Listener Supported Volume 11

Dive into the most chilling tales ever shared by our dedicated listeners in this Best Of collection of true scary stories. From eerie encounters in the dead of night to bone-chilling brushes with the unexplained, these handpicked submissions represent the finest—and most frightening—moments from our listener-supported archives. Real people. Real fear. Real stories that will keep you looking over your shoulder long after the episode ends.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/uncle-joshs-true-scary-stories--1977911/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire crew, Let's get it on.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
From the store. Submitted by Lynn R. This happened two
years ago before my mom and I moved. I was
in college, staying home to save money while I went
to school and worked my part time job, and my
mom was recently divorced, so she enjoyed having me around.
We did have four cats, but I joked that I

(00:40):
didn't want her turning into crazy cat Lady if she
lived on her own. This really after the tumultuous relationship
she had just ended.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
With my dad.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
My dad has nothing to do with this story, and
I love my dad very much, but he and my
mom were just not a good mix. They did end
things on a good note, and two years later are
better friends than they were when they were married, but
the events leading up to their breakup was not the best.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Okay, I'll shut up about that.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
We lived in a decent neighborhood in a residential area
of my city. My street was one of the only
ones that had off street parking for each individual home,
as city life made everyone park in the street or
wherever they could. It was kind of a nicer neighborhood
from a time long gone by, while everything else eventually
got built up around it. After my classes this day,

(01:28):
which I was taking via zoom due to the pandemic craziness,
I would often go down to a supermarket about two
blocks away to shop for dinner, which I always made
for my mom. She busted her ass at work, and
I always liked to prepare something for both of us
to kind of end the day on a relaxing note.
Plus I love cooking. When this all started, that's exactly

(01:48):
what I was doing. I was shopping at the store
for the things I needed that night, just a couple
of things I had forgotten on my normal weekly shopping trip.
As I was walking through the aisles, I noticed a
man in his late things He's looking at me. At first,
I couldn't be sure, because really, how can you be
sure in situations like that that someone really is looking
at you and not just something else in the store.

(02:11):
But I confirmed it when he came over to where
I was and I was looking at some produce, and
he said, excuse me, I don't want you to think
I'm weird, but I wanted to tell you that you
have really great legs. Have we met somewhere before? Okay,
that's not awkward. I know, I'm in really good shape
and I take care of my body, and that wouldn't
be weird if the situation hadn't been with a total stranger.

(02:34):
But I gave off a meek thank you, and then
I just got what I needed and moved away. As
I walked around the rest of the store, I only
saw him one or two more times as I was
busy shopping. I just chalked it up to a guy
who didn't know how to talk to women and was
giving it his best shot. I got all of my
items checked out and made my short walk home kind

(02:55):
of laughing about things and thinking about what I was
going to tell my mom when I saw her. When
I did get home, I put everything away and cracked
out some of my assignments. Before I was going to
get dinner going, I went to get the mail, and
when I went out of my front door, for some reason,
I looked down the street and saw what looked like
the same guy I saw at the grocery store. Now

(03:16):
he was just standing on the sidewalk about two houses
down for mine. It really was just a quick glance,
but I noticed the red ball cap that he had
been wearing, and made the connection that it was the
same guy. Not trying to be paranoid, I just went
back inside and tried not to think of anything of it.
I mean, who knows, Maybe he was a neighbor I

(03:37):
had never seen before, perhaps someone visiting someone in my neighborhood.
We have a very tight knit neighborhood and all of us,
for the most part, are on a first named basis.
But the truth is I couldn't say I really knew
every single person that lived there. So I went back
inside and started making dinner. And it was now around
four thirty in the afternoon, about forty five minutes before

(03:57):
my mom would be home from work. The front door
bell rang and I went to answer it, and of
course just looked outside to see who it was before
opening the door. There was no one there, so immediately
I thought ups FedEx. I opened the door to see
if a package had been left, and again glanced up
the street when I noticed there was no package on

(04:19):
our front porch. What I did see was a figure
running away that was wearing a red ball cap. Now
I had a new set of questions bouncing around in
my head. Was it the same guy, was it a
neighborhood kid that kind of resembled him.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
That was just playing a prank on me. I mean, who.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Hasn't done the whole ding dong ditch thing in their life?

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Right?

Speaker 2 (04:41):
I shut the door, got back to dinner and waited
for my mom to come home. Once she did, I
gave her a few minutes to chill out before dinner
and mention the things that had happened that afternoon. Later,
she kind of shrugged when I told her and said,
there were so many coincidences. How could be draw that
it's the same guy you saw in the story doing
those things and saying those things. We got on with

(05:03):
the evening and I had more reading to do for school.
So after feeding the cats and playing with a couple
of them before bed, I should mention two of them
are extremely lovable. One is fifty to fifty and the
other is a complete epitome of a nasty house cat,
loves you when he wants to make sure you know
you are serving him, and is markedly not as affectionate
as the other cats. But we all got along, But

(05:26):
for some reason Tom was hanging out near me. After
trying to pet him for a few seconds, Tom jumped
away and went up into the bay window looking out
over our front porch. He is certainly a protector as
much as he is a jerk, and I heard his
low growl as he looked out the window. He has
a growl that sounds kind of like he's purring, but

(05:47):
there's a menacing aspect to it. You can tell that
he's mad. I was switching off the lights in our
living room. When the room was dark, I walked over
to where Tom was sitting. I asked him what he
was looking at. Have glanced over his shoulder at me,
and then went back to looking out the front window.
I crouched next to him and pulled the curtain a

(06:07):
little bit over to the side to see what he
might be looking at. And knowing Tom it was just
someone taking their dog for a walk or something like that,
I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, and the
street light right next to my yard in my neighbor's
yard was shining brightly and there was nothing going on.
But it was at the edge of the light that
I thought I saw someone standing looking at our house.

(06:29):
My heart sank that it was the same person with
the red ball cap, and that made me go up
to my room that also looked out through the trees
onto the street. It was wintertime, so there were no
leaves on the trees, and when I got there, I
looked over to the street light where we had just
been looking. Sure enough, across the street, just in the shadows,
was someone standing wearing a red ball cap. The man

(06:54):
just stood there for another few minutes before turning and
walking across the street directly under the light, and that's
when I knew it was the same guy. I called
to my mom and I said, hey, I think that
guy is outside again, and she came from her room
into mine and looked out just as the figure was
walking back up the street out of range of our sight.

(07:15):
Mom said to just make sure all the doors were locked,
asked me what my schedule was the next day, and
said that she would also be making sure to take
better stock of the surroundings because at this point things
were getting weird. Nothing happened that night outside of the
normal two thirty am cat freak out I mean cat
owner experiences. I mean, we love them, but they drive
us crazy. Right the next morning, I got up at

(07:39):
my normal time to go to the gym, and as
I was backing down our driveway from our garage. I
was looking on both sides in the dark to see
if someone was standing outside our house, trying to still
not be paranoid. I kept thinking I would see someone,
but didn't, so I just got my workout in and
was on my way home, knowing that I had to
shower quick to get to my friend class. My mom

(08:01):
would already be gone by that time, so I got
cleaned up, got something to eat, and then logged on
for my zoom meeting. It was a pretty boring lecture
and I got up to make some tea when I
looked out my kitchen window into our small backyard and
saw that I had forgotten to close the garage. That's
when I saw him. Now I knew it was the

(08:23):
same guy, long hair, green military style jacket and a
red ball cap. He was staring into our garage. I
immediately went to the extra remote control for the garage
that we keep in our kitchen. I hit the button
and then went to the back door. I opened it
and yelled out, hey, who are you? What are you
doing in our backyard? The guy never even looked in

(08:46):
my direction, but immediately bolted down our driveway to the street.
That's when I called my mom to tell her about
what had happened, and she said to call the police.
I called the non emergency number and let them know
that there was someone strange in our neighborhood that I
had never seen before, but that I thought I had
seen him at the store before and that he had
talked to me. Without busting on our Cities police, I

(09:10):
got the be sure to keep an eye out if
you see him again and call us back line. Okay, sure,
I said, knowing that the only way anyone was going
to come out was if something serious happened. Nothing happened
for the rest of the day and the next evening,
but things were about to escalate. The following day, I

(09:30):
did my gym routine, and I should mention the gym
is about two miles from my house. I was talking
to a friend as we walked back to our cars.
It was just starting to get light out at that point.
When I stopped in my tracks, I noticed the same
guy was standing at the edge of the parking lot
of the gym. I told my friend that someone was

(09:50):
following me, and we both went back inside right away.
I told some of the guys at the gym and
also called the police from there. I told him that
someone I thought who had been and hanging around my
house was now hanging around the gym that I was at,
and they told me to stay put. This time they
did send someone out. The officer asked me for a
full description of the person what he'd been doing, and

(10:13):
then asked me to retell the same thing I had
told the police the other day. He asked me if
he could follow me home, and I said yes, that
would be great. He gave me his card and told
me to call him if something else happened. He said
he was going to make a full report and see
if a patrol car could go up and down our
neighborhood a couple of times during the day, just to
see if anyone was hanging around, or maybe even possibly

(10:36):
scare off someone who may have been hiding out. I
was nervous about going home and being alone, so I
decided I was going to get all my stuff for
school and go to the public library rather than be home.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
I emailed my.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Professors and said I was going to be working on
assignments but wasn't going to be in.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Class that day.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
I don't know why I thought that would be a
good idea, but it made me feel better to be
around other people. I stayed at the line for most
of the day, outside of going to get something to
eat around one and then I headed home. My cell
phone rang and it was my mom. She was already
home for some reason and was yelling into the phone
that she saw the guy standing on our porch when

(11:14):
she pulled in. Same jacket, same hair, same ball cap.
I told her to call the police immediately and that
I was on my way home too. At first she
said to stay away, but I was not about to
leave my mom home alone with some weirdos stalking around
our house. I got home and shortly after an officer

(11:34):
pulled up in front of our house, as did another car.
We again told them everything that had been happening, and
they said that they were going to put a full
description out on their radios for everyone to be on
the lookout for anyone matching the description we gave them.
I asked them about driving around our neighborhood as the
first officer I talked to said what they would do,
and the officer confirmed that they had been doing it,

(11:57):
but they hadn't seen anything or anyone out of the ordinary.
We were both pretty scared at this point, my mom
and I.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
That is, this was.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Someone who was not going away, and even though I
joked about it, was kind of freaked out as well
as whoever this guy was didn't seem to change his clothes.
When I pointed that out to the police officer, the
other officer said, he might be a homeless person who's
just confused. I almost laughed out loud at that, as
it certainly was the same person I saw in the store,

(12:28):
and if he was a homeless person that was confused,
he sure had a funny way of showing that. After
our conversation and his weird compliment, the police left and
I made something to eat for dinner, but my mom
and I were both on edge. Thankfully, it was Friday
and my boyfriend was coming over to visit. He lived
in a town about an hour away and was planning
on staying the weekend. We all just decided to have

(12:51):
a couple of drinks and relax, and we were planning
on going out to meet some of my friends, but
suddenly I didn't feel like that and kind of wanted
to just be with him at home. Chris is an
awesome guy, and we're now engaged.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
To be married.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
By the way, he tried to keep the evening light
for us, knowing we were a little shaken up. And
as the evening wore on and we had a couple
of bottles of wine and my mom decided to retire
for the evening, we were just kind of doing our thing,
making out in the living room and talking about all
the things school and future.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
That were in our paths.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Around twelve thirty, Chris looked up and said, someone's outside.
I said, what are you talking about? And he said
that he could hear someone was on the porch, but
wasn't sure if they were still there. The lights were
off in the living room, and he went over to
the bay window. He ripped the curtains open, and there,
staring into the windows from the other side was the guy.

(13:45):
This was the first time we both got a look
at him, and he didn't look anything like he looked
in the store. To me. Now, he looked disheveled and
really creepy. His eyes seemed to be bugging out of
his head. Chris jumped back and then ran for the
front door, with me telling him to not open it.
He wasn't listening to me as he ran out under
the front porch and tackled the guy. I mean really

(14:07):
tackled him. They both went over the porch, railing into
the bushes and onto the frozen ground. They were rolling
all over the place. I was screaming, and my mom
came down. The cats were inside going bananas, and that's
when Chris let out a very loud yell. I was
standing on the porch yelling if he was okay as
he was clutching onto this guy, and thankfully my mom

(14:30):
had called nine.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
To one one.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Chris was yelling all kinds of swear words at this guy,
and I could see darkness on the snow around our bushes,
but not realizing at the time that it was actually blood.
I kept screaming, and now lights were coming out in
our neighbor's houses, and my next door neighbor came out
with a flashlight and immediately jumped towards Chris and the guy.

