come as a result of dehydration starvation exhaustion and septic shock just as mr. wits bowled was launching into another horrific description of expiration the period bell sounded at first some of the class was too scared to move we normally rushed out of the room as soon as the period was over but this was different we were rendered almost immobile by the torturous words of the substitute teacher complaints were made and an inquiry was held parents wanted to know just how such a man could slip through the system some took their children out of the school citing trauma and stress disorders brown tone from the experience I know I never ever saw the shine now see girl at school again as a matter of fact I never saw or heard of mister wits bolt again but that's something I find myself thanking God for every single day [Music] Scotland is an old and wild place it's there that the unstoppable expansion of the mighty Roman Empire was halted firmly in its tracks Legionnaire veterans hardened by years of armed conflict on these savage fringes of the Imperium were turned back once they reached the land that they called caldonia it had always been somewhat of a mystery to my high school history teacher as to why such a powerful organized force stopped in its tracks some scholars note the lack of Natural Resources explaining that the Empire had nothing to gain from conquering Scotland but thick ancient forests would have yielded millions of tons of lumber to fuel the Empire's war machine not to mention the abundant red iron ore buried in Scotland's vast rolling hills regardless mr. Lennon believed that the answer to the age-old question actually did reside in the land seemingly infinite impenetrable forests for there is something that exists in the dark damp woodlands of old Caledonia something that was once worshiped before it slipped into rumour and legend something that was here long before humanity and will be here long after we're gone we were excited when mr. Lennon informed us that our class would be eligible for the week-long field trip to Edinburgh in hindsight maybe we shouldn't have been as Americans abroad we were often objects of curiosity viewed as practically exotics by many of the local populace two of my buddies and I formed a kind of homesick Americans Club who saw themselves as a trio of Marauders from the old colonies pillaging the lands of their ancestors it'll do us a world of good to take a break from city living mr. Lennon said with a wide smile stepping off onto the railway platform of the small Scottish town some of you kids are unaware that there's a world outside of your cellphone's we were headed for a place known as maybe forest a few hundred square miles of lakes hills and woodland with only a handful of trails to divide it up it was a chill October morning as our group of twenty or so students made the short hike out of town paying no mind to the locals who eyed us suspiciously from grubby windowpanes not even a half hour had passed but already I was regretting having packed so much in my backpack the straps dug into my shoulders so hard at felt like they were cutting off circulation I had to rest my thumb's under them just to keep the ache at bay naturally it was a great relief when mr. Lennon called a 5-minute break I had never been so relieved to be off my feet the autumn Sun was an afternoon decline as we continued to trudge along the narrow country lanes the strain of lugging my heavy pack had beads of sweat forming on my brow a dull ache now present in my shoulders and feet it had been hours since we've seen any cars for people and it was beginning to show in our environment foliage at the sides of the road grew progressively untamed dry stone walls crumbling as twisting vines began to reclaim what was once mankind's we were getting pretty tired at this point we've been walking along all morning and it didn't seem like we were getting any closer to the actual forest the narrow country lanes flanked on each side by wildly overgrown hedgerows were beginning to look all identical as frustration grew some of the students began to argue over which route we should have taken after an entire days worth of walking we had finally reached the end of the road the tarmac was cracked and weathered grass sprouted through the tiny fissures in the surface it was here that the road literally and physically ended swallowed up by nature as the vast sprawling forest opened up ahead of us it struck me as deeply unnerving seeing the road so inexplicably abandoned it was primeval millions of huge dense Pines that spread up a forest like an ocean of dark green I had never seen anything quite like it in my life by this point the Sun was beginning to sink towards the horizon transforming the skies deep blue into magnificent shades of pink and orange despite being hungry thirsty and disgustingly sweat soaked from our exertions we decided to push on we had to after all darkness was drawing near moving through the forest itself was hard work pine needles dug into exposed flesh while small biting insects feasted on us causing huge itchy welts walking behind someone meant that thin spiky branches would whip back into your face sometimes we would find a little clearing somewhere the trees opened up a little and we would get a good look at just where we were it was an ancient ethereal forest beds of moss spreading out before us mr. Lennon remarked that we must have been 15 to 20 miles away from the nearest piece of farmland even further from the nearest village and it was agonizing even the country boys were beginning to complain so upon reaching the first real clearing and the thick pines we began to set up camp the gorgeous golden sunset had become a ceiling of twinkling stars we organized our camp opting for a meager dinner of packed sandwiches we were worn out hacking our way through the pines had left us well and truly fatigued but this place was beautiful it was untouched or so we thought it started that night a thunderous noise echoed through the trees around us something that broke the ominous stillness of the death saturated clearing a deep otherworldly how unlike anything I had ever heard before or since assaulted my ears I felt nauseous with fear like I might regurgitate my measly breakfast all over the forest floor as the roar died down and that horrible silence returned once again we could hear the rustling of Pines the crunching of dry twigs and pine needles in the near distance something was coming for us students screamed and cried hiding away in their sleeping bags are just plain panicking a buddy of mine came rushing up to me a look of pure terror in his eyes mr. Lenin's gone I tried looking for him but I can't find him anywhere we need to find mr. Lennon we ran blindly through the pines as straight branches and bramble thorns scratched and sliced any exposed flesh exhaustion didn't seem to be a factor anymore neither was the weight of our backpacks we tore through the forest at breakneck speeds fear and adrenaline providing strength and stamina that seemed almost impossible eventually I saw something through the inky blackness of the night something illuminated by a shaft a pale moonlight there were huge pine trees twisted and deformed the roots and limbs whining together in a kind of arcing cradle beneath them a large shallow pit that had been cut away from the earth every inch was filled with bones entire rib cages jutted out from the soil like animal traps long femurs yellowed and broken with age were arranged into intricate patterns in the earth beneath us centipedes and lice crawled out from the open eye sockets of cracked skulls their jaws hanging open a silent scream of death there must have been hundreds if not thousands of human remains half buried in the earth before us as my eyes return to the twisted mass of branches and roots above us I noticed a doll glittering among the network of woven tree limbs withered steel helmets still with a few slivers of red plumage brass jewelry that had been intricately stitched into the patchwork of dry bones Roman coins more than a thousand years old were pressed so hard into the dying timber that the trees were growing up and around them half consuming the small pieces of bronze kneeling before it all was a shirtless hunched figure its torso tattooed with strange ethereal designs they were roughly inked not the word of a professional artist no they were crude ritualistic images the figure was whispering something soft but rabid repeating the same few sentences over and over in a guttural ancient sounding language the howls were louder now closer to the camp the thing was circling the students like hunters surrounding their quarry iron-willed patience the only thing preventing them from commencing the slaughter an absolute terror I crept closer towards the prostrate figure instantly recognizing who it was when they saw their face it was mr. Lennon he was praying mr. Lennon I roared taking him by the bare shoulder and trying to shake him from his trance mr. Lennon sir we need your help please I'm begging you please just help us I was so scared that I could feel tears forming in my eyes my voice cracking with the insanity of the situation