Relaxing Rain and True Scary Stories | HD RAIN VIDEO | (Scary Stories) | (Rain Video) | (Rain)

[Music] welcome to relaxing rain and scary stories volume 9. this video was created specifically for people to relax or fall asleep to in order to help you relax as always i only put three mid-roll ads in this video one after story number one one after story number two and one more after story number three this way you can relax to the rest of the video without any more interruption thank you for watching and you can help this video get recommended to more people if you do me a huge favor and hit that like button consider subscribing too i am 100 devoted to my subscribers and their experience while visiting my channel i really hope you enjoy and to my current subscribers i want to say thank you very much this channel would be nothing without you now let's begin back during the summer of 2011 a few friends and i decided to organize a little camping trip to a forest just a few miles outside our hometown delamere forest despite being pretty small presented us with a much needed opportunity to connect with nature city living can be good but it can be stifling so any chance to get out into the countryside was well received but as time went by and the date of the camping trip approached things began to unravel one by one various friends called and texted to inform us that they wouldn't be attending be it family illness lack of cash or just laziness in the end there was only two of us that actually decided to go so early on sunny summer morning we boarded a train for the journey down to the forest the weather was perfect a cloudless sky with a light breeze that made the hike through the woods not nearly as oppressive as we were expecting it didn't take long for us to find a decent spot in the shade that happened to be right next to a stream that we could use for washing and drinking water the only trouble was the spot was very open visible to passerby and not the least bit subtle so it's late afternoon we are tired from our hike and we decide to build a fire to cook some dinner on but here's the thing building a small fire is an essential part of camping sure but it attracts people the smell of burning wood in the cooking food the smoke sometimes you might as well be announcing yourself to the whole forest with a megaphone but we know this so we're not exactly surprised when a group of locals stumbles across our little camp and comes down to say hello they seem friendly enough at first and this might sound paranoid but the whole time i just had this bad feeling about them it fascinates me how human instinct can pick up things like that little clues in body language or speech that lead to us to believe that someone isn't being entirely genuine i wasn't sure if it was the way the locals were looking at each other or the strange probing questions they asked but i knew they didn't have the best of intentions when they moved on and were out of earshot my friend suggested that we move the camp now he's normally the skittish one who i'm perennially telling to calm down or chill out but on this occasion i knew he was right maybe we were being a little bit paranoid but in instances such as that it's always better to be safe than sorry so as tired and half drunk as we were we packed up our stuff doused the fire and then started looking for another place to set up camp luckily we found somewhere pretty quick a heavily wooded hill that basically overlooked our old campsite on one side not that we had a direct view of it but if you walked a minute or so away from camp we had a pretty good view of the surrounding area at least we did during the daytime as the sun set we started another fire cooked ourselves up some ramen noodles in our mess tins then then proceeded to drink and smoke ourselves stupid we talked about stuffer on the fire until we were too tired to drink and continue then retired to our pancho shelters for the night i'm pretty sure i passed out as soon as i got into my sleeping bag as i don't remember drifting off or anything i just know the next thing i can recall is opening my eyes in pitch darkness to the sound of a distant car revving its engine at first i was just annoyed to be woken up the hangover was kicking in hard and i felt like boiled crap as i tried to fall back asleep but the distant vehicle kept revving its engine and as the sound grew louder and louder i knew it was getting closer something told me to go check it out by the time i started to hear voices it might have just been a bunch of kids taking a stolen car for a spin but like i said sometimes it's better to be safe than sorry but when i go to the edge of the hill i can already see torch beams all over our old campsite the revving engine was from a vehicle that had been driven all the way down the forest path to our previous camp someone was down there looking for us i think i acted more out of instinct than anything else moving as quickly and quietly as i could back to my sleeping friend to wake him i must have explained what i'd seen like two or three times he was just as exhausted and half drunk as i was but when it sank in he was up on his feet with me and helping to kick dirt on our dying fire we then grabbed a pair of binoculars we were carrying with us and then ran back to the edge of the hill to watch the scene below in utter horror we could see what was in the men's hands thanks to the torches they shone on one another baseball bats hammers and a length of rope were just a few of the things they carried they spat and cursed furious that they had come back too late to catch us all we had were our swiss army knives to defend ourselves with if the guys down there had decided to actually search the area they'd have found us pretty easily and i'm not sure i'd be here telling this story today but to our infinite fortune they didn't maybe they had been drinking themselves or were just too lazy to actually look for us but we are so thankful they didn't with one person keeping watch the other went back to camp to pack their gear as fast as they could the guys down below were hanging around our old camp kicking at the fire we had so carefully constructed taking all their spite out on things we had left behind as i've mentioned they didn't seem keen on actually looking for us but they didn't seem like they were in a hurry to leave either this meant that we were essentially stuck on this wooded hill as an escape attempt with our heavy packs meant that if we were discovered there would be no outrunning any of them especially since they had a vehicle we ended up staying there until morning neither of us could get any sleep despite the gang leaving with their vehicle i remember being terrified they would return one more time more torches more people with more of a will to find us but they didn't they were probably sleeping off their own hangovers by the time that we were on the train home we were due to stay another two nights and i was still annoyed that we had to call a trip short but with those scummy local people around we just didn't want to risk it be careful when you're traveling around whether it is internationally or locally because despite the unfathomable kindness of strangers some of them aren't so friendly this took place a few years ago in a little english town me and my friends had been out in the town and i think we may have been out to see a movie or something we were walking back to my friend's house a walk i had walked many times before when we got to this church we were being rowdy and having a good time when all of a sudden we heard a gut-wrenching scream at first we thought it was coming from across the road where an abandoned building was the screams continued and after a few seconds we realized that they were coming from behind us in the church we thought that it could possibly be a few kids messing around but either way our curiosity got the better of us we walked into the yard to try and pin down the location of the screams it's safe to say at this point we were freaked out the screams honestly sounded like someone being murdered i got out my phone at this point and called the police all the while the screams were continuing getting louder the closer we approached the church the police were asking for our location what we were hearing trying to keep us calm my friends were losing it it was then that the lights of the church illuminated the graveyard we ducked to avoid the lights hiding behind headstones then just as suddenly as they came on they went off again then on then off then on and off once more at that point we hightailed it out of there we weren't sticking around to find out what was going on the police called me back a few minutes later when we were further down the road they said that they arrived at the church and looked around however they couldn't see or hear anything i asked whether the lights were on or any doors were unlocked but they said the entire property was fully sealed and no lights were on to this day i have no idea what took place that night in all honesty i had forgotten about it until my friend had reminded me we all kind of wrote it off as a weird experience but there was something about those screams that still even to this very day makes me feel uneasy i have never really had anything actually scary happen to me awkward moments sure people being outright mean that too but never anything legit scary but all that changed just a few weeks before lockdown when i was asked to babysit a neighbor's kid while they went to a party relating to one of their jobs i had never ever babysat for anyone before so admittedly i was pretty nervous but if i had known what kind of night i had in store for me i'd have turned the job down in a second it was made all the worse by the fact that my parents pretty much assured me that it would be an easy 50 bucks and that the night would be over before i knew it i had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the start but my dad actually managed to talk me out of that headspace now i wish i had just trusted my gut and stayed well away so i wander over to the house around seven in the evening introducing myself to the parents and the kid before they go over a few ground rules at first it seemed like my dad was right that i was just being silly and that if i played my cards right i could turn this into a regular thing to fund my weekend shopping habits the parents were lovely and so was the kid so i got pretty chill pretty quickly and ended up sort of enjoying myself entertaining the kid after they left with the help of disney plus which i'd be lying if i said i wasn't a huge fan of everything is going well until it comes time to put the kid to bed then things started getting a little awkward the kid straight up refuses and our new happy little friendship starts to quickly deteriorate i felt super mean having to lay down the law with the kid and he went from crying and wailing to shouting and screaming at me like i wasn't his mom he hated me and i didn't belong there stuff like that it actually kind of hurt and i started to realize that maybe i wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility yet to be a parent or a guardian you need to be tough enough to be able to kind of like be the bad guy if that makes any sense and if there are any of you out there that are looking to get into babysitting thinking it'll be easy money please reconsider i have done way way easier things for money before and since things that don't make you feel crappy for having to shout at a kid but after a while the whole temper tantrum seems to have tired the kid out and even though he still seemed upset with me he went up to his room got into his pajamas and climbed into his bed to sleep he asked me to read him a story and since he had actually done as he was told i obliged and when his eyes finally closed over and his breathing slowed i snuck out of the room and downstairs to leave him to get some rest so about an hour or so later i was sitting on the couch texting a friend of mine telling them how babysitting was way harder than i thought it was going to be i'm working through the leftover chicken pot pie that my mom had given me to take over there catching up on some episodes of the mandalorian when the family house phone starts to ring thinking it was the parents looking to check up on me i pick up greeting the caller and the cheeriest voice i could manage only no one on the other end responds i say hello a few more times assume it's a butt dial or a bad line and i hang up heading back to finish off my meal no sooner am i sat down again the phone rings again i was kind of expecting it i suppose maybe the parents had gone through a tunnel or something i don't know but either way i get up again head over to the phone and pick up only this time when i do i can hear breathing on the other end of the phone i give another cheery hello but there's just the same breathing coming from the other end when the person finally speaks it's this super deep voice obviously a guy telling me to check on the sleeping kid i thought it might have been the kid's dad playing a prank but there was also something really weird and distorted about the voice i respond like okay i'll go check and the line goes dead immediately the kid is fine sleeping like a rock so as much as i'm kind of creeped out by the weird voice i figure it must have been the dad maybe the parents had argued i don't know i tried not to think so much about it but then pretty much as soon as i'm back downstairs the phone rings again no caller id no nothing so i answer unable to prevent this fear from entering my voice big mistake whoever is calling senses this and starts to like giggle down the phone line in that same weirdly distorted voice what they said next made my blood turn to ice gonna snatch him up gonna snatch up the kitty when you're not looking gonna get him i went silent just totally silent out of fear and that's when i heard a creak in the floorboards above me someone was moving around in the rooms upstairs i pretty much dropped the phone and bolt upstairs and into the kid's room to find that he's still asleep or rather that he very much appears to be asleep but that same deep slow breathing isn't there the more i look the more like he seems like he's almost holding his breath not only that but his arm is at this weird angle that makes it look like he's holding on to something under his pillow something he's trying to hide in a fury i pull the pillow up slightly and then realize what's been happening whoever thought it was a good idea to buy an eight-year-old kid a phone is straight up crazy but under that pillow wasn't just a phone there was some kind of voice changer under there too i grabbed both and run out of the room back downstairs where the kid starts throwing another temper tantrum i felt so dumb completely played by the kid made to feel terrified and vulnerable how the heck could someone be so young yet so malicious and mean-spirited the parents arrived back shortly afterward and i didn't mention a word of what happened until they had paid me in full then i read them the riot act i was never going to babysit for them and they were completely irresponsible letting their kid have things like a phone let alone an actual voice changer turns out the creepy little gadget was their older college-aged kids and that the little guy was fascinated with it and wouldn't give it back to him but i didn't care i wasn't about to put myself out there like that ever again let me start out by saying that when i sleep i have lucid dreams when i say this i mean i make active decisions in my dreams and i remember my dreams vividly when i wake up but i don't always realize that i'm dreaming when i'm dreaming this is the case when the dreams are especially realistic because of this my nightmares become that much more terrifying one nightmare that i experienced years ago was so surreal that i still cringe when i think about it it's hard to remember because it was years ago but it was one of my worst nightmares it started out in my house i remember feeling uncomfortable like if you were about to get on an airplane for the first time and you were afraid of heights then i heard screams from the other rooms in my house my mom's room in my sister's room i exited my room to see what was happening my house was a two story three-bedroom two-bathroom house all the bedrooms were on the top floor where mine was the closest to the stairs almost the same time i exited my room i saw a man whom i did not recognize exiting my mom's room he looked at me and i saw that his face had no emotion before i could notice anything else about him my surroundings changed i was in a dimly lit street he was barely visible between the street lights and when he came to the light i finally noticed that he had a scalpel and his face was freckled by spots of blood fear swept over my body i spent the next three hours running from him hiding from him and banging on vacant homes for help he always knew where i was he always caught up to me i was slower in my dream for whatever reason i could not escape him as a quick example i would hide in a bush or behind a wall he would walk directly towards where i was hiding staring directly at me without fail i would manage an escape before he got too close again he did not have a line of sight and he would still manage to find me i could keep running but that's all i could do i could not hide from this man the most chilling part is that after many failed attempts at escaping without my dream changing or ending i gave up on running as he caught me he half smiled in a motionless smile grabbed his scalpel and i can still remember the cold blade running across my neck i felt calm and peaceful in comparison to the terror i had experienced for what felt like hours i felt my neck and saw my own blood covering my hands i remember closing my eyes and in the next moment i was awake in a state of panic with a cold sweat i realized that i had a lucid dream where i was killed i couldn't sleep for the rest of the night after that let me give a little information about me i am an 18 year old male i was 17 at the time of this incident i have had some weird incidents happen to me throughout my life but nothing has topped this and i hope nothing ever does my parents were having a get together at our house which seemed to me like it was dying down i was getting bored and i got a text from one of my close friends luke who wanted me to come over i replied back and said sure he said that my other friends colton ryan and matthew are also there and they were waiting for me i said i'll be there in 10 minutes when i got there i walked in and i couldn't find anybody i looked all over the house and found everyone except for luke i asked over and over again where he was and they only told me to go find him i assumed they were messing with me so i played along and went to look let me give you a layout of his house he has a relatively long driveway that has a few curves with a barn on one side and his driveway on the opposite the house is mainly surrounded by woods and fields i searched around the house for a while and they ended up telling me that he was in the barn so i went outside to the barn when i walked in i couldn't hear anything so i called him he didn't pick up so i decided to give up just as i got a phone call it was luke i picked up and said dude where are you he replied i'm running through the back woods you have to come find me i hung up dreading having to walk through the woods why would he come back here i thought it's dark it's cold it's practically a swamp i got another phone call it was luke i asked why he would come back there he only said to come to the tree line something sounded really off about his voice but i told myself i was being paranoid i told him i was coming and i walked through the swampy field that's when i got another phone call it was my friend ryan he said dude where are you did you leave we're looking for you i told him i was going to get luke what he said next made my heart drop into my stomach he said that luke was standing next to him so i asked him why he called me and said that he was in the woods ryan told me that he was in the garage and that his phone was dead i felt like my heart punched the inside of my stomach as he told me this i sprinted back to the house as fast as i could when i got back luke charged his phone and showed me there was no recent outgoing call i have no idea who called me that night or why they tried to lure me into the woods late last year i had my 21st birthday along with celebrating with my friends my boyfriend's mom wanted to take me out as well so his mom went ahead and reserved a table at a bar in downtown for saturday night saturday night comes and there's major traffic his mom and i park in a toll parking lot and we have to walk about five blocks to the bar where we are going to meet my boyfriend and everyone else so we start walking and arrive at a crosswalk we have to weigh that there's maybe eight other people standing at this crosswalk with us i'm just patiently standing there minding my own business when suddenly i notice this girl standing next to me she startled me to be honest one because of how she seemed to appear out of thin air and two because of how close she was standing next to me it almost felt as if she was trying to huddle into me like you know when a little kid is shy and will try to hide behind his or her parent yeah that's how she was except she was just leaning into me and she had her shoulders hunched over her hair was black and long at least down to her waist she had a long striped dress that went down to her ankles a leather jacket and sandals she looked to be around my age but she had dark tan skin and black eyes her attire was normal but she didn't act normal she was being really weird and kept plugging her nose as if she was smelling something bad and she kept skittishly looking around as if she expected something to pop out and grab her to be honest she was acting like a scared animal but her demeanor was cold her eyes felt like they were dead and empty her face held no emotion so not liking how close she got to me i took a few steps to the side and guess what she stepped towards me and got as close as she was the first time what i sort of thought that was weird but gave the situation the benefit of the doubt plus the crosswalk light turned green right after she came close to me so i figured i didn't have to deal with her because we would walk our separate ways right wrong she walked across the street in the first few blocks with me staying the same closeness she was at no matter where i moved to no matter how many times she almost got lost in the crowd of people she would scurry up right next to me again all the while plugging her nose and looking around everywhere she made me feel weird my boyfriend's mom at this point confronted the girl saying hey do you need something or are you okay or what to which the girl responded it's not safe after she said that she slowly lifted her head cocked her head slightly and looked at me dead in the eyes her mouth quivered my boyfriend's mom and i just looked at each other like what the heck is happening at that point i just wanted to get away from this weirdo it was bad enough she wouldn't stop invading my space and following me but now she's saying this weird stuff while looking at me my boyfriend's mom pulls me to her and whispers to me in my ear walk faster and don't look at her i want to see if she's following us so that's exactly what i do and guess what she follows us all the way to the bar despite my boyfriend's mom telling her to please stop she responded with i want to stay with you guys despite taking unnecessary turns to see if she would turn to follow us she would i was freaking out internally all the way there we finally get to the bar we whip out our ids as quickly as we can so we can get inside and get away from this girl following us you guys she followed us inside and sat at our table but she sits at the furthest side of the table and she starts to scoot herself over but she only moves over when we look away you turn your head and boom she's managed to hop one seat closer to you and she's just staring the whole time with this blank expression on her face my boyfriend's mom has had it at this point and gets up to tell the bodyguard to make the girl leave the bodyguard comes tells the girl she has to go and she actually starts to argue with him i didn't catch the whole conversation over the loud music but i caught the girl asking him why she had to leave and saying that she can sit anywhere she wanted she began to get really aggressive once he told her that this table was reserved for us and our group that she was not a part of she got all fussy and looked at me with malice before she got up and stormed out but she didn't leave right away she stood outside looking in at me through the open patio at the front of the bar she wasn't moving and seemed to care less about the hustle and bustle of the people around her she stood there for about 15 minutes before finally leaving there was just this really bad and dark feeling that i got from her she made me really nervous for some reason and she just felt wrong she was probably someone just cracked out on drugs but it was super creepy and i hope i never see her again so this story is going to be partly from my perspective as well as my brother's perspective this is a true story that happened last night while i was at my grandma's house so before this all took place i went to mcdonald's in the nearest city to us which is about 20 minutes away after that i decided to go down to my grandma's house instead of going straight home for context she lives down a long farm road to which you also have to turn off down a half mile dirt driveway just to get to her house i arrived