(14:53):
It seemed like forever, but the cops finally showed up
and grabbed both Chris and the guy and they got
him separated. I was trying to hold it together, but
kept yelling for Chris and my neighbor was trying to
do his best to hold the other guy to help
the police officer. Another police car showed up and things
started to get a little settled down, but the guy

(15:15):
was screaming about someone named Scarlet and that he had
to see her. Chris finally piped up and said I've
been stabbed, and the cops attended to him quickly. It
was kind of hard to see things in the dark,
even though the street light was there. Chris had in
fact been stabbed twice, once in his thigh and once

(15:35):
in his arm. Now another cop car pulled up and
all of these people in the neighborhood were now surrounding
our yard, and an ambulance was called for Chris. My
mother was on the porch and hysterics, and I was
crying my eyes out, trying to make sure Chris was
going to be okay. He kept saying he was going
to be fine, but the cops said, you need to
get to the hospital right now. They got the man

(15:58):
in the red ball cap into a car and tried
to start settling the neighborhood down. Another car showed up,
and there were tons of questions for me and my mom,
and of course Chris. One of the police officers found
the knife that the man had stabbed Chris with, and
it was a big survival type knife. Actually, the officer
called it a rambo knife. I was asked to go

(16:21):
with Chris to the hospital and another officer would be
following us there. Once we got there, Chris needed a
bunch of stitches in his arm for a really big gash,
but the stab wound in his right thigh and needed staples.
The knife was so sharp it really split his leg
open like a right melon. Chris was in stable condition,
but had lost a lot of blood on our front

(16:42):
yard as well as on the way to the hospital.
He was going to be fine, so I breathed a
sigh of relief about that. The officer who stayed with
us asked way more questions for us and told us
that the man was indeed homeless and mentally incapacitated. He
was convinced I was his ex wife, and when he
saw me at the store and then he was telling

(17:02):
the police that he needed to talk to me about
his divorce. He wasn't strung out on drugs, he just
wasn't in his head anymore. A while later, I learned
a little bit more about him, and it's a very
sad story. His wife had cheated on him with his
business partner, and the two of them had stolen all
of the money out of the business and run off together.

(17:23):
They had taken this guy for everything that he had
in his life, and he kind of just went crazy
and then went into the streets. This had happened about
eight years before all of this happened to me. We
did have to press charges and he was put into
a criminal facility in a hospital. For all I know,
he's still there, but he pled guilty to all the charges.

(17:44):
I think someone convinced him that this was the best
thing for him to do, and I like to think
that maybe one part of his sane mind realized who
he really was, where he was, and what he'd been
up to. Chris healed just fine. My mom decided to
move to Flora and sold the house and I got
my own place as I finished up school. Chris and
I are planning on moving as well as soon as

(18:06):
I finish my degree. So that's my story, basically being
stalked by a guy who thought I was someone else.
It's too bad he couldn't have talked to me or
maybe I could have talked to him to let him
know that I wasn't who he thought I was. Maybe
all of this could have been avoided. I'm very thankful
to the police officers who showed up and took what

(18:26):
I was saying seriously after the first call where I
didn't think they cared at all. I am much more
diligent about being with people when I go out now,
even though I know i'm safe. Every once in a while,
I will see someone at a store or a bar
or a restaurant who's looking at me, and I think,
oh boy, is this going to be round two. It's

(18:47):
hard to get out of that mindset. Thanks for sharing
my story if you do, and all I can say
to everyone is be aware of your surroundings and don't
take things lightly if you have a gut feeling that
something is wrong. I don't harbor ill feelings towards the
guy who did this stuff, and I just hope that
he's getting the help that he needs, and I hope
that he can get back into life. I'm not sure

(19:10):
if that's possible, but there's always hope. Bad neighbor submitted
by Blonde Bryan. This happened when I was fifteen years
old and my sister was thirteen. We grew up in
a suburb of Rochester, New York, in a good neighborhood

(19:30):
with a good school district and lots of friends everywhere
we could walk or ride our bikes to. It was
an awesome place to live and still is even though
I'm much older now and live in San Diego. My
sister and me both wanted to get summer jobs for
spending money outside of our allowance, So Jane and I
would ask our neighbors if they had any jobs or

(19:50):
chores they would like us to do on a weekly
basis for the summer months, mowing the lawn, watering flowers, whatever.
I got a couple of lawn jobs that my sister
would help me with, but we thought we hit the
jackpod when one of our neighbors I'll call Stan, asked
if we were interested in light cleaning in his house.
My mom said no at first, until Stan explained to

(20:12):
her that we wouldn't be using household chemicals, just dusting
and vacuuming that sort of thing. I think the most
caustic job we had was washing windows once in a while,
and my mom was cool with that. I love my mom,
but she was very protective. I mean, seriously, we could
use all that shit at our house, but have someone
else asked us to do it for money, that's crazy talk.

(20:36):
Stan was going to pay us twenty dollars a week,
so we were going to split that, and I told
her that I would give her some of my money
for lawnmowing jobs. We were going to be making an
extra bunch of bank for the summer. We both got
a ten dollar allowance on top of that, so all
this extra money was really great for us. The first
time we went to Stan's house, he showed us all

(20:57):
the stuff that he wanted us to do every Friday.
She showed us where he kept the vacuum, the dusting stuff,
all that kind of thing. We figured it would only
take us about an hour and a half to do everything,
so it was a deal and a half in our world.
Everything was fine, and we started working as soon as
school ended in June. The only time we couldn't do
anything was one week when my parents always took us

(21:19):
on summer vacation, and Stan was fine with that. Stan
had been in the neighborhood for as long as I
can remember, was married but didn't have kids, just two
Corgie dogs that were a lot.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Of fun to play with.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
We were doing our thing every week until the last
week of July when we were going on vacation. We
had a bunch of money stocked up for the trip.
We were going to see my cousins in Pennsylvania and
we had a blast. Everything was just a great time.
When we got home, our accumulated mail had been dropped
off by the mailman and my dad was going through
all the stuff we had received, most of it junk,

(21:52):
I'm sure, just like today. But he came across a
handwritten note and then looked at my mom and didn't
say anything. When she asked him about it, he said
he would talk to her in a few minutes, and
then asked me and my sister to keep unloading the navigator.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
We didn't think anything about him.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
We were just ready to go see our friends and
head over to my friend Randy's pool for a swim.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
This was on a Sunday, and when.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
We got back we completely forgot about the look my
dad gave my mom when he read the note. That Monday,
I was getting ready to go out that morning to
do one of the lawns I had to normally do
on a weekend, but my dad asked me to stay
home for a little bit. I called the neighbor whose
lawn I cut, and he just joked with me that
if I took any longer, the grass was going to

(22:35):
grow over his house. I told him I would be
there later that day. At about ten that morning, a
guy came to our house who turned out to be
a detective with the police department. He introduced himself, and
my father invited him in and told me and my
sister to go in the back yard for a minute,
but not to go anywhere else. I immediately thought of
the note, but being dutiful to my parents, I just

(22:58):
did as my father asked and dragged my sister with me.
It was then that I realized my mom had stayed
home from work too, so something certainly was up. My
dad called for us to come back inside after a
bit and told us that the detective had some questions
for us and we needed to be truthful with our answers.
The detective asked us about what we did at Stan's house,

(23:20):
and we told him about our cleaning job that we'd
been doing for the past couple of weeks. He nodded
and wrote things down and asked about what rooms we
went into, what kind of chores we did. All that
stuff seemed pretty straightforward, and then I asked, are we
in trouble? The detective looked at my dad and then
looked at us and said, no, you're not in any

(23:42):
kind of trouble. But then he started asking questions about
if we noticed anything strange in Stan's house. We both
said no, We just did our cleaning thing and sometimes
stayed longer to play with the dogs. I should mention
that Stan and his wife were not home while we
cleaned the house. I mean they had jobs too. The

(24:03):
detective thanked us for our time, and then my dad
and he went out into our front yard and kept talking.
After he drove away and my dad had come back inside,
I asked my dad what was up, and he said
he would tell me about it in a little while.
Then he made a phone call and took a walk
up the street to a neighbor's house. I had asked
him if I could go and cut my lawn, and
he said yeah. We had no idea what was happening.

(24:26):
But by the time I was finished cutting my lawn,
Randy had called me and asked if I wanted to
go swimming, so I got permission from my mom and
that's what I did. When I got home for lunch,
my dad and mom were at our kitchen table talking
and they didn't look very happy. The detective had come
back to talk to my dad and he just seemed
very angry. I asked him if everything was okay and

(24:49):
if we were in trouble. He just took me by
the arm and gave me a big hug. My sister
came into the room and he did the same thing
to her. My dad was a very gruff guy and
did not show his emotions very much when I was
growing up. As he's gotten older, he's much more emotional,
especially when it comes to his grandkids. I guess he
was saving all that up for them, and that's okay

(25:12):
because I loved my dad and mom no matter what.
My dad asked me to get him a beer out
of the fridge, and I did, also asking for the
customary sip. He smiled and said go ahead. Everything seemed
to be calmed down, but later that day the detective
came back one more time and spoke with my father privately.

(25:32):
It wasn't until the next day that my dad sat
me and Jane down and said the detective was coming
back over. When he got there, he opened up a
Manila envelope and showed some pictures to us. They were
pictures of me and Jane at Stan's house as we
were cleaning. We both looked at each other and answered
the detective when he asked us, is that you? And

(25:53):
we said, yeah, that's us. He didn't say anything else
and just nodded, and then he had more pictures of
me without my T shirt on as I worked. Stan's
house didn't have air conditioning and it did get hot
in there, so sometimes I would take my t shirt
off and my little sister would work in her sports bra.
I mean, we didn't think anything of it. We were
home alone.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
I mean, it's my sister.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
For crying out loud, and no one else was around,
so we didn't think it was weird. What we didn't
know is that Stan had asked another neighborhood kid to
fill in for us on the friday that we had
been on vacation. That's when the trouble started. It was
a kid that I knew in the neighborhood named Ben
but it wasn't friends with him because he was only
eleven or so. Ben had been asked to do what

(26:38):
we did, but Stan was home when Ben was there.
Stan had apparently asked Ben to work wearing a pair
of shorts that Stan asked him to wear, saying that
they were special cleaning shorts they were just like regular
bike shorts, but Stan also asked him to take off
his t shirt. Ben did what he was told, but
immediately told his mom when he got home after getting

(27:00):
his money. Ben's mom then called the police, as she
was a single mom and didn't want to confront Stan
or Stan's wife on her own when she knew something
was very wrong. Stan had also taken pictures of Ben,
which the police went over and asked him about. Stan
admitted to taking the pictures and was reluctant to show
the police the pictures he had taken, but when he did,

(27:22):
he wasn't careful with the printouts that he had, and
the police noticed other pictures in this scrap book that
he had. This led to more questions for Stan, and eventually,
in the next two days before we got home, the
police raided his house. They found all kinds of child
pornography on his computer, including the pictures of me and

(27:43):
my sister. Obviously we weren't in any kind of pornographic picture,
but we were still lumped in with all these other kids.
Stan had been home the entire time we were doing
our job for him, but he had been hiding and
taking pictures of us as we worked. Like I said,
the other pictures were terrible according to my parents, and

(28:05):
we were never really shown what they were. I can
only imagine. Stan was arrested for trafficking kittie porn and
was convicted and is now serving a sentence in prison.
He got sixteen years for the amount of stuff that
he had, and he was also sharing and trading it
on the internet in various chat rooms and websites. Whenever
he does get out. He's also a registered sex offender

(28:27):
wherever he goes. All I do know is that his
wife left him, but I think he is up for
release this year. It's creepy as hell for me and
my sister to this day to think that our pictures
had been stored with some of the most vile garbage
that can possibly be created out there. What kills me
is that he had actual photographs that he had to

(28:48):
have had developed or printed out on his own computer.
I mean, those were of us. Why he did that,
I have no idea, but in one instance, I feel
glad that he did because it was his downfall and
he got caught for all the other crap that he had.
Goes to show you that you never really know who
your neighbors are. Stan and his wife always seemed like

(29:09):
regular people and joined in neighborhood get togethers all the time.
Who knows what else he was up to, but I'm
glad he was arrested and sent to jail. Sick people
like that don't ever change, and it sounds like he
had a collection that.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Went back many, many years.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
I don't think about this all the time, but I
thought I would send my story into you, And as
I finished writing this out, I'm going to check on
my kids, who are now fast asleep. I'm a trusting person,
but when it comes to my kids, I have vowed
never to be lax. The thought of them ever ending
up in pictures like that on someone's computer or wherever
else is terrifying to me. Something wrong at our new house.