unfolding around us sir wake up I smacked mr. Lennon around the side of his head finally freeing him from his days he flinched violently coming to and looking around as if he'd forgotten where he was as he did so the house subsided he stood there the silence descending back around us still panting from our terrified exertions no one ever talked about the incident in the woods or how it was that such a terrifying experience ended as quickly as it began some of the students who returned from the Scotland trip were treated for symptoms of post-traumatic stress but they can never bring themselves to talk about the knife that had them suffering so terribly nor did anyone discuss how mr. Lennon's mysterious actions that night had undoubtedly saved us from a fate worse than death what I hadn't forgotten and I'll never forget mr. Lennon saved our souls that night and we can never never repay him for it my secondary school was old when you're a kid everything that was around before you were born is old but the Blue Coat school for boys was practically ancient founded in 1708 by the reverend robert Steiff he envisioned the school as a institution for teaching poor children to read write and cast accounts constructed from huge sandstone blocks with neoclassical georgy and masonry the school stands in stark contrast to the modern cityscape that sprung up around it passing the entrance exam and attending the school was as exhilarating as it was intimidating discipline was harsh but the benefits were many the feeling I got whenever I walked into the old gothic looking library building was magical it was a place at a time the smell of old books and Wood varnish made me feel like I was privy to all kinds of ancient secrets forbidden knowledge fits only for the eyes of the intellectually elite it was perusing the time-worn shelves that I came across the book known as the king in yellow it stood out among the dusty leather bindings thanks to its mustard yellow cover sliding the old tome out from its Snug space on the Shelf I opened it to be greeted by a strange pale yellow symbol on the inside I had to squint at first straining my eyes to make out just what the odds sign was turning the page as my head began to hurt the printed text over leaf was tiny so small that I could barely read it this made my headache even worse I closed the book rub my eyes then placed it inside my bag for later perusal the next day as my English literature class was coming to an end and the pupils were filing out of the room I approached the teacher's desk mr. Brady was younger than most of the teaching staff and had always cut an approachable figure sir have you ever heard of a book called the king in yellow I asked picking my fingernails nervously as his demeanor changed dramatically mr. Brady froze slowly looking up from the paper he was marking why do you ask Martin he tried to sound calm and collected I sensed he was anything but well I was looking online at a few Martin he interrupted sternly have you found a copy of this book no sir I lied sensing there was some kind of trouble afoot I had taken the book from the library without permission after all Martin listen to me carefully if you find a copy of this book you must inform me immediately is that clear sir I I was just immediately he replied give me a look that chills my spine even to this day I kept the book a secret for the next week occasionally opening it and attempting to read the tiny cryptic text each time the same dull headache would return forcing me to cease reading I decided to stay late after school one night devoting time to properly trying to decipher the book's contents in an almost empty library I found a quiet sheltered corner closed off by huge oaken bookshelves with trepidation I took out the mustard-yellow tome opening it to a random page before straining my eyes to read the text it was laid out like poetry strange stanzas that made my skull feel like it might rupture at any moment strange is the night where black stars rise and strange moons circle through the skies but stranger still is lost Carcosa I was trembling my eyes felt swollen in their sockets I wasn't just reading the book the book felt like it was reading me I got up leaving the book on the table and stumbling out of the library so clumsily that I drew the ire of the bespectacled librarian I rushed to a nearby bathroom locking myself in a stall and with my hands gripping the filthy porcelain bowl I vomited so hard it made my nose bleed shuddering and spitting out the foul taste on my mouth I finally managed to rise myself up clean myself off and return to the library yet as I turned the corner into the little nook I had previously occupied my blood turned to ice and the book was gone and that was July of 2004 just a few weeks later on July 25th a Bluecoat pupil named mark blackwell arrived home after spending time alone in a nearby park his father was sitting in the family TV room relaxing after dinner mark went to the family's garage took a claw hammer from a toolkit that his father owned then walked into the TV room Mark's father didn't even look up before he was struck in the back of the head with the blunt end of the hammer the son he raised for 18 years proceeded to bludgeon and stab his own father so heavily that the police originally thought that the wounds were caused by gunshots as Mark finished mutilating his father his mother returned home and walked in on the grisly scene mark was waiting for her she would need to be identified by her dental records there was only one other people in the library the night I lost the king in yellow that pupil was Mark blackwell the following year I completed my end of school exams attending a celebratory event that signaled the end of our formal education it was a happy time the tragic incidents involving mark blackwell had slipped into the back of everyone's mind as the celebrations subsided parents and pupils began to depart school grounds I too approached the school gates only to be greeted by the figure of mr. Brady smoking a cigarette as he stared off into space mr. Brady sir I approached him ready to unburden myself of the truth I I wanted to talk to you about about the book you found it I know he replied solemnly I just I had no idea that I know no one does he took a deep drag of the cigarette not once making eye contact with me I pause for a moment lost for words in the grim silence that surrounded us what will you do now I asked continue to do what I've spent my life doing search for that book and when you find it he didn't reply he simply stamped out the smoldering tobacco after dropping the button to the Darton and walked out of Blue Coat school for boys forever I've never ever told anyone the story I've never felt the need to but earlier this month I received some news that brought the memories of these terrible events rushing back to me my old English teacher mr. Brady had died upon learning that he ended his own life I contacted the police investigators charged with inquiring into the circumstances of his departure although they were not entirely at liberty to disclose information on the inquiry a kindly female detective was generous with what she had learned when I informed her that I was a former student of mr. Brady her tone dropped when I asked if mr. Brady had made an index of the books in his possession at the time of his death with a nervous voice she responded in the affirmative I asked her if any of the books in this index were missing when mr. Brady's body was recovered again she answered in the affirmative what was the name of the missing book and there was a pause as the detective consulted her case notes a pause that seemed to last an eternity as I waited with grim expectation for the words I knew were going to be spoken the king in yellow she said with trembling hands I hung up the let's read podcast has brought to you by wicks your one-stop shop when creating your very own custom website for your business or interests I've been wanting to create a website for my podcasts and YouTube channel for some time where I can aggregate all of my utilities in one website and Wix is helping me accomplish this as I'm developing my website some of the coolest features of the site include the most technologically advanced website building platform available in that Wix code is creation without limits you can build a professional website any way you want use sophisticated technology to build advanced web applications build robust 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actionable analytics to solve you know any sort of IT problems you have voice recognition capabilities and chat BOTS which is pretty amazing now all of this is something that I'm in the process of building and learning as I go along with Wix which is amazing because they're really making it incredibly easy now if this sounds like something that you would be interested in getting involved in you can get started now by going to Wix calm that's WI X calm slash podcast to get 10% off Wix calm slash podcast in these encounters I've had with these shadow-like entities in the past two years to start I've never done any hallucinogenic drugs or anything of the sort I'm in a