US Marines witness PARANORMAL event in Afghanistan | Observation Post Rock

the paranormal does not really have a place in the military despite what anybody tells you it's just not something that gets discussed now i was a bit of an anomaly i was in the navy for seven years uh five of those years were spent on a seal team and maybe because we were in such small teams people had to put up with my weirdness and my interest in you know the strange happenings around the world but you know really that was an anomaly and i think it comes from the culture inside the military where you have a group of people that has such a intense job that's so rooted on practical approaches to problem solving there is no time to be theorizing about how demons and ghosts and things that are out of this world are having an impact because we need to focus on what's happening right now in front of us there's no space for anything else and so when you do hear stories coming out of the military that are paranormal in nature it isn't that you should inherently believe them but rather you should understand that if they have come to the conclusion that this is paranormal they have ruled out virtually everything else and so today i'm going to share a military paranormal story that happened in afghanistan in 2009 when eight u.s marines were stationed at this very isolated observation post in the middle of helmand province and some very strange things happened out there that the marines that were there believe are still plaguing them to this day but before we get into today's story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format you've come to the right channel because that's all i do and i upload three four even five times every week so if that's of interest to you i would encourage you to play ding dong ditch on the like button's house and then also subscribe to this channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly uploads all right let's get into today's story in june of 2009 us and nato forces surged into afghanistan troop numbers escalated dramatically in preparation for this massive offensive against the taliban during this surge a very small team of marines eight marines were given a mission to go to an observation post in hellmann province where a group of british soldiers were stationed at the time an observation post or op as it's called in the military is any location where you're able to observe hence the name most ops if not all ops are located on high ground because that provides you the best view ops are very strategically valuable you have the higher ground and you can see what's going on around you and so as a result ops become prime targets for attack now the op that these marines were going to op rock was a little bit unique it was strategically very important but it didn't really have the higher ground all around it were other large pieces of terrain which meant if you poke your head up for too long you might get shot from a sniper on the mountain and so op rock was like a very dangerous and isolated place to be not to mention laughably small and had almost no amenities there was basically a couple of hesco barriers those big brown squares that get filled with sand and dirt to stop bullets and then you know not even cots they slept literally on the ground on sleeping pads and a couple of gilly tents overhead that was about it and so these marines were going to be there for 60 days where they were not going to be able to go anywhere they were just isolated and stuck on this tiny little wasteland in the middle of afghanistan the eight marines were led by sergeant green and his second in command was corporal lina the other six junior marines were zolick hoyt wilson parker smith and gibbs after driving their up armored vehicles all the way through the snaking pass that get to op rock and the british soldiers are there anxiously waiting for them normally any time you turn over with any other unit you do something called turnover operations where because you're new to the area you want to go out and do like a presence patrol or something to get a feel for the area with the people who have been there to kind of give you a lay of the land and say hey look out for this area we think there's ieds over there remember if you're over here you're in plain sight of the enemy they can shoot you but when they got there the british were so anxious to leave they did not do turnover ops the british just looked totally weathered and beaten down and ragged like they had been fighting at op rock for decades but they'd only been there for 60 days the same amount of time that these marines are about to be there and before they leave one of the british soldiers turns and says hey just so you know if you dig anything up here just put it back and the marines look at him like what are you talking about and he doesn't elaborate he just says again if you dig anything up just put it back trust me so that night the men have settled into their new home for the next 60 days and the way it works on any base in the world but certainly in a war zone is there's always someone manning a guard post and so the first night it happened to be corporal lena's turn to be on watch corporalino's the second in command of these eight marines and he was up in the guard tower and you got to put yourself in his mind okay even if you've never been to afghanistan just imagine being out in the middle of nowhere like in the middle of a mountainous desert with no village no people know anything but at the same time you are hanging it out there you are totally exposed there are people in the mountains around you that want to kill you for sure and it's you and seven other sleeping people right in your little tiny op all you got is a radio where you can call back to your main base that's far enough away that if something bad happened you better hope that one you can get through to them and two they can get over here as quickly as they can and the great fear when you're in these remote locations is that you're going to get ambushed there's so many stories about these complex attacks being launched on these small little outposts where all of a sudden groups like these eight marines just get totally overrun by the taliban so it's a terrifying thing when i was in afghanistan i didn't stand all