(29:55):
Submitted by Dan W. This all began and when my
wife and I decided to build a new house rather
than buy an existing one. We did a lot of
research as to where we wanted to build our permanent
home and found a great spot in a new limited subdivision.
When I say limited, I don't think that's a technical
real estate term, but it was a one street neighborhood

(30:17):
surrounded by forestreet. We were going to live at the
very end and had three acres in our backyard and
off to the side, which was a little bit larger
than most of our neighbor's yards. Part of the reason
that we wanted the place in the first place. It
was exciting to be doing the project from the ground up,
working with the architects and their design people. The whole

(30:37):
process took months, and I spent a lot of time
after working on weekends popping out to look at the
progress and meet with contractors and that sort of thing.
Soon we had our house, as other houses were going
up in the neighborhood too. I'll take a few seconds
and describe the house for the rest of the story.
There was a main flour with a large staircase after
the foyer in our front hall when you entered off

(31:00):
to the right was my home office, and library. Off
to the left was our formal living room that opened
up into our dining room. The dining room and kitchen
were opened to each other, separated by a breakfast bar,
and on the other side of that was our massive
family room that opened up onto our deck.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Off the back of the house.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
There was another door to the deck from our dining
room as well. We had a three car garage, four
bedrooms upstairs, with an attic cupola as a third floor
where my kids had a lot of their stuff. At
the time, all of our kids were home. Joe was
eighteen getting ready for college, Jody was fifteen and in
high school, and my little guy, Will was twelve. I

(31:39):
have a successful business as a clinical psychologist that I
run from the home. My wife is a realtor who
will smack me for referring to our.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Neighborhood as limited.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
I suppose they should have checked with her before writing this,
but she happens to be out of town, so that's
my excuse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could call her text,
but that doesn't matter. The house was finally built and
we moved in mid August of that year, perfect timing
for our kids to be ready for school and a
couple of weeks to get settled in. Everyone was loving
the house and the yard and the woods right next door,

(32:11):
and my wife decided we should have Thanksgiving celebrated at
our place that year. I don't have a very large family,
but my wife does, and I love to cook, so
of course I said it was a great idea. Her
brother and sister came with their families on the Wednesday
before Thanksgiving. My two nephews and two nieces, both two
with each. Brother and sister in law were obviously with them.

(32:32):
All of them were in their teens, and I was
surprised that they were actually having a good time. You
know how teens can get selling on family vacations, but
my kids got along with them very well, and half
the time they were playing video games.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
And just laughing.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
That night, I was up later than everyone, getting things
ready for the next day so as to not have
a mad rush with food on Thanksgiving. Everyone else headed
off to bed and I kept up with my prep
and a couple of beers. My brother in law stayed
around too. We were both talking, laid into the night
and ended up falling asleep in my living room. I
woke up around three in the morning, noticing that it

(33:06):
was really cold in the house, despite a fire in
the fireplace and.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
The heat on.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
My brother in law was in a recliner and sawing wood,
so I just got up quietly to see the thermostat
it was working, and that's when I noticed the front
door and storm door were wide open. I closed them
after looking around outside, and went back to the living
room to wake my brother in law up for bed.
In the time that I had walked to the front foyer,

(33:32):
the back door to our deck had been slid open
and was letting the cold air in as well. I
looked at my brother in law, but he was out
like a light. I figured somehow one of the kids
had opened or left the doors open in the front
and the wind had knocked them open completely. I mean,
looking back, it was a stupid thought, as there was
no way that that could have possibly happened. I still

(33:55):
don't have any explanation for the back sliding door, but
I made a point to tell everyone and to keep
the door shut as I wasn't heating the outside, I
was turning into my father. I got into bed, as
did my brother in law, and I knew I would
have to be up by six to get my smoker
ready and another turkey ready for the inside of it. Thankfully,
I had done all the prep work the day before,

(34:16):
yay me. When I woke up, my wife was barely
stirring and I mentioned.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
The doors to her.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
She told me that she had personally locked the front
door before going upstairs and couldn't tell me why they
were open. I told her I was going to remind
everyone to make sure the doors were shut, and she
sleepily agreed and went back to sleep, saying she would
be up by seven. The house was totally quiet as
everyone was sleeping in perfect I thought I could have

(34:44):
my first cup of coffee and get things rolling. I
love my family, but moments like that are awesome to me.
Knowing that they're all there and safe. Having a chance
to clear my head and be thankful for everything we
had and then be able to share my love with
them and my food later on sounds cheesy, but hey,
that's me.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
It's the truth.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
It was about six thirty after I had gotten the
smoker going out on the deck and came back into
the kitchen. I was sipping my coffee and I heard
a thumping down in the basement. The door to the
basement was in the kitchen, so I wandered over, opened
the door, and flicked down the lights and walked downstairs.
The thumping was getting louder as I walked down the stairs,

(35:24):
and I couldn't think of what was making that noise.
Then I thought maybe my wife had woken up and
thrown some laundry in the washing machine and it had
gotten off kilter. That was my explanation. As soon as
I got to my basement, I looked around and turned
on the other recessed lighting, and the thumping stopped. We
have a finished basement with another living area down there,

(35:46):
a pool table at a bar for entertaining. For one second,
I thought maybe some of the kids had come down
here to this gaming system and maybe fallen asleep on
one of the couches, but upon inspection, the basement was empty.
I stood there just trying to figure out what that
thumping noise was, and that's when both the dryer and

(36:07):
washer doors opened and slammed shut on their own. I
had my back to the laundry area when this happened,
so I didn't actually see it, but I sure as
hell heard it. I jumped as I turned around and
then walked over to the machines. I stared at them
for a minute and then shrugged my shoulders. Was I
just hearing all this in my head? As a clinical psychologist,

(36:30):
I know that this is totally possible, but I was
trying to add everything up. The strange open doors, the
weird sound down here, and I was sure I heard
the dryer and washing machine doors open and shut. I
wasn't jumping to any conclusions. I was trying to think
of rational explanations for everything. But I also knew that

(36:50):
everyone was going to be waking up soon and I
needed to get my breakfast pizza and casserole in the
ovens to warm up. I walked back upstairs and turned
the lights off, and as soon as I got to
closing the door, I heard the dryer and washing machine
doors open and slam shut again.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
I couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
I figured I would talk to my wife about it
when I got a chance, but I didn't want to
tell the entire family strange things were going on and
run the risk of ruining Thanksgiving. I was a staunch
disbeliever in the paranormal and am still skeptical today, even
after telling the rest of my story. I could hear
people starting to get up and move around upstairs, so
I got breakfast things going, got the big dining room

(37:32):
table set for everyone, and waited for them to come down.
My wife came down, as did everyone else, in their pajamas,
wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. My brother in law asked
me about the smoker and offered his help, which I
gladly accepted. Everyone was enjoying their coffee and juice and
breakfast when I pulled my wife aside and told her

(37:52):
about what I had heard in the basement. She had
a strange look come over her face and said, well,
I wanted to tell you something too. I asked her
what was up, and she said, while she was washing
her face in our master bath, the tub faucet came
on and the jets on our whirlpool tub started up.
She was worried that maybe there was an electrical problem

(38:13):
with the tub, but that didn't explain why the water
turned on. I shook my head and said, something very
strange is going on here. We both agreed to keep
things to ourselves, but she is an avid not about
the paranormal, and giggling told me she was wondering what
else the day would bring. I told her that wasn't funny,
gave her a quick swan on her ass and kissed

(38:34):
her and said Happy Thanksgiving. The rest of the morning
was most of everyone just kind of wandering around as
we were going to.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
Eat at three.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Kids were playing their video games, and some were watching
the Macy's Day parade, and everyone was talking amongst themselves
about girls and boys and all that kind of thing,
except for my twelve year old and my eleven year
old nephew. I know this for a fact, as my
nephew wandered into the kitchen and out of nowhere said
girls are gross. Asked why he thought that, and he
said they get their hair everywhere, and I laughed and

(39:03):
went back to the deck to check on the smoker.
When I went back in for another cup of coffee,
my brother in law was standing in the kitchen. He
also had a weird look on his face and said, Hey, man,
can I ask you a question? And I said, yeah, sure,
what's up? He leaned in and said, in a low voice,
have you noticed anything strange ever happening in your house?

(39:25):
I mean, the place is awesome. I know it's brand new.
I'd like to think it's just settling. But I was
just upstairs getting my clothes ready and about to jump
in the shower when the closet door in our room
opened and shut a few times. I mean I actually
saw it happened on the last time. I didn't know
whether to tell him about anything else I had noticed
going on, but said, man, that's really odd. The house

(39:47):
is solid. I mean I watched the thing being built.
He just shook his head and said, well, maybe I
had one too many beers last night, but in my
mind I thought he only had two, and my brother
in law tie one on. I didn't say anything else,
and he said he was going to get ready and
tell the troops that they needed to get dressed as well.

(40:08):
Not for the rest of the day, but he was
organizing a touch football game in the yard with the kids.
That's an old tradition in their family. I had forgotten about,
and I said I was going to be there too,
No way I was missing out on some early football.
After making sure the turkey was doing its thing in
our oven and the other turkey was smoking away, I
went into our sideyard where everyone was throwing the ball

(40:29):
around and trying to divide up into teams. We started
playing after a few minutes, and there were tons of laughs,
and my neighbors came over with their kids to join in.
After a while, we took a break to grab some water,
and my neighbor's son, who was a brilliant kid, asked
me who the girl was in the window and why
she wasn't playing football with us. I said what, and

(40:50):
he pointed up to one of our bedroom windows and said,
that girl with the long black hair. How come she's
not playing. My niece on my sisters in law's side
has long black hair, but she was playing with us,
as was my niece on my brother in law's side,
but she's blonde. When I looked up at the window,
there was no one there, and I said, who are

(41:11):
you talking about? And he said, I just saw a
young girl with long black hair looking out at us.
Normally I would have said that he saw a shadow
or something, maybe the glare of the really weak sun
in our cloudy weather, but of course I thought of
the other things going on. I just told him he
was mistaken. Everyone was out here having fun and we

(41:31):
should get back to the game. After another half hour
or so, we broke up the game, and all went
inside laughing, and my sister's in law and wife yelling
at everyone to go directly to the basement and get
our muddy clothes off. The three women had arranged other
clothes for them to tramp through the house before getting
showered up. In the start of our meal, we all
got cleaned up, and my wife came into the bathroom

(41:52):
as I was shaving. She shut the door and she
had that same strange look on her face. I knew
something was going on, and she said, something is happening
in this house, and I don't know what it is.
She told me that after she had thrown some laundry
in the washing machine from the clothes that we had
been wearing outside, she'd gone upstairs into the kitchen, but

(42:14):
then heard a thumping in the basement. When she went
down there, the entire load that had been put into
the washing machine was spread out all over the floor.
The other clothes were still piled on top of the machine,
and the door was wide open. It had never even started.
I immediately asked my wife if she was mistaken about

(42:35):
putting laundry in, and she said she was not. My
wife may be into the paranormal but she's a straight
shooter and would not have made anything like that up.
I then told her about the neighborhood kids seeing someone
standing in the window of our front bedroom. We were
both getting concerned about what was happening. Something certainly strange
was going on. We all got downstairs and people were

(42:59):
jumping into the charcuteri board and relish tray, gearing up
for the main meal. All of the adults were enjoying
a glass of wine or a beer, and my wife
poured herself a large glass, and I knew she did
so because of everything that had been happening and everything
that was bouncing around in her head. I checked down
the turkeys and they were almost ready, and then I
went upstairs to grab something and my niece, the young

(43:21):
lady with the long black hair, was coming down the stairs.
I said, hey, kiddo, what's up. As I was walking
into the foyer and she was about to pass me,
I noticed that our glass chandelier we had hanging from
the second floor ceiling started to swing back and forth
as she went under it. I'm telling you, it was
right out of that movie Amityville Horror. Thankfully she didn't

(43:43):
see it, but I did, and the chandelier was still
swaying back and forth as I went upstairs. I stood
at the top of the stairs watching it as it
slowed down, and my mind began to race. I remembered
something from my college studies in postgrad work on my
way to my doctorate about parapsychology, but never really gave
it a thought. Now I was trying to think back

(44:06):
about its connection with teenagers and poltergeist phenomenon. I was
well aware of all the bullshit nonsense that goes with
the paranormal, but something strange was happening, and the fact
that two of the odd things happened involved my niece
had my mind running. We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner and dessert,
and everyone was going to just chill out for the
rest of the afternoon, watching football or playing video games,