there at around 9pm and i went in and visited with my grandmother and my brother who lives with her ever since my grandma passed away so that she wouldn't have to live down there alone my brother and i took out my grandma's dog to pee around 10 30 pm and we just sat outside listening to music and talked for a while at that point i was starting to get cold because this is east texas and i am not used to it getting down into the low 40s at night so i was about ready to head inside i noticed something moving in the corner of my eye near the large metal shop that sits a few hundred yards from the house i didn't really take too much notice though because it is not uncommon for deer or raccoons to come snooping around in the yard and plus my grandma's dog wasn't barking so i thought that it might have just been my eyes playing tricks on me we finally headed back inside and my grandma went to sleep at around 11 pm so me and my brother stayed up and played among us and watched youtube for a while at around 2 30 a.m i was very tired and ready to go home so i asked my brother to walk with me to the door and make sure that i get to my car because i am always very paranoid especially at night he joked around and said that he would turn the light off on me and lock the door and i freaked out and begged him to walk me to the car to which he finally humored me i got in my car and immediately locked the doors as i was driving off back down the dirt road i got home within 10 minutes and fixed myself some ice cream before i sat down and enjoyed some creepy scary stories on youtube another 15 or so minutes passed and i got a facetime call from my brother to which i picked up almost immediately i could tell that he was freaked out about something but he wasn't saying anything right away so i asked him what was wrong the following is my best attempt to paraphrase what my brother told me he said that after i left he went back outside to listen to some music and sit on the porch he had the music on his phone up pretty loud which would usually mask any noises of animals coming from the nearby woods after a few minutes of listening to music he said that he heard what he thought to be sounds of metal banging around so he quickly paused the music and listened to see if he could hear the sound again he stood up and looked towards the shop in the boat shed which are adjacent to each other and are a few hundred yards away from where he was standing he saw a faint light shining around near the boat shed but then it quickly flicked off at this point he was freaking he was fr so he so he quietly crept back inside the house and locked the door behind him he said that he ran to his room in the back of the house i guess not thinking to wake up our grandma he grabbed a weapon and quickly ran back outside he saw the glow of a flashlight move around he walked out to the edge of the concrete carport and stared out towards the boat shed the only thing illuminating the boat shed was the faint light coming from the house he said that he tried to muster up the most intimidating voice he could manage and said who is out there to which there was no immediate reply except for a slight bumping sound which solidified the fact that someone was indeed there now keep in mind this is out in the middle of the country in a town with a population of just over 1 000 people and the nearest house is across the lake or miles down the farm road so no well-meaning person would just happen to stumble across my grandma's house this late at night also my grandma has had problems with people snooping around the property in the past so this is not something any of us take lightly and for the life of me i can't tell you why my brother didn't call the police but you also have to remember that there is literally one cop in our entire town and it is 3am so it would take at least 30 minutes for the cop to even show up so my brother again called for the person to show themselves he said that he saw a tall lanky figure slowly emerged from the boat shed with a flashlight in hand although my brother couldn't see any distinct features about the person he could definitely tell that it was an older man and that it was no one that we knew it was especially not anyone that should be in our boat shed at 3 am at this point shouted who are you the man was still silent and began slowly walking towards him my brother waved the weapon back and forth and gave one last verbal warning to the man and said tell me who you are now why are you here the man quickly raised his hands up and said whoa whoa whoa calm down man as he continued walking towards my brother my brother waved the weapon again the man suddenly took off down the driveway and my brother screamed i wouldn't come back if i were you my brother then quickly ran inside to wake up my grandma who had somehow slept through the entire commotion she didn't seem worried enough to actually call the police but of course after hearing this all i could think was what were the true intentions of that man was he just some druggie snooping around looking to steal some tools for drug money or were his intentions much more sinister another question that haunts me about this whole situation is how many times has this happened after my grandma and brother went to bed and we just didn't know and was he watching us from the shadows all night was he watching me as i walked out to my car what would have happened if my brother had actually turned out the lights and locked the door before i could get to my car messed me up for a while and i'm still not completely okay but it's easier to cope it was the middle of summer and my parents had left for the weekend to go to our house in cape cod it's about a two hour drive away so it's no big deal for them to leave me alone for a few days my mom had made some pulled pork and pasta for me to heat up to eat whenever and i had some money if i wanted to order a pizza things were all good the first night i was alone i stayed up until three in the morning playing xbox so i woke up really late the next day i checked my phone when i woke up and saw it was a little past one i had made some plans to play some street hockey with my friends at three so i threw myself out of bed and stumbled into the shower i take really long showers i was in there for about 45 minutes on my phone scrolling through reddit and twitter and whatnot when i heard my front door open the bathroom is directly up the stairs from the front door and the door is pretty loud when it opens and closes i immediately froze since obviously i was supposed to be alone i waited for about two minutes ears trained and trying to hear anything else nothing i figured it was just the wind or maybe my parents were home early so i turned off the shower wrapped my towel around myself and slowly walked down the stairs i can't see into the kitchen when i walk down the stairs my house was really old so each step on the stairs made a super loud creak noise i still took my time and tried to be as quiet as possible i probably took about 45 seconds to walk down the stairs so when i get to the second to the last stair right before i could see around the corner into the kitchen i take a little breath to compose myself in my mind i knew i was being stupid there obviously wasn't anything in the kitchen there's no way i wouldn't have heard another noise and there's no reason for them to still be in the kitchen even if there were burglars or something in the house after sort of mentally chastising myself for being such a wuss i sort of chuckle to myself for being so stupid and just normally walk the last two stairs and turn the corner into the kitchen standing about two feet away from me in the middle of my kitchen is a man staring straight at me perfectly still with a massive smile across his face just staring at me the thing i remember most vividly wasn't his face or his smile but his arms they weren't just at his side he held them in the strangest most abnormal position i've ever seen they were where one would normally hold their arms but he had rotated them to the point where they were almost completely reversed as well as lifting them up and a little behind himself i don't know why i remember this so much but it's just the weirdest position that i've ever seen somebody hold their arms honestly i thought i almost had a heart attack right there looking back i can realize how creepy the situation was but in the moment i just took a step towards him and punched him as hard as i could in the jaw the second i connected i beelined up the stairs dropping my towel in the kitchen with my heart beating out of control i sprinted into my room and locked the door behind me i quickly put a chair up against the doorknob almost without thinking i called 9-1-1 and nearly in tears told the operator what happened as i sat on the floor of my room in practically the fetal position staring at the door praying that a cop would be here soon i noticed the light coming from the gap between my door had stopped the man was standing on the other side of the door there's no words to describe the feeling i had i was paralyzed with fear watching the shadow across the bottom of the door shift in tiny ways i stayed balled up staring at the gap praying the man would go away for what seemed like an hour all the while the 9-1-1 operator was asking hello sir sir are you there hello i didn't want to make a noise and even if i wanted to move my arms to bring the phone to my mouth i don't think i could have eventually the light returned to the gap and i heard the faintest of footsteps slowly creaking the wooden floorboards as he walked down the hall it was silent for minutes as i just sat there curled up unable to even speak i heard banging on the front door and the sound of two officers entering my house i finally felt safe and i opened the door to the two of them standing there i almost cried nowadays my parents don't even leave me home alone which i honestly don't mind and i check every lock in the house before going to bed i still get nightmares occasionally and my heart starts racing whenever i see someone standing still but i'm doing all right even working with sketch artists in a few lineups the police never found who was in my house it sends shivers down my spine every time i look outside half expecting to see him standing across the street smiling under a lamppost i have no idea what he wanted or who he was but regardless i hope i never see him again and i'm still afraid that someday he might come back this incident happened to me when i was 20 years old i've always been an outwardly alternative person but i am known to be notoriously friendly and loud i am not the kind of girl you would think people would want to try anything with this is not to say i'm ugly i've always thought of myself as average black hair coffee eyes pale skin the catch here is that i was very heavily into thrash metal at the time so even though i am on the shorter side i would wear flipped bill trucker hats ripped jean jackets with patches and studs and if you saw me at the shows i was in the mosh pit throwing punches i wasn't dating at the time but i was talking consistently to a guy that i liked at the time i enjoyed taking nightly evening walks around my neighborhood a semi-nice middle-income area that my parents had managed to move us to after lots of overtime in a lawsuit at my father's work that ended up paying out i had made friends in the neighborhood and it wasn't uncommon for me to show up unannounced at a friend's house and play some mario kart or maybe smoke after an uneventful visit to my friend's house seeing as they weren't home i decided to walk the long stretch of golf course i just didn't want to be home yet so i'm walking listening to slayer on my earphones when i notice that a black range rover has been crawling by just a little behind where i was walking figure they are checking out the golf course maybe trying to get a look at the size of it but a car horn honks behind the range rover and they are forced to drive forward oblivious i continue my walk until i notice the range rover has made a u-turn to crawl behind me again he circles maybe two more times i take one earphone out and look at the car the driver kind of freaks out at being noticed and drives forward again so you know the feeling you get when you know something isn't right well it finally hit me and i start speed walking to the liquor store i duck into the store shooting the owner a quick head nod of acknowledgement because we knew each other fairly well at this point that's when i hear a car door outside being closed and i see a guy walking towards the liquor store it's the guy in the range rover i tell the owner that i need to use the bathroom an employee-only sort of deal and he begrudgingly obliges me i get to the bathroom which provides a good view of this door and just listen with the door cracked and the lights off so i can see out the guy walks in i have never seen him before he was about my age tall dark hair blue eyes he then proceeds to tell the owner of the store that he's looking for his little sister that she's run away from home and his parents are worried sick that she'll probably fight back if he approaches her and doesn't want to alert her to his presence he then describes me in detail from my custom jean jacket to my beat up nikes to my mirrored aviators and identifiable facial features i get a sick feeling in my stomach who is this guy i have never seen him in my life he leaves the store when the owner says no and the guy walks back to his car scanning the entire parking lot and i hear the car start up and pull out i emerge from my hiding place and look at the owner who stares back at me to confirm that we were both kind of weirded out looking at him i quietly say that guy is not my brother i'm not sure what he wanted from me and why he made up an elaborate story but i have come to the conclusion it can't have been anything good so this event took place over 10 years ago back when i was 13. now before i get into it i should let you know that i have a very overprotective mother like textbook overprotectiveness something she often did was come into my room at different times throughout the night to check on me it's something i actually really disliked because i'm a light sleeper and i also scare extremely easily so most of the time when she came to check up on me she'd either wake me up or scare the crap out of me now one night i was turning in for bed all i know is that it was a weeknight because i had school the next day the tv was on and i always left it on because it helped me sleep i had pulled my covers over my head as i like to sleep in a cocoon like fashion i had just closed my eyes when i could hear footsteps from outside my door i side and get out of my blanket cocoon knowing that at any moment my mother was going to enter the room to check up on me i sat up in my bed waiting so at least this way she wouldn't scare me i wait for about a minute or so and my mother doesn't come in but i can still hear her footsteps which confused me i continue to listen as i hear her go back and forth just pacing what is she doing i thought to myself there was no reason for her to go past my room nor pace in front of it the only thing past my room was my sister's bedroom but she had long since moved out so i couldn't fathom any reason why my mother would just be going back and forth in front of my door so i finally get out of bed and open up my door to ask my mother what in the world she was doing but when i opened the door i found nothing this puzzled me even more as i look up and down the hallway and still no mom there's no way i could have missed her and i think maybe it was possible she was playing a prank on me something my family sometimes does so i make my way across the house to my mother's room and i pause when i see her calmly laying in her bed it became clear that she hadn't been messing with me if so there's no way she would have been able to make it back to her room without me seeing her unless she had run back she looked too calm and her breathing was too relaxed to imply that she had been running at any point i walk over to her bed and she must have heard me because she rolled over to face me she asked me what was wrong and i asked her if she had been over to my room to check up on me she said no and i really wish she hadn't i don't know what face i was making but it was clear by the way my mother's expression changed that she sensed something was very wrong but she didn't press on the matter and instead let me go back to my room i almost ran back to my room now scared and immediately shut the door and dived back into my bed i do my best to brush the whole thing off as my imagination playing tricks on me and i get back under my covers attempting to go back to sleep i shut my eyes tightly and lay still it only felt like a few seconds go by before i hear the footsteps again i sit back up throwing the covers off and turn off my tv hoping that the old thing was just making odd noises well that didn't work and it just made the sounds of the footsteps even louder although now i'm scared out of my mind i make my way back over to the door and open it once again finding the hallway empty and dark i quickly step out to the hallway and turn on the light before going back into my room in my mind the light will keep away whatever was there but that wasn't the case i get back in my bed and sit just watching the door and that's when it happens my heart stops when i see a shadow slowly pass by under the crack of my door i remember all the air leaving my lungs and just the absolute terror i felt at that moment i had no clue as to what i could do all i know is i just wanted to keep whoever it was out for the rest of the night i just sat on my bed my knees pulled up to my chest just watching whoever it was walk back and forth i didn't know how nor when but i had fallen asleep at one point and awoke the next morning extremely tired i told my mom what had happened and while she did listen and pay attention to my worries seeing as there was nothing she could do it was brushed off she did tell me if this happened again and if i was too scared to sleep in my room i could come to her room and sleep there for the next few days i slept with my door locked but the mysterious footsteps never happened again to this day i have no clue who or what it was a spirit an intruder seeing as they didn't harm me and just scared me i don't think it was malevolent but i'd still really like to know what or who it was and why they were there when my mom was 16 a year before she got pregnant with me she was having the same dream every night for about a year in this dream she and a boy around her age would be surrounded by a group of men in a cemetery my mom had no idea who the boy was but every night a man from the group would stand in front of them and ask would you die for him my mom would answer no being that she had no idea who the guy was the man would ask the boy would you die for her the boy would reply no as well one night however the man asked the boy first will you die for her he said no as usual the man then turned to my mom and asked her will you die for him she isn't sure why maybe out of curiosity of what would happen or fear of getting hurt she said yes the man stared at her the man then said your fate is sealed and so is his but this time he didn't hurt them she just woke up my mom was a model and on this specific day she had a fashion show that she would be doing in another nearby city her aunt had come to drive and accompany her to the show along with my mom's best friend everything was fine that morning my mom got dressed her friend came over her aunt arrived and they piled into the car ready for the three to four hour drive while on the highway my mom noticed she had forgotten something at home they were only about 10 minutes out at this point with plenty of time to spare so they turned around to go grab it just as they turned around listening to music and singing along my mom's friend asked to turn the music down do you hear that she asked my mom and her aunt were silent for a moment before hearing a strange scraping sound like metal on concrete they looked around for the source of the noise but saw nothing around them there were no other cars on the road when they got back to the house my mom ran inside as her friend and aunt checked the car to make sure the strange noise wasn't the car everything looked fine to them and my grandfather even checked and gave them the okay this all took maybe 20 to 30 minutes with that they shrugged it off and headed back towards the highway when they finally got on the highway was now covered with police cars blocking off a lane where they could see a horrible accident had taken place my mom's aunt approached the scene slowly as a cop waved her down telling her to stop uh give us a second to clear this lane of debris what happened her aunt asked clearly shocked at the scene it was a head-on collision he replied when did this happen we were just here 30 minutes ago the officer looked shocked uh it happened about 30 minutes ago you didn't see anything they explained that they had heard a strange noise that sounded like metal scraping against concrete before exchanging worried looks as her aunt asked is everyone okay no ma'am you ladies are lucky it sounds like if you had been running even three seconds late that could have been you with that the officer waved them through and told them to have a nice day but as they passed the wreckage my mom looked out the window to see them removing a body from the car her heart sank when she realized it was the boy from her dream she never had that dream again i have heard countless stories about other people's experiences with sleep paralysis and i thought i would share my scariest ones a lot of people have heard of the shadow people i have had an unknown black force pin me down in bed suffocating me however the other two instances i've had are more bizarre and i still think about them quite often about four years ago i was 24. i still lived with my mom since i was in my second year of nursing school and it was just easier to live at home while going to school going to bed one night all seemed well until i woke up for no reason i couldn't move or talk i heard almost static mumbling sounds on my left completely terrified i listen as i try desperately to move slowly this static starts to get clearer and i hear young voices children's voices they begin chanting you're going to die and giggling after each chant it was like they were singing a nursery rhyme they chanted the same thing over and over again my heart was pounding out of my chest logically in my head i was telling myself this wasn't real for all those that aren't religious this may not seem like it makes sense but i decided to pray in my head to make it stop it was like i was screaming in my head because i couldn't physically speak it felt like an eternity before it went away and i was able to move again i rushed out of my room to my mom and told her everything i didn't go back into my room that night she looked at me with disbelief i don't know if she truly believed me or understand sleep paralysis regardless it's something i will never forget my second story was around the same year when sleep paralysis becomes a recurring theme every night or every other night i just started to sleep with the lights on for added comfort my cats would sleep on my bed and cuddle with me until i fell asleep for a while no instances of sleep paralysis occurred so i just assumed this is what i needed to do each night like usual i went to bed with the lights on and one of my cats salem curled up in my arm while i slept i woke up with a feeling of all too familiar dread i couldn't believe what was happening i felt like i was being watched to my horror i can't make this up if i wanted to disturbingly saw a white figure on the right side of my bed standing very close to me my heart felt like it dropped into my stomach i see piercing bright blue eyes staring at me i glanced down at my cat seemingly unaware of the figure and sleeping soundly this eased me up a bit seeing this made me remind myself that this wasn't real after a few moments the figure disappeared even with the lights on i did not feel safe i don't experience sleep paralysis as much as i used to thankfully but those are two instances i will never forget and if you suffer from sleep paralysis you know exactly what i went through and how horrible it truly is this story takes place all the way back when i was still in high school in order to earn money to fund my video game addiction i regularly tutored this 11 year old girl we actually got along so well that the parents ended up asking me to babysit her and her little brother a couple times one night in particular the parents were meant to go downtown to watch a baseball game before a few drinks with friends telling me they would be back earlier than midnight basic babysitting job right wrong right around eight o'clock in the evening it started raining pretty hard we all lived in a gulf city at the time and storms can blow in fast before turning into flooding really fast once it became horrifyingly clear we were in for one big storm the parents tried to get home as quickly and safely as possible but the streets had already started to flood and apparently they ended up trapped in a parking lot the irony was lost on me at the time but not today the kid's parents called and we agreed i would spend the night in their guest bedroom while they booked themselves into a motel i had the kids go to bed while i sat up in the kitchen to do homework and watch netflix after a little while i started to notice water seeping in from under the back doors they had a large house with like three double doors to the back so it was very large with lots of square feet