military and it's way too hard to get away with that stuff to begin with from what I can remember all of this started happening to me when I was stationed at Fort Sill Oklahoma for my military job training late one night I was sleeping in my bunk when I suddenly woke up to what looked like a black figure walking into my room with him asleep out of my eyes and sat up thinking that it was one of the guys on fire guard that night taking head counts for the sergeant on CQ fire guard is just one of the guys that watches over the barracks during the night to make sure no funny business happens just as soon as I sat up to greet the guy walking in it dissipated into nothingness really confused I looked at the top bunk in the saw that my bunk mates was up from his phone screen lighting up the ceiling I spoke up and said hey long did you see someone walk into our room just now he paused and looked down from the top of this bunk at me and said nah man fire guard came in like an hour ago you were knocked out for the night this time I simply just brushed the encounter off and a really strange occurrence and nothing else fast forward to January of 2018 I started college at the University of North Dakota und this is when the encounter has gotten really bad to the point where I was too afraid to go to sleep some nights I lived in a really old dorm building called Squires Hall built way back in the day by myself the encounters I had didn't all have these shadow people while I was there so I'll share everything of note one night I went to bed and woke up to a tall shadow person standing in front of the door of my room with crimson eyes that seemed to stare right through me i sat up in my bed and freaked out sidenote I don't consider myself a very religious person at all more like agnostic to clear everything up so you can imagine my fear seeing these things after what felt like an eternity having a staring contest with this entity I shouted at it what do you want with me it took one big step towards me shook its head and in a feminine voice said hell with that it vanished into the darkness in the room another time that really stands out was when it was the end of the spring semester the last week of school I had most of my room enclose packed up and ready to move out for after my finals are done I had a couple of cans of coke in the back of my mini fridge by the door in my room one night during that week I went to bed and woke up to a loud bang i sat up in my bed and look towards where the noise came from in my room towards the door there standing in front of my door was a black figure that took one step towards me next to the fridge and pointed down at it and disappeared I turned on the lamp on my bed and walked over to my fridge opened it and looked into it there in the back of the fridge a can of coke exploded an example of the non shadow people things I see while I was at UND I had a long-distance girlfriend for over a year he started dating in high school and when I enlisted in the military she started school in the College of st. Scholastica a private college in Duluth Minnesota so at the time of the story we had been dating for over a year and everything was great although she had a grand father at the time who was very sick one night I woke up and at the foot of my bed I saw three figures standing at the foot of my bed in my dorm room on the right there stood my girlfriend from the past a little girl with a silly Bob haircut and a pink dress from a photo that I once saw of her in the middle was my girlfriend from the present long blonde hair leggings and a sweatshirt then on the left was my girlfriend from the future she wore a long black dress as dark as the night with long black hair where her face should have been was just a black messy blur unlike the other figures beside her brushing off the incident I didn't think anything of it I didn't tell her about what I saw that night two days later I got a phone call from her crying she told me that the grandfather that she was so close to had passed away and then she wanted to take a break from our relationship to try and figure everything out after the call and as I thought back to what I saw that night and analyze what that third figure might have been trying to tell me the black dress symbolizes death like the clothes you wear to a funeral and the blurry black face meaning she would break up our relationship to deal with her grandfather's death somehow I had a clairvoyant vision of the near future other times I hear people in my room while I'm trying to fall asleep how the people trying to speak to me or talking to someone else in the room most of the time I'll hear people whisper my name in my ear while I'm laying in bed trying to fall asleep that summer I went to a psychiatrist to make sure that I wasn't going crazy from the sessions I had and the stories I told him mine wasn't schizophrenic but I was diagnosed with the kind of sleeping disorder called hypnagogic falling asleep and hypnopompic waking up hallucinations basically as am either falling asleep or coming out of sleep certain parts of my brain either go to sleep or come out of a sleeping State slower and faster than other parts making me have visual and auditory hallucinations hearing all of this I still have my doubts I don't doubt his credibility or anything but I think that there's more to this than I'm just hallucinating [Music] this one is an unexplained encounter and a bit long about six years ago over the summer of my junior year going into my senior year of high school I experienced something I can't quite shake off to this day my friend's parents were going out of town for the weekend so myself and three others including Matt planned a sleepover so we could all hang out be as loud as we wanted we slept over at my friend's Matt's house his house was located on the east side of town where that small wooded area was located I mentioned this area in a previous post about the scream I heard in my house that night we all mentioned how we should sleep on his trampoline since it was warm that night and none of us had done it before Matt was a little concerned with the idea because he had mentioned that homeless people and sometimes deer wander in and out of the little forest next to his house and there was no fence separating us from the woods so anything could go in and out of the yard into the forest and vice versa I told him we were gonna be fine and that there was nothing to worry about boy did I wish I could take that statement back we started setting up our spots on the trampoline getting cozy and just hanging out looking at our phones about an hour into this I started to hear twigs snapping and leaves crunching that was the only one who wasn't on the trampoline but sitting on a small River donut on the deck next to the trampoline he was sitting on this due to an injury that happened to him a few weeks prior to these events I was looking at mats while all of this was happening and he was looking into the woods he didn't say anything other than a quiet I told you this was a bad idea I kept listening for a few minutes and that had stopped my friends were all listening to but they didn't seem concerned it was really quiet after it stopped none of us said a thing we all look back on our phones and then that's when I saw it the second my eyes met my phone I saw from my peripheral vision this seven to eight foot tall run out of the woods into the backyard and darted to the side of the house oh we saw was the silhouette or whatever it was it was almost as if it was ghostly it was extremely thin and bipedal here's the kicker though we saw it run but we didn't hear it run it made zero sound when it was moving but it made the motion of someone running when we saw this we all did the exact same thing screamed and ran off the trampoline Matt was the first one inside and I was surprised he was even able to walk let alone run because of his injury we left some blankets and pillows outside because we were in such a hurry we shot and locked the sliding door all of the windows and doors we could find we kept looking out some of the windows to see if we could see anything but there was nothing because we were so startled when we stood up until sunrise to finally go to sleep I think about what happened on an almost daily basis everyone I have told has a theory that it has scaped from the mountains next to the forest for a little backstory I live in magna Utah the mountains on the east side that separate us from - Ella are said to have some sort of secret military base where experimentation and other things are done on who knows who or what [Music] the story was relayed to me by a colleague and friend before joining our organization this colleague worked as a tour guide at this time the story happened he worked for a tour company that specialized in Japanese and Korean tourists and he was assigned to work the trips going to the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia it should be noted that there now is a major highway that links the east coast and west coast but at the time the highway was in the process of being built and while most of the highway was intact there was still stretches where you