that much guard duty but when i did you're up you're up in the shack and you're kind of looking out into this like vast expanse of kind of nothingness and you're wondering like are people watching me right now you know is someone taking aim at me right now i mean you're protected and you're doing all the things you're supposed to do but nighttime in afghanistan standing guard duty it's very eerie and so this first night lena is up there it's very quiet and his radio that's right next to him like imagine like a big walkie-talkie right military-grade radio it starts crackling military radios at least american military radios are from the 1950s and they've basically not changed they're very durable and they work but it's not uncommon for them to falter and that's how we have people that specialize in just radios that can fix these things for us because if you lose your line of communication you're screwed and so he's sitting there and he starts hearing crackling on the radio and so he just he notices it but he doesn't think much of it and the crackling stops and he's looking out into the mountainside and he's kind of looking around just doing his typical guard duty then the crackling picks up again and he thinks he can hear someone speaking in the radio it didn't sound like english it didn't sound like even words necessarily but it was a little bit louder now he's really paying attention to it because he was worried his radio might be going bad he first took the battery off looked at it blew it off reconnected the battery rebooted it and put it back down and he's a little more keyed into his radio and then a couple minutes later he hears this crackling and now he can clearly hear someone's voice and it sounds like russian he thinks someone is speaking in russian this is an encrypted radio you're not picking up random signals all over the place you you only are picking up people that have your crypto and it doesn't make any sense to pick up somebody else's voice this has to be someone on your team and so he thinks okay i'll just i'll check in with the main base because my guys are all asleep right here they're all sleeping right there seven of them there's no beds they're laying on the ground right there i can count them no one's on the radio so he picks up the radio and he calls into the main base and he says hey is anybody pushing traffic out this way to op rock and like right away they get a response from from the main base that says no we're not pushing or receiving traffic lane is not terrified about this but he's like okay there's something going on with the radio the crackling and gurgling and weird sounds would persist throughout the night to the point where the next morning when the next guard came on duty he said hey i think there's something strange going on with the radio you should probably go switch it out and get somebody else's radio while you're up here lena's relieved of guard duty and he goes down to check on the other marines and at this point everybody's awake and you know it's the start of their first full day at op rock and because they have nothing else to do besides defend it they start taking stock of how well fortified is it what are some ways that we can improve this place and they notice that there's a trench dug around the inside of of op rock basically right up against the hescos that allows anyone to stand and not be jutting out of the op and run the risk of getting shot by a sniper and they're looking at it and they're thinking to themselves it's not deep enough it's maybe a couple feet down you're certainly not going to be able to stand on this trench you'll totally be exposed and they thought why didn't the british who were here for 60 days why didn't they dig a deeper trench and so lena and the rest of the marines decide they're going to spend that day digging the trench a little bit deeper and a little bit wider as they're digging lena hits something metal in the trench and he pulls it out and it's like this metal stake like an engineering stake and he brushes off the dirt on the stake and he's looking at it and he can see some foreign writing and it looks like russian writing and he's thinking to himself oh that's not that weird back in the 80s the russians were here it's totally possible that they may have left some of their gear here and it got buried about 10 meters away from lena is one of the younger marines named wilson who's digging and at some point he hits the ground and like a pocket in the soil opens up and he sees there's some pottery and some pieces of what look like ceramics that are inside of this this hole and after pulling out some of the plates and pots they pull out a huge human bone a femur your leg bone they ultimately decide to tuck the leg bone back into where it was and they stop digging in that area and they continue to dig in the other sections of the trench but they couldn't dig more than a couple inches before running into more human remains and by the end of the day they had unearthed dozens of skeletons inside of this trench and so they realized that this is probably what the british meant when they said if you dig something up put it back a couple of weeks go by and the marines at this point have accepted that they live in a very creepy place and on day 13 of being at op rock hoyt who had just turned 20 years old is up on guard duty as he's sitting there he starts getting this really uncomfortable feeling that someone is right behind him and so at one point he turns around to look at what's behind him basically looking back into the camp itself and now coming from outside the wire where he had just been looking he hears this horrible blood curdling scream he turns around and he's looking out he's got his night vision goggles on he's looking around for anything and all of a sudden a couple hundred meters away he sees a man running between one bush to another bush now they know that at any time they could get attacked so they're not thinking that this could be anything other than the taliban coming to attack them and so the other marines have jumped up because they heard the scream and they're looking to hoyt to be like what's going on hoyt is saying to them i got a guy he's about 200 meters away i just saw him running right to left lena runs over to the edge of the hesco and