i got every towel in the house and started wiping up the water and using the towels to block the door after this had mostly been cleaned up i went back to the kitchen table to watch more netflix not much else i could do right but it couldn't have been any more than like 15 minutes later when the power cuts out and all the lights shut off this freaked me out a bit but i tried to stay as calm as i could that's when the burglar alarm went off in the other room i pretty much crapped my pants i was in a pitch black house with two young kids surrounded by flooded roads that no one could drive on after a minute or so of almost blind panic i realized to my horror i was the closest thing in the house to an adult there was no one looking after me in fact i was directly responsible for those kids so i grabbed the biggest sharpest kitchen knife i could find then went to go check all the doors they were all still closed and no one was in the house so i called the parents it turns out the alarm went off when the power cut out and i just needed to shut it off with a code upstairs this happened about three more times over the next few hours after the power came back on i thought things had chilled out but then we got a tornado warning i went and got the kids from upstairs and we all hung out in this study for about an hour until the warning passed at this point it was 2 am and i passed out in the guest bedroom the parents woke me up when they got home at around 7 00 am and i drove home past giant fallen branches and stalled abandoned cars it was surreal but thankfully everyone was safe and well in the end just a few days ago i had the strangest experience i have had in the 10 plus years of driving a cab i picked up this well-dressed and good-looking middle-aged man however when he opened his mouth he said the strangest things what started out as an entertaining discussion ended up as an all-consuming fear i'm going to explain everything saturday night i was working the graveyard shift most of my fares come from bars i just dropped off a pair of drunk women it was around 3 am when i noticed a well-dressed tall man waving me down the neighborhood combined with his fancy suit spoke possible big tipper to me once he got in and closed the door he removed his hat a fine looking straw fedora his clothing and movie star good looks were out of place i feared at first that i'd picked up a time traveler i did the usual and asked him where he was headed i don't know really i'm in town on business and i was looking for someone to show me around his answer made me chuckle it seemed awful late for a sightseeing trip as long as you're paying mister i'll drive you anywhere and that was how it all started for the next two hours or so i showed him around town the university the capitol building the usual touristy stuff at some point during our little tour i remembered why he said he was in town so what kind of business are you in his reply made me laugh even more than his first the guy was a natural comedian i'm what some people would call a contract killer we've been having such a good time so far i decided to go ahead with the ruse okay mister i'll play along tell me how it works how does one go about hiring a contract killer well a woman contacts me how they do so i'll keep to myself if their references check out we move on to business she gives me the names and any other info i ask for if i decide to take the job we move on to money if we agree on a number then i go to work with all that anonymity i asked him how he made sure that he would get paid after he offed someone it appeared my choice of words made him laugh it probably wouldn't be wise to tell you that part we professionals have to keep some secrets to ourselves okay fair enough well then how does the client know you've completed the job i regretted asking the question even before i finished asking it even though it was a stupid question he still entertained me with an answer albeit with a tinge of sarcasm in his voice we live in a time with a 24-hour news cycle and multiple social media outlets don't you think if your dad died suddenly that someone's not going to contact your mother first if you don't discover it on your own someone is going to tell you once i'm paid my relationship with the customer ends she's ultimately on her own after that the last part of his answer brought up another question in my mind uh if something goes wrong per se and she gets arrested or implicates herself what do you do he thought for a moment before answering i imagine he was considering how much he should say to a stranger driving his taxi some contingencies have been put in place to protect myself first off if i have done my job right the client shouldn't have any information about me to give to the cops and if on the off chance i screw up so badly that she can i have multiple exit strategies i certainly won't let the police get their hands on me none of us get to live forever there were a few times i had to remind myself that this was a game he made it fun nonetheless his imagination and forethought wowed me we had been playing this game for hours before i had thought to ask him how he got started in his business i joined the army fresh out of high school it seemed my work caught the attention of my superiors they referred me to a couple of gentlemen in the government and i worked for them for 10 years before i made the decision to go into business for myself i gotta tell you mister you're really good at this stuff you really should be a storyteller if that's not what you're really doing for a living i'm seriously impressed and i wasn't blowing smoke this was the most fun i had had driving a cab in my entire life i was used to dealing with drunks and arrogant businessmen this was a blast thank you young man i appreciate everything you have shown me tonight i can tell by the way he was talking the night was coming to an end it was just as well the sun would be up soon and i was beginning to flag myself i took the opportunity to ask one more question one i should have asked far earlier he had said earlier in the night that he was in town on business did that mean he was here to take care of someone a sly grin grew across his face as he thought on his answer as a matter of fact i was however i received a message at the last minute to cancel the hit i get to keep the half she had already given me so i didn't mind that's business it happens on occasion that's a woman's prerogative after all isn't it to change their minds i hope her and her old man work it out anyhow that's how i ended up with you just as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon he pointed out a place to let him out there were a few hotels at the end of the parking lot and i assumed that was where he was headed he reached over the seat and handed me 10 100 bills before i could argue he told me to keep the change keep the change kid you earned it i had a great time tonight thank you mister i had a great time myself and thank you most of all for that awesome story as he stepped from the cab he said one last thing thank you for showing me around tonight adam take care of linda and stay out of trouble i pulled out of the lot and headed for home my hope was that linda would have breakfast going that was when it hit me like a hammer how did that man know my name not to mention my wife's my license was nowhere he could have seen it i reenacted the night's discussion in my head there was never a point in which i told him it would have ruined the game i didn't ask him his and there was no reason for me to tell him mine certainly not my wife's how did he know i was married anyway i hadn't worn a ring in years i lost it down a drain and never found it he could have guessed the problem with that is linda and i had just gotten back together last week we had been separated and considering divorce for two years before that when i pulled into the driveway of my house a terrible idea came into my mind was there a possibility that guy wasn't making up a story no one would dare tell someone even a stranger in such a bold and frank way that he was a hitman if he was serious the fact he knew my name and my wife's could only mean one thing even if it was true i wasn't ready to accept it while linda and i sat and ate that morning i couldn't stop myself from watching her i was terrified that my wife had wanted me dead even if she had changed her mind there was no way she would admit it if i did ask either answer would most likely destroy the fragile peace we have built between us i need to know you listening what do you think am i crazy or is this really happening former funeral director here the cemetery i run is really old like by a good few hundred years at least it must be since the church next to it was constructed during the 17th century considering the fact that it is a pretty rural place as well most people back in the day were buried with only wooden crosses and such no stone or marble so as time goes on crosses rot and wither away new people get buried etc nowadays due to less people living out here in the sticks the cemetery is really run down and overgrown so as some of you can imagine when you keep burying bodies in the same small patch of dirt for that many centuries eventually the soil has been worked over dozens and dozens of times so in the end it consists mainly of bone meal you can't even rake over the flower beds there without accidentally uncovering some teeth or finger bones or something equally grim it's nothing but fragmented skeletons all the way down under the thin turf the soil sort of resembles the kind of dirt you would see near sandy beaches except on closer examination all the light colored parts are just bone fragments rather than crushed seashells not really scary or unexpected just super eerie until you eventually get used to it you learn to treat anything recognizable as human remains with respect and just tuck it away out of sight under the plant or whatever else you were putting there anyway so someone was taking care of their relatives grave and decided to expand the area around the grave for some reason the people around here are not particularly fond of grass rather preferring a well-leveled ground with zen garden lines made with a rake the person removed the grass and was sprucing up the place with a rake when they pulled up a bunch of snow white hair from the dirt they must have freaked out and ran out of there leaving the cemetery attendant to stumble across what is essentially hair coming out of the ground she reported it to the church and supposedly they reburied the remains even with all my years as an undertaker i'm not entirely sure how there could have been a body so close to the surface but there's another incident that sticks with me even more than that one my business partner and i had just gotten back to the funeral home from a house call for a 27 year old woman who tragically passed away as we were moving her body from the cot to the embalming table we heard an audible click and the radio across the room turned on full volume of static it's one of those old radios where you turn the volume dial until it clicks to turn on we both looked at each other pale as ghosts he happened to be an extremely religious man and this event visibly shook him he found an excuse to leave early not long after the incident i shut the radio off as i typically used my iphone to listen to music while doing embalming work when i had finished the procedure and was attempting to move her from the embalming table to a dressing table i heard that click from that old radio and it turned on full volume yet again at that point i was fairly freaked out and left not long after my partner and i never spoke of it again and nothing like that ever occurred to my knowledge before or after this story takes place two years ago when i was living in the same house as my two younger sisters and my father we lived in a neighborhood that wasn't necessarily unsafe but wasn't the best neighborhood for people to live in i can recall some neighbors getting arrested for selling drugs when i was maybe five but this story is not about them in the summer of 2018 my sisters and i would stay up late into the night sometimes only going to bed after the sun had risen i was 17 and my sisters were 15 and 13. my father would go to bed early as he was a responsible adult to explain the situation best i need to describe what my house looked like it was a one-story home with four doors on the front of my house three of which opened to our living room and one of which opened to my bedroom our backyard fence had been knocked down by a storm recently and we had two doors on the back of the house one that opened to the kitchen and one that opened to my father's room one night around 12 30 a.m i was doing what i usually did i was listening to scary stories on my phone as i made art on my ipad i didn't use earbuds because i've always been paranoid that something might happen while i'm using them my sisters who shared a room down the hall from me were doing whatever they did at night it didn't really concern me my father was fast asleep in his room now i don't know about all of you but i always end up very on edge while i'm listening to scary stories so i'm hyper aware of what's going on around me you can imagine how hard i jumped when i heard a sharp pounding on our front door four hard thuds could be heard throughout the house and i could hear the front door shake with the strength of each knock i held my breath hoping that i had heard wrong i really didn't want to think someone was at my front door at this moment my middle sister jen came running into my room trying to keep her steps silent she looked at me eyes wild you heard that too right she asked voice trembling i swallowed and nodded heart pounding in my chest we need to go wake dad up i responded and started towards my father's bedroom she followed diligently behind me on our way to our dad's room my youngest sister ness peeked her head out from her room she too looked scared i opened my dad's door and shook him awake trembling slightly one of my worst fears is someone breaking into our house dad someone's at the front door even as i said this i felt sick what my dad said groggy and not at all happy that we had woken him up there's someone here jen whispered i heard it someone knocked on the door i said my dad slowly got out of bed he knows that my sisters and i always jump to the worst conclusions whenever anything happens so he assumed we were doing the same here i watched silently as he went to the front door my stomach leaping to my throat there's no one out there he told my sisters and i absolutely unimpressed as he looked through the blinds my heart sank a little i kind of started to doubt myself but my sisters had heard the knocking too so i knew i wasn't alone in this we tried to reason with him before he went back to bed but he didn't believe us too tired to really care about what we were saying dejected but scared i ended up taking my mattress off my bed and sleeping in my sister's room for the night taking a baseball bat and laying it next to my mattress my overactive imagination had me thinking that whoever was at the door was out to hurt us and i knew i would have to defend my younger sisters against any danger that dared to enter our house the next day passed just fine my sisters and i knew that we had heard something and our dad brushed off our attempts to explain it he thought we were sleep deprived or perhaps that a large bug had hit our door which was ridiculous it wasn't until 11 pm that night when my father was lounging on one of the couches in the living room that we heard the pounding again only this time it was much more aggressive and directly on the door behind my father my father let out a loud what the and charged towards the front door i had been standing in the living room when the pounding occurred again and my sisters had rushed to stand next to me after hearing my father shout we were all shaken our father never yelled like that i started to cry as my father went to rush outside and confront whoever was out there i begged him not to go outside because i thought he might get hurt he told my sisters and i to call the cops and he cursed some more when he realized that whoever had knocked on the door was gone my sisters called the cops and they arrived fairly quickly talking with my dad about what was going on claiming that there had been other complaints about this happening nearby and explaining that they would try their best to find out who was doing it the police did a search around our house but didn't find anyone even searching the backyard where i was afraid the perpetrator might be the police assured us that someone would patrol the neighborhood that night once the cops were gone my dad apologized for not believing us the night before we said it was okay and left it at that he locked all the doors and stayed up later than my sisters and i i couldn't calm down so i slept in my sister's room that night as well eventually though i put this situation behind me a few months had passed but not without nightmares and sleep paralysis about the whole ordeal most nightmares ending with someone breaking in and hurting my sisters other nightmares ending in more brutal ways i had thought nothing more of the whole thing that is until one day i came home from school and ness ran up to me buzzing with energy she proceeded to tell me that apparently the cops had found out who was knocking on everyone's doors about a month or so ago it was an older man who lived a few houses down from us they had gotten him to stop and i'm not sure if he was given a warning or whatever he was a little unstable mentally and nobody had opened their doors for him nest then told me that the same guy had been arrested earlier this day i was shocked he had only been knocking on people's doors at odd hours of the night i'm happy to say that he is in jail and no longer lives in that neighborhood i haven't done any more looking into his crime other than trying to confirm it for myself the day he was arrested i'm also happy to say that after another recent event where someone tried to break into our house my father installed a ring doorbell the doorbell with a camera which gave my sisters and i some comfort i really hope this man gets what he deserves or maybe that he gets the help that he needs if he really is insane so this story is a bit unsettling and weird the events of this night i didn't really consider scary until years later when i really reflected on what truly happened i am 30 years old now but was only 15 during the events of this story the evening started fairly normal a bunch of my friends and i just hanging out thinking we were cool because we were at the state fair without any adults it was a group of about 10 of us if i remember correctly we decided to post up towards the back of the fairgrounds where all the rides were we were just talking telling jokes and trying to impress the girls that would occasionally walk by during our time hanging out in the back we were approached by a very strange looking person he was an average height a little thick in the belly bald but was sporting some hair on the sides he approached us with great confidence and said in a stern voice you guys waiting for the ship as well thinking this was more comical than scary we kind of just laughed and responded with uh the ship what are you talking about the man smiled and flashed his chipped teeth and again in his confident voice said yeah the ship from space are you guys here to board as well well being kids we just thought this was a joke we laughed hysterically and just thought this guy had a lot to drink or something along those lines after we had finished basically laughing in the guy's face i finally responded to him saying where's the ship going he responded confidently the andromeda galaxy of course that was the last straw for us we were just about hunched over in pain we were laughing so hard well the man finally realized we were laughing at him and changed his tune real quick the confident voice suddenly became faint and the man said go ahead and laugh at me when they come you will see we responded by basically saying whatever and stepped away from this crazy guy at this point he started to follow us and was now irate chasing us and was yelling about the aliens finally after a few minutes of this and lots of stares from the people at the fair i turned around and said in my blunt fifteen-year-old voice dude leave us alone we don't want any part of your ship or aliens still treating this as a joke but more annoyed and creeped out than anything else we just kept walking the man finally yelled stop we all turned and looked at the creepy ufo man and he said almost in tears now i've seen you in my dreams you've been on the ship with me they chose us officially creeped out i pushed the guy away he surprisingly went backwards quickly like he weighed nothing after that he just started laughing with all the commotion we noticed many fairgoers forming a circle around us to make sure there wasn't an issue escalating the crazy man started pacing around the circle of people that formed and started to ask everyone an almost a desperate voice now are any of you going up they will be here soon we need to get ready this poor guy was met with tons of laughter i started to feel bad for him it seemed like this person was really suffering from some sort of crazed delusion while the man was interrogating the other fairgoers we used the opportunity to make our way to the main entrance honestly we were just done with the guy and done with the night it was starting to get concerning and we really didn't want any trouble or to have something happen that would need our parents to get involved once we got to the main entrance we took a shuttle back to the parking lot where my mom was picking me up along with three of my friends we got to the lot and she was not there yet so we just waited by the entrance to the lot until my mom got there right on cue directly across from the lot which is essentially a heavily wooded area we saw the same guy just standing there staring at us we did not say or do anything to provoke him this time we just watched and waited anxiously for my mom as we stood there we noticed that the man just kept pointing up to the sky he didn't look like he was saying anything but we wouldn't have been able to hear him if he was anyway because he was probably at least 100 yards away in the distance we finally saw my mom driving up in our green windstar van as we approached the doors of the van we noticed the man was now somewhat rapidly approaching us not running but walking briskly i would say we started to move fast not really knowing if this guy was dangerous or not and as i got into the passenger side the man waved from the side of the road and i just barely heard him say i'll see you up there as he smiled awkwardly at the van it was not until years later when i was telling this story that i realized just how disturbing it really was we had no idea if this guy could have caused us harm if he was insane or if by some crazy chance there was some truth to his delusion i often used to wonder what happened to that guy i never saw him again i still attend the fair every year and honestly i always go back to that spot at the back of the grounds to see if the strange man would ever come back either way it was a very strange and interesting story i really wanted to share just makes you wonder what goes on in other people's minds and what their true intentions are i don't fly anymore i used to a lot actually it was a big part of my job to fly around the country to pitch investment prospects at meetings held for wealthy hedge fund managers it was a cushy job i mean it paid far far more than it was worth but now i work from home and i drive everywhere i'm talking everywhere i live in new york city but my parents lived down in florida since they retired and yep i drive down there to see them three times a year sometimes it's pretty bad but i'd rather drive all that way and get stomach flu from bad roadside tacos than fly and now i'll tell you why it was a regular flight from laguardia down to houston another business trip to finance flirt with oil rich investors down in texas i was sat in a window seat in business class takeoff was pretty normal everything was peachy nothing i hadn't done a hundred times before as i thumbed through the inflight magazine and browsed the drinks menu i had to get up at like 5 30 in order to make the flight and i have never been a morning person so as soon as i was able i shut the window flap next to me closed my eyes and tried to catch a few z's so i would be as fresh as possible for the afternoon meeting then just as i'm about to drift off the loud popped noise in my weary state i actually thought it was some champagne bottle being opened by some celebratory suit who was opting for the fizz breakfast i look around and no one has a bottle there is no attendant with an ice bucket nothing like that then some horrible idea pops into my head and in order to belay my seemingly irrational fears i slide open to check on the plane's left wing engine i remember expecting it to be fine nothing had ever happened on a flight before even though i had had those little flashes of fear previously but it was not fine the popping sound had been exactly what i had feared there was smoke billowing from the engine a thick stream of dark vapor that trailed along as we flew i grabbed an attendant and silently pointed out the window not wanting to raise too much of a panic when she looked she turned pale then rushed up the aisle in the direction of the cockpit moments later others were noticing what i had seen cries of panic sounding from all along the plane as more and more people noticed the danger we were in people were