(44:29):
or just catching up and talking like families do. My
wife had solved her problem with the wash and had
successfully gotten a bunch of clothes clean, and I was
on my third beer, just enjoying myself despite all the
strange things that had been happening. My brothers in law
were taking cat naps and I could hear the kids
upstairs laughing and doing regular teenage stuff. Just sitting in

(44:50):
my chair watching the game. I had heard a loud
crash come from the kitchen. The ladies were up in
the formal living room up front, and I could hear
them chattering away until the loud crash. I jumped up
and ran into the kitchen before anyone else and saw
that a large stack of plates waiting to go in
the dishwasher that had been sitting on the counter were

(45:10):
now smashed all over the floor. No one was in
the kitchen. There's no way anyone could have been in there,
as I would have seen them walk through our family room,
or at least walking out of the kitchen into the
dining room or back into the living room. My wife
came in and bumped into me, and I just looked
at her wide eyed. I was trying to piece all

(45:31):
of this together, what the hell was going on here.
I made some lame excuse to everyone that the dishes
must have been on the edge of the counter and
fallen off by accident. I blamed myself for being careless,
and my sister in law and wife helped me clean
up the mess. The kids upstairs never heard anything, and
none of them came down. The rest of the day

(45:52):
was quiet, and around seven in the evening or so,
my brothers in law whipped up some turkey sandwiches and
busted out the relish tray and other things that had
not been eaten during our dinner.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
I love that part of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
The second Thanksgiving, everyone was now hanging out in the
family room and debating what movie we were going to
watch that night. My niece, the blonde one, left the
room and went upstairs, and when she came back, she
had a strange look on her face. She actually looked
like she was upset, and her mother asked her what
was wrong. She said she didn't want to talk about it,

(46:26):
in motion for her mom to join her in the kitchen.
They both left, and we decided on a movie and
everyone got settled in to enjoy it. My sister in
law came back in the room with my niece and
then asked my other sister in law if she could
speak with her. They both went into the kitchen and
I went in behind them on the auspices of getting
beers from my brothers in law, but I also wanted

(46:47):
to hear what they were going to say. I didn't eavesdrop.
I made it clearly known that I was there, and
they didn't care. My sister in law told my other
sister in law that her daughter had bumped into her
daughter on her way to the bathroom. She said that
my black haired niece was standing in her way on
the landing upstairs and started to say some very awful

(47:08):
things to my blonde haired niece. She was calling her
a bitch and saying that she was a worthless human being,
and some other things I don't want to repeat here.
My sister in law went out to talk to her
daughter about this, who of course denied being upstairs. Everyone
else quickly heard what was going on. I mean word
travels fast in two rooms, and we all said that

(47:29):
was impossible because my black haired niece had been in
the living room with us. My niece who went upstairs
was the only one who left the room without going
into a panic. I said everyone was probably just tired
from the day and we should all just watch the
movie and relax. Of course, I got looks from my
wife and my brother in law, who had experienced the
weird things earlier that day, but we all enjoyed the movie,

(47:52):
and as the night wore on, everyone started to drift
off or one upstairs to bed.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
What happened that night was very odd.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
When everyone was in bed and asleep, anyone who had
a cell phone received a call at the same time.
It was from an unknown number, and it came at
two forty seven am. Everyone's phone either vibrated or rang.
Of course, it woke a lot of us up. Those
who answered didn't hear anything except the static noise, me included.

(48:23):
I didn't know about everyone getting the phone call until
the next morning, but the front door and storm door
once again were wide open. When I wandered downstairs before
everyone else. I wondered if there was a connection about
those two and the time that they happened. I didn't
say anything and just shut the door. We had plans
to go to Niagara Falls that day and then hit

(48:43):
up an outlet mall in the area so we would
all be out of the house, and I thought that
was a good idea. Stop thinking about this weird shit
until everyone went home and then tried to take a
look at it objectively.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
My wife agreed.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
We had a blast at the attractions, even though everyone
had been to Niagara Falls. Then we went shopping and
then got some dinner out. We got back to the
house at around nine thirty that night, and all of
the lights in the house were on. I never leave
the lights in my house on save for the front
foyer and the outside lights, and I control those with
my phone. As we were pulling up my driveway, the

(49:20):
front bedroom, where my nieces were staying, was flicking on
and off. I looked at my phone and the programming
that I had set up, but it showed that all
the lights were off except for the foyer and the
outside lights. Everyone got out of the vehicles and was
going inside, and the minute the garage door to the
house opened, the light upstairs stopped flickering and all of

(49:41):
the lights in the house went out. I had no
idea what to do. Everyone saw that. I said to
my brother in law, there must be something in the
electric and I'd have to get my electrician out to
take a look at it. But my brother in law,
who had experienced the closet door, just looked at me skeptically. Thankfully,
nothing else happened that night and everyone was heading home

(50:03):
the next day. We saw everyone off and just had
that day to crash as our family. Now here's the
stranger thing. Nothing happened, I mean nothing happened for months.
Nothing happened for almost the next year. No funny noises,
no lights, no sounds, no doors opening, nothing. My wife

(50:25):
and I discussed it over and over and could not
figure out what was going on, but we both deduced
that it had something to do with my niece. Nothing
had happened before she got there, nothing happened after she left.
I mean, we weren't looking to blame her for anything,
but the coincidence was there. However, things did come back.
When my niece and sister in law visited that summer.

(50:47):
A lot of the strange things started happening again. Doors
were opening and closing so much and so loud that
everyone noticed what was going on. One evening, when my
niece was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, the
entire bed she was on slid all the way across
the room and bumped into the wall on the other
side of the room. My daughter was in the room

(51:08):
to see that happen. Of course, everyone was freaking out,
and I was trying to calm everyone down, but my
sister in law decided that they were going to cut
their trip shot today and my daughter was going to
go and stay with them at their house for a week.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Again.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Once my niece left, nothing happened in the house. When
I called my daughter during the week just to say
hi and check in on her, I asked if anything
weird was happening at their house and she said no,
everything had been awesome. They'd been swimming in their pool,
and they went to movies and were just having a
good time. Then came Thanksgiving this past year. Again we

(51:45):
were having everyone over, and I knew everyone was thinking
about what had happened the year before. But nothing happened.
Everything was normal and fine. I have zero explanation for
what happened. But after talking to Collie and dipping into
what are often referred to as the pseudosciences, I wonder
if there is some shred of credibility to the theories

(52:07):
that poltergeist activities surround teenage girls and that time of
the life they are growing up in. I don't know,
and I can't say. All I can say is nothing
like that has ever happened again. Since this past summer.
My wife, of course, read a bunch of stuff on
the Internet that was a little too far out there
for me, but she is convinced that my niece somehow

(52:29):
was affecting our house with her abilities that she wasn't
even aware of. Because my background is what it is,
I've never called any of these so called paranormal investigators
to come in and help with anything. But I did
talk to some friends who knew some people in a
skeptical society who, without seeing anything or experiencing anything, advised
there was likely some logical explanation. We were just not

(52:51):
coming up with it. At this point, I don't care.
I would rather have my dream house to be exactly
what it is a dream house.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
I don't care to.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Have any of that crap ever happen again. And here's
the twenty twenty three being paranormal free for my family.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
She was magic.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Submitted by Cherry Oh. I lost my grandmother when I
was thirty two years old. I was very close with her,
as I was the only granddaughter she had out of
seven grandchildren. Sure, she loved my brothers and cousins, but
there was a bond between us that went very deep.
I was into just about everything she shared with me,

(53:37):
her love of baking and knitting, Bengo and game shows
on TV. I still do all those things, and I
am a certified game show nut. I was even on
the prices right once, but never got out of contestants row.
But my grandmother was so proud of me, even though
I didn't do much to get on other than the
standard stuff they asked you to do to be chosen

(53:57):
as a contestant. It was a sketchy time in my
mid twenties after that, the time where I made a
lot of bad decisions in relationships and personal habits. I
fell in love with a man who would go on
to marry me at twenty five, beat the shit out
of me for the first time at age twenty six,
and introduced me to speed. On top of my already

(54:18):
hefty drinking problem. I always kept my job, always went
to church, but sometimes wearing a little more makeup to
hide the beatings, and usually drunk to numb the pain.
But my one constant was my grandma. She was always there.
At first, my family was too, including my brothers, but
after my mom died and telling me I was breaking

(54:40):
her heart by staying with my man although she was
really dying of cancer. I should also mention my dad
died when I was twelve in a car accident. My
brothers blamed me for worrying my mother and pushing her
into a too young and untimely death. They said me
hanging out with the wrong crowd and marrying my husband
put too much worry into her.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
The I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
After my mom died, my grandma was all I had,
and she was much more patient with me than my
mom or my brothers. There were plenty of knights that
I stayed with her, afraid to go home to my
husband when he was on a run, and one time
he did come looking for me there. But just one time,
while I was hiding there, he showed up, hammered and

(55:22):
banging at the back door, yelling for me. We were
watching TV when it happened, and I just cringed. Grandma
patted me on the knee and said, stay right here,
I'll be right back. I did as I was told,
and I don't know what she said to him, but
things got very quiet and she came back in the
room smiling. He left and never once came back to

(55:45):
my grandma's house for as long as he lived. When
I asked her what she said to him, she only replied, magic, honey,
She smiled. Magic That will one day take care of
him and take care of you, but not in the
same way. That night, she talked to me straight and
told me I needed to get out from under him,

(56:05):
that I was welcome to stay with her as long
as I wanted to stay, and it would be another
year before I left my husband and took her up
on that offer. When I did, my grandmother got me
into a rehab and supported me getting clean of drugs
and booze, and then I went to live with her.
My husband and I were separated, but not divorced. He
never came by, but he would send letters and emails

(56:28):
saying the foulest things to me. He tried to paint
me poorly on Facebook with old friends, and even tried
to get me fired from my job when I went
back to it. Thankfully, my boss is great and supported
me through everything he still does. But then my husband
made a mistake. He sent a threat to my grandma,

(56:49):
and she did not take it in stride like I
took my lumps and threats. I'd seen her angry before,
but this was a different look. I'd never seen it.
Her blue eyes seemed to flash like ice under the moon,
and when I asked her if she was okay. She
just nodded and said, oh, yes, I'm fine, honey. Another

(57:09):
year went by and I was finalizing my divorce when
a second threat was made to my grandma. This time
her eyes seemed to go black. That was also the
night she told me that she had been sick for
a while and had hidden it from me cancer, just
like my mom. Her prognosis was not good, and she
decided she didn't want any treatment, didn't want to fight,

(57:31):
and by the time I found out it was too
late to do anything. I cried and cried when she
told me, and I even got angry and shouted at her.
She just hugged me and told me it was going
to be all right. That's when I saw the letter
my husband had sent to her. It was a threat
that he was going to.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Kill us both.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Real genius right there. I was planning on using it
as evidence in the divorce and for a stronger restraining order,
but I wouldn't have to. Two nights after all that happened,
there was a bad thunderstorm. I woke up with the
lightning flashing and my grandmother sitting in a rocking chair
in my room. She was smiling at me and said,

(58:12):
my troubles were over with my husband and her pain
was over too. I asked her what she meant, and
she just smiled and said, magic, honey, magic. I got
up to give her a hug, but as I got
near her, she held up her hand and said, I
love you, honey. Please stay healthy for me, find a

(58:32):
new man, have kids, and eventually a granddaughter of your own.
I have to go. I love you so much. Then
she faded away, just like that, faded right out of sight.
I stood there for a second before running down the
hall to her bedroom to find her lying in bed
with a smile on her face. I touched her cold

(58:54):
hand and knew that she was gone. I cried for
the longest time before calling my oldest brother to let
him know that she had gone, and he said he
was on his way over and would call the police.
It wasn't for another two days that I had found
out that my now ex husband had died. The same night,
he was having a bunch of his asshole drinking buddies

(59:14):
over for a party to celebrate his soon divorce. I
guess they were all on our old back porch, and
he kept telling the dipshits that he saw flashing light
in the rain at the edge of the yard. Beer
in hand, he went to investigate, and all they heard
him yell in the darkness was you what are you
doing here, you crazy bitch? Then he yelled out my

(59:35):
grandmother's name, Lana, followed by a no.