he raises his rifle with a thermal imager on it and he's looking out and there's no heat signature out there it's totally cold there's no animals there's no people certainly there's nothing and lena is yelling to hoyt where is he where do i need to look and hoyt's saying he's right there i just saw him go behind that bush but lena is looking out and he can't see anything on thermal and he's like i don't see anything there's no one out there the marines also had a dog that they inherited from the british soldiers that had been there her name was ugly betty they loved ugly betty they took care of her and she was apparently really good at identifying when people were coming towards the op so she was a great watchdog and this whole time she had been looking in the same direction that hoyt had seen this figure and she is barking like a maniac and even after they're looking with thermal and they can't see anyone out there they can't get betty to calm down she's completely transfixed on the area where hoyt had seen this figure so for the rest of the night the marines are totally on guard anticipating at any moment that they're gonna get attacked someone's gonna take a shot they're gonna throw a grenade in because we lost this guy who was right there in front of us so eventually the next day when they didn't get attacked they just kind of said okay and they moved on and just figured it was an anomaly another couple of weeks later on day 26 zolick who's another one of the younger marines was on guard duty and was really hot he remembers even taking his helmet off because he was sweating so bad and then at some point while he's just looking out into the vast open nothingness he said the temperature dropped inside of the shack dramatically so much so that he actually felt cold there was no breeze there was no reason for it to be getting cold and as he's thinking to himself like is there a storm coming in or a cold front coming in he starts feeling like someone's standing behind him and he keeps looking over his shoulder and no one's there he's in this tiny little shack and he just he's feeling creeped out and all of a sudden he starts hearing whispering from behind him not on the radio but like in the shack with him and he keeps turning around and he keeps thinking like am i hearing things i'm losing my mind he starts hearing footsteps on the roof of his shack and that's what he thinks oh smith who was the kind of class clown of the group is playing a joke on me he must be whispering outside i bet he climbed up on top and he's screwing with me so he jumps out of the shack and looks up expecting to see smith standing on the roof of the guard shack but no one's on the guard shack at this point zola looks pretty spooked he does a quick search on either side of the guard shack thinking maybe smith is there but no one's there and then he turns around and of course sees that the other seven marines are all asleep so it wasn't smith it wasn't any of his teammates at this point he goes back in the shack and he raises his rifle and he's looking through his thermal scope so any human would light up like a christmas tree if you if you saw them on a thermal and he's scanning outside all around thinking did i hear someone who's out there because they had that weird run-in two weeks earlier with that random person that they could never find he's thinking maybe there's somebody else out here and as he's scanning he sees a man standing a couple hundred meters away with his fists raised like this zolick was so caught off guard from the way he was standing that he actually lowered his rifle to look because the moon was pretty bright the illumination was pretty good and he looked he couldn't really see him again so he brought his rifle back up and now through his thermal the figure was gone zoligan interviews has admitted that he was really stressed out about being at op rock he was really down i think of all the marines there he was depressed he did not want to be there he felt like he was experiencing real combat fatigue and he thought at this moment that he's losing his mind between the whispering and the footsteps on the roof and seeing this person with his fist raised and so instead of telling people that he had potentially just seen this person out along the perimeter of their op he started to convince himself that you're just losing your mind you're stressed and you're hallucinating you just gotta calm down for the rest of the night he would not see the figure on his thermal or anybody out there but he would hear whispering behind him he kept hearing footsteps on the roof but he would go out and no one would be there so by the time the sun came up he really thought that he was kind of losing his mind and so he went to his leadership sergeant green and corporal lina and he told them about what had happened the night before about you know seeing the figure that had disappeared and hearing these whispers and the footsteps i mean he really thought that he was losing it and he requested to be transferred and they granted it to him and the other seven marines were really upset about that they felt like he was kind of abandoning them and they were really critical of the reason for him leaving they're like oh you're just playing the crazy card you're just making that up so you can leave this crappy place that we don't want to be here either so they were not taking seriously what he claimed happened they just believed he was using the crazy card to get out of being an op rock just a couple of days after zolik's departure lena is on guard duty in that guard shack and as he's looking out ugly betty starts barking really aggressively towards the area that lena is looking at and so he raises his night vision goggles and he's scanning the mountainside looking for any sign of people that perhaps ugly betty has sensed and he stops when he sees what he believes is a taliban scout standing on the mountainside who's pretty far away a few hundred meters away and he switches to his thermal scope to confirm that it's a person before he engages and when he raises his thermal scope there's nobody there there's no heat signature anywhere but ugly betty is still barking like a maniac in the direction of where this potential scout was standing and so lena goes back to his night vision