rushing over to the left side of the plane looking out the windows and screaming all while the air hostesses aboard were trying everything they could to both keep calm as well as keeping the passengers calm right before the terror reached a fever pitch the pilot comes over the intercom i think that was the weirdest most surreal moment of my life when people were losing their minds but the captain was calm to the point of seeming bored i suppose that's just the level of training they receive the captain tells everyone to keep calm to go back to their seats and that the plane will be making an emergency landing at the nearest airport which by that time was an airport in virginia we actually landed just fine and the only remotely bad thing to really happen that day was that i had to rearrange the investment meeting but i swear part of me thought that plane was about to become a fireball as the engine exploded and we plummeted towards the earth at like 500 miles an hour it was probably the most terrifying experience i have ever endured and despite me trying to i was never able to get on a plane ever again so like i said i drive everywhere now and as much as it sucks it's better than getting the cold sweats and panic attacks from sitting on a runway somewhere just waiting for the engines to go up in flames my mother's side of the family is fairly vast she has three brothers and three sisters all of whom are married and have several kids of their own it goes without saying that when summer rolled around and it was time for the annual family vacation there would be endless hours of fun and entertainment my grandparents were fairly wealthy individuals and with a share of their fortune each year they would rent out a lake house cabin or beachside mansion for our family to resort at in its entirety for the year in question my grandparents decided to rent out a large four-story lakeside home it was complete with a dock game room movie theater vast kitchen and even a tube slide system that went from floor to floor what was supposed to be a blissful escape would soon become home to one of my worst memories to date before we delve any deeper into the story i would like to do a quick explanation of the layout of the home because it's pertinent to the understanding of the rest of the story the house was built upon a very steep slope that led down to a lake the house was literally built horizontally off of the side of the hill so on the part of the home that wasn't connected to the hill there were long stilts that connected to the base of the home to the bottom of the hill for additional support of the home brick was added in between the stilts creating a vast canaveral-like room underneath the home only accessible by a cellar door at the bottom floor of the house this pit or room had no insulation dirt floors which in reality was just the bottom of the hill and filled with spiders and other small rodents and such it was highly recommended by the homeowners who we were renting the property from that we do not venture down into this area because it would be a 10 or so foot drop to the floor and no ladder for assistance returning to the bottom floor of the home so anyone that found themselves in this place would practically be imprisoned in a tall dark cement hole alright back to the story after all the pleasantries with my family and settling in for the first couple nights all the more mature members of the family which included me my brother and all my aunts uncles and their significant others decided to play a game commonly known as sardines the game is basically inverse hide and seek where there is one hider and the rest of the players are seekers all the lights in the home are turned off creating an atmosphere of complete darkness the hider is given a minute to hide and once they are settled the seekers begin their hunt if a seeker happens upon the hider then they silently slip away and hide in the same place as the hider until all people are hidden and only one seeker remains now that you have a quick synopsis of the game house and large number of people playing you can see how this could be the perfect concoction for a fun time my uncle mike was the one selected to do the hiding first we shut out all the lights in the home and after the given minute of hiding time the hunt was on my brother aunts uncles and i searched the first couple floors to no avail searching under each table in each closet and behind each couch after about 15 minutes of searching and nobody seemed to have found him an idea sprouted in my head though i dismissed the thought at first i couldn't stop thinking about that cellar door and that space that lay beneath the home being that i was on the younger end of the family around 17 years old i wanted to impress them by being the first one to find him so i silently crept away from the group and down the last two stories i had to go to get to the bottom floor of the house where the cellar doors were when i got there i found my body physically shaking with adrenaline and after opening the door that closed off the little closet-sized room that held the cellar doors i was trembling with fear they just looked so ominous and in the dark lighting i walked up to them and placed a hand on each of the handles before i even opened the door i was able to hear scuffling and maniacal giggling from the room this assured me even more that i had found him and my fear turned into excitement when i learned of his presence i flung the doors open and looked down into the dark abyss of the hole i quietly whispered down at my uncle telling him that i had found him and that i was gonna drop down and join him he just kept laughing and laughing which really unnerved me because it was unlike him to do that sort of thing without at least admitting he had been found or telling me to join him really wanting to be the first seeker to find him i slowly began lowering myself down into the hole hanging onto the ledge of the cellar door and letting my feet dangle into the hole i could hear his laughter getting louder and heard his footing shifting as he began to walk closer to me a horrid stench assaulted me the second that i lowered the rest of my body into the hole i still clung to the cellar door not allowing myself to drop the extra five feet or so being that i was closer to the ground now i could start to begin to see his shape and it looked off i couldn't make out facial features but seeing his slouched posture and lanky arms made me hold onto the ledge of the cellar door for a moment longer and hesitation in that moment i heard my aunt's voice calling for me telling me they had all found my uncle and that i was the last to find him my mind didn't piece the two together instantly but when it did saying that i could feel my heart sink to my stomach wouldn't be an exaggeration the immense overwhelming fear that i felt in that moment i have yet to feel ever again without a moment's hesitation i pulled myself up out of the hole and instantly ran to my aunt calling for help screaming about the man underneath the house she looked confused at first but sprung into action when she too heard the laughing from the hole she called my uncles down while she phoned the police and gave them my quick description of the man but because we were in the middle of nowhere it took them about 25 minutes to arrive when they finally did it was a flurry of red and blue lights but what unnerved me the most was that a full swat team arrived as well a dozen men poured into the home which felt intense for what seemed like a mentally ill home invader within moments they came out carrying a deranged looking man in handcuffs it wasn't until later on did i get the full details of the story the man that they had arrested was indeed a mentally insane person with a warrant out for his arrest for the mutilation of his ex-wife i also found later that the stench that was coming out of the room was his feces it appeared he had been trapped down there for several days he claimed he had gotten himself stuck down there when he had initially broken into the cellar to elude police capture it has been around three years since this incident and its memory has become less and less intense with each passing day however some nights i lie awake at night thankful that i did not let go of that seller's ledge this happened a long time ago when i was about four or five years old and i'm 15 now looking back at the situation i really think i should have seen the red flags about this guy but since i was really young and stupid i didn't see anything out of the ordinary i thought he was just a nice guy the whole thing happened in a mall in plain sight in front of hundreds of people i had gone with my mother shopping a girl's day out kind of thing at some point i got lost typical everyone has a story like that right so far no red flags at all i remember seeing a guy with a very southeastern accent he was dressed like a junkie but in my five-year-old mind i thought he looked fine so since i was a lost five-year-old girl who didn't know any better i walked up to him and asked him for directions and if he had seen my mommy etc he ignored my questions and when he saw me his eyes lit up he immediately started showering me with compliments some of them inappropriate to say to a five-year-old kid he gave me a pink and black bracelet and told me how well it looked on me of course i was oblivious to the situation and ignoring all the red flags so at some point he offers to take me to his private jet and fly me to jamaica to relax and play with the dolphins basically made it sound like a child's paradise all i had to do was get in his car of course since it sounded like a dream come true i trusted him i kid you not at the exact moment i was about to leave the mall some guy wearing a suit and tie stopped us dead in our tracks and asked him where he was going with a five-year-old girl you could easily tell that we weren't related the guy responded with his raspy southeastern accent and said that i was his daughter's kid and he was taking me home we were clearly not related and so the guy in the suit asked me where my mom was i told him she was still in the mall and from that point on there was some arguing between the two men i didn't get the most of it but i ended up going with the man in the suit and the junkie cursed him out we went to the lobby of the mall and found my mom there telling the worker behind the desk my description she had clearly picked up by this point that i was gone it turned out that the guy in the suit was a security guard at the mall and had picked up on how wrong the situation was when my mom saw me with this guy she picked me up and hugged me this story is in fact very old but i recently was reminded of it because a couple of my friends told me they were planning on going to jamaica for vacation and the memories just came flooding back so security guard who noticed how wrong the situation was thank you thank you so much after my freshman year of high school i moved states with my parents being split up i moved with my mom so once a month i would fly down to where i used to live and visit my dad i would fly alone seeing as i am 16. when i got to the airport i went to my terminal waiting to get onto my flight i looked up from where i was sitting to see a man staring at me he wasn't shaggy or rough looking he looked like a middle-class older man the man looked to be in his mid-40s i didn't really think anything of it because usually i space out the airport when they called my number to board the plane i looked back to see the man staring at me again and this time he grinned at me i was very uncomfortable at this point but since there was free seating on this airline i figured i would just sit in the very back hoping he wouldn't follow me when i got to my seat i looked out for the man hoping he would take one of the front seats because they were all open instead i see him make his way to the back and he sits right next to me i was near the window and the middle and aisle seat were both open and you guessed it he sat in the middle seat at this point i was really freaking out because i did not get good vibes off this guy at all he smiled at me and i gave him a weak smile and turned my head to the window hoping he would not talk hey my name is jack what's yours i looked at him and panicked riley i said i gave him my real name as it left my lips it ventured into his riley what a beautiful name i just said thanks and continued to look out the window what school do you go to riley the way that he said my name made me scream on the inside i wanted him far away from me i said back i don't see how that's important he looked at me and put his hands up and apologized chuckling he then started talking to me about his job he was a college football ref and asked me if i was a cheerleader which i was wearing my cheerleading jacket so i assumed he already knew i just nodded not wanting to engage in conversation anymore thankfully this man came and sat in the aisle seat and jack stopped talking to me however constantly staring at me i faced my head opposite to his and put my head down pretending to be asleep i did eventually fall asleep and i was awakened to the plane landing relief spread throughout my entire body you're such a cute sleeper i wish you would have never woken up he says with the most sinister grin my eyes widened and my blood ran cold i didn't say anything and just unbuckled my seat giving him the impression i was trying to get off when the aisle started to disperse out of the plane he walked off and paused looking back at me i let four people pass me before stepping onto the aisle and i saw rage in his eyes he continued walking down the aisle with his head down when i got to the front of the plane i went to say thank you to the flight attendants and pilot like i always do however the flight attendant pulled me aside she said hey do you know that man that was sitting next to you i shook my head no her face went white when you fell asleep he was taking pictures of you and telling us how cute his daughter was when she was sleeping i was very puzzled because your body language was off i asked her to walk me down to baggage claim and she agreed since she had time to kill when we walked out of the plane and into the airport jack was standing there waiting for me she told me to keep walking and i did i ran into my dad's arms when i finally saw him the man saw this and went the opposite direction i don't know what his intentions were but i am glad i never found out i also realized that my school's initials were on my jacket which makes me very nervous i work at a non-profit home that works with people experiencing mental health or substance use barriers we have an in-home location for services and also offer a warm line for individuals to call in my line of work you experience beautiful life-changing moments heart-wrenching traumas overdoses recovery stories and everything in between needless to say myself and many others in my field can attest that very little tends to surprise you however this story was one of those that completely took me off guard a few years back we had a gentleman with a very unique voice that would call almost every day with a private number the subject matter of his calls seemed harmless at first but slowly seemed to escalate he started by talking about worries that he had at home but as his call frequency increased so did his tendency to over share he began telling our female team members completely inappropriate things he eventually told us that he enjoyed super gluing women to chairs to watch them struggle to get out of the seat the first time i heard this my face became simultaneously cold and hot i could not believe what i had heard i was in an angry state of shock and said that i had to end the call due to the apparent lack of words that had stricken me weeks went on and we had heard very little from our secretive super glue aficionado until it was a quiet day at the office and our midship person had called in usually we would try to find someone to replace this shift but since we had no guests currently we decided at best that i just hold the fort down on my own i would soon find out what a mistake that was i tried to keep myself busy and while i was doing some paperwork and cleaning around the office space i heard a knock at the front door at this point i was not expecting anyone and potential guests are expected to call before coming to stay or to see the location as to best protect everyone's safety and confidentiality i approached the frosted glass pane in the center of the door and saw a large shape of a man eclipsing our equally large doorway i cracked the door open and sternly greeted the man and asked what can i do for you he stared at me in a way that wasn't completely predatory but also did not feel safe he remained silent for a few seconds before a very eerily familiar voice said i need to talk he pushed the door fully open and let himself in as i stared in a state of disbelief he continued on from his earlier statement and chuckled out so let's talk as calmly as i could i offered him a seat at the table in the dining room area and sat across from him his eyes stayed locked on mine and if i was not almost completely positive that this was our mystery caller what he said next fully confirmed it while remaining his cold eye contact he said in a seemingly amused way i have this problem i don't know if it's a problem really but i can't stop doing it and i don't really know what to do you see i like to glue women to chairs i like knowing that i'm causing them discomfort and that they are stuck because of me i like watching them struggle and it makes me feel better than anything else i've ever done the feeling is completely euphoric it was taking everything in me to not cry on the spot this was causing every alarm signal in my body to scream at me to get out or get harmed i slowly slid my hand towards the work phone while looking at every possible exit and finding a flaw in every potential escape route and hoping that he would not notice as my pinky edged the case of the phone i saw his dark eyes flick over to where my hand was am i making you uncomfortable i assure you i'm not going to harm you i just want to talk just talk he teasingly said as i stammered out of falsely confident i'm not uncomfortable my boss will be here soon so i was just trying to see if she had messaged the work phone he continued staring ice-cold daggers into my eyes that caused me to sit up straighter in an attempt to mask the involuntary shiver that had taken over my body is that so well i wouldn't want to keep you occupied any longer as he stood up my heart began to pound impossibly more i had no idea if he was going to harm me leave or both he began walking towards me and as he towered over me my heart was practically fully in my throat at that point he extended a handout and said thanks for the chat i quietly grabbed the tips of his fingers and choked out a you're welcome he smirked at me as he began walking to the door as soon as he shut the door behind him i locked the deadbolt and called my director after the incident i installed a panic button app on the phone and put chain locks on each entrance to allow us to open the door when needing but to hopefully help us avoid people pushing the door fully open and finding ourselves uncomfortable and in potentially dangerous situations in the future a week went by and i was at the office with a fairly new mid-shift team member and she received a call from a private number i watched as her face dropped after answering the call i took the phone from her and introduced myself i heard that same nauseatingly familiar voice say hello i just want to talk i can't stop asking women their bra sizes in public i was done i barked out sir this is not that kind of warm line the addict anonymous meetings are every thursday and i can give you their number but the reason that we are here is because we have our own lived experience and traumas that do not need to be reactivated thank you for calling and have a good day months went by without seeing or hearing that voice until i was waiting for some takeout in the waiting area of a restaurant and once again heard that spine-chilling voice enter my ears i looked up and met those same dark eyes that caused me and my team so much panic and distress just months prior they were there in front of me yet again he looked panicked and taken by surprise in contrast to his amused and cocky persona that he portrayed before he swept up the food in a hurried rush and found his way to his vehicle and tried to speed off but not before i managed to photograph his vehicle make and model so if he ever decided to make an impromptu visit again or drive by we would have the information i love my job and i cannot stress enough that the taboo around mental health needs to be lessened it's very unfortunate that someone was not even properly utilizing our services and they had made such a lasting impression of myself and my other team members i still become incredibly anxious every time i hear the doorbell ring or a knock at the door when i am alone at work be kind to those that are unwell and need compassion but always be mindful of your own well-being and listen to your gut feelings because some people with or without diagnosis or labels can be dangerous be safe out there i don't know what compelled me to finally share this but i have been thinking about it a lot the past few days i have a lot of thoughts about this as it was the first and only time i felt legitimately afraid for my life when i was about eight years old my parents were going through a divorce and me and my older sister used to spend a lot of time at our grandparents house it's a long ranch style home on a corner in a very nice neighborhood that's a 10 minute walk from a gas station grocery store and a few fast food restaurants the streets are long and lined with well-manicured houses cradled by big scenic california valley hills all around we were never very wealthy but my grandpa bought it as a fixer-upper many years ago and the property value has skyrocketed since then as you can imagine it's a very safe spot and although there weren't many other kids in the neighborhood it wasn't uncommon to see neighbors walking their dogs or pushing a stroller down the sidewalk outside of our house although my mom was especially protective all our lives this particular neighborhood was densely populated and my family knew just about everyone who lived there she grew up in that neighborhood herself so she was understandably trusting she would once in a while let me and my sister walk to the rotten ravi gas station on the other end of the block to grab a snack i would always get a ring pop and my sister would grab a three musketeers before we made our way back home my sister was about 11 at the time and this small amount of freedom was a really big deal to us nothing compared to walking down that street all by ourselves in the summertime laughing and joking around a couple dollar bills in our pockets i felt like i owned the world the one oddity i ever noticed around the neighborhood was a small camper that was parked on the side of the road opposite to the gas station right along the back side of the fence of another house it sat there in the shade like a permanent fixture all the windows constantly covered by opaque beige curtains i can't explain why but it always gave me this deep sense of foreboding when i would pass it i was almost positive someone was living inside it because at times i would hear the air conditioning running as it sat stagnant in the same spot the hairs on my neck would always stand on end as i passed it particularly as i passed the camper door and i'd always keep an eye on it for the fear that one day it would swing open just as i came to pass by i think what bothered me the most was a drawing taped to the door from the inside it was extremely messy a sketch of odd lines in a brown colored pencil that was frustratingly indiscernible i could see the outline of something a vague shape but could never make out what it was intended to be i never had the nerves to stop and stare long enough to really investigate but each time i walked by i would steal a glance a year prior to the incident i'm about to describe i was walking with my mom past the camper in the shade we had just gone to the park nearby and unfortunately had to pass the camper before we could cross the street and continue walking i didn't want to seem afraid so i kept on walking right behind her and did not object when she walked past it this time i felt a little more brave i was frustrated not being able to decipher the drawing for so long and while my mom was feet away i stopped in front of the camper door and took a moment to really look at the drawing upon closer inspection the paper was filthy i remember doing a project in elementary school where we soaked printer paper and black coffee to make it look aged and that's what it reminded me of my mom walked on without noticing that i had stopped following her but my eyes stayed fixed on the indistinct mass of dirt caked scribbles until i could make out what looked to be a tiny malformed face my stomach turned i immediately felt cold and disgusted as my eyes trailed over the rest of the image i didn't know what kind of creature it was at the time but now i can look back and say the drawing was a badly deformed fetus inside a mass of large perfect circles like those made by a circular ring ruler its face was contorted as if in pain it was so graphically disturbing and seemed to portray this odd sense of suffering that stuck with me for days as a child i didn't know how to process it and the mental image still makes me sick to think about i had never seen anything like it before adrenaline flooded my body and my chest hurt with fear but