Speaker 1 (59:39):
No.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
Two of the guys made official statements to that the
time of death was just before my last conversation with
my grandma, or what I believe was her spirit. I'm
forty three years old now. I have a great husband
and three kids. I have a special room where I
do all my knitting with a TV that I only
watch game shows on. I have pictures of my grandma

(01:00:03):
all over the room, pictures of her alone, pictures with
my family, and pictures of both of us throughout our lives.
When any of my kids look at them and ask
what was great Grandma like, I say, she was magic.
This is a true story, whether you believe.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
It or not.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
My Grandma was magic until the very end. Run in
with drug dealers submitted by Patrick twenty two. When I
was in high school in the suburbs of a larger
town out in the Midwest, I was a pretty decent
football player wide receiver to be exact. This has nothing

(01:00:45):
to do with the story, but I also served as
a team kicker for whatever reason. I had a good
legg and was in track, so I guess that's why
they picked me rather than having a full time kicker.
I was also a wrestler and this happened between football
and wrestling season. There was a guy on the football
team who was.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Two years older than me.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
I was a sophomore at the time, and for whatever reason,
he didn't like me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
To begin with.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Most of the guys on varsity were juniors and seniors,
but there were a couple of sophomores like myself. This guy,
I'll call Bob would harass me all the time in
practice and was a lot bigger than me. So I
just shut my mouth and took it. But the real
trouble came towards the end of the season when his
girlfriend dumped him for me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
I knew the.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
Trouble that I was bringing on myself if I started
dating the girl, but she was a year older than me,
she was super hot, and my loins couldn't say no.
Of course, that didn't go well with him. Bob was
more than pissed. He would seek me out in the
hallways and try to start fights with me, and I
kept telling him I wasn't going to fight because I
didn't want to lose my wrestling season or get into

(01:01:49):
any other kind of trouble. He would just call me
a pussy and push me, but he never threw a punch.
Friends between us told me how much he hated me,
and that he was planning on kicking my ass at
some point, and how they didn't want to get involved.
They liked us both, and they told me that they
kept trying to talk to him, but he was so
pissed that his girlfriend dumped him. I was dead meat

(01:02:10):
in his eyes.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Yes, the stupidity of youth. Get dumped by a girl
and beat up the guy she starts dating, like it's
that guy's fault anyway. Despite it being colder, I was
at the outdoor track of the high school one evening,
running to cut some weight and just stay in shape
for wrestling season. I took wrestling a hell of a
lot more seriously than I did football and was planning
on improving.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
My record that year.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
The year before I came in third in our regionals,
and this year a goal of mine was to win and.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
Go to States.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
So I was just out there as it was getting
dark and thinking I needed to wrap up my run
and get home for dinner, when I noticed a figure
step onto the track about two hundred meters away of
the four hundred meter track. Whoever it was just stood
there and was far enough away that I couldn't see
who it was. Well, when I got to that end
of the track where the gate to get to the
parking lot was, it was clear to me that it

(01:03:03):
was Bob. It was also clear that he was there
for one reason to fight me. I showed no fear
as I got closer to him and stopped about ten
feet away from him. He just looked at me and said, Okay,
fag this is it. No one else is around, no
one else.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
Needs to know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
Obviously I knew what he was talking about, so I said, look, man,
I'm not going to fight you. He called me a pussy,
and I said, look, man, I know I can kick
the living shit out of you, but that doesn't change anything.
We could both get kicked off our teams. He was
on the basketball team. I took a step to kind
of move around him, but he moved in front of

(01:03:42):
me again and said, nope, we're doing this. At that
end of the track where the parking lot was was
also the bus garage. Behind that was a dip that
went down to a little ravine where a creek ran
by our high school.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
It was usually a.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Hangout for all the heads to smoke their weed and
do their thing without prying eyes. Seeing them again, I
tried to use reason with Bob, but there he was
wanting to fight. That's when a car pulled up and
three dudes I recognized as grads like graduated from high
school three or four years ago, got out of the
car and started walking along the bus garage. I don't

(01:04:18):
think they noticed us right away, but then I heard
a noise behind me and turned slightly to see two
other older guys I had never seen before coming up
from the ravine. Had we known exactly what was going down,
I'm sure Bob and I would have run before we
finally did. But it took the two older guys finally
noticing us after the other guys met up with them

(01:04:38):
that we knew something was wrong. Without going into all
the details, we were witnessing a pretty big drug deal
for our town. We found out that later after telling
some friends.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
What had happened to us.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
As Bob and I stood there looking at them, one
of the guys noticed that we were standing on the
track and yelled over the fuck.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
Are you looking at?

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
The guy he was with said something to him that
we couldn't hear, And then all five guys were looking
at us, and even in the dark, I could see
two of them take out knives.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
I said to Bob, you're going to have to put
your fight on hold.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
He just said yep, and we started to back up
a little bit. There was no way we could go
through the gate to get to the parking lot, and
the woods at the far end of the track were
a bad idea. The only outlet for me, in my mind,
was the far side of the track. There was a
fence there that led up to the baseball fields, wide
open fields. Nowhere to hide, but up good place to run.

(01:05:37):
I certainly didn't want to mess with anyone with a knife,
and I certainly didn't want to deal with a drugged
out bunch of guys with knives. I whispered to Bob,
when need to book it to the baseball fields. I
don't think they'll be able to catch us. We started
to turn and we heard one of the guys yell out, hey, assholes,
get over here now. That was our cue to start

(01:05:59):
running and run we did. Even though Bob was bigger
than me. He had his sprint shoes on that night.
We hauled ass over to the other side of the
track as the guys gave chase to us. We cleared
the fence, got onto the baseball fields and kept running.
I turned around once to see the other guys getting
over the fence, still chasing us. We kept running until

(01:06:22):
we got up to the outside wall of the school
and ran alongside that. I hadn't even thought of my
car that I had left back in the parking lot,
and when I did, I thought, fuck it, I'll go
back and get it later. Bob actually didn't live that
far away and had walked over to fight me. Anyway,
We got to the edge of the school and ran
to the other parking lot that ran in front of

(01:06:42):
the school. We came up short about halfway as we
saw car lights staring right at us from the parking lot.
It was the two older guys, the drug dealers. They
stood there and one called out, you who get your
asses over here myself. This is not good. Then I

(01:07:03):
got a brilliant idea. I told Bob, hey, if you're
looking for a fight, I think it's standing right in
front of us. He kind of grunted, and we both
took off like rockets towards the two guys, who I
think were a little bit surprised we were running right
at them. I took one guy and Bob took the other,
and we plowed right over them. They fell onto their

(01:07:24):
asses and leather jackets, and we kept running. As we
were rolling along, I heard a loud bang from behind us,
and I swear that a bullet went right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
By my head.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
It was just this really strange whizzing sound. I can't
say for sure. All we knew is that someone had
fired off a shot, and to this day, I believe
that a bullet or something went right by my head.
Bob and I kept running to the street that led
to our school, and we crossed over it, almost getting
hit by two cars. We jumped another fence and started
running willy nilly through Bob's neighborhood, and he said to

(01:07:57):
cut over here to get to his house. I followed him,
and we finally burst through his back door, and he
led me down to the basement. His mom called out, Bob,
is that you, and he said, yeah, Mom, I'm just
down here with a friend. Oh, I guess we were friends.
At that point, we collapsed into two chairs, not saying
a word, just breathing heavily. Then we were just staring

(01:08:19):
at each other, and I piped up, holy shit, man,
did that guy shoot at us? Big Bob nodded his head.
We didn't say a word for another few minutes, and
I asked, should we tell somebody about this? He said
I don't know, should we? And I shook my head.
Those guys probably couldn't have recognized us, and I certainly

(01:08:40):
didn't want any more trouble.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
Neither did Bob.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
I looked at him again and said, you still want
to fight me? Then a big smile came over his
face and he said no, man, no. We ended up
talking for another hour or so, me blowing off dinner
and his mom bringing pizza down to us. He kept
saying how he should never even have been out there.
Had he not stopped me, I probably would have just
gotten to my car and gone home. And that's when

(01:09:06):
I remembered my car and to call my parents to
let them know where I was and that I was okay.
Bob and I ended up becoming best friends after that.
As a matter of fact, he convinced me to go
to the college that he was going to when he graduated.
We're still friends to this day. I was the best
man in his wedding and he was the best man
in mine. Funny how a terrifying time can make enemies

(01:09:30):
the best of friends. We still laugh about that night,
even though one of us could have gotten shot to
idiot guys who got unified by a larger group of
idiot guys. I've been through lots of other things in
my life, including time in the military, but that night
still stands out as one of the scariest things that's
happened to me. Thankfully, in the military, I was never

(01:09:52):
shot at that time.

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
At school was the only time. I don't recommend it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
Manhunt game submitted by Universal Jazz. Growing up in the
eighties and early nineties, we had a cool neighborhood and
played a lot of games with all the kids who
lived there. We had the normal pickup games of baseball
and football and hot box before the bus game to
pick us up in the morning, but the nighttime games
were always way more fun, stuff like hide and Seek,

(01:10:26):
Capture the Flag, and what we always just referred to
as Army. We also played a game called Manhunt, which
I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with. It's
kind of like reverse hide and Seek, where one person
hides and everyone else has to look for him or her.
Super fun as we would get into teams of two
or three and then spend time running around in between
houses of their neighborhood looking for the fugitive and hiding.

(01:10:49):
We were always coming up with new and cool ways
to hide, but there were basic rules like you couldn't
go inside a garage or a house or a shed.
Wherever you did hide, it had to be semi out
in the open. We had a creek that ran around
our neighborhood and that was a border you couldn't hide.
On the other side of that. There were woods between
the neighborhood and the creek, so a lot of times
that's where people hid. Coming up with new places to

(01:11:11):
hide was always a challenge after you've played it so
many times, but it was never a boring time when
we were playing Manhunt. The time that I'm about to
tell you happened in the fall, a couple of weeks
before Halloween. I lived in the northeast, so the sun
goes down fairly early at that time of the year,
and it does get a little cooler out, certainly not
the freezing of winter, but that time of year when

(01:11:33):
everyone is wearing sweatshirts and stuff. When we played outside,
it was a Saturday night, and a bunch of us
in our early teens decided to get together and play
some manhunt before going to one guy's house, my friend John's,
to watch a movie and have popcorn. I will say
right now that our neighborhood was fairly tight knit. Everyone
knew each other, and if families weren't good friends, we

(01:11:53):
all certainly knew everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
On a first name basis.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
This is long before the twenty four hour news cycle
of the terrors of what happens when kids play alone outside.
Back then, it was basically tell us where you're going,
stick around the neighborhood, and if you hear us calling,
get your ass home. Everyone also had their own method
of calling the kids home. My dad had a very
powerful whistle. Some families had airhorns. Other dads would just

(01:12:17):
yell at any rate. We all met in my backyard
around seven o'clock to start the first of the man hunts.
My buddy Rick was chosen, and he was never a
good Manhunter player. He always wanted to be the hunted,
but he sucked at it and we always found him
within a short amount of time. I will say this,
our version of Manhunter might not be the same as

(01:12:38):
what anyone listening might have played. The hunted could move
around if someone yelled out fugitive. That allowed them to
continue the game and made for more fun for everyone
rather than just someone hiding in the bushes. But like
I said, and I'm saying this because I know he'll
listen to this, Rick sucked. One team found him right
away and we had to change up who the man

(01:12:59):
to be hunted. I teamed up with my other friend Casey,
and there were three other teams of two, with the
odd man out being the manhunted. After Rick's flaming debacle,
my friend Jordan was going to be on the run,
so we gave him as five minutes and then all
the teams started to fan out to look for him.
Casey and I took off towards the woods near the creek,

(01:13:19):
and I figured Jordan was going to find a new
spot there. He liked the rest of us, loved to
play the game, but also liked to keep things fresh.
Some guys had their go to spots, which kind of
made the game boring. We were all wearing camouflage or
dark clothing except for a couple of people, and on
this particular night, Jordan was wearing a dark blue or

(01:13:40):
black hoodie. I think the only thing white on it
was in Adidas logo, and that caused some trouble for me.
Jordan had hid pretty well and it was about fifteen
minutes into the game and no one had found him yet.
We bumped into the other teams and they still hadn't
a clue where he was. One of the teams went
back into the housing part of the neighborhood, while and

(01:14:00):
I and the other team stayed in the woods and
along the bed of the creek. Still we couldn't find Jordan.
He was whipping our ass at this point, and Casey
and I decided to split up to maximize our hunting efforts,
but stayed within earshot. I was creeping along the bed
of the creek with the moonlight shining off the creek
when I glimpsed someone behind a big rock that I

(01:14:21):
knew had to be Jordan, dark sweatshirt. New spot had
to be Jordan. Part of the rules where you had
to stay in place until someone spotted you, and I
was beginning to think though that Jordan was breaking the
rules by moving around on us. I would be so
happy if.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
I could catch him.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
I didn't say anything as I got nearer to the figure,
and my thoughts were correct. As I got closer, the
dark shape got up and started to move towards the woods.
I kept along, being as quiet as I could, just
following and again not yelling out or anything. I was
going to prove that Jordan was a cheater. I didn't

(01:15:00):
hear anyone else around. I just kept following the dark
figure as it walked through the trails of the woods
and came up to a clearing before a bridge that
separated our neighborhood from another neighborhood in town. It was
a big bridge with a big road that had lights
all the way across it. I mean, basically it split
the village where I grew up. Going on the other

(01:15:21):
side of the bridge was certainly way out of bounds.
But that's where Jordan was heading. I was so psyched
I was going to bust him, but wanted to do
it under the lights of the bridge so everyone who
was playing would know he was a cheater. I stopped
and whispered for Casey, but didn't hear anything back, and
when I looked back at the edge of the woods,
I realized that no one else was over where we were.