goggles like a second later and he's looking and he sees the same scout now about a hundred meters closer to him way closer to him like impossible to cover that distance in that amount of time he practically falls over when he sees it he switches to his thermal and he's getting ready to engage but there's nothing there and this is all happening in a matter of seconds he goes back to his nbg's and he's looking and there's nothing there and as he's about to go to his thermal for one last look he feels a tap on his shoulder which he believes is going to be one of the other marines that must have heard him frantically moving around in the guard shack and when he turns there's no one there there's no one anywhere near the shack all seven are asleep in the middle of the camp at this point lena felt bad because he was critical of zolick who had left because he had heard voices and seen apparitions on the distance and here's lena the second in command of the group having the exact same experience but over the next 10 days hoyt smith and wilson would all have very similar experiences in that guard shack and after a while they all began sharing their stories and they all realized that zolick probably wasn't lying and we were we were unfair to be critical of him because we've all experienced this now then on day 59 the day before they're scheduled to leave all of their radios go dead all of them and lena goes over to gibbs who is their comms guy and he's like what's going on and gibbs was like i've been working on the radios this whole time we're here i've changed nothing they've always worked now they did have a satellite phone but it was an unreliable way to get in touch with reinforcements if you really needed it they're pretty much isolated at this point and they're all just sitting there just hoping they can get through one more night without any problems wilson is the one actually in the guard shack and then all of a sudden machine gun fire opens up right outside of their base and wilson is totally caught off guard he has no idea where it's coming from he's trying to call it out to the guys where they're getting shot from and although the marines are scrambling to the walls they're taking cover behind the hescos and as they're laying there lena runs up into the guard shack with wilson he's like he grabs him and he's like where are they shooting us from and wilson's like i have no idea and it's like it's so loud there's all this gunfire coming in at them and as lena and wilson are trying to figure out where this is coming from they hear the distinctive sound of an rpg being fired at them that's a rocket-propelled grenade it's like a whistling sound and they know it's going to hit them at any moment the two of them brace for impact and they hear the sound of this rpg smashing inside of the op and the machine gun fire is just continuing it's a non-stop and so a couple of the other younger marines basically low crawled their way into the trench where they were protected from these rounds and they're thinking like we got to make sure no one's in the trenches and so they start clearing the trenches but no one's in the trench and it's just this constant barrage of gunfire they have no idea where it's coming from and then just as suddenly as it started the gunfire stops and it's silent as soon as the shooting stopped the marines did not just poke their head up and say everything's fine now if you're being shot at you assume that even if there's a break in the gunfire they're going to start shooting at you again and so for hours they're just like waiting for the next round of fire to start but they don't even know where it's coming from and they're kind of isolated and exposed so they're all just kind of hunkered down against the hescos waiting to respond to the next volley of fire but it never comes and when the sun comes up they're able to take stock of the damage to their op from all the machine gun fire and from the rocket-propelled grenade but there's no damage no one had ever been shooting at the op there was no damage so they had no explanation for it so when reinforcements arrived they just wanted to pack their stuff up and get the heck out of there and they did after leaving op rock very shortly after smith parker and diggs three of the eight marines that were there were all killed in afghanistan in separate instances and then sergeant greene who was their leader was very badly injured in an ied blast lena believes that when they were digging out those trenches and finding all those bones that they unleashed something it turned out a lot of people had lost their lives on that little strip of rock when the russians invaded afghanistan they captured opi rock and killed all of the mujahideen that were located at op rock then the taliban came in and they took back opi rock from the russians and killed all the russians that were at op rock then americans came in and took back op rock from the taliban killing all the taliban that were there so you have all these people probably dozens and dozens of people that at one point have been holding op rock that had all been killed at op rock and so lena believes that it's only a matter of time before this curse that they unleashed comes back to get him so i'd love to get your reaction what do you think happened at op rock is this paranormal or is there a rational explanation for this let me know in the comments and i'll do my best to get back to as many of you as i possibly can if you enjoyed this story and you haven't done this already please play ding dong ditch on the like button's house and then also subscribe to my channel and turn on all post notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly three four even five video uploads if you have a story suggestion we have a subreddit just called mr ballen it's linked in the description below you can submit your stories there and if i intentionally use your story i will certainly credit you if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram my handle is john ballen416 i'm also very active on tick tock where my handle is mr ballen so whether i see you on reddit instagram tick tock or here on youtube or some combination i'm just very thankful for your support and until next time guys see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,918,928