i selfishly thought of my glorious little trips for ring pops and said absolutely nothing as i followed behind my mom this was in retrospect a classically terrible idea it's one of those things you scream at main characters and movies for ever since my ill feelings towards the camper had been elevated by the drawing on the door i thought about it every time we drove by and about a month later my mom once again graced us with several bucks and permission to walk down to rotten robbie and grab our respective snacks i thought about telling my sister about what i had seen on the way there but she was older and braver and i was terrified she would make me cross the street with her to check it out it was a bright sunny day and i told myself with false certainty that nothing was going to happen if i didn't acknowledge it maybe it would go away we walked past the camper and it was thankfully uneventful on the walk back i was feeling more comfortable and was focused on fighting open my candy wrapper until my sister walked alongside me we passed the camper a second time but i didn't give it half as much thought as the first time i don't remember what we were talking about but i recall being interrupted mid-sentence as my sister softly yet firmly said my name there was a distinct fear in her voice that immediately set me on edge like a bucket of ice water all my senses heightened and i became aware of everything including the sound of haphazard footsteps about 10 feet behind us it was accompanied by a heavy rustling sound like a heavy backpack and nervously i have turned my head to look a man with a long unkempt beard and wearing many layers of ragged clothing stood behind us eyes unmistakably burning into our backs as he walked his movements weren't normal it was a drunken shuffle like each of his feet were unimaginably heavy and needed to be moved one grand effort at a time his shoulders were skewed head tilted downward with a strange arc of his neck i could hear his shoes scraping the gravel with every step but rather than seeming genuinely intoxicated it was as if he was intentionally meandering our direction like a zombie with a direct effort to frighten us behind him i saw that the camper door was wide open for the first time in all the years we had spent living there and realized this was the man who had been living inside he's following us i choked out my eyes filling with tears my mind was spinning as i stared straight ahead again and the wide street and sidewalks abnormally empty all around my sister grabbed my hand she squeezed it hard enough to hurt without looking my way speaking carefully under her breath on the count of three we race home she told me in a very serious tone of voice i couldn't reply through the growing lump in my throat but every single cell in my body understood that we had to put some distance between us and this man as quickly as possible she began to count steadily while we walked faster and the most terrifying part is that he started running before we even had a chance to he must have heard her directions to me and tried to get a head start by sprinting our direction before she got to three but his footsteps were noisy and we bolted like deer the instant we heard him behind us i'll never forget it the chase felt exactly like you imagine in your nightmares the fear your pursuer is inches away from grabbing your arm or a fistful of your hair i pictured myself being dragged into the van with nobody around to see or hear me we ran so fast we didn't even have the breath to scream and peering back behind me about 10 seconds later i saw him running in our direction with absolutely none of the impairment he showed with those zombie-like steps moments before i think back on it now and he may have been deliberately pretending to be handicapped to lower our guard so we wouldn't start running the thought is terrifying but i can't rationalize it any other way we made it to our grandparents house and without looking behind us yanked open the stubborn old door before slamming it closed and scrambling past their excited dogs to get as deep into the house as possible i don't even think we locked it as our main goal was getting within the line of sight of any adults as quickly as possible my mom was talking to my grandpa at the table and gave us an amused look when we bounded into the living room since we were kids running around wasn't anything out of the ordinary and she didn't ask what happened as we collapsed on the couch and tried to catch our breath the inside of the house felt safe and felt in such good spirits that i didn't even want to bring up what just happened like waking up from a nightmare you don't want to talk about i was desperate to go back to normalcy i wanted to forget it entirely to unwrap my candy and act like everything was completely normal for the sake of my own sanity and that's exactly what i did i asked my sister a few years back if she remembered this incident and her response was strange she remembered immediately without the need for me to provide details but she quickly waved it off and insisted he had to have been a bored homeless man looking to spook some kids walking home with no real intent to harm anyone i don't know i'd like to believe it's some innocent misunderstanding but like they always say about gut feelings they are rarely wrong i feel in my soul that he wanted to hurt me and my sister that day i never told her or anyone else about the strange drawing on the door and i'm not sure if my sister saw the open door and connected him to the camper or not it's one of my biggest regrets as i would hate for any other children to have been less fortunate after innocently walking past the camper in the shade i believe he may have chosen the spot between the park and gas station deliberately due to the number of children walking around the area i never saw the camper again a day or so after this i am not proud of how i handled this and would encourage anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation to contact authorities immediately for the safety of others around i don't know if maybe this whole story comes off as melodramatic but it was very real and very frightening in a way that i cannot forget this happened in college maybe seven years ago at the time i was living with one of my best friends and we were very into the bar scene and partying and such we lived in a city that was very much inundated with college kids so it was never hard to find a party and i am ashamed to admit it but probably every other night i was out partying so this story starts on a night very much like every other she and i got all dressed up and went on a bar crawl we ended up at this club it was one of the more popular ones in the area and we meet up with my ex-roommate the three of us are having a great night but periodically we were all interacting with this one guy none of us remember his name but he seemed normal enough he sat next to us on the smoking porch and bummed a sig from me he bought my friend a drink and he was dancing next to us we even all had a little conversation together although i can't for the life of me remember what it was about but he was there in the periphery all night around 1am the three of us decided that we were drunk enough and done dancing and my ex-roommate invites me and the bestie to her place to smoke none of us have cars at this point but it's a nice night and she only lives a couple of miles away so we start walking the downtown streets quickly turn into a semi-residential semi-warehouse district area not the best part of town or the most populated but not a bad area by any means and usually the streets are fully empty we are maybe halfway to the house when we notice there's someone behind us trailing along and getting closer we really don't think anything of it until we pause to light up some cigarettes and he catches up and we realize it's the guy who had been hanging around us at the bar he's kind of stumbly clearly drunk and he greets us like old friends we don't want to be rude but it strikes all of us as kind of weird that he's there to begin with but we shrug it off because he's drunk and seemingly harmless i should say right now he's a real scrawny guy on the taller side but thin very thin with a baby face and very big eyes he just looks generally harmless and drunk he asks if he can bum a smoke and walk with us until he gets where he's going which isn't far and he's clearly very unsteady on his feet so we say sure why not so we're walking and chatting and we're getting closer to our destination but he doesn't make any indication of where he's going so finally i asked him where do you live anyway and he gives me this funny look like i had asked something really stupid and says oh i don't live anywhere near here this kind of creeps us all out and we sort of stop where we are and i say okay well then where are you going and he replies oh i'm following you at this point i think that maybe there's been like a misunderstanding in his mind so i respond with something along the lines of ok well no offense but we don't even know your name so you're not coming with us and he gets this look like hurt but also angry and a little manic and he gets kind of loud and says but i told you all my name i told each of you my name how do none of you remember my name at this point my ex-roommate steps in and says look man i know you're drunk but you really need to calm down and the guy stops and gets real calm real fast and he gets this really serious look and says no i'm not drunk i'm fine i just knew you'd trust me more if you thought i was drunk at that point i'm like uh no i'm out but my roommate doesn't believe him and says something like you've been stumbling this whole time of course you're drunk and he shakes his head and in a completely calm tone with no slurring whatsoever he goes no i'm sober i just wanted to see if you'd let me in your house and my friend responds why and the guy gets this huge smile and his big eyes get even wider and he says i just wanted to see how close i could get to killing you at that point i'd had enough and i put on my authority voice and i told him that that is enough and that we're leaving and he needs to go the other direction now before i call the cops he just shrugs and says fine and we scurry away and leave him leaning up against a stop sign just smoking a sig and watching us go as soon as we are around the corner we all break into a dead sprint and run for a few blocks and then stop and freak out we're in the middle of a panic whisper huddle when my friend looks over my shoulder and lets out this little scream we turn around and there he is it's dark so we can't really see his face just his silhouette against the street lamps but it was enough to know it was definitely him he is striding down the road a few blocks down hands in his pockets not a trace of a stumble and he's not exactly running but he's walking at this real brisk pace and he had been on us in less than a minute luckily we're only about a block away from my friend's place so we start booking it there we're almost at the front door when i realize oh crap we don't want him to know where we're going not the three of us alone that seems dangerous fortune shines on us as up the block i can see the telltale signs of a garage party and we book it over there instead we come up to the lawn and there's a bunch of guys out front and we are breathlessly trying to explain ourselves but when we turn around to point out the guy he's gone the partiers sympathize and let us hang out for a few hours and a few of them even walked us back to the house thankfully we never saw the guy again and needless to say my friends and i lost our taste for partying for quite a while after that this story is 100 real here is a little bit about me i live with my mom dad younger brother and our dog in a very rural area in germany when this happened i was about 13 years old we don't have any close neighbors it was a very cold saturday in december i remember the day because my mother only worked on saturdays my brother father and i spent our afternoon watching movies it was close to 5 pm at the point this happened since it was winter it was nearly dark outside the room was lit by the tv and our fireplace at one point my brother looked outside the window because it started to snow heavily we all looked outside the window when all of a sudden my dog began to growl he ran up and down the room very alert this was very unusual for him to do my dad stood up and looked around but he didn't see anything after a few minutes he began to calm down again we returned to our movie and everything was fine for a few minutes then he started doing it again i noticed my brother was staring out the window next to our back door i asked him what he saw and he shook his head then all of a sudden we saw an elderly lady approaching our back door we were baffled because hardly anyone comes out here especially not an older lady like this she looked to be around 80 or 90 wearing one of those typical grandma aprons and a head scarf mind you it was below zero outside she tapped on the back door glass and started to smile really weird meanwhile my dog hid under the table whimpering and growling my brother came close to me and my dad walked to the back door and opened it a bit in a confused tone he asked what she was doing in our backyard she smiled and looked directly past him at us she never even looked at my dad she took a step forward to the door shoving her foot inside my dad immediately pushed her foot back and shut the door on her she glared at him invented us before she started to laugh maniacally then she just calmly walked away like nothing had happened we looked at each other in confusion not knowing what to say my brother and i looked outside the window behind us we couldn't see her the only way in and out of our backyard was the small path next to the house from the window behind us we would have seen her leaving but she never passed by the window my dad stepped outside and couldn't see her anywhere neither could he see any footprints in the snow there was absolutely no way the tracks would have been covered by snow already since only a couple of minutes had passed between her leaving and my dad going outside to this day we don't know what happened that day i don't know if this was something paranormal or not it may not seem so creepy to you but to us as kids this was the most terrifying thing we have ever witnessed i'm an emt have been for almost three years now i live and work in southern california and this particular transport happened when i was a brand new ems worker at four months at a private ambulance company this company was a private bls or basic life support company primarily meaning we typically transported patients whose care provider had a contract with us however sometimes we would run night at our 911 when i heard the tone from my radio unit 221 priority response to state prison for an unknown medical copy wheels up in two i replied i walked over to my partner who was sleeping on our wreck area couch rise a life needs saving i sarcastically exclaimed we hopped into the rig the engine roared to life and we set off lights blazing sirens wailing as we approached the prison we killed the lights and sirens and proceeded with the routine security check once the guards were satisfied with the search we were given access and led through the gates and parked outside the medical bay gurney and medical equipment in tow we entered the prison hospital now because my partner was the patient person for the last call i was going to be primary care provider for this patient though i had been a pretty new emt i had done a lot of prison transports in a small period of time i have had inmates scream at me try to bribe me and yes even tried to hurt me so as you can imagine i really wasn't looking for fight night on unit 221 at four in the morning regardless i always prepared for the worst we were escorted in by guards as usual and led into the main area of the hospital's rooms which were still fitted as cells i was approached by a nurse who gave me a sheet of paper with his information and most recent vitals i began to ask for the turnover report and why this patient required transport and where we were transporting to the nurse stared blankly for a moment before he said you're going to scripps mercy shores hospital room 329 he's going because he doesn't feel well and he needs some tests done he shouldn't be a problem for you already a few silent alarms were going off in my head scripps mercy shores is a rich people hospital i have never heard of anyone other than someone wealthy going there let alone a prisoner second not feeling well and needs tests don't really paint me a great picture for why he needs to go and what i'll be dealing with and finally what does he shouldn't be a problem for you mean if he's a violent inmate or even an at-risk patient they would normally just say so getting an actual report on this patient's health and medical condition was like getting blood from a stone i decided to just relent and go ahead with the transport the prison guards brought the shackled patient out to us another oddity every other time i would go in and talk with them before getting them onto the gurney standing before me was a tall rather frail looking man with dark complexion his eyes were red and sunken his overall demeanor was a fearful one he was constantly shivering he looked horrible i introduced myself and began my whole checklist of things to ask and address we'll call him david he answered all my questions with a small and quivering voice when i asked what the problem was tonight he gave a quick and frightened glance towards the guards and the nurse i don't feel well his reply sounded forced and rehearsed abuse from the staff came to mind first but i would address that later i decided to just go ahead and get this guy going and i would wrap everything up in the ambulance before loading him in i asked him the same question i asked all inmate patients be straight with me and i'll be straight with you are you gonna cause problems once we get going he quickly shook his head no and we were off when transporting prisoners one guard accompanies in the ambulance and another follows in what's called a tail car this is for everyone's safety and ensuring that if the patient tries anything an official guard is there to address it i was busy writing up my report when i realized that between the confusion of the call and the late hour i had forgotten to get my own set of vitals a rookie mistake we were about halfway to our destination and the patient had remained silent this whole time i told him i was going to take his vitals and instructed him to give me his arm so i could begin he did so immediately like he was trained to obey anything demanded of him and did so with that haunting look of fear i wrapped my blood pressure cuff around his arm and that's when i felt him for the first time his skin was ice cold there wasn't even a slight warmth to his skin i asked him if he would like a blanket but he declined i continued with my evaluation i inflated the cuff pressed my stethoscope to his brachial artery and listened for the pulse to come back to show me his blood pressure it did not come back at first i thought my stethoscope was broken so i grabbed a spare one same result no pulse i removed all my equipment and felt for his pulse myself nothing i looked at him and asked if he felt all right he replied with this simple quiet i'm okay thank you caught off guard i grabbed my pulse oximetry which is used to find a heart rate and blood oxygen level and put it on his finger after a moment of the machine reading the heart rate came back at zero and the blood oxygen level came back at zero my heart dropped i took another set of vitals to see if i misread anything but they all came back the same heart rate zero blood pressure zero blood oxygen level zero the only thing consistent was his respiratory rate which was 24 breaths a minute a bit higher than resting rate but not alarming in itself i looked back again and asked him once more if he's okay he looked me in the eyes and nodded his head yes as tears welled up in his eyes then he looked away he was completely alert he responded perfectly to all my questions his eyes were equal and reactive all signs of good brain function but no signs of a pulse or any vascular activity at this point i don't know what to think scientifically there is no reason this guy should be alive even if he had an artificial heart he would be showing vital signs and have a battery pack with a filter kit but he is right in front of me alert breathing talking when addressed it makes absolutely no sense i decided to continue investigating i listened to his heart with my stethoscope there was no beating no thumping just the muffled sounds of his breathing while i was there i listened to his lungs all clear all normal i had just finished listening to his chest when we pulled into our destination we offloaded him from the ambulance took him to the room we were instructed to then he hopped off the gurney and was escorted to the hospital bed by the guards i began giving my almost unbelievable turnover report to the nurse who surprisingly did not seem alarmed by any of it i wrapped up my turnover and then sat down in a nearby chair to finish up my report as i sat typing away at my computer i am interrupted by the sound of a hospital bernie rolling down the hallway it was accompanied by four people in surgical gowns who entered the inmates room with said gurney after a few minutes the team in surgical attire emerges from the room inmates strapped down to the gurney with restraints he is audibly crying and they wheel him down the hall and around the corner that was the last i saw of him i told my partner once we were back in the ambulance he didn't believe me at first which i can understand i joke around a lot but with the look i gave him he knew i wasn't kidding this story may not have been what you were expecting it's not violent or particularly frightening but this was hands down the most disturbing call i have ever had i don't know what i saw i don't know what i transported i have my theories such as experimental treatment being carried out on inmates but with skin like ice hardly any vital signs and such a fearful demeanor i can only wonder what kind of experiments and what kind of horrors this man had faced as a female who's been on the game for 15 years now i have met a load of creeps but only a few have made me feel unsafe to start off i've always had a laptop since i was in high school a luxury back then i worked hard to earn enough to buy one my mom always took my money that i earned for things less than respectable but luckily money i made in tips were in cash so it was easier to hide it from her at first my mom was mad that i bought myself a laptop but she soon forgot like everything else my dad could care less and my older brother already had his own so i started playing world of warcraft with him at 14 and back then girls playing were unheard of so i got the usual creeps who usually backed off after hearing my age but not this one guy this guy loved that i was underage i was about 16 and used to creepy guys at this point no longer a noob at the game or fending off the creeps it was no surprise that a guy in my guild started hitting on me now i was 16. stupid but i knew i wasn't going to find love on world of warcraft where you know no one in real life plus i had this ultimate crush on a guy that i couldn't have because he was my brother's best friend so it was easy to turn guys down despite being desperate for one but that all changed after my brother's friend went off to college i had a part-time job with my brother's friend but girls at work surrounded him and i became demoralized that i would never find love cue the 19 year old guy on world of warcraft who made me feel wanted i had a camera phone so i could send and post pictures at that age and back then i mostly used facebook myspace and photo bucket i lost a lot of weight my sophomore year so i posted confidently bikini pictures and sexy pictures thinking that i would lure the attention of my brother's friend whom was 19. so when this guy who was also 19 liked me it didn't phase me he looked the part in his photos and his younger brother was my age so i thought he was extremely attractive in his photos and even proved it was him and his pictures by holding items i asked for he started paying my world of warcraft subscription which in the long run i realized was to get my home address and my real name i was so stupid and heartbroken over my brother's friend years of teaching myself online safety and the ability to be strong against flirts was all but lost in the fog we would talk for hours on ventrio and he would make me feel pretty i was completely blinded by this point he sent me gifts and i didn't even question how he had my address benny offered to drive and pick me up as only then did i suddenly get cold feet i had a good friend on world of warcraft someone my brother met on pax and joined the guild and is still one of my best friends to this day he's six years older than me but never creeped on me was more like the protective brother that i lacked he caught onto it through conversation and was my words of wisdom in a time that i was lacking any of my own he saw something was fishy when i couldn't i told my friend i was scared to meet him because dumb teenager logic i thought he would not like me my friend chimed in that i shouldn't meet anyone off the internet at my age i told him about the gifts and i swear i have never been scolded like that before in my life not even by my own parents but he always cared like that he wondered why i would give my address to someone i never met and the expensive gifts that i received were not