would need to take the trunk roads through towns and villages before rejoining the highway some miles ahead he was supposed to meet a small group of Japanese tourists at the airport didn't escort them on their small bus to Kuantan a major tourist town in the East Coast which was more than four hours away at the time and the weather was bad that night and the plane was delayed by the time they go on their way it was already 9:00 p.m. a little more than an hour out of Kuala Lumpur Malaysia s capital a member of the tour group asked my friend if there was somewhere that they could stop to get something to eat because some of the tourist members were famished my friends said he would do what he could he then asked the same to the driver this was not their regular driver he was standing in for the regular driver who unfortunately had taken ill so the driver said he did not know but he would look for an all-night place along the way by that time they had reached the section of the highway that was under construction thus they had to take the parallel road they drove a little further when the driver and my friends saw an open-air restaurant which seemed to be quite lively just after a small town they had just passed so they stopped there the tour group exited and went about getting their refreshments my friend helped them with translations and he also got some food for himself and the driver less than an hour later they were back on the bus and heading to Kuantan the tourists were very happy with their stop because they said the food was excellent a few days later they were on their way back to the west coast for the same tour group but it was daytime and this time the regular driver was driving a tour member asked my friend if they could stop at the place where they had stopped on their first day again my friend said that he would do what he could he told this to the driver the driver asked him to describe the place which she did the drivers face went a little pale a little later they came to a place that seemed familiar to my friend and the driver asked him is that the place you mean pointing to a patch of land where a run-down building stood surrounded by what was once a clearing with a few tables and broken chairs there was also tall grass everywhere my friend recognized the place it was indeed the place where they had stopped a few days earlier he turned to the tour group and informed them that they would not be able to stop at the place they went to earlier because it was only open at night they sighed but left it at that later when they could talk in private my friend asked the driver about the place the driver informed him that the place had indeed been a restaurant with an outdoor eating area around it but it had been abandoned for a year since something terrible happened there and the business went under the driver didn't know what that terrible incident was but it led to more than one death that stretch of highway has since been completed then the parallel road is only rarely used they've used that road once to see if I could find the place I followed my friend's description and I think I found the place but there were only the remains of an old building there with tall grass all around it perhaps I should try going there at night if only to see if the food was really that good [Music] this is a personal story of mine it happened around my freshman year of high school in 2011 I was around 13 or 14 years old and my sister was four school grades younger than me every day I would come home on the bus arriving at my house around 2:20 p.m. about a 10 maybe 15 minute ride from the high school to my house I lived in the countryside so my stop was ways away from the other neighborhoods that kids lived in my house was directly next to a farm and we only had a few neighbors all older folk who stuck to themselves due to living in a rural area and having an extremely long dirt driveway when I got home from school I had to walk for a few minutes down the driveway before I got to the back slider door I would enter my house lock the door behind me and put my things down every day the same routine when I got home I would check on my dog's food and water and watch TV in the living room for a little while my living room window had a perfect view of the front yard of my house as well as the driveway and where the bus would stop at the end of our driveway here is where things start to get interesting while I watch TV in the living room I would keep an eye out the window to watch for my sister to arrive home from middle school and make sure she got off the bus and up the driveway safely she would get out of school around 2:30 and arrived at my house closer to 3:00 p.m. I would keep the door locked until I knew she would be home in a few minutes and then I'm with unlock it so she can get in the house when she gets the back door I did that same thing this day just like every other day while in the living room I saw my sister's bus pull up to the end of the driveway stop and I watched her get off the bus I remember she was wearing a North Face jacket a scarf and she had her fairly large teal backpack on jeans and boots she was walking up to the driveway and went out of my view and I heard the backslider door open close and lock as she came into the house from where I was sitting in the living room I could see her walk past a doorway down the hallway to a room I yelled out her name and pastor how school was but got no answer I got up to follow her and repeat my question as I walked into the hallway the very same hallway I had just seen her walk down I noticed there were no lights on the hallway was dark and her room at the end of the hallway was also dark I said her name again then heard nothing I turned the light on and went into her room and she wasn't there either I figured maybe she went into another room in the house but I could not find her anywhere I went back out to check the back door and to my surprise it was still unlocked and slightly open which didn't make any sense because I had just heard my sister closed and locked the door when she got home confused I closed the door and locked it and went back to the living room to grab my phone as I entered the room the strangest thing happened out of the window I saw my sister's bus pull up stop and I watched her get off the bus and walk up my driveway again when she came in the house I told her the weirdest thing just happened I saw you get off your bus and come inside and locked the door but you weren't anywhere in the house then I looked outside and saw you get off the bus again and when I checked the door was unlocked and open she responded by saying that's really weird because the door was locked when I came inside and usually leave it open for me I explained how I locked it because I thought she was in the house and thought it was really strange that the door was opened and unlocked without either of us manipulating it might I add my sister was wearing a t-shirt a scarf leggings and boots totally different outfit than I saw the first time I didn't know what I was seeing or what had just happened I had paranormal experiences in the past stories that I would be happy to share but this one really took the cake I didn't know if this was some kind of entity mimicking my sister and trying to get my attention or if this was some kind of glitch in reality but I would love to hear some theories and stories that are similar to mine I was 17 in 1992 when due to financial difficulties my family and I were forced to move into my grandmother's condominium in Claremont California we had come into some hard times and my mother could no longer afford the house my two brothers and sisters and I grew up in my grandmother shared this condo with my aunt Rosie my grandmother had just turned 90 while my aunt was somewhere in her late 80s this was not enough room for all of us so my brothers and I would take turns sleeping either on one of two couches or on the floor my aunt had two rooms that were considered her own one was her bedroom and the other was a room with a couch and a TV on one particular night I was the lucky one who got to sleep in this room I was always more than happy to sleep on a couch rather than the floor we all were as I was readying myself to sleep there was an overwhelming eerie sense of darkness that I could not deny this was a different kind of darkness one that I didn't understand then but do now this darkness was not physical but spiritual a blackness that could be felt I tried not to trip out about this because I knew that when I awake this feeling would be gone and I would feel silly as it began to drift I heard a deep guttural growl of what could only be one inch from my left ear I jumped off the couch and flipped on the light I was alone instantly I knew it was an evil spirit if this thing were to have manifested flesh and blood its lips would have practically been touching my ear when it ground naturally this scared me but as a Christian I was taught that through Jesus Christ I have authority over such evil spirits I decided that it was time to exercise this Authority I prayed and rebuked to rebuke in a Christian senses to command and Jesus's name the demonic