(01:15:43):
I just kept following Jordan to another pile.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
Of boulders right before the bridge, but.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
I noticed he had been speeding up, so I had
to pick up the pace to catch him. When I
got to the big boulders, I knew he was hiding
somewhere amongst them, and finally yelled out, hey, asshole, you're
done cheating. From behind me, I heard something, but before
I could turn around, a forearm got me in a
headlock and started to pull me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
Towards the bridge.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):
I quickly realized this was not Jordan. This was someone
much bigger and stronger than me. I was trying to
yell and fight back because I knew this person dragging
me underneath the bridge was just taking me farther away
from my friends. The farther I was dragged away, the
less anyone would be apt to hear or see something wrong.
The guy never said anything, except one time he said,

(01:16:30):
shut up, kid, as he pulled me along underneath the
bridge towards the other side. When we got there, thankfully,
there was a group of older kids drinking beer at.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
The edge of the bridge.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
These were the kids that we all called the dirt bags,
but looking back, they were just the same as everyone else.
Funny how guys who did that stuff were looked down
upon as the bad kids, but when we all played
sports and did the same thing, we were studs. When
they saw me getting dragged along, I saw all of
them stand up with their beer cans, and one guy,
in a very harsh voice, said, what the hell do

(01:17:05):
you think you're doing. He wasn't speaking to me, he
was speaking to the guy, who then stopped dragging me
and let go of his headlock a little bit. I
was beyond terrified at that point, despite being thirteen years old.
I had no idea who this guy was or what
he was thinking, but he certainly had bad intentions if
he was dragging me along as far as he did.

(01:17:27):
I heard the guy start saying something about me being
his little brother, and he was trying to get me
home because I was late. But then I recognized one
of the guys in the gang as a dude who
lived in my neighborhood that we all liked, despite our
parents saying he was a bad kid. His name was Eric,
and he had long black hair, listened to heavy metal,
and had a really beat up Camaro that we all
thought was awesome. He recognized me right away and said,

(01:17:52):
I don't fucking think so, dude, and all the guys,
all four of them, started to come over to us.
The guy tightened his grip on my ne for a
second and then he threw me to the side and
I fell into the creek. The guy made a run
for it and got past Eric and his friends, but
when he got into the light from the other side
of the bridge, he turned to look at us, and
the hood that he had had on his sweatshirt pulled back,

(01:18:14):
and it was a guy I would say was maybe
in his thirties, thinning hair, He had a weird pinched face,
and I remember he had some teeth missing. He ran
like the wind away from us after Eric and his
friends chased him for a bit. After coming back to
me to make sure, I was okay. I was fine,
other than just being scared and soaking wet. Eric told

(01:18:34):
me to get on home and to not worry about
the guy. He offered me a beer, but I was
only thirteen and I didn't think it was a good
idea at the time. I thanked him and his friends
and started hauling my butt back to my friends. When
I got to them, I told them what happened, and
they told me Jordan had been cheating, but no one
had cared at that point. After they heard my story,

(01:18:55):
we all went back to my friend's house for the
movie and I told his dad what happened. He immediately
called my dad and made me tell him what happened,
and my dad said I had to go home. I
thought he was mad at me at first, but when
I got there we called the police to let them
know what happened. He was happy I was safe. The
police were already ahead of us. Apparently the guy had

(01:19:16):
been called on for peeping into the windows of another
house while we were playing, and then he did it
again in another neighborhood on the other side of the bridge.
After he let go of me, they picked him up,
and from what I learned, over the next couple of days.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
He was a guy who lived.

Speaker 2 (01:19:30):
In the town over from us who was considered one.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Of those weird guys.

Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
That's what we called them back then, but today we
just call him out for the pedophiles that they are.
I have no idea what happened to him after that,
but we were all scared as kids for a little
bit to be running around in the dark, despite the
fact that we knew he had been arrested. The specter
of a guy like that hanging out where kids were playing,
that's pretty spooky. Eventually we got back to playing Manhunt

(01:19:57):
and all of our other games, but there was alway
an element of horror whenever we went out at night.
Our parents changed rules for us for a little bit,
but things went back to normal not very long after. Sometimes,
when I go back to visit my parents, who still
live in that neighborhood, I'll go for a walk down
by the creek at night and kind of relive that
scary time. It sounds kind of lame as I write

(01:20:19):
this down and send it to you, but as an adult,
it really hits home how creepy some people are, how
danger really can be lurking around every corner, and how
I was super lucky that Eric and his buddies were
there to put a stop to something that probably would
have ended up very bad for me. When my kids
were growing up, I let them do their thing too.
And I hate when people say things are so much

(01:20:41):
different now, because they're not the same. Predators were out
there when I was a kid, as they were in
the seventies, the sixties, the fifties, and.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
All the way back.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
We just hear so much more about them now. Always
be safe is what I preached to my kids, and
I advise the adults of kids today to do the same.
My One Night's Stand submitted by Ash. All of those
times I thought I was invincible usually happened during my twenties.

(01:21:15):
What is it about that age that makes you think
you can handle everything and everyone? I learned the hard way.
I was visiting my sister at college. She was going
to school in a large college city, lots of bars,
lots of drinking, lots of college kids, all feeling invincible.
And there I was at a bar that I knew

(01:21:35):
nobody except my sister, drinking and laughing at strangers jokes.
Before long, I was introduced to a cute boy around
my age, possibly a little younger. My sister introduced us
and we hit it right off. I will admit the
alcohol definitely added to his personality. I was absolutely looking

(01:21:56):
through beer goggles. He was also pretty intoxicated, but I
didn't care. We were young and having fun. Before long,
he asked if I wanted to leave. I knew exactly
what that meant, and yes, I was up for it.
I didn't know anything about him, could not hear what
he was yelling in my ear at the bar. I

(01:22:17):
just thought he was cute. I know how stupid of me.
I left with him, but not before telling my sister
I was going. She couldn't really hear me through the
music and the other people talking and yelling, but I
wasn't aware of that. We went to where I do
not even know to this day. I was a complete
stranger in that town. So leaving with this guy was

(01:22:38):
stupid and dangerous. As I mentioned already, I felt like
nothing could harm me. I would learn to regret my.

Speaker 1 (01:22:46):
Decision to leave with him that night.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
I don't remember where we walked to get to his apartment.
I just remember flirting the whole way, enjoying his company.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
For what it was worth.

Speaker 2 (01:22:57):
We got to his house and it was an efficiency apartment,
one large room with a small room off of the
main room for a bathroom. The kitchen was in the
main room, not much furniture, a mattress on the floor,
and clothes left lying everywhere. I do remember. He explained
that he was with the Police Force Narcotics Division. Specifically,

(01:23:18):
he would raid drug houses weekly with his partner and
other police officers. It was dangerous and he had been
involved in many weapon exchanges. Very scary and dangerous job
for someone so young, I thought. Soon we were making
out on the mattress, getting to the business at hand.
I wasn't sure how far I wanted to go with
this guy, but the alcohol that was coursing through my

(01:23:40):
veins took over. Next thing I knew, we were lying
in bed, naked, talking and slightly dozing on and off.
I asked for a glass of water and began to
take notice of my surroundings while he went to get it.
His uniform was on the floor and there was other
police paraphernalia around that I was unaccustomed to. I began
to look at all the little things, taking notice of

(01:24:02):
who this guy was. And the alcohol was wearing off
and my alertness was coming back. Who was this guy,
I thought? As I looked about, I noticed he had
received a few accommodations for his bravery cool. He had
a lot of the typical young guy's things. Shot glasses,
alcohol bottles, some empty, some half full, and toiletries lying about.

(01:24:25):
Not much food, but scraps of what he had recently
eaten were scattered about as well.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
Typical. Right then I noticed the gun, and a knife
and another gun.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
I don't know anything about weapons, but the one closest
to the bed was very large, black and shiny. I
began to get a little frightened, I mean not terribly so,
because he was an officer of the law. Right, I
figured he knew about safety, and probably all people who
were cops had stuff like this in their home. I
was so young and naive. I took the water from

(01:25:01):
him and took a sip. He must have noticed me
looking at his things and began to talk about his job.
I asked him a question about the guns, and he
responded that most cops have some of their weapons at home.
He had gotten a few guns from his uncles, who
were also on the force, so okay, no alarms yet. Then,
as I was looking down at the floor, I felt

(01:25:24):
a metallic circle pressed against my temple. Dare me to
pull the trigger? He asked, Holy shit? I thought, what
do I say? I went blank, completely bereft of words.
Why does that happen? Time slows down into milliseconds. But

(01:25:44):
then something came to mind, and I blurted out, I've
never held a gun before. Can I hold it? Without hesitating?
He handed over the gun and I pretended to be
amazed at the weapon.

Speaker 1 (01:25:55):
In my hands. Actually I was shaking.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
I steadied my hands the best way I could, and
I asked him dumb questions that I can't even remember
this day, just to distract him. He answered, then got
up to use the toilet, and thank god he shut
the door. I quickly opened the chamber, and yes, it
was fully loaded, and now I was shaking all over.

(01:26:19):
I quickly emptied it, threw the bullets under the mattress,
and then went looking for the other guns I had
seen around the room. I did the same thing with those,
and they were all loaded, and then I sat back
down in my previous position. When he came out of
the bathroom, I explained, I had an early flight home
and had to be getting back. I mean that was
a lie. I just wanted to get out of there
as quickly as possible since the alcohol was wearing off.

(01:26:43):
We both seemed to be over the attraction we first felt.
He gladly took me to my sister's house, where I
snuck back inside. She was furious with me for leaving
with him. I didn't know it at the time, but
that was her friend's boyfriend. He never mentioned that. His
sister told me in the bar. I didn't hear her, regardless.

(01:27:04):
I told her what happened, and all she could focus
on was that I left that night with that guy
and hurt her friend's feelings. I told her that he
was crazy, but my protests fell on deaf ears. I
just went to the airport that morning, and my sister
and I did not speak for a few months afterwards. Meanwhile,
I had given that guy my phone number. Stupid, right,

(01:27:27):
but I would have agreed to anything just to get
out of his apartment that night and away from him.
I answered only three times when he called. I went
to his school very far away from him, so I
felt it was safe to maintain a phone relationship.

Speaker 1 (01:27:40):
With him.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):
The first call was a few weeks after this incident,
and he told me that he had just lost his partner.
He was drunk off his ass and explained it that
happened when they busted a drug house. His partner shot
while he was right next to him. A few weeks
later he called again and there was another death in
his unit.

Speaker 1 (01:28:00):
He was drunk again. I got the picture.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
He used alcohol to escape from the job and the fatalities,
and I could understand that to some degree. But the
gun to my head, that was a different story. That
was just scary and insane. Do I need to say
I learned a very valuable lesson that night, I would
say yes, but not entirely. Did that stop the crazy

(01:28:24):
behavior on my part? I never ever went home with
anyone I did not know or recognize after that. I
always checked with my friends before I left to make
sure they knew where I was going and who I
was with. I mean, let's be clear, I didn't make
a habit out of this, but still not a bright idea.
But I was young and infallible, right. Nope, this is

(01:28:47):
a story I tell to warn others about the danger
of doing things like that. I hope they take this
to heart and learn from my mistakes. Possible abduction submitted
by Selma S. I can't say what exactly happened, because

(01:29:08):
I'm still unsure to this day how or why it happened.
But when I was around seven or eight, my brother
and I shared a room together. I was in the
top bunk and he was on the bottom. It was
an uneventful night. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened
leading up to us going to bed. I remember waking
up in the.

Speaker 1 (01:29:27):
Middle of the night.