something the average 19 year old could afford none of this ever clicked for me of course because i was lonely and trying to prove something to myself that i could get a boyfriend so just like that i told the guy it wasn't wise to meet in person and my parents said i wasn't allowed to that's when he went dark at first it was pestering over and over guilting me over the gifts he gave me and encouraging me to defy my parents while he kept bothering me it never once occurred to me that he would lose his cool while my friend was worried about the guy having my address going as far to drive the 11 hours to my house and explain the situation to my dad as i refused to tell him out of fear of getting in trouble at the time all while taking his spring break in my state instead of his own with his friends there's a reason he's still one of my best friends he has a little sister of his own as well and she's my age so his protective nature is natural eventually he made me block the guy and that was that this guy was so angry he would go on different accounts to accuse me of gold digging and using him luckily my friend was smart enough and had the foresight to change my world of warcraft password and even paid for my account for me taking this guy off of it entirely as one of this guy's threats was to delete my account but it did not end there it got worse as he would consistently find ways to message me and tell me how horrible i was till about a month had passed i was walking home from school about a two mile walk in the wealthy suburbs of new england which i had done for years many kids did it as it was a very safe town with no crime without a second thought i took off with my 100 pound backpack put my headphones in and started my 20-minute walk home it was cold so i had earmuffs over my headphones only drowning out the sound more i swear if i could talk to myself as a kid i probably would just slap myself for being so stupid because the world of warcraft guy knew that i walked home every day as i had talked about it before he knew my address and i never thought twice i was on the back roads walking home and honestly easy to map from my school to home as it was pretty straightforward with only one turn at halfway home in between songs i heard a vague crunching sound of tires rolling over gravel on the road slowly i turned around to see a tinted black car and you couldn't see much of the person driving i jogged out of the driveway that i was standing in front of assuming it was waiting to turn in but it didn't turn in the roads were dead and it did not make sense for him to not go around i swear the saying that you go cold when you're terrified is absolutely true it could have been a summer's day at 95 degrees and my bones would have been cold my heart just sank and my breathing was uncontrollable i felt like i had no control over my body as i realized this guy was following me my blood ran cold and my hands shook as tears formed and my skin felt tight my body felt like it wasn't ready to fight or flight but simply freeze there and die it only got worse as the second time i turned my head to see the car stop i stopped my world stopped i couldn't stop staring just froze and breathing like all my school books were on my chest crying silently my eyes hurt with no tears or sound as i just stood there the door opened after what felt like hours but only seconds maybe a minute and it was in fact him it was the attractive guy from the photos not a catfish but something seemed different at first i thought it was his angry expression but soon realized he was definitely not 19 more like in his 30s i could barely think over the loud sound of my heart racing as it froze me in place i thought i was about to throw up as he spoke to me told me to get in the car or he would light my house on fire i honestly just couldn't move couldn't reach for my phone as his words turned me to stone and somehow we both failed to notice the little old lady on her porch watching this play out suddenly i hear her yell get away from that girl right now before i burn you alive we both turned to meet her eyes a completely serious angry small lady about 60 or 70 with white hair i think she noticed my frozen and fear state as she told me to get over to her quickly like that i ran over to her tossing off my heavy brick of a backpack it was obvious he was unsure what to do next as he stood there and watched me run to her must have been a sight this tiny thin old lady standing in front of a teenage girl yelling at this man to go away just like that savior number two joined the battle as her husband stepped out a man that looked like he had been through a war or two with a booming voice i've killed men for less reason you better leave right now he got into his car and drove off as i simply collapsed all that fear just came out as i cried harder and harder as my brain sifted through the past few months of mistakes after calming me down enough to speak and non-hyperventilating words she asked me if i knew him i told her kind of but only online from a video game not real life of course explaining it wasn't easy she got on the phone with the school counselor her daughter apparently told her my name i was well known to her daughter ironically but it was only 250 or less kids in the school and the town itself was small many staff at our school had family in town kids at school they were related to either by their own children or their siblings children it was the kind of town if you didn't leave by a certain age you were stuck there so honestly it seems ironic but not entirely a huge surprise the counselor was well aware of my family and my mom's addiction as child services had been involved a few times she came by in about 10 minutes to pick me up and asked me a ton of questions of course knowing i didn't want to involve the police as i was scared of being taken away from my parents again we weren't rich but we were more well off than many though my mom worked my dad kept my mom in a tight budget to keep her from buying prescriptions from canada she wasn't prescribed she knew all of this and knew though it would be rough i was better off than foster care which was a gamble with losing odds at best plus two more years and i would be off to college anyway so we didn't involve the cops but she made me promise to take the bus every day and to inform my dad of the situation she also called my dad at work to inform him and had a teacher make sure i got on the bus every day until i graduated it really sucked but i understood if it ended there it would be nice but there's still more to the story two days after this my dad had to fly out for business my brother was off at college so it left me and my mom who promised my dad she would stay sober while he was gone but i was used to helping her while she was intoxicated it was like taking care of a child but i was on edge as every creak in that big house from the 60s the cat stirring at night the dog barking outside set me on edge and i barely slept my friend from world of warcraft called every night making sure i was okay for the past month i lived in the middle of the woods next to a huge river in my backyard so there was still a lot of wildlife outside in the dead silence of cold months running water is an important source of water when the lakes freeze i had been used to all the bumps in the night cats coming and going and dogs barking at every animal in the yard but it all seemed new to me as i laid in bed trying to drown out my fears the house i grew up in was a six-bedroom house i had a little sister too but she stayed with my grandma in another state per court order while i was allowed to choose due to her only being nine and me sixteen the other rooms were used as a game room an office for my dad and a guest room mostly for when my sister visited my grandma so she had a room to stay in so in a large house like that in the middle of the woods it was scary to virtually be alone because my mom was defenseless i was letting my last cat inside for the night and i noticed at the end of the long driveway between my neighbor's house and our house was a parked black car i quickly shut the door and locked it after my cat got inside i made sure all five doors were locked and even put cardboard on the glass doors to the pool hoping that if someone broke them it would delay him if he was in fact in that car i went and turned off all the lights and got all my cats into one room so i knew they were safe here's the thing about my dog he's untrained for the most part but was basically a giant puppy in his mind he growled at strangers not barked like at animals we had to keep him outside if we had guests but he never bit anyone and if you spent enough time around him he would eventually accept you he didn't growl at all strangers either so he wasn't the most reliable guard dog but he was big and he had a deep bark i mulled over what to do as i sat there in the dark with my dog waiting for a shadow to pass by the window i eventually went upstairs to my mom's room and woke her up from her sleeping pill slumber groggy and still kind of intoxicated she did not quite grasp what i was telling her until i started crying she kind of sobered up and asked me to get her some coffee and i did all while i'm watching my dog's every move because i knew that he would be able to sense something before i did as my mom sobered the fear in her eyes grew eventually she got the idea to call my neighbors and ask them if they knew the car after they all said no two of the men left their house to go check the car the car was empty at closer inspection they noticed it was a newer car a lexus and in the passenger seat was a laptop the car was locked but with a flashlight you could see somewhat into the tinted windows they never told us why but something they saw in the car prompted them to call the local sheriff there was only one and he lived in town he drove over about 15 minutes later ran the plates and asked all the neighbors about it apparently it was a rental car from ohio and he was calling to see who it was rented to but the offices were closed he stuck around in his car for about an hour until someone came out of the woods and ran back in as the cop shined his spotlight on him i couldn't see what he was pointing out with his light as it was on the side of my house and i was looking out the front i guess he called for backup as three other cop cars showed up in five minutes from the neighboring town at which time a lady cop got out of her car and i asked to speak with her and for her to call my counselor in school to explain who that might be i was pretty shy back then but something about a female cop made me feel more comfortable to open up to i told her the gist of this story and then she called my counselor who backed up my story but also was explaining why i was scared of cops because of my history with foster care and not wanting to go back at which time a mostly sober mom joined me hugging me doing her typical apologetic routine but also offering much needed comfort as she called my dad too eventually the lady cop asked if she could take a look around the house to see if things were secure and get any information from my laptop about him in her search she found something i didn't think about checking the basement door was not just unlocked but open it's never unlocked so i did not even think to check it as our backyard floods in the spring due to beaver dams and it's got extra seals and stuff to prevent the basement from flooding again but the stuff that was sealing it which was mostly sandbags and stuff were set aside but the door at the bottom of the stairs was locked even though it did have some damage like someone tried to pick it but he did have access to half the basement that was storage and the other half used to be used for my brother's parties the door between the sections was like a front door not an indoor door as in the summer my dad left the hatch open to dry out the basement and adjust pool settings as it was basically the pool house and the cats loved it so it also had a few cat beds the section that led upstairs was locked from the inside and the wall and door were not drywalled and were made of cheap material but the lock and key heavy door was brick upon noticing this my dad confirmed that he had not left it open my suspicions that black car was his was pretty much confirmed as we walked through the house to make sure everything was still safe she got on my laptop as they searched the woods i gave her everything i had his photos username and she even checked to see if his credit card was still on my account but it wasn't but the last few digits were she then asked to take my laptop for a few days as she thought she could get some good evidence from it i asked her to please not damage it and return it as soon as possible because i used it a lot this was before smartphones so it was all that i had after a few hours and the onlooking neighbors had gone to bed the cops came back empty-handed but left one cop outside of our house and they towed the guy's car from what the lady cop told me what permitted such fear in the car was multiple weapons some sort of rope and handcuffs and the guy that ran back into the dense woods was wearing a mask so eventually i try and lay down to go to sleep but pretty sure i was gonna call out sick tomorrow and kept all my cats inside for the day i was too restless to sleep every sound scared me my mom slept with the dog in her room and my cat slept in my room most nights by choice as my room was usually the warmest at 3 30 a.m i heard a knock at the back door and i heard a man say that he was an undercover police officer and to open the door i was still awake as i walked downstairs to make out a guy standing in the dark he had a weapon as he saw me he demanded that i let him in now as he needed to speak with me something felt off my gut knew it before i did that this guy's voice seemed forced like someone purposely making their voice deeper and why was he at the back door so i turned on a light outside and sure enough it was him i just screamed and as quickly as i did he started pounding on the door hard it wasn't a loud horror movie scream but more like a gasp i don't think the fear in my body had a loud scream to let out but the banging was pretty loud as i ran to the front to see the officer was still outside he was but he wasn't getting out of his car i didn't want to run outside as i am not the fastest runner so i turned the porch lights on and off a couple times but still nothing after a minute my dog came bolting down to the door barking and growling nearly foaming at the mouth soon followed by my mom who was angry and was threatening the man somehow during all this the cop outside had snuck around back and had his weapon pointed at him yelling at him to put his down i hid as the rest went down but he was arrested no trial needed me to attend and my statement was enough come to find out he wasn't even american the car was rented under his friend's name and after all that was done he was deported back to canada i assume something with this passport would prevent him from coming back to the usa as the cop reassured me that he couldn't come back to the usa now i don't know what exactly he was charged with but i think my dad said activated assault with a deadly weapon attempted kidnapping and something else and it also turned out that he was 32 years old not 19 so i assume me being a minor carried another charge and life moved on from there i had plenty of creeps before and after but he was by far the worst from world of warcraft i experienced a couple more creeps from streaming but i'm an adult now and much better at staying safe online i was living in tibili sea a few years ago the capital of the republic of georgia running a kind of legally ambiguous consumer credit operation when i figured it was time i took a much-needed weekend to get away in a nearby small town the town i settled on is an extremely popular tourist location given its beautiful location along a river nestled in a deep valley and rife with ancient churches with many options for potential guest houses hotels and rentals i decided to not book in advance and to just traipse around until i found something appropriate i found a very adequate guest house perched on a hill with about a one acre plot upon entering the guest house i was greeted in typical georgian fashion by an incredibly hospitable elderly woman and her son who seemed to be in his early 30s who resumed his yard work of filling a large hole that he said was a septic tank with a foul lingering smell after a brief introduction again in typical georgian fashion the hostess offered me tea homemade wine bread and cheese all of which were much needed and fantastic i am an american but my family came from eastern europe so i speak russian as most georgians do so we were able to chat a lot our conversation progressed from basic get to know you bits to more personal information like whether i'm seeing anyone or who i am dating which does come up in surprising frequency when you meet sweet grandmothers who want you to meet their granddaughters at the time i was dating a fellow expat from a western european country when i told the hostess that i was seeing someone she seemed thrilled and asked me to show her a photo she reacted with an ah and nodded in approval commenting on her physique in a way that would probably be inappropriate if it wasn't a cute old grandma i was then pressed by the hostess as to why i didn't invite her and how that isn't what a good boyfriend would do put on the spot like this i lied and said she was very busy with a work project which she wasn't but would be arriving later in the evening the hostess was elated by this news and called over her son and asked me to show the photo of the girl i was seeing early in our conversation it was established that i do not speak in georgian the son saw the photo and affirmatively nodded and spoke in georgian to the hostess briefly and then turned to me with a beaming smile and a thumbs up and said in english very pretty you lucky brother he then in russian asked if i texted her to invite her i lied and said that i did text her and reiterated that she was arriving in a few hours it was around 4 p.m at the time in a beautiful golden hour glow that lit up the surrounding mountains and valley the sun said that he would join us and asked if i liked cha-cha cha-cha is the very strong national liquor of georgia ranging from 30 to 75 alcohol content and made from distilled grapes i had become quite the savant of cha-cha and despite some strange feelings about their fixation on the female visitor i obliged cha-cha is not for the weak-hearted but i was very used to consuming it at the time i should have paid more notice to the very intentional placement of the shots that he filled for us but i pushed those misgivings aside and had the shot after a very traditional toast around 20 minutes later i felt exhausted and ill and excused myself to my room saying that i needed a quick nap walking to my room i knew something was amiss as mentioned in the beginning i was fronting a questionable business and i did have a weapon in my bag and made a mental note to take it and put it under my pillow but as one can imagine it isn't easy to remember things even on short term when you're apparently drugged despite failing to collect my weapon as the afternoon sun was blaring into the room and i wanted darkness passing out at around 4 30 pm i awoke to darkness at 4 45 a.m with a raging headache my window shades were partially opened despite me closing them before passing out they were opened with about two feet of space visible to the outside my bags were not in the position i left them and the television was on and on high volume despite me never using it and the door was only partially closed i peered out the window and didn't see anything so i quickly went to my bag retrieved my weapon and went to the bathroom with the intention of calling my co-workers or a driver to pick me up i had no cell service and no wi-fi despite having perfectly fine reception the day prior i went back to the bed with the weapon under my pillow with zero desire or inclination to fall back asleep after an hour or so of pretending to be asleep i saw this sun peer through the window to get a look inside at this point i was certain it was not my imagination playing tricks on me and that i was in trouble i came out around sunrise to find both the hostess and her son sipping tea on the deck and i told the hostess that my girlfriend was arriving soon on a bus and that i would bring her when it arrived i grabbed my backpack and left my other bag to give the impression i wasn't fleeing got service immediately after leaving the property and called a partner to pick me up old school businessman who was floating the money that i had run the lending operation with i told him the story and he said he would handle it and he did handle it i still think about the foul-smelling hole the sun was digging maybe the last guest weeks later i decided that wasn't the place or business for me and applied to law school on the other side of the world one time my two friends and i were chilling in my living room my two friends were both sitting on my chair about six to seven feet away from me and i was reclining back in my lazy boy i was getting drowsy and thought that i might take a little nap and i started getting a little cold i need to mention that i had been unconsciously holding onto a cigarette lighter in one hand that had a metal lighter case on it since i was beginning to get a little chilly i crossed my arms in order to warm up the second that i did i started being electrocuted and i don't mean shocked like some static electricity or something i mean my entire body started convulsing uncontrollably i remember in that instant putting every ounce of my focus and energy into attempting to stand up and after a few short seconds i was able to the moment i was able to the electricity stopped shocking me and i stood there flabbergasted not sure what just happened and that's what's even weirder is that neither of my friends even noticed what had just happened when i told them they didn't believe me and it didn't make sense since i hadn't been touching or even near touching anything electrical or that could conduct electricity my one friend turned the chair i'd been sitting in over and helped me look everywhere around me for some kind of explanation as to how it might have happened we never found anything but a few minutes later as i sat trying to convince them both that it really happened i opened my hand and set the lighter down and on my hand sat a little square burn the same shape as the metal lighter that i had been holding suffice it to say that was the craziest thing that's ever happened to me the burn was proof that it really happened and i still have no clue how i was able to get my body to stand up or how i knew that's what would make it stop but it did i still have no idea how it happened how i got shocked so dramatically from sitting in a cushioned chair but it happened so let me preface this story by explaining that i live in a regional town of australia there is no trafficking problem here it just doesn't exist there's no gang activity no unsolved murders and no missing people or unsolved crimes just to give you the lowdown of the sort of area that i live this happened today and i'm still unsure whether i should do anything about it or if the police would even bother i flip furniture as a hobby i like to pick up free or cheap worn out furniture repair it repaint it and then resell it it keeps my mind occupied facebook marketplace is usually my go-to to find stuff so this morning i found a post for a free table i message the person asking if i can pick it up today as i'm messaging them their facebook profile picture disappeared i thought that was weird but maybe they had just changed it they agreed to a time and gave me the address no worries it's on the edge of town they send me a random obscure message asking if i'm coming alone or if i'll have somebody with me i'm not married or anything and this is slapping me in the face with red flags but i think maybe the table is heavy and they just think that i might need some help to carry it i respond with no it's all good i'll be fine no response back i have this uneasy feeling that something isn't right with this i've never felt this way before and i don't know why i do now but i figure it's the middle of the day i've got my phone and i'm driving and this is a safe town maybe i'm just overthinking the whole thing so i hop in my car and head to the agreed place i couldn't find the exact address on my gps which i thought was odd but nevertheless i find the street there's nothing there and by that i mean there is a creek that runs by the side of it empty lots with bushland and tall overgrown grass a disused isolated somewhat motel and three warehouses by this stage i am feeling really off everything inside me is saying there is definitely something wrong with this situation i'm paying a little more attention to that feeling but keep going two of the warehouses have no signage but there's a couple of cars out front and i can tell that they're used as businesses of some sort their address isn't the one i was given though even though the motel looked like it hadn't been used in years i see a man sitting on the step of one of the units smoking i think to myself that's a bit creepy but maybe he owns the place and is doing some work there and is just taking a break or maybe he's a squatter so i drive down the street a little further and find the last warehouse the address is where pickup is meant to be so this must be it i start thinking maybe they got the number wrong i mean this place has tall weeds surrounding it garbage in the front and surely