spirit to leave the Bible says that if you resist the devil he will flee from you I rebuke this thing a countless amount of times before I felt that maybe it was safe to try to sleep once again as I lay on the verge of crossing over and asleep for a second time again an inch from my ear I heard something otherworldly this time it wasn't a deep guttural growl but a wicked hissing screeching like Angry whisper what stood out to me from both of these voices is its scornful hatred for me this hatred was not based on anything I did this thing hated me for merely existing this time my knee-jerk reaction was to throw my fists when you can feel and hear a presence right next to you and ninety-nine percent of the time when you're flailing your fists about you're going to hit something but once again there was nothing there now I'm confused I commanded this thing to leave and not only did it not leave but I think I angered it I did not sleep until the Sun came up I recognized this as a test of my faith about a week later it was once again my turn to sleep in my aunt Rosie's room was I concerned he better believe it but I hate being afraid and I was determined to conquer this fear I mustered up all my faith prayed and began to drift this time there was no guttural growl nor was there any demonic windy hissing I heard what sounded like a dungeon door slam shut immediately followed by the mystifying tormented scream of women the screen was not like one who was quickly spooked and quickly brushes off her fright but this expression of terror endured I'd say it was a good 20 seconds of an enduring scream loud and intense it was like someone was failing to endure the flames of hell just like the previous week in this room I sprung from the couch but this time I'm bolted directly to the living room where my mother typically slept on a pull-out bed she was still asleep but how is that possible I wondered the screen was so loud I remember thinking that the entire condo complex should have heard it with yet here's my mother sleeping undisturbed I woke her mom what was that she honestly didn't know what I was talking about I was soon to find nobody heard this but me completely dumbfounded i sat on a chair in the living room trying to make sense of these things in my head the chair I sat upon was adjacent to the den where my brother's slept I happened to look up into the darkness of the den and I saw at knee level two beaming eyes of red staring back it was too dark to make out any form of the body but if there was enough light to see more I am sure I would have seen this being and crawling position at this point that was so tired of being scared I simply stared it down for god knows how long before it finally vanished that night I didn't sleep until the Sun had risen the fact that this being continued to pester me and not respond to my rebukes bothered me for some time to come all these years it had become clear to me why that was there I was boldly engaging in spiritual warfare but I was rebuking the symptoms of this oppression rather than the heart of this attack I believe that I had confronted my aunt Rosie and commanded this evil spirit to leave her I would have gotten results I was seeking I don't believe my aunt was possessed although she may have been but she was certainly oppressed my mother on occasion would catch my aunt when she thought she was alone looking at something that wasn't there and speaking to this something that could not be audibly heard I told you to leave me alone get out of here Rosie would say my mother would ask her I'm Rosie who are you talking to realizing she was caught in this recourse like a child with her hand caught in a cookie jar she would become sheepish and avoid giving a real answer by saying oh there was nothing I was somewhat relieved when one nights it was my brother Brian's turn to sleep in on Rosie's room and he not yet knowing of my experiences in that room shared in a lot of what I did he did not hear any demonic voices in his ear but did hear what sounded like a dungeon door slams shut followed by a woman's scream there was a strange comfort in knowing that was not alone in this my sister Michelle went on to have her own experiences even to the point where she saw a full-on apparition appear before her this activity stopped one day it wasn't until later than we realized that it all stopped once aunt Rosie moved out of my grandmother's condo to live with her son evidently she took this spirit or spirits with her a few years later it came to be that I had adopted a party lifestyle a group of fellow party buddies and I like to gather in remote locations and hopes of not running into an authority figure we were all drinking and smoking and many of us were underage and remember hearing rumors about Satanists that would get together in this location and perform their rituals whatever that might be I didn't think much of it my buddies and I were in the midst of having a great time standing on and how to play slab of cement getting thoroughly loaded I happened to glance behind me and I saw something moving fast out of the corner of my eye I turned to see and it was a spirit of light and moved at will and ran as if it were running in an incalculable speed it happened so fast I wasn't able to get a good look at it and shock I turned to my friend known as redheaded Dave standing next to me to see if he saw what I saw he had the same look of bewildered fear about his face that I was wearing he asked me did you see that he saw it longer and better than I did and said there was what looked like a scrawny old man in light we had no idea what to make of it our fellow friends missed it entirely as they were looking in another direction later that same night and dave was with me when I returned to my grandmother's condo complex we were walking around the area discussing how weird our earlier experience was when we came across a condo with the lemon tree in the backyard its branches were hanging over a wall over the street we were walking we jumped in both grabbed a lemon we decided to have a contest to see who can throw their lemon the furthest down the parking lot Street I realized as I'm writing this that this could very well be a he had to be there a moment that you won't fully appreciate otherwise but regardless I'm going to write it out exactly as it happened we both chucked our lemons as far as we could it felt like I threw mine too far to the left and that I likely hit someone's condo or something we thought he threw his too far to the right likely over a fence into a field it was too dark to see either way from our distance we walked down the street thinking we were going to confirm the lemons didn't make it onto the street as we walk down the street we found our lemons in the middle of the street perfectly lined up side by side we were mesmerised how is that possible our first thoughts were that these lemons must have rolled down an incline or slope and settled that way we thoroughly inspected the streets and could not find any such thing this street was completely flat how they ended up so diametrically and mathematically perfect right next to each other with less than an inch of separation really tripped us out we contemplated on what the odds were that that should happen and we knew the odds must have been astronomical the next night Dave and I were out once again gallivanting around the condo having had a few to drink we came across the lemon tree with plans of repeating that contest we laughed and talked about how weird the previous night was and we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the results would be different this time we chucked our lemons as far as we possibly could this time we were even more certain we would never see those lemons again having thrown them too far to the left or right as we walked down the street we joked about how we were going to completely trip out if we saw the exact same results but we knew that would not happen it was impossible but when we came upon the lemons only to find them exactly as they were the previous night in the exact same spot with no logical explanation behind it we said nothing it was like the wind got knocked right out of our lungs and we simply forgot to breathe we just stared at the lemons as if somehow they would reveal their secrets but they did not I pondered in my head and still do how long it would take for this to happen by chance if you took two random people and had them do this contest how long would it take before they would get the same results me and Dave did maybe eternity I do not doubt that it had something to do with the spirit we saw but why would it behave this way I will never know maybe just to blow our minds a few years later me and a couple of buddies were out late on a quiet still night my friend Pete decided to lead us to where a house once stood while walking there he gave us the backstory of this location he said there was a man who owned this house that somehow managed to lose his mind slaughter his family and burned the house down along with him inside I couldn't tell the story was true or not because it sounded a bit cliche as far as horror stories go but we went there and the