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):
I usually always wake up one or two times to night,
so this wasn't any different to me. I just turned
over and tried to go back to sleep. I noticed
that I was cold. I tried to tug my blanket
over me, thinking it was off and that would explain
why I was cold, But it was already on me,
and that's when I noticed I was completely naked under

(01:29:49):
my covers. At first, I thought I was just half
asleep and I was stuck in a dream. But I
quickly realized that wasn't the case, and I frantically looked
from my clothes under the blankets. They just weren't there.
I was too sleepy to freak out. At that point,
I just wanted to get some clothes on as fast
as I could without waking up anyone, let alone my brother,

(01:30:11):
maybe go back to sleep. I remember sprinting to turn
the lights on, grabbing whatever clothes I could find for
my drawers, and then booking it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):
To the restroom.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
I thought I was the only one up, so when
I heard a knock at the door, I jumped a bit.
It was my mom and she was asking what I
was doing. Too confused and a bit scared to tell her,
I just said I had to use the restroom. That
was good enough for her, so she left and we
both went back to bed. Thinking back now, I've always

(01:30:41):
used the restroom in the middle of the night. I
wonder why my mom chose that night to check up
on me. I don't know, maybe it was a mom
instinct she felt. When I got back to bed, I
laid there and I thought about it more and more.
How weird it was for me to wake up like that,
and it started to freak me out.

Speaker 1 (01:31:00):
So I walked over to my parents room and.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
I tried to wake up my mom as quietly as possible,
but she woke up with a gasp, I feel like
almost all moms do that. No matter how lately you
try to wake them up, they will always wake up
as if there's a serial killer right in front of them.
She woke up and I told her what had happened.
I know she thought it was weird too, but I

(01:31:22):
guess to make me feel more at ease, she just
walked me over to my bed and put me back asleep.

Speaker 1 (01:31:27):
I did go to sleep, and.

Speaker 2 (01:31:28):
In the morning I yanked off all my blankets and
there they were, all my clothes from the night before.
I could have sworn that they weren't anywhere in my bed,
but there they were. To this day, I'm not sure
what happened that night, and I've chalked it up to
sleep walking. I used to be a very weird kid

(01:31:48):
with a weird sleepwalking issue and scared my dad a
couple of times with it, but all of those episodes
stopped when I was about five. My parents liked to
tease me that I was abducted by aliens. Maybe I was,
who's to say otherwise. Anyways, that was probably the weirdest
thing that has happened to me ever. Hitchhiking ghost submitted

(01:32:16):
by Michael G.

Speaker 1 (01:32:19):
I'm not one who.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
Believes a whole lot in the paranormal. There are things
that can't be explained. But to believe that ghosts are
everywhere following us, waiting to either scare us or hurt us,
that's not my belief. That being said, a few weeks
ago in late January, we had a massive cold hit
us in Saint adel Quebec, Canada. It was thirty below
or more with a windshill factor that made it feel

(01:32:42):
like it was forty below. For any of you wondering
out there, celsius and fahrenheit are the same when it's minus.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Thirty or forty.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
It was like this for at least four days. When
I went out to shovel after the cold ended, it
was only four below then, and I shoveled in my
t shirt. On one of the nights where it was
really cold, I had to heat up my car for
at least fifteen minutes before going anywhere. That's if you
wanted to be comfortable while driving. I took my usual

(01:33:10):
root home from work, and I was glad there weren't
too many cars on the road. When I arrived at
my street, I saw that there was a woman where
the sidewalk turned, so instead of driving straight to my
block apartment building, I stopped beside her and asked her
if everything was all right. She was an older woman.
She was wearing a body length white winter coat, and

(01:33:31):
she had a shoulder bag and thankfully, winter boots. She
told me she'd been waiting for her ride for half
an hour, being that cold outside. I asked her if
she needed a ride. She didn't hesitate and got in.
I was happy that I had a car with heated seats.
I activated the heater in the passenger seat. With my
car being so warm for driving for twenty ish minutes,

(01:33:54):
she got comfortable pretty fast. We started with the usual chatter,
her thanking me for stopping me, saying it was only
natural because it was so cold out, and I asked
her where she thought her ride could be. She said
that she probably gave him the wrong directions or something,
because she's always doing that accidentally, and that one day
it would be the death of her. I didn't really

(01:34:17):
pay attention to her comments, as I was on the
lookout for her street name near the tim Hortons and
Vau David. It's about ten minutes north of Saint Adele
If you go by car, that is. I saw the
road and told her, hey, we're here. She was glad
and let out a little sigh. She told me to
take the next ride and her house would be on
the right. I asked her which one, because there were

(01:34:40):
maybe six houses and I didn't know which one to
stop in front of. She just said, you can let
me out here. And I looked at her and she
seemed to be startled in a way. I guess it
was just me not understanding what she was feeling or thinking,
so I didn't insist. I just pulled over and she
got out. She thanked me before closing my door, and
I I waited till she walked away a bit before

(01:35:01):
doing a three point turn. After I did, I decided
to wait until she had walked into her house, just
in case she might have slipped, and then had to
spend the rest of the freezing night outside. But I
couldn't see her anymore. I looked around in my side
view mirror, but I couldn't see her at all anywhere.

(01:35:22):
I decided to step out of my car, fearing the worst,
and then followed her footsteps to make sure she didn't
slip and hurt herself, but her footprints abruptly stopped. They
were right on the side of the road, no sidewalk,
but they didn't turn to the right as you would
expect when someone walked up to their front entrance, and
they were the same distance apart as they had been

(01:35:43):
with every step. I mean, I didn't measure them, obviously,
but the left step she took was the last. There
weren't any other steps for me to get confused with,
and there wasn't even a small ditch on the side
of the road, so it's not like her right foot
would have slipped and have her fall in. She just
wasn't there. I was freezing my ass off, so I

(01:36:03):
ran back to my car and decided to drive her
around slowly to try and see her, but I never did.
I looked for her for about five minutes more before
deciding to head back home. My thoughts immediately turned to ghosts,
but I quickly dismissed that I didn't believe in ghosts.
But what else could she have been. Once I got home,

(01:36:25):
I started looking online for articles of people that may
have frozen to death.

Speaker 1 (01:36:28):
In my immediate area.

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
I found several articles relating to such news, but not
where I live. It got me to thinking that maybe,
just maybe a soul or spirit had wandered around and
gotten lost. Maybe she was able to cross over now
that someone had given her a ride. Whatever the case,
I just don't know what happened to her or where

(01:36:50):
she went. More than lock your Doors submitted by Carol
Why this story started when I was a little girl,
but continued into.

Speaker 1 (01:37:05):
My late teens.

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
The first house my parents bought when I was five
years old. Up until that time, we'd been living in apartments,
and my parents found a house they really liked for
what I now understand was a very cheap price. I
had no idea about the history of the house at
the time, but I would find out later why the
price was so right. When we first moved in, I
really loved it. My sister and I had our own rooms,

(01:37:30):
we had a big backyard to play in, and I
was just starting school. There were new kids in the
neighborhood that became my fast friends, and it was just
so much nicer than living in the apartment we had
been living in before. I mean, this was a long
time ago, but even at that age I could appreciate
why my parents bought the house. They bought it in
August and we moved in just in time for school

(01:37:52):
to start. And around that time I started to wake
up in the night and see a woman standing in
my room. It wasn't all ghostly or anything. It looked
like a real woman with long, scraggly hairs, standing there
holding something in her hand. Even though I was scared,
I would usually just close my eyes, and after a while,
when I opened them, the woman would be gone. I

(01:38:13):
told my parents, and they told me it was just
a dream and that I shouldn't eat as many sweets
as I did before bed. Honestly, it did feel like
a dream, so I listened to them, and when I
would wake up, my room would be empty. A dream,
it must have been. But around Christmas time it happened again.
I woke up and there stood this woman in the dark.

(01:38:37):
I could see she was holding a hammer. That really
scared me, and I scream. I closed my eyes and
heard my dad running up from the basement. He'd been
down there putting together some of our toys for Christmas,
and my mom was at work at the time. She
worked an overnight shift as an e yar nurse. I
should mention that my bedroom was the only bedroom on

(01:38:57):
the first floors. Were wary about me being there or
away from my sister and them when I slept, but
I loved all the windows and begged and begged for
that room. When I heard my dad running up the stairs,
I opened my eyes and the woman was gone. My
dad came in, asking if everything was okay, what was wrong,
and he had a frantic look on his face. I

(01:39:21):
told him that the woman I had told him about
before was back in my room and it wasn't a dream.
My dad flicked the lights on instead of just standing
with the hall light on and looked down at my floor.
He didn't say anything right away, but even at five,
I looked around and saw wet footprints on my carpet.
They came and went out from my door. My dad

(01:39:42):
told me to stay where I was and turned around
and went into the hall and was gone for a minute.
He was checking the doors and windows, and also on
my sister. She had woken up from my scream all
the way upstairs. Then I heard my dad make a
phone call to my mom, and I overheard him saying
he didn't want to scare her, but something happened and
he didn't want her to not know that he was

(01:40:02):
calling the police. I couldn't make out much of the conversation,
but I did pick up on the words footprints, and
I heard him saying, I don't know all the doors
are locked. My dad did call the police, and in
the middle of the night there they were talking well.
My sister and I had hat coco in the kitchen.
The police were very nice and asked me questions about
what I saw, and I also mentioned at that point

(01:40:25):
that I had seen the woman before but had thought
it was a dream. My dad had his hand on
my shoulder and said, yeah, that is true, but at
the time he figured it was a dream. The police
looked around and then looked around outside. There wasn't much
to look at. The grass was wet, but this was
in the South and we didn't have any snow or
anything like that. The police talked to my dad again

(01:40:48):
and then left, saying to call if anything else happened.
My dad was and is a great guy, and he
knew that my sister and I were shook up. It
was about one point thirty in the morning at this point,
and neither of us could see. So my dad did
his best and made a game out of it. He
said we could all sleep in his room and watch
a video on my parents' TV. He propped up all

(01:41:09):
of the pillows to make a sort of makeshift for
it to protect us, and then he made us some
popcorn too. We all eventually fell asleep and were woken
up on my mom when she came home in the morning.
Christmas came and was awesome, and eventually all of this
was forgotten by me and my sister.

Speaker 1 (01:41:27):
But every once in.

Speaker 2 (01:41:27):
A while my dad and mom would have a conversation
that we weren't supposed to listen to. It wasn't until
later in life that he told me that they had
been talking about the owners of the house previous to
us moving in. My dad was an avid hunter and
had lots of guns he kept in a safe in
the basement. When I was a little older, I learned
that he kept on in his sock drawer, a forty five.
He would later teach me to shoot. So the years

(01:41:50):
went rolling by and nothing else happened in the house,
and my childhood was really great. All of the things
that had happened were forgotten, and my sister and I
just grew up with awesome parents, great friends. We loved
our school. We were really involved there, and it was
just a great place to live. That is until my
freshman year of college when I came home for Christmas break.

(01:42:11):
My mom had changed my room around a little bit,
but it was still a bedroom and that's where I
would stay when I was home. I still loved all
those windows. One night, during the week between Christmas and
New Year's I was talking to my new boyfriend, who
lived about an hour away. I was hoping you would
come over to meet my parents during the break, and
we were planning that visit. We talked into the late

(01:42:33):
night and eventually hung up. I got up to get
a drink of water, brushed my teeth, and was really
tired from the day, and just fell asleep with all
of my clothes on. While I laid on my bed,
sometime in the night, I heard a noise that woke
me up. Usually I slept with a radio on. I
love talk radio, and now I fall asleep listening to
your stories, Uncle Josh. But this sound sounded like my

(01:42:56):
door opening, and it was enough to wake me up.
I opened my eyes and cleared out some of the
sleep to see a woman with long, scraggly hairs standing
in my bedroom. I froze a scream stuck in my
throat that wouldn't come out. It was the same woman.
She looked a lot older, but it was the same woman.

(01:43:19):
And the shock of my life came when I saw
that she was holding a hammer in her hand. I
sat there, frozen, staring at her as she just stared
back at me. She didn't say a word, just stood
there staring at me. I started to speak, and she
raised her arm up with the hammer. Now, I screamed.
I screamed as loud as I could, and the woman

(01:43:40):
stopped raising her arm and put her other hand to
her mouth with a finger up in front of her lips,
and said it'll be over in a second. I sat
up in bed, and she sort of moved towards me,
and I heard my father running to my room. He
got there and flicked the lights on, and I could
see he was holding up his forty five. He was

(01:44:02):
also taken aback by the woman standing in my room.
For a second, nothing happened until he screamed, who the
fuck are you get away from my daughter. At that point,
he was now pointing the gun at the woman's back,
as she hadn't even bothered to turn and look at him.
Dad wasn't waiting for her to respond. He slammed his
knee into the back of her knee, and she fell

(01:44:23):
over with a yell, onto the ground, dropping the hammer.
My mother came up behind my dad, and my father screamed, Sherry,
call the fucking cops. The woman just lay there on
the ground, not saying anything but kind of crying. I'm
embarrassed to say this, and I peed my pants.