hasn't been used since it was built i might like free furniture but i'm not an idiot i decide i don't want it anymore and messaged the guy that i was sorry but i couldn't find the place i get a message back asking if i'm the one in the truck and telling me that they saw me drive down the road and they ask again if i'm alone there's no cars or any sign of life at this warehouse and by now my intuition is screaming at me to get out of there yes i'm in a truck but i don't see anyone i message or reply and say yes sorry i couldn't find the place i'm leaving i get no response for about an hour no sorry nothing a little bit later the only response i got was it's the old motel you have to get out of your car and walk to the back of it to get reception that same worn down isolated motel with overgrown weeds that hasn't been used for years the same one with the weird guy sitting on the step i assumed that guy was the person messaging me i message back and say it looked like that motel hadn't been used in years i get no response nothing so i head home and sit down for a drink and to google this place again i have forgotten the exact address he gave so i go back to messenger to find it except it's gone so i go back to facebook marketplace and the whole ad is gone it disappeared as if it never existed what do you think am i overthinking this or did i just avoid something sinister it was the summer right after i graduated from high school a good friend and i decided to try our hand at camping we grew up in the greater los angeles area so our knowledge of the great outdoors was nothing beyond the couple of years that we had in cub scouts of america when we were in elementary school in other words we had almost no idea what we were doing we packed a tent a couple sleeping bags supplies etc and headed off in his car we grew up in the 80s so this is a time before the wide prevalence of cell phones and the existence of other portable digital devices we drove north on the 395 for about six hours and then headed westward into the mountains in the area of inyo canyon first mistake we did not plan on which place to camp we played it by ear like fools second mistake we left in mid-afternoon so it was pitch black darkness when we arrived in the general area we had driven off the main road and onto a dirt road in order to find a spot to camp the dust from driving on the dirt road overwhelmed the headlight high beams when we finally decided to pull over and set up camp it was around 11 30 at this time and we were exhausted and famished any place was a good spot to camp for us given our only reason to do so at that point was our hunger and exhaustion third mistake we did not bring flashlights we only had bic lighters for our cigarettes we tried to set up the tent using our lighters and the headlights of the car which was parked about 10 to 15 feet away the wind was blowing so the lighter constantly went out after a few seconds either directly because of the wind or indirectly because the wind would push the flame into our thumb clearly we were being complete idiots we finished setting up the tent but at that point i was too tired to eat my friend managed to make some instant ramen we smoked a cigarette in the car then crashed out in the tent we awoke to a very cold morning it must have been around 5 30. immediately upon exiting the tent we realized that we were camped at the entrance of a hiking trail there were at least two no camping signs invisible distance from us we dismantled the tent cleaned up and cleared out that morning we ended up buying some cheap flashlights and a nice hot meal in a very small town it wasn't really a town but more like a few store fronts with shops on a main road about the length of an average city block we went into some office though i don't recall exactly what it was it might have been a park ranger station or the office headquarters for a campground in any case we found and reserved a site for the night the campground was basically like a large circle with campsites along its outer circumference with each campsite being about 50 yards from its neighbor in the middle of the circle was a common bathroom and shower we circled around it once and i think we saw one family that was all set up with a tent and camper we found our spot and set up camp which was quite far from them that night is when we had the creepy encounter my friend and i were laying in the tent shining our flashlights upwards and chatting our new flashlights eventually gave out yes broke our fire pit was about six feet from the opening of our tent and it was just a glowing ember we probably should have completely put it out and we probably shouldn't have had the tent so close in any case there we were chatting away and having a good time my friend began to be distracted with his foot after the third or fourth time he got up to check his foot i asked him what was wrong he told me that something was tapping his foot from the outside of the tent his foot was against the side of the tent so from the outside you would have been able to see a bulge in the tent's side where his foot was it was as if pebbles were being thrown at his foot through the tent there it is again what the heck each time it happened there was a sound like pebbles or a light tap we sort of laughed it off assuming that it was a twig or grass moving in the wind or perhaps a loose strap on the outside of the tent i don't recall exactly how it happened at first but i do remember we suddenly became silent at the same time a sound came to be audible to both of us footsteps slowly moving towards our tent we wondered if it was a bear or other non-human animal but it seemed distinctly bipedal they were very slow and measured like a step every two seconds i finally said in a whisper someone's out there my friend didn't move his face had an expression of fear at some point my friend bolted up and said if this he grabbed his pipe stuffed it full and took the biggest deepest drag i've ever seen a person take about one or two minutes later he was out smoking is not my thing so i was alone in the tent as far as conscious bodies are concerned i was sitting up at this point and i had taken out the only weapon i had a swiss army pocket knife i took out the big and small blades as well as the ice pick in the middle and held it like some ridiculous melee weapon i could see the glowing embers of the fire pit through the sheer nylon material of our tent and i was able to roughly but barely discern some of the rocks around it i watched and listened intently the footsteps came closer and at the same slow pace with each step i could hear the dirt and rocks underfoot crunching and grinding at some point it was clear to me that whoever it was was standing between the tent and the fire pit from my fuzzy line of sight to the burning embers through the nylon tent became obscured by something outside of the tent the footsteps stopped right at the front of our tent about six to eight inches from the entrance to the tent it was silent for about one minute and then i heard a click at exactly the same time i clearly saw through the nylon tent wall a flashlight turn on i was able to see not just the flashlight but the outline of the hand holding it the flashlight was shining on the zipper entrance into the tent just inches from the zipper blood drained out of my head and my palms instantly became dripping in sweat i yelled who's there there was some fear in my voice but it was mostly aggressive in tone whoever it was the person immediately turned off their flashlight i didn't move but neither did they the person just stood there inches from the tent's only entrance my friend is out totally unaware of what's going on nevertheless i pretended that he was still awake and whispered just loud enough to be audible to our visitor yeah loaded there's one in the chamber as if my friend was awake and asked me about a weapon fourth mistake we did not have any real weapon for self-defense it felt like an eternity but after sitting still for at least 10 minutes i heard feet slowly turning in the dirt then slowly walking away from the tent i stayed up the whole night and it wasn't until the light of dawn came through the tent that i crashed out the heat inside the tent woke us up and it was near noon by this point we went outside to inspect the site but found nothing missing however we did find boot prints all over our campsite and leading away from the campsite and outside the campground that was the last time i camped in the tent when i was 11 my family lived in alaska about 14 miles north of anchorage as soon as you leave the actual city of anchorage you're in the wilderness pretty quickly this event happened to me in the summer of 1977 i remember because the original star wars had just come out a few weeks before and i was obsessed with it at the time in 1977 the town i lived in was actually just a series of roads and off roads most of the people there commuted to anchorage for work that's what my parents did they both worked nights meaning i spent most of my time alone at home i don't have any siblings our house was about a half a mile in front of the nearest paved road and surrounded by woods i didn't have any real friends that lived close by i knew a kid who lived at the end of my road he was actually the next closest house and it was still about 300 yards from mine one afternoon that summer i was watching tv when there was a knock at our door i looked outside and saw that it was the kid from the end of the street with someone else i opened the door and he told me this kid was his cousin whose family had flown up from wherever they were to visit i can't remember the kid's name i do remember immediately being nervous around this guy he had blonde hair down to his shoulders wore a t-shirt under a thin leather vest this kid's eyes were dark very dark i knew he was very bad news the boy from down the street even seemed nervous around him they asked to come inside and i told him they weren't allowed and this kid then reaches behind his back and pulls out the biggest knife i have ever seen i remember thinking for a second that it looked like a sword if you've ever seen the movie crocodile dundee where he tells some robbers that's not a knife this is a knife and pulls out a huge knife well that's the knife this kid had i told him i was going back inside i went back in and watched some more tv about an hour later there was another knock on the door i go to the window to where i can see the door i peek out and sure enough it's that kid again although now he's alone the second time he knocked was louder he called my name the kid down the street must have told him my name i stayed quiet he left the door and started walking around our house my mother had a sunroom where she grew plants it had large windows all along the wall i saw him go to those windows press his face against the glass and cup his eyes trying to see deep into the house i stayed out of sight luckily there were no lights on and i had turned the tv off when i heard the knock when he couldn't see anything he continued around the house he took out that huge knife and began tapping the blade on the wall as he circled around then he started saying i know you're in there i almost crapped myself of course he knew i was in the house i was 11 home alone he knew i didn't leave hop in a car and take off i continued keeping low and quiet hoping he might think i went to a friend's house somewhere else how long could this psycho kid just circle the house he was maybe 14. he would get bored quickly right no this kept up for about an hour i had gone all in on the i'm not home tactic so i stayed quiet and made my way to the kitchen where our telephone was this was 1977 remember no cell phones and our phone was attached to a wall in the kitchen luckily it had a super long handset cord i got it stayed low to the floor and called my mother at work she took me seriously but there was no way she could get home my dad was in the air force and they sure wouldn't let him skip out early to handle his son's crisis i would have to ride it out the sun had gone down and by that i mean it was barely peeking above the horizon in the summer the sun never went completely down in our area the kid kept pacing around for another 30 minutes or so and then suddenly was gone not being an idiot in a horror movie i just stayed down and quiet eventually my parents got home i was still awake they brushed it off as to say see nothing to worry about i never hung out with a kid down the street again and i pretty much stayed inside the remainder of the summer there was something wrong with that kid maybe it was in my head or maybe he would have done something absolutely brutal to me thankfully i'll never know a few years back my husband brought home one of those video doorbells from a local gadget store we had had some problems with thieves in our neighborhood here in lake worth florida and we figured this would help us catch the culprits the whole thing with the video doorbell was that as soon as anyone steps onto the porch the built-in camera started to record so basically anyone who came close enough to our front door would be caught on camera and if our amazon packages continued to get stolen we would have a clear image of whoever had taken them long story short it worked we caught the thieves on the doorbell cam took the footage to the cops and within a week we had gotten news that they had been arrested it was a huge win for us those guys had stolen almost 300 worth of stuff from us over the course of about three months or so and it had caused a bunch of problems with amazon before we figured out the stuff was just being stolen point being the doorbell cam was a huge success and despite the hefty price tag it was well worth the investment but then last year on thursday morning of january 24th i woke up to a notification on my phone we were so pleased with our doorbell cam that we ended up getting a better model in late 2018 one which came with a very interesting feature the camera came with an app you could download for free from the google app store one which would show live images from the camera direct to your phone it also had a feature which if you weren't available to open up the app to check out the live feed it would make a little recording which you could then stream whenever you had the time to do so neat little feature right well i didn't think it was so neat that morning the app was telling me that a video had been recording at around 6 am one that was a good few minutes long the last time it had done that was when the neighbor's cat was chilling on our porch for a while in the middle of the night which was frankly amazing to wake up to and had me and my husband like ah for a while when we woke up only this video was not so cute i opened it up and pressed play and the first thing i see is this shadowy figure silhouetted on the porch the doorbell cam emitted a certain amount of infrared light so it could pick up directly what was in front of it even in the dark but the figure was just out of range of this so all i could see was this big old dark shape but then the shape got nearer to the camera closer and closer until a face was slowly illuminated by the infrared light those of you who know what a person's face looks like when it's lit up like you know how disturbing it can be how inhuman that kind of light makes a person look it makes light-colored eyes seem almost pale white like they're undead or something it just generally gives the person an ethereal ghostly look it looked like a ghost but it was most definitely just a man not that it made the idea of him hanging around our porch any less creepy this guy had a rough scraggly beard and was wearing what appeared to be a really dirty t-shirt in his left hand he had like a stack of mini newspapers or something or maybe it was a phone book i'm not completely sure whatever they were at one point he brought them up to his face and appeared to sniff them before moving in much closer to the camera like darting close and away close and away over and over again i had no idea what he was doing at first up until the point that he leaned in close to the camera and gave it a big lick like yes he actually licked it and it was absolutely disgusting you could see right inside this guy's mouth how much slobber was on his tongue and knowing that stuff ended up on my doorbell gross he knew he was being recorded too like as crazy as this guy was he knew enough to realize that it was a doorbell cam and must have had some idea of how they functioned too because after he's done licking the camera and assumedly the doorbell he starts showing off the phone book or the newspapers pointing to different words and stuff like he wanted us to read them then after a few more licks or kisses of the doorbell he begins to walk away with a string of drool just hanging from his chin i mean he was obviously on something or drunk but what exactly i have no idea i'll never truly know but what i did know was that it was intensely creepy to know that he had been so close to me while i was asleep like our house at the time was kind of small and the bedroom was pretty close to the main hallway and therefore the front door if he had really wanted to he could have just bust open our bedroom window and had been in our bedroom in a few seconds i was just thankful that he wasn't in a violent mood that night where things could have been very very different but perhaps even weirder and probably pretty sad too is that when i showed my husband the video he actually knew the guy according to my husband he used to live in the neighborhood and had lost his home somehow and ended up and ended up on the street apparently he still came around the old homestead from time to looking at what he used to own probably remembering a time when he was much happier and much safer my husband knew him by name too said the guy asked him for a few cigarettes a few times but he doesn't smoke so all he could do was offer him a few dollars and some well wishes the whole thing just pendulums between creepy and sad for me like yeah it's creepy that he was hanging around our house at night but the other thing that really creeps me out is how he used to just be a regular guy my husband said he was a family man knew that he at least used to have a wife and kids a model life at one time that just somehow went to crap maybe it was drugs maybe it was a divorce that just fried his mental health at some point either way at one time he was just like you and me and i suppose that same thing could happen to any of us given the right kinds of circumstances a slide into addiction to ease the pain of heartbreak that scares me more than any ghost or ghoul i mean we have no idea what's around the corner so i try my best to count my blessings these days and not to take anything for granted because you really don't ever know when you're going to lose things and never truly know when it's your last time hugging a loved one or seeing a friend you never know when that happiness is just going to slip away from you never to return i am a 30 year old male from boston massachusetts and this happened to me when i was 16 years old i was away in an all-boys boarding school in tennessee i was in a phase of hating everything about this school and resented my parents for leaving me there during my first week i wasn't interested in making friends just sulked and wished to become 18 years old so i can leave this place for good and start my own life and do whatever i want like a typical angry teenager a week later once my anger had simmered i figured well since i'm here i might as well make the most of it and just make some friends during recreation period i spotted a few guys from my dorm hanging around a lunch bin out next to the basketball court so i walked over to try my attempts of being social when i arrived at the bench a student we'll call him gavin was telling the other guys his eerie experience while doing chores in our dorm i arrived in the middle of the story so what i gathered from the story it was gavin's turn to clean the dorm hallway as it was his room's week for cleaning the entire dorm common area and hallway gavin was in the middle of cleaning when he started to feel like someone was watching him gavin looked around trying to find the source but the hull was empty everyone in the dorm was cleaning other parts of the building and he was all alone on that floor gavin tried to convince himself that he was just tired and coming from a big family in a single family home he was never truly alone during his upbringing so he just chalked this up to him experiencing true solitude for the first time so he resumed his duties gavin then said he started to feel goosebumps running throughout his entire body and a slight chill on the back of his neck as if someone was very close behind him breathing gavin didn't want to turn around to face whoever was there so he just took off running until he found other guys working in their respective areas and assisted them pretending everything was fine side note around that time period i was a skeptic in anything paranormal yes i enjoyed watching ghost adventures and all those cheesy ghost hunter shows but that was only for laughs and entertainment please do people really believe in this stuff anyway this student gavin he was talking about how he doesn't like to clean the dorm hallway alone because he always felt that someone was watching him i remember rolling my eyes listening to this story and was about to call bs on gavin's entire story when another student let's call him adam spoke up about his personal encounter in dorm 2 ultimately corroborating with gavin's story gavin's story stuck with me throughout the rest of the recreation period until it was time for us to go back to our respective dorms to have dinner do our homework and get ready for bed during the last few minutes before lights out i laid in my bed just thinking about gavin's story envisioning the entire experience the fact i was staying in the exact same dorm made me feel both excited and nervous lights out came and it was time for bed even though i had been there for a whole week thus far i never truly got used to sleeping in a four in bed and wished to be back home in boston in my own room playing video games and sleeping in my own bed i guess i was deeply fantasizing about me being back home because i ended up falling asleep while during my sleep i found myself groggily waking up for some reason the entire room was partially dark and the expectation of road lights outside my window which illuminated the room a fair bit i was laying on my stomach but i felt my spine slowly bending slightly upwards as if someone tied a rope to my legs and was slowly hoisting me up i collected myself fully coming out of my sleep state to notice my leg was actually being pulled up into the air then my leg just dropped back down to the bed as goosebumps echoed throughout my body i quickly sat up and scanned the room allowing my eyes to adjust to the dark at first i figured it was one of my three roommates who were playing a joke on me because i was the new guy but they were all asleep in their areas of the room i felt uneasy as that was the most bizarre thing to ever happen to me in my entire life i was about to get out of bed to wake up one of the guys to tell them about my experience then i saw them now our room door was one of those classroom type doors with a narrow vertical rectangular shaped window outside of this door window was the dorm hallway which was also dark but the red glow to the exit sign outside in the hallway illuminated two men they were silhouettes these two men appeared to be having some sort of discussion because they were moving slowly expressing with their hands the way some people do throughout a conversation however there was no tone that i could hear not even a whisper it was absolutely silent but they were having a flat out silent conversation my skeptical mind figured it was guys from another room and they were responsible for lifting my legs and now they were planning whatever else they can do to screw with me or my roommates well the joke's on them because i'm about to sneak over to the door and catch them in the act and put an end to this nonsense so i can go back to sleep i slowly got out of my bed and kept low to the floor as to not as to not let them see me i slowly made my way over to them still keeping an eye on them as they continued their silent conversation i looked over at my two roommates who were sleeping in their own beds solidifying my suspicion of other guys in the dorm pranking us i grabbed a hold of the door to our room quickly stood up and flung open the door only when i opened it the hallway was empty no one was around it was impossible for these two guys to have run down the hall back to their rooms because i would have seen and heard them running besides they couldn't possibly make it back to their rooms in time of me opening the door this didn't make any sense just then i felt a chill on the back of my neck as if someone was standing right behind me i froze someone was standing there behind me breathing on my neck dread took over my body which made me angry because i hate feeling helpless i quickly turned around to face whoever was standing behind me only again to find nothing except three sleeping roommates i closed the door of the room and walked back to my bed and laid back down keeping an eye on the door the two men were gone no silhouettes nothing i honestly can't say what i experienced that night because even as i tell this story i'm still trying to rationalize what i saw was i half asleep the entire time did my constant thinking about gavin's story really take my brain for a ride to the point i started hallucinating the brain is very powerful and it can make you feel see hear and smell anything