second we got to where we were standing in the middle of where this house once stood an intense wind came out of nowhere not thinking much of it I started messing around trying to sound McCobb and said the spirits are telling us to get out and flying the wind was proof of this I didn't really believe that I was just trying to be funny but what really tripped me out was the insane wind completely stopped the second we left a couple of feet from where the house once stood there was no wind at all that day except for the five to ten minutes of us being at that space was it a coincidence maybe but it sure was weird my final encounter with a supernatural of ill-repute happened in 2005 by this time I had left my partying days behind me and was happily married me and my wife decided to go out and see a movie we weren't sure what we wanted to see but we ended up settling for white noise this movie starred Michael Keaton and had to do with electronic voice phenomena Keaton's character wife dies and he comes to find that by putting his TV on a frequency of white static that by 3:30 every morning he is able to make out voices in the static that tell him things primarily from his recently deceased wife the movie was no that good in fact I have seen far scarier movies in my life done far better albeit I will admit there was a couple of scenes that were a bit eerie but this is what were supposed to expect from a movie of this genre done properly nothing out of the ordinary that nights being a night out I was watching television women exactly at 3:30 the TV switched from what I was watching and went to pure white noise that didn't just happen I thought I turned the TV off woke up my wife who was sleeping in our bedroom and told her what had happened and I asked her to pray she pretty much rolled her eyes and said what she thought I wanted to hear but I could tell she thought all the movie did was spark my imagination and that it will pass the following night I was asleep in the bedroom and my wife was watching TV the roles completely reversed this time she wakes me up at 3:30 scared out of her mind to tell me that the TV again went to white noise she left the white noise on too scared to be in the living room long enough to turn the TV off as I'm walking down the hallway I was looking at this white noise remembering that in the movie this was a way for the dead to communicate with the living no way I was going to speak to the noise God condemns necromancy in the Bible with the dead truly wanted to connect with me they can wait until I die I turned the TV off this began some investigation I had to know if there was a way that one of us accidentally set the TV to do this we came to find that it was possible to sent our cable to change channels at specific times the thing is neither of us knew how to do this and what are the odds one of us accidentally setting our cable to do this at 3:30 a.m. on the very night we saw that movie odds are so astronomical that one can call it impossible next time around we made sure that the TV was turned off and were both in bed by the time 3:30 rolled around I was certain this would take care of the issue it did not at exactly that time we heard the sound of static coming from the living room I go out there to find the TV had managed to turn itself on and went right into white noise scary I was pretty much at a loss at what else to do the following night except unplug the TV if spirits are using my TV to mess with us maybe if I unplug their power source all will return to normal it did and what a strange experience that was to this day I wonder how it came to be that this paranormal incidents came to be I wasn't the least bit connected with the white noise movie I didn't think much of it again I've seen scarier movies so why of all movies was this one chosen by some otherworldly entity I wonder if a demon from my past encounters has attached itself to me with the goal to oppress and believe I will never know the answers has been 14 years since my last experience and I must say I do prefer it this way [Music] I've had a lot of experiences ever since I was a kid in my house every single one could be put down to coincidence or explained in some other way forgetfulness older sister playing a prank etc but the sheer volume of experiences make me feel as if it's something more I don't know what I hope to get in posting this since it'll probably be drowned out in other stories I just like talking about my boy I had an imaginary kid as a child his name was Andy that was also a mild sleepwalker and terribly afraid of the dark I told my parents that Andy who usually lived in the Attic would come down on a night to make sure I was safe and I didn't leave my room if I got out of bed I also believed that there was a monster that only Andy would keep me safe from now I was a kid and my mom just put it down to an overactive imagination which is fair enough then one day when I was a little older and we had a letter come to the house intended for a man he used to live here they hadn't realized he didn't anymore his name was Andrew and as I now know he was dead this could mean nothing Andy is a common name I have uncles called Andy and I watched Andy's on TV but it was enough of a creepy coincidence that it stuck with me here are some of my other experiences that I can think of off the top of my head I had dolls when I was very little I had this sort of jet ski thing that came with one doll that you could strap the legs into but with my little grubby fingers I could never manage it I got so frustrated once that I stormed downstairs to fetch my mom she was too busy to help and I came back upstairs mine doll was sitting upright in its little ski all done up the kitchen scissors went missing once and no one could find them my mom joked it's that ghost again so I also jokingly said Andy we need those can you please have them back I found them laying out in the middle of my bedroom floor a minute later said thanks and left it at that one time the Christmas decorations in the Attic mysteriously organized themselves we often leave them a tiny bit messy when we put them up there after Christmas no one ever goes into that attic but I don't know how they ended up all neat I tried to hold a seance once because I have dumb idiots syndrome and I can remember this creepy feeling that made me need to stop I know it's not the most exciting thing ever but it was definitely a sensation that I had never felt before one time when something else went missing I called him terrible names and he knocked over things on my desk this probably isn't convincing evidence but nyjah's feel a presence in this house it's not threatening or anything it just feels like someone's there doing his own thing living his best afterlife it's entirely possible that maybe I'm just crazy [Music] this was back when I was in high school my mom used to say she heard and saw stuff but I always thought that she was just exaggerating and being annoying one day I was home alone playing video games in my room I had my headset on this was when modern warfare 2 was saw the hype so I had my volume up high and through the headphones I hear someone yelled Jacob coming from the kitchen I'm playing online so I couldn't pause it so I yelled back what didn't get a response figured my mom needed help with the groceries or something but I had four minutes left in the match I'll finish up I heard my name again Jacob I yelled back I'm about to be done I'll be there in a minute I yelled so the game finishes and I go to the kitchen and nobody is there go to my parents room and nobody in there looked in the driveway no car I call my mom and ask her where she's at and she says that she's at Walmart and she'll be home in a bit I could feel the blood draining from my face I never told my mom cuz she would just freak herself out more but that was scary does anybody have something similar happened to them I'm not sure how this group works but I have other stuff that it happened and I don't want to cram it into one post update I just gotten out of the shower nobody was home I had my towel on around my waist and I had opened the door to let the steam out as I brush my teeth I started to hear the sound of plastic bags being moved around and I heard the refrigerator door closed I figured my parents were home so I shut the door when I finished brushing my teeth I went into my room and as I walked in there I could still hear the rustling of plastic bags I kept thinking man they bought a lot of groceries as it was changing I finished putting on my clothes and went to the kitchen to help put up groceries I stopped hearing the rustling at that point I didn't see any bags or anything it looked in the refrigerator and it didn't look like groceries had been put in there had it happened again I went and sat outside for a while I finally took off to a friend's house my bike can call my parents a little later sure enough they had been at my sister's house the whole time I wanted to convince myself that I was hearing things again but I remember it to this day how clear I heard it and it still gives me chills my sister is quite a bit older so my house was always just my dad mom and I so I always