Rating: 4.9222431 out of 5

Keywords: marines, soldier, soldiers, us marine, usmc, afghanistan, ghost, paranormal, scary, scary story, ghost story, war story, war, navy seal, mrballen, terrifying, gun fight, battle

Id: mVZRtDzcba0

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jeropian-fly]

I have a feeling that ghosts are the reason why every marine that steps foot on Okinawa turns into a complete fucking retard within a week.

A+ marine on Pendleton

Then causes a DUI crash in a Govie that kills a local once they get to Okinawa.

[u/HeyYoChill]

Thumbnail guy is about to lay siege to Ram Ranch.

[u/tylerawn]

Wtf is up with Marines and their ghost stories

[u/buff_penguin]

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or maybe it was shared delusions or psychosis, but myself and several others can attest to seeing some weird shit both stateside and on deployment. I'll share one:

Standing post in FOB Haqlaniyah, late as fuck maybe 2-3 am. I see a blue streak of light fly across the sky above me and it dissipates as it passes. It was completely silent, whatever it was didn't make any noise at all. I didn't see where it came from, but I would say it stopped somewhere in the sky pretty close because the entire FOB lit up like someone popped lume. The thing is the sky and FOB lit up BLUE for 3 seconds at most. I called it in and asked if the COC saw it. Nothing. Nothing tracked on the G BOSS. I called the other posts and 2 other ones saw it but didn't know what it was either.

[u/Pilot0350]

This one time in Afghanistan we were in the middle of a firefight (the entire airbase was being over run) and the streetlights started flickering on and off real slow for no reason (they never usually did). So our Sgmaj starts yelling "they're shootin the lights, they're shootin the lights!" Then runs into a bunker and hides. Shit was so funny we all started laughing buy yeah, that's about as spooky as it ever got over there and later we made shirts for the entire squadron that had those lights being shot out and the sgmaj's phrase on them. Dude didn't even realize we were making fun of him.

Oh, and I did see FLIR footage of a man fucking a donkey once, could be considered abnormal maybe?

[u/Kurgen22]

I once saw a CWO5 pull into work at 0630 and stay until 1630 on a Friday,

[u/AKelly1775]

I’ve read stories (not sure about their authenticity) about guys in Afghanistan seeing and hearing weird shit in the mountains, especially places where the Soviets were. Hearing people speaking Russian, seeing apparitions, what have you

[u/Dank_Green_Gyrene]

https://youtu.be/5JuWFOfy8ww

The show Paranormal Witness did an episode on it.