if you really focus on it long and hard enough i could go with that explanation but i actually got out of bed walked over to the door all while keeping my eyes on those silhouetted men the entire time as they had their silent conversation i was in fact fully awake i just don't know ever since then i've kept my mind open to the unknown and i have experienced other weird stuff later in life but those are stories for another time so to the silhouetted men why did you lift my legs so high in the air what were you doing and what were you conversing about at 3am outside of my dorm i guess i'll never know before i begin this insanely terrifying tale do me a favor think of the one person that you have a genuine connection with not a romantic connection just a friendly connection think of the one person that you trust and that helps you with anything and everything it doesn't matter how you met or or how long you've known each other do you have that person good hopefully this story does not affect your friendship with that person in the end of 2018 i was a sophomore in college and i was majoring in physics i was taking one of my final calculus courses and on the first day of class i sat down next to this guy who would become one of my closest most trusted friends for the sake of this story let's call him tony i'm a female and when we first met i'm not going to lie there was a bit of an attraction but it was nothing more than the completely natural thought of that person is good looking nothing ever happened and it was as if we were only meant to be friends we would study together for exams and when i needed help with the physics chapter he would go out of his way to meet up with me and help me out we told each other everything about ourselves not in an attempt to flirt or anything but just talking as if we were long-lost friends at the time of our meeting i was managing a very well-known retail store and during the christmas season of 2018 i was looking for seasonal workers i gave tony a job and we maintained a manager employee relationship at work and then we were regular friends outside of work he was one of the best salespeople that i had on staff and he caught on rather quickly and got along with everyone he was hilarious after the christmas season was over in january of 2019 he left the store and we went on with our normal friendship sadly we somehow just stopped talking towards the end of 2019 we didn't get into an argument or anything and we still liked each other's posts on facebook and instagram then this year 2020 the news broke my new best friend was planning something terrible for our school he was arrested on federal charges for threats against the school he had planned and he was ready he said that he had planned for plenty of time and he would get enough people to make him a legend he had a list of people that he wanted to take care of at the school who was on that list me don't trust anyone ever i've got a story for you about my stepdad and this one is pretty creepy so when i was little my stepdad used to work the night shift at a gas station on the outskirts of reno nevada in a nice part of town off the highway before you head up to the sierra nevadas and lake tahoe it's also the route you could have taken to reach donner pass which is the party along with the reeds who were settlers that got snowed in on their travels to california and wound up eating their dead companions to try and stay alive the area back then was fairly new and the shell gas station was really nice there were quite a few there were quite a few other stores in that area along with a bagel shop and a grocery store and everything was made out of this really dark wood paneling my step dad never had any problems working the night shift though he did tell me some interesting characters would come in and he often had regulars that he became friends with my stepdad was the only one in the shop when he worked the night shift and he was always told about the ghost that liked to pester the other workers like turn off lights open or close the bathroom door knock snacks off the shelf the works my stepdad being the massive skeptic as he is didn't believe any of these stories and because nothing ever happened to him he just brushed them off until one night my stepdad is working on the night shifts and it's a pretty quiet night he hasn't had many customers coming through other than for gas and since it's a pay at the pump station hardly anyone comes into the store so my stepdad is playing on his phone and frequently glances up at the doors or at the security monitor to see if anyone is coming but the station is deserted he turns his attention back to his game when he hears the electronic sliding doors open and the sound of the bell above the door goes off my stepdad puts his phone down and looks up to greet the customer but he doesn't see anyone he calls out but no one answers he glances at the security camera but doesn't see anyone else in the shop except him and there are no cars at the station or in the parking lot he gets a little weirded out since the doors have centers and the only time they open is if they sense someone approaching them but he just chalks it up to a prank or some sort of malfunction and gets back to his game hello he hears the voice as clear as day right in front of him and his head immediately snaps up to speak to the customer he clearly did not see before there's no one there he's even more weirded out but convinces himself he was either imagining things or that the sound somehow came from his phone or the radio then he hears the screams he said the sound of the woman screaming came out of nowhere and they were so loud and so chilling he jumped and dropped his phone my stepdad is a pretty big guy about 6'2 and a little hefty and he doesn't normally get scared over much but he said the screaming terrified him so much he couldn't really think straight he ran out from behind the counter and checked the aisles but no one was there he checked the bathrooms and maintenance closet and no one was in there but the screams were still going and they were still deafeningly loud so he thinks maybe there's a woman outside who might be hurt or being attacked he runs outside to where he thinks the screaming woman is nobody there the lot is empty there are no people no cars nothing he checks around the back of the store and does a loop but he can't find the source of the screaming and just as suddenly as the screaming had started it stopped he goes back inside and checks the security tapes to see if he's missing anything but other than him running inside and outside of the store like an idiot he doesn't see anything else and he's unsure of what to think the next day he's leaving work and his co-worker takes over he tells them about what happened brushing it off as just some weird prank by some little punk but the co-worker's response was very different and even though my step-dad doesn't believe in any sort of paranormal activity the words still stick with him all these years later oh so you heard her too this may sound strange to some people but i collect movies on vhs my collection is currently at over 1 000 and growing daily i spend my weekends searching through thrift shops and online sellers for interesting and hard to find cassettes sometimes i'll purchase lots or boxes of tapes these often include home recordings of forgotten television shows and family memories deemed no longer important a time was i loved nothing more than to cuddle up and watch them with my girlfriend although most turned out to be boring i occasionally stumble upon something very special a couple of years ago i was browsing through craigslist and i came across a box of cassettes it was taking up space and they wanted it gone free to the first person to show up so i pounced on the deal an hour later i was parked in front of my tv with a big box of tapes the hall totaled 44. many were blank or home recordings lacking labels oh well i always love a mystery i had a few hours before work and watched a tape or two on fast forward the first had an episode of the original battle star galactica and the other was blank once i was done i pushed the box into the closet and left for work it would stay there for another nine months untouched and forgotten in the meantime i bought countless more tapes and my collection began to take over my spare bedroom i built a massive shelf to store it all and inventoried each tape as i shelved them this is how i remembered the box in my closet when i realized i hadn't finished watching each tape i set aside an evening with my girlfriend to do so i remember that night like it was yesterday my girlfriend brittany arrived just after 7 pm we made dinner together and had butterfinger ice cream for dessert at about nine we curled up together and started the first tape the next few hours we saw a recording of nbc primetime from 1987 three movies from hbo and a wedding from 1991 brittany especially loved that one the fourth tape was also a wedding i watched as much as i could before opting on a pee break and having a smoke when i stepped away she was fully engrossed in the ceremony after i hit the head i slipped out on the porch for a cigarette that only took five minutes max before i returned to the bedroom i grabbed a refill of water i was in the process of doing this when i heard britney scream my name i ran into the room as fast as i could she had her hands over her mouth and her eyes were the size of saucers her gaze seemed to be fixed on the tv screen what what i said i leaned over the tv but saw nothing but a blue screen i asked her again she remained speechless but pressed rewind on the vcr a few seconds later she pressed play and patted on the spot next to her i assumed this meant it sit down so i did the tape began as the happy couple prepared to cut the cake i got annoyed and asked what is going on with you wait a second it's coming the words were so sudden i jumped so i kept watching waiting for some mystery thing to occur the couple were feeding one another cake and the recording cut out static blared at us for a moment before a new recording began now a man was staring at us he looked to be staring at a video camera when he moved away from the camera you could see a nude woman laying on a bed the guy hopped on the bed and they began doing things all right baby i said in a joking way britney snapped and told me to shut up by this point i was completely dumbfounded i almost felt embarrassed watching it the couple continued coupling and the woman whispered choke me he did and i'm thinking okay this is kind of kinky to myself not my thing but to each their own the man continues to choke the woman she began gasping for air but he didn't stop even when she grabbed his arms he kept going he completed the act and let go of her throat the couple laid quietly together for a few moments and said nothing suddenly the man turns towards the woman he stares for a few seconds then abruptly starts shaking her the dude is yelling her name and occasionally slapping her cheeks which she's not moving this is when i started to catch on the man then stands up now holding his partner by the shoulders and shaking her still no movement this is when he started to catch on he eventually stops and just stares into her empty eyes i'm beginning to freak out now no way britney is silent the man sat down on the edge of the bed his head buried in his hands a low sobbing could be heard this goes on for a few moments before he remembers the camera in one long motion he reaches out and slams his hand down on it the blaring of the static returned and i sat struck dumb the hissing continued until britney finally pressed stop dude it was the only word i could get out i had never seen anything like that in my life britney turned towards me and asked what we should do i honestly had no idea i still couldn't believe it was real maybe it wasn't let me have a smoke and i'll consider our options i retreated outside to think when i returned i proposed the idea that it may have been fake i don't want to go to the cops until i'm sure it's real no way do i want to become the butt of some trolls joke okay if she had any misgivings she kept them to herself she may have still been in shock i know i was our evening was clearly over i suggested she stay the night but she declined no big deal i'd have a hard time getting any sleep until i knew the truth my first goal was to contact the tape's previous owner i knew for sure the man in the tape wasn't the guy i had gotten the box from there was a good chance he may know his identity though my emails went unanswered i tried to contact him by phone but his number no longer worked i finally went by his place and discovered he had moved without a way to contact him my options had run out off to the police it would be the cops said that they would watch the video and contact me if they had any additional questions it was out of my hands now in the weeks during my search i had seen very little of brittany she always had some excuse i figured it was only a matter of time before she ended things completely another week would pass before she called i can't do this anymore i haven't slept for weeks all i see is that woman there was no sense in arguing i wished her a good life and hung up the phone it would have been heartless to expect her to let it go i definitely had my share of bad dreams over the past month if her feelings change in the future i am not hard to find hundreds of cassettes have passed through my hands since then with room now becoming scarce i have taken i have taken to selling blank tapes and extra copies of films with britney no longer in the picture i admit curling up in bed and watching tapes has lost a bit of its luster most of my viewing takes place in the living room now to this day every time i put an unlabeled tape in the player i get a little tinge of fear i have had a lot of time to think it over when you collect something that captures a moment in time a sliver of someone's life you never know what terrible secret you may uncover in 2007 my single mom began dating a man who lived in a campground and she my older brother and i soon moved in with him while most campgrounds are seasonal and not intended for residential use this particular campground had a large area up front dedicated to campers and a row of trailers in the background that people lived in full time most of the trailers were occupied by elderly folks who wanted a cheap place to live that was close to nature and there was only one other family there with kids my age it was lonely during the off seasons when no families came to camp but during the summer numerous families would stay there giving me giving me the opportunity to make new friends and in some cases reunite with the families that would visit on a yearly basis summers in the campground were lots of fun for a kid my age there was a large pool in the center of the campground a pavilion that would host parties practically every night and plenty of new people coming in and out as the summer progressed however this influx of strangers made my mom weary and she always stressed to me that not all grown-ups were nice especially given how many were intoxicated during their vacation thankfully i never really encountered anyone truly malicious in the seven years i lived there a few oddballs and more drunks than i could count of course but most people were either nice or simply kept to themselves however one summer a rumor had begun to spread amongst the kids in the campground i was told that there was an elderly couple visiting that summer that had been caught a number of times staring into people's windows following them at night and even supposedly intentionally walking in on people as they used the public showers i didn't take this warning very seriously since scary stories told between kids were the norm in a place like that and i personally hadn't encountered any creepy old people i suppose word of this got to my mom because she reminded me to always close my blinds at night just in case since she began to take it seriously so did i until the nights became unbearably hot and i began keeping my window and blinds open at night in order to let cooler air into my room i had gone days without any strange encounters so i figured the rumors were simply rumors and continued to leave my windows open at night one night i was in bed playing my ds and watching old disney channel sitcoms at around one in the morning or so when i started to hear rustling outside this wasn't particularly unusual since we had outside cats who liked to play in the leaves and it wasn't uncommon for deer raccoons coyotes and other wild animals to pass through our yard entering and exiting the woods behind the line of trailers when you live in the country the nights can be just as lively as the days due to wildlife however the rustling seemed to be much louder than i was accustomed to whatever was making the noise wasn't nearly as light a foot as a typical animal my bed was directly in front of my window so i would have to turn my body completely around to look outside and i was simply too tired to do so even if it meant catching a glimpse of an elusive coyote after a while the noises stopped so they completely faded from my mind as i continued to play my game about 15 minutes later or so i heard an incredibly strange noise however it sounded like a fingernail scratching against the mesh screen of my window i immediately started to feel anxious the cats couldn't reach my window and no wild animal would care to come that close to a bright window instinctively i turned around to see what made the noise right outside my window was an elderly man wide eyes and a big toothless grin face practically pressed against my window his expression wasn't at all what i would have expected he looked so genuinely happy to see me as if he had been waiting all that time for me to turn around and notice him instead of screaming for my mom or my brother i froze up just staring at this face in my window for what felt like minutes but was probably more like seconds before i grabbed the blinds rod and rapidly twisted it closing my blinds and throwing my blankets over my head i remember trying to take shallow breaths as though i were afraid he would hear me despite already having seen me i tried to convince myself it was just a hallucination or maybe even my own reflection distorted but i knew that what i saw was real he was inches away from me separated only by a thin mesh screen at some point i must have fallen asleep because as soon as i woke up i rushed to tell my mom what happened she immediately called the campground's owners who were pretty close friends of ours and they informed us that the old man along with his wife had already been kicked out apparently after i closed my blinds and shut him out the old man went to another trailer with an open window one belonging to one of my neighbors who was also still awake she called the campground owners who immediately called the cops and they evicted him along with his wife who was apparently making her rounds peering into the windows of the campers up front they had been doing this for over a week and finally had been caught to this day i'm not really sure what their motives were regardless this event shook me quite a bit and it was a long time before i was comfortable even having my blinds open whatsoever i was more than willing to suffocate in the summer heat if it meant not risking being spied on again i lived in that campground for seven years and my childhood was certainly interesting due to it but the voyeuristic couple who came to visit in the summer of 2008 definitely changed my perspective my dad's side of the family is really weird my grandmother had eight kids in 10 years with my grandfather and then my grandfather went off and had an additional four kids with random women my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic and pretty much all the children had some kind of mental health problem growing up leading to more mental problems throughout their adulthood my dad included when my grandmother died i was about 18 years old one of my aunts who was very successful rented out a huge mansion in florida for the whole family to stay in that meant all eight children and my grandmother their spouses and kids and one of the stepchildren came along with their family as well all together in this mansion stayed between 25 to 30 people i was lucky enough to get a room all to myself how the floor plan worked on our floor was there were five rooms all in a row and if you walked out the sliding glass door in your room it would lead you out to a balcony that was connected to all of our rooms i had the room on the very end to myself the next room was my two single uncles room after that was my aunt and her kids the next room after that was another aunt and her kids etc i love my family but my uncles are very strange one of them has schizophrenia the other one is completely narcissistic he literally thinks he is charlie sheen he tries to dress like him tries to act like him even got facial surgery to look more like him it's just bizarre but but i never had any reason to be scared of my uncles regardless of their mental health issues so i never thought anything of them being in the room next to me so the first day we were at the mansion was amazing we had a pool in the backyard and a whole beach i was very tired around 11 pm that night i left the blinds open at the sliding glass door because i wanted to see the view of the ocean as i was falling asleep as i was falling asleep i was woken up by a flash i slowly opened my eyes and picked up my head and saw a figure dashing across the balcony i was so freaked out i couldn't move i didn't want to go tell anyone so i just laid there all night never falling back asleep the next day my family went about their normal routine but i couldn't stop thinking about the dark figure on the balcony the night before i was hoping that it wasn't someone trying to break into the mansion that night we are all sitting around for dinner and i noticed that my narcissist uncle is on the phone the whole time he's also waving his phone around right in front of my face trying to get signal so i'm talking to my aunt and my uncle we are talking about our dogs and we start showing pictures of our dogs to each other on our phones my uncle gives my aunt his phone and must have showed her the wrong picture because she goes oh no that's emily she looks up at me really confused my uncle starts acting extremely uncomfortable and snatches the phone out of her hand he just gets up and leaves she told me later that night that there were pictures on his phone of me sleeping it all made sense because of the flash and then the figure running on the balcony i was pretty scared for the rest of the trip and slept with my doors locked and curtains closed this is the most bizarre thing that has ever happened to me when i was 11 years old this kid from my school went missing his name was casper yes like the friendly ghost i remember he was a nice kid and seemed pretty normal as far as having friends and whatnot i had a few conversations with him at school at recess but i wouldn't say we were necessarily friends so i heard he was missing one day at school the news was buzzing around the playground and all the classrooms so so many different rumors his parents killed him he was kidnapped he ran away you name it it was pretty alarming and all the teachers were scrambling around making sure all the gates were locked appropriately around the school okay so here it is that night on the same day everyone found out he was missing i was laying in bed trying to fall asleep i heard a noise at my window i look over quickly and casper is standing outside my window with blood smeared across his forehead to say i was scared would be the biggest understatement you could imagine frozen eyes wide for some reason i felt as though he wanted to do me harm not that he was a victim in some way that needed help he just looked at me and mouthed the words open the window i didn't of course and instead just lay there in shock eventually he just abruptly ran away my window faced the backyard meaning he must have jumped our fence as my dad kept the backyard gate locked i got up after a few minutes trying to process this and looked outside he was nowhere to be found i bolted to my parents room and told them what i saw they believed me easily because of how i was i was literally shaking they called the cops and they came out pretty quickly it was a huge deal and i don't think i slept that night i found out later that casper lived just a few blocks away from me and i never knew it i have no idea how he knew where i lived or why he came to my house that night this was 22 years ago and as far as i know he was never seen again i recently looked his parents up on facebook his mom passed away but i saw that his dad still lived in my hometown he has old pictures of casper on his facebook page and it gives me chills to look at them i do feel guilty for not opening my window that night but honestly more than that i still feel in my heart of hearts that that would have been a big mistake so you

Channel: Being Scared

Views: 466,725

Rating: 4.8856034 out of 5

Keywords: scary stories, true scary stories, scary true stories, being scared, scary stories told in rain, scary stories told in the rain, scary stories in rain, scary stories rain, scary stories for a rainy night, rainy night, rain stories, rain, rain video, rain sounds, rain asmr, long rain, best rain video, rainy day, relaxing, relaxing video, relaxing sounds, sleep sounds, sounds for sleep, video for sleep, sleep aid, sleep aid sounds, white noise, insomnia aid, relaxation, asmr

Id: 3e7X1km3bJ0

Length: 255min 20sec (15320 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020