had my own room my mom always liked the antique look of the house so for some reason when I needed a computer chair she got me this big red and leather computer chair it's real comfy but it was huge I hated how much room it took up but I kept it anyways cuz I liked how it made me look like a villain sometimes I'd spin around and that's when people came in my room and pretended I was wearing an eyepatch and petting a cat I was facing my window away from my computer area where the chair was sitting when I woke up one night to the sound of squeaking like a long squeak like it always made when I would turn around in it and then it stopped I was awake but not had my eyes closed I knew it was the chair but I didn't turn around cuz I guess the fear froze me up I heard it again and this time I opened my eyes but still didn't turn around to hear it I heard it one more time but it was in sections such as multiple squeaks I just closed my eyes after that and eventually fell asleep I didn't even want to turn around a couple of months passed after that I was sitting on the edge of my bed putting on my shoes to go to the gym the edge of my bed is directly in front of the bedroom door and in front of it is the kitchen it's a very small one more like a small hallway with a fridge and sink in counters and stove when I looked up I saw six fingers which looked like two hands were holding the door but it was at eye level so it had to have been a child's hand and I saw the very top of what looked like black hair the way the hands and top of the head were made it look like it was holding itself up horizontally now before you ask no way did not do a double-take it was not something I kind of just glanced I stared at a Farragut three seconds I kicked the door closed as hard as I could and took off running to my friend's house I was a six foot to 295 pound defensive end for my school I didn't scare easily but I was scared that day I left for college after I graduated and it didn't experience anything there but that my dad started calling me my dad's an old school construction worker very serious and always rolled his eyes when he heard my mom was seeing stuff I did too till they started happening to me so my dad called me one nights and told me he was experiencing things I knew I wasn't crazy so when I left for college it was just my dad and mom at the house he tells me that he woke up at 5:00 a.m. like he always does started his pot of coffee and got dressed for work when he got back the coffee pot was off the coffee maker and didn't think much of it because he figured he had just forgotten to put it on the machines since he was probably still groggy from waking up a couple of days later same thing happened except the pot was closer to the sink again he wasn't one to believe in stuff like that so he just shrugged it off as him doing it and blaming it on being in automatic mode in the morning it happened again a third time but this time the coffeepot was on the floor when he saw that he ran to my mom's room to see if she wasn't playing some trick on him she was stoned asleep he drained the coffee and in the coffee pot was some change 37 cents I think he said he was freaked out I don't have any little brothers or kids who might be playing tricks on him currently it's just my mom and dad a couple of years passed by I have a daughter she's about three years old I had just gotten divorced so I moved in with my parents till I got back on my feet and got my own place my daughter was playing with her little kitchen playsets and I'm in the kitchen making her some food I hear her talking in her baby voice mine it's mine my toy I think she has an imaginary friends so I don't think anything of it a couple of minutes pass and she let out a Yelp and starts crying so I run to her thinking she had smashed a finger on a door or something and I pick her up and hug her and ask her what's wrong and she says he's scary and I said who and she points towards the kitchen so I asked her simple questions is he tall or short using my hands as a measuring stick she points at the tall gesture I asked her what color pointed at white she said no I pointed at red she said no again I pointed at black and she said yes I asked her if it was pretty or ugly and she said ugly a couple of weeks passed by again and my daughter is sleeping with me in my old room I feel her sliding down towards the bottom part of the bed my initial reaction is that she is moving around but it was a smooth feeling like she was being pulled by her feet so I sit up as soon as I realized it and she was fast asleep I get up turn on the lights and start looking around the room and found nothing I don't know if my mind was playing tricks on me because I had just woken up out of nowhere but it felt real to me maybe I was dreaming but after everything that had happened over the years I didn't think it was logically explainable anymore i moved out shortly after that i never saw or heard anything again where i live now my parents still live there and my mom says she hears things every now and then but nothing huge like what I've seen and heard my people the Malays sir Javanese have this belief that there are seven people in the world who look exactly like you some also believe that if you meet all of them you will die personally I do not believe this however my family members and I and my close friends have experienced seeing these doppelgangers numerous times the first time it happened to me albeit indirectly it was when my brothers saw my daughter and I in London he was walking towards a tube station near Hyde Park when he heard a child's voice behind him he turned and saw a girl walking towards him he was pleasantly surprised because he thought the girl was my daughter and behind her he saw someone who he thought was me according to him both the daughter and the man looked exactly like my daughter and I it was not until they got within a few feet away when they all realized that they were not who they thought they were apparently the dad said my brother looked exactly like his own brother which was why his daughter thought he was her uncle my brother told him that he too thought that they were almost identical to my daughter and me he even showed them our pictures and the man was extremely surprised the second time this happened was at a shopping complex near my place my wife and her best friends were having lunch together at a Nando's a roast chicken place my wife's friend then said she saw me coming down an escalator and walking towards them great my wife snickered let's get him to pay for lunch so they waited for me to come nearer but when I got within a few feet they both realized that it was not me and was very surprised at how the man closely resembled me the third time was also at a shopping complex near my place but a different complex a close friend who was also a former student was having a drink at a cafe when she saw me a couple of tables away she wanted to join me but before she got up from her place she picked up on something that made her sit back down she decided to scrutinize the man a little more and realized that he was not in fact me she said there were minor differences he was slightly smaller and his glasses were different she remembered this because the last time we met which was not long before this incident I had just come back from the optician and I was telling her about the good deal that I got from the optician for my new pair of glasses I also showed her the glasses she took a photo of the man and sent it to me I'm sure I have the photo still somewhere in my external hard drive the fourth time happened in Malacca a town in states south of Kuala Lumpur the town in the States shared the same name I was at a hotel for a conference it was in the afternoon and I was making my way back to my hotel room when a man stopped me he addressed me by a name that I did not recognize and he acted like we were old friends he asked why he had not seen me at Zilker ages zookas club and Kuala Lumpur I told him that he had me mistaken for someone else and that I had never been to Zook even though it is actually not far from my place it was silent as he scrutinized me up and down for quite some time before exclaiming Jesus Christ you're not man's name which I had forgotten at this time he was embarrassed and very apologetic which I said he had no reason to be he then excused himself and went down the corridor still shaking his head and perhaps are not so related incident my father was at an airport in Delhi when a man dressed in military uniform came up to him snapped to attention and saluted him and the man said major Abajo do sir my father was surprised he then told the man that he was not major bahador the man told him that the major was his former commanding officer and had since retired moreover he informed my father that he looked exactly like the retired major so I have had for indirect encounters with my doppelganger according to the superstition if I have three more indirect encounters or if I encounter this man directly I'm a goner sooo if you guys don't hear from me anymore you know what happened if others had told me that there is a man who looks exactly like me I might not have believed them but the people who have seen my doppelganger are my own brother my wife her best friend and a close friend I trust that they would not have been fooled by what they saw so easily [Music] throughout my childhood I've had a few minor experiences which I believe have been paranormal by sharing I'm looking for advice answers people with mutual encounters when I was little about three or four I distinctly remember being terrified of the shadow which was on my bedroom wall every night I was too scared to sleep without a lamp on and I would always wake up to see the shadow on the wall it was never there when I went to sleep only when I woke up feeling scared in the middle of the night the shadow was a profile of a woman's neck and head and the distinguishing feature was a big ponytail exactly like Polly Pocket I would always wake up my mom but she would has a non-believer explained to me that it was just a shadow of one of my toys and dolls and tell me to go back to sleep after we moved house I never saw the shadow of her again and after recently asking my mum about it she said that she vaguely remembered it a few years later when I was about five or six I had terrifying nightmares specifically revolving around religion to example as I remember are as follows the first dream I remember in vivid detail was about angels I was standing in my backyard with my class from school when we looked up over the hill and we saw angels flying around in a circle making a weird type of music the teacher asked us what are they doing as though she was teaching a lesson and one of the girls in my class said they're laughing and I woke up in terror the next dream was about Jesus I remember it so clearly because of how scared I was when I woke up I was holding a crucifix with a gold Jesus figure on it the Jesus started talking to me I was scared so I threw it in the garden I was outside again then I remember it's saying no Emma pick me up I picked it up and the next thing I remember from the dream was I was in the mall with the crucifix and everything was blurring around us it was talking to me but I can't remember what it was saying next thing I recall was waking up crying after a while I stopped having these dreams and now if I'm in a nightmare I can literally wake myself up by telling myself I'm dreaming I had a pretty normal childhood after that until I was about nine or ten if once again we had moved house and that was a happy child small things happen in this house but thinking back on them now I feel uneasy I used to take a bottle of drink with me to bed at night and still slept with a lamp on and a blanket I called blanky I did this until I was about 15 I would wake up in the middle of the night sand my bottle of drink would be in the middle of my floor and blanky was folded into a neat pile next to my head on my pillow I asked both my parents if they were doing this and they both said no and that I was probably doing it in my sleep Yeah right my sister also complained of feeling scared of the house and had to go to therapy because she honestly believed that there was a man in the roof I have spoken to her since and she says that she was just a kid with a vivid imagination I also had an experience of falling asleep to be woken up by a distinct whisper in my ear of someone saying Emma I was also afraid of my parents room in this house they had a built-in wardrobe with mirrored doors and I hated their whole room we moved again when I was in year ten to a house that was undoubtedly haunted or possessed really negative energy I witnessed a door closing by itself which I told myself was just because of a draft and I was mentally at my worst I was extremely depressed and remember contemplating ending my life to the point I even wrote my family a goodbye letter after we moved I was fine I never thought about that again and was mentally doing well and so much better in this house however I did feel scared being by myself and once experienced an object in the kitchen a metal object that could not have been carried by the wind fallen to the floor by itself nothing other than that really happened I just felt uneasy I always have before we moved out of this house I was in the shower home alone at about 8:00 p.m. my family was at her new house unboxing our kitchen stuff so I was alone except for my puppy who was in his playpen in the kitchen when I was under the water I heard our door open and closed it was a loud door so I could hear its trademark squeak and slam I assumed it was my dad picking up more boxes so I continued my shower normally when I got out my mom and sister got home about 5 minutes later I asked them what Dad had come back for and they said they had been at the other house with them all night I told them what had happened and we searched the house and found nothing needless to say we were all pretty shaken up but I've only heard the door open and closed once so either if it was a person they had been in the house for a while and we're leaving or coming in but there was no one in her house I still feel uneasy sometimes in my home I see shadows out of the corner of my eye and hear noises before I go to sleep I usually sleep with a fan on so I can't hear the random clicks or knocks around my room I have spoken to one of my more spiritual friends about my experiences and she believes I may be a little psychic honestly I feel like I'm just paranoid so I'd love to hear your thoughts maybe it was the house that was haunted but whatever reason I saw my husband's doppelganger at least twice while we lived there the first time was after I drove him to work he was a 45-minute Drive each way and I was just getting back home when I pulled up in front of the house there he was standing on the porch smoking a cigarette same black hat and red shirt he had on when I dropped him off I looked away for a second to put the car in park and when I looked back he was gone I hopped out of the car and looked on either side of the house for him and I was so confused I called and asked him where he was obviously he was still miles away at work I thought it was going crazy the second time my was not alone we had a friend of ours over at the house who I'll refer to as Debbie au nom w and I were hanging out in the kitchen eating Munchie food and my husband was outside for whatever reason I forget before I continued the house was set up like this the kitchen is the first room you walk into from the front door and front porch it's the only room on the bottom floor there's a set of wooden stairs in the kitchen that leads upstairs to the rest of the house in front of the house is the main road so you have to walk off the porch onto the sidewalk and around to the side of the house to get to the yard so we're both in the kitchen but I'm leaning over the counter eating leftover halal keys and w's at the kitchen table facing the door my husband burst through the door and runs through the kitchen slamming the door shut behind him I only see him mad at my periphery after a second W says to me where did he just go and the chill goes down my spine I turn around and he's not there I don't even bother checking the stairs because they're very loud then I would have heard him I knew what it was I say to W that wasn't him and go towards the door to check outside and prove to both of us he was still out there and this is where it gets hilarious w grabs a hold of the back of my shirt terrified and yells don't open that door I bravely opened the door and yelled for my husband who responds yeah and comes walking around the house from the side yard our simple friend then says to him dude someone just ran into your house causing my husband to go into attack mode running into the house searching for the intruder I know this is ridiculous because W didn't act as if a stranger ran into the house when we were in the kitchen in fact I think he even said something to him before asking me where he went I stopped them both and say wait a minute wait a minute w what did you see and he looks at my husband and says I saw you at that moment we all realized what happened we saw something supernatural and we were thoroughly freaked out and W refuses to talk about it to this day 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 our let's read official and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video enjoy my discord to interact with me and other 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Channel: Lets Read!

Views: 578,729

Rating: 4.6136293 out of 5

Keywords: true scary stories, lets read podcast, scary true stories, true horror stories, reddit scary true stories, scary stories, horror stories, true scary stories from reddit, true horror stories from reddit, subscriber submissions, true stories, scary horror stories, stories from reddit, lets not meet, reddit, lets read, asmr reading, asmr sleep, ASMR, true creepy stories, creepy stories, subscriber submitted scary stories, true scary stories reddit lets not meet, podcast

Id: R8iu1TkwEdU

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Length: 206min 9sec (12369 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019

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