Speaker 1 (01:44:40):
I was so afraid.

Speaker 2 (01:44:42):
So my mom was freaking out as she called nine
one one, and my sister wasn't home, and the only
other thing going bonkers was my golden retriever, funnily enough
named bonkers Bonki kept trying to get by my dad
to get to me, but he was holding him back,
keeping his forty five pointed at this woman laying on
the floor. A few minutes later, the police arrived and

(01:45:02):
got the woman up and out of my room. She
didn't say anything at first, but just looked at me
with these crazy eyes and said.

Speaker 1 (01:45:10):
It would have been over in a second.

Speaker 2 (01:45:14):
I had no idea what she meant, but I think
she was inferring that she was going to kill me. Yeah,
that's a little bit of a thought to have as
a late teenager. Long story short, this woman had lived
in the house before my parents had bought it. She
had always been a disturbed young girl who never got
treatment because her parents were also really messed up. She

(01:45:36):
had once tried attacking her mother with a hammer, so
they kept her locked in a room in the house
for fifteen years of her life until other family members
stepped in and got her removed for treatment. She severely
needed that treatment. Something happened to the parents and some
other issues came up with the house, and I don't
really know what happened to them, but I know they
lost custody of the girl and they were forced to

(01:45:58):
sell the house.

Speaker 1 (01:46:00):
Now here's the kicker.

Speaker 2 (01:46:02):
This woman had been let out of a treatment facility
on her own recognissance. She was now in her early thirties,
and come to find out that when I was five,
she had actually escaped from the same place. So basically
she got out twice. And here's the other kicker. My
parents had never changed the locks on the house. This

(01:46:25):
crazy woman had remembered a spare key that her parents
had hidden somewhere outside near our back door. She had
simply just gotten the key and gotten into our house.
I mean, how fucked up is that? And how fucked
up is it that every time she came in, when
she left, she put the key back in its hidden spot.
I suppose the early lesson here is change your locks

(01:46:46):
the minute you get a new place. The police arrested her,
and the whole rigamarole started all over again, with her
not being competent to stand trial, and she was remanded
to another mental health facility. She's still there now, and
while we couldn't prove that she was going to harm
or kill me, the prosecutors made a good case that
she at least was posing a very dangerous threat, and

(01:47:08):
that she remained locked up in the facility without the
possibility of getting out again. I don't know how any
of that works, But this last thing happened about twenty
five years ago, and like I said, as far as
I know, she's still where she was. After I graduated
from college, my parents sold the place, and all of
us moved to different states. I don't think we had

(01:47:29):
anything to do with this woman personally. She was just
going back to the only place she knew where she
got the hammer. Nobody knew it was not one of ours.
Now I have my own family, and I made sure
to change the locks on both of the houses I've
lived in. My sister and I still tease my parents
for not changing the locks in the first place on
that first house. I mean, after all of this time,

(01:47:51):
we can sort of joke about it. But the truth is,
sometimes in the night, I do wake up and think
that I see that woman standing in my room. I
know she's not there, but I guess it's something that
will always be stuck in my mind and in my
dreams for the rest of my life. What happened after

(01:48:15):
Submitted by Devin O. This happened ten years ago when
I was thirteen. I grew up in the suburbs in
a neighborhood with a lot of my close friends. It
was a tight knit neighborhood where everyone knew everyone and
all the parents, if not good friends, were on a
first named basis. We were given a lot of leeway

(01:48:37):
as far as our free time because we usually just
stuck around the neighborhood. It was situated right outside of
our village, where there was a boys and girls club
we all hung out at and a creek on the
far side of the neighborhood that we all hung out
at a lot too. These were the days before our
partying in the woods and all that kind of thing,
sort of right on the edge of that time and

(01:48:58):
most people's lives where they started experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
Our little group was mixed with boys and girls, all
ranging from ages ten to fifteen. After that, most of
the older kids hung out in their own group doing
their own thing, which is the normal progression I suppose.

Speaker 1 (01:49:14):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:49:15):
We would swim in the creek in the summer in
some of the deeper spots, but this story is about
when we would get big storms and the creek would
kind of turn into a small river. Most of the
time in the summer, the creek was only about a
foot deep or so outside of the deeper swimming holes,
so there was no lazy river rafting or anything like that. However,
when it would rain, the water would rise up significantly

(01:49:37):
and there were lots of rapids, and us kids, being stupid,
would get inner tubes and whatnot and get in the
water to float down the creek. This was stupid for
a lot of reasons. All of the rains and storms
would send a lot of dead trees and branches down
our way, and like I mentioned, the rapids would get
a little crazy, lots of big rocks on both sides

(01:49:58):
of the creek as well as underwater. The normally tame
water would turn into a torrent and we would start
at a bridge and let the fast moving water carry
us down to another bridge. We'd done it a bunch
of times and no one had ever gotten hurt, but
almost every time someone had squealed to a parent, and
we all got read the riot Act of how dangerous
and stupid it was to go in the water when

(01:50:19):
it was that unpredictable. Strangely, we never got banned from
hanging out of the creek. We just got yelled at
for going down there when we knew it was a
bad idea anyway, but still did it. The last time
we did it is what I'm talking about now. There
was a group of six of us, Jay, Ben Carter,
his brother, Kurt, and Dakota. We were hanging out in

(01:50:42):
Carter's basement, just playing video games on a lazy summer
morning and talking about what we were going to do
for the rest of the day. That's when the storm
came in and we immediately got the idea if the
water got high enough to go tubing. This set everyone
in a scramble, running back to their houses in the
rain to find their inner tubes bring them back to
Carter's house. He had a pump in the garage and

(01:51:03):
we could blow up all of our inner tubes there.
All of our parents were at work, and while the
cats away, the mice certainly did play. We were getting
fired up as the rain kept coming down, and said
that as soon as the lightning and thunderstop, we would
go and check out the water and see if there
would be enough to tube. The major part of the
storm moved away and took the lightning and thunder with it,

(01:51:24):
but it kept raining. Trying to keep a low profile
so as not to let the other parents in the
neighborhood know where we were going was pretty hard. The
only way to get there was down the street, and
anyone who looked out the window would see six kids
carrying inner tubes. Wouldn't take a genius to tip them
off where we were headed, but we took the risk

(01:51:45):
and no one noticed. I should mention that Carter's little brother,
Kurt was the youngest, and he was ten. God, it's
giving me chills just thinking about this. Now, we got
down to the creek and sure enough the waters were raging,
throwing rush into the wind and yelling excitedly. We got
into the water slowly by the first bridge, and one
by one pushed ourselves out into the middle of the creek.

(01:52:07):
And again, one by one we all zipped away, yelling
and laughing as the current took us downstream. Every once
in a while somebody would fall off their tube and
stand up as the water was deep enough to tube
but still shallow enough to stand up, maybe only knee.

Speaker 1 (01:52:22):
Or hip hie.

Speaker 2 (01:52:24):
That was never the trouble. It was the current moving
super fast that would just knock you over again. And
even though it was dangerous, we were all laughing and
making fun of each other as we fell off, climbed
back onto our tubes, and made our way to the
second bridge. When we all got there safe and sound,
we sat on the side of the creek, laughing and
reliving the funnier parts of the trip where guys fell

(01:52:45):
off and couldn't get back on their tubes, all that
sort of thing. We talked about doing it another time,
but someone walking across the bridge saw us and yelled
at us that if we didn't get out of the water,
he was going to call the cops. More than one
of us yelled back the general teenage yanks stuff, fuck you,
mind your own business, and all those kinds of comments,

(01:53:05):
But we also didn't want to get busted, so we
grabbed our stuff and began walking back to our neighborhood.
This is when things went wrong. For some reason, Kurt
and Carter were fighting. Kurt kept saying he wanted to
go again, and Carter, being a bigger brother, was not
wanting to hear his whining. He kept telling him to
shut up and that we were going home. When Kurt

(01:53:27):
decided that he was going with or without any of us.
Before we knew what we could do, Kurt jumped into
the water with his inner tube and zipped down the creek.
Carter started calling him names and telling him to get
his ass out of the water, but even though we
tried running after him, we lost sight of him. At
a bend in the creek about a quarter mile before
the next bridge where we had just walked from, all

(01:53:49):
of us dropped our inner tubes and ran alongside the
creek to catch up to Kurt when we heard a
muffled scream. With the water rushing as much as it
was and the rain's still coming down, it made it
really hard to hear, but we clearly knew that he
was in trouble. When we got around the bend, we
couldn't see him.

Speaker 1 (01:54:09):
He was gone.

Speaker 2 (01:54:11):
I saw his inner tube floating quickly away and just
yelled out, oh shit. At first, we didn't know what
to do. We all just stood there until I can't
remember who of the group said we got to find him. Initially,
Carter thought maybe it was all a joke and that
Kurt had gotten on the other side of the creek
and was hiding in some bushes trying to prank.

Speaker 1 (01:54:31):
Us, But it quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:54:33):
Became obvious that that wasn't the case. All of us
were panicking, wading into the fast moving water looking for
any sign of him. We were screaming his name and
saying that it wasn't funny and to come out. Jay
and I were walking together in the water and I
was kind of holding onto his arm. That's when he
bumped into something he knew was not a rock underwater.

(01:54:55):
The muddy water was moving so fast he couldn't see anything,
but when he bumped into what whatever it was, Kurt's
arm came up to the surface. We both started screaming
and tugging at his arm. The other guys realized what
was going on and came over to help, and we
slowly dislodged Kurt from where he had gotten stuck. There
was some faint blood trickling down his temple. Jay was

(01:55:18):
in Scouts and new First Aid in CPR, and after
we dragged Kurt onto the bank of the creek, he
set to work trying to revive him. I didn't know
what to do and just stood there, dumbfounded while two
of the other guys ran to get help. None of
us had our cell phones with us. None of us
brought them into the rain or the water. I'm going
to skip ahead because I don't like to think about

(01:55:38):
much of this, but I'll just leave it and say
Kurt died. He was dead before we got him to
the side of the creek. After the police, fire department,
and paramedics got there and did their investigation, they determined
that he most likely fell off his inner tube, went
underwater and hit his head on some rocks, and then
got stuck between a couple of them. He was only

(01:56:00):
ten years old. At first, our parents didn't yell at us.
I mean, everyone was just in shock over Kurt's death.
Everybody was more numb. I mean, we knew what we
had done was stupid, but none of us thought anything
bad like this was going to happen. The police asked
a ton of questions, and our parents all came home
from work, and like I said, at first, it was
a lot of crying and sympathy, but later the anger

(01:56:22):
came out pretty freely after the initial shock. That night,
I lay on my bed just bawling my eyes out.
I was so upset that Kurt had died, but still
in a state of shock that it was me and
Jay who found him. I don't know if anyone listening
to this has ever had a friend die like something
like this, or if they've ever found a dead body,
but I tell you, it's something that stays with you

(01:56:44):
for the rest of your life. Then, on the evening
of it happening, obviously it was still super fresh in
my mind. I could hear my parents downstairs talking to
my older sister, and then both of them talking to
other parents in the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (01:56:56):
On the phone.

Speaker 2 (01:56:58):
I just lay there crying, wanting to text my friends,
but not finding the energy to do it. I finally
fell asleep, but was woken up in the middle of
the night by my phone. It was vibrating that I
had received a call. When I checked, it was from
an unknown number, so I just blew it off. As
I laid back down, it rang again and I answered it,

(01:57:21):
but no one was there, just the sound of running water.
I immediately thought it was a fucking joke and said
into the phone, this isn't funny, asshole, go fuck yourself.
I hung up and got upset all over again. My
dad came in to check on me, and though I
knew he was very pissed off at me, he sat

(01:57:42):
next to me and was very comforting. I didn't tell
him why I woke up and about the phone call,
and after he left my room, I got a text
from Jay. It just said, Hey, did you just call me?
I replied no, but someone called me. I went into
my closet so my parents couldn't hear me, and.

Speaker 1 (01:58:03):
I called him. We had both.

Speaker 2 (01:58:05):
Gotten the same phone call with the same running water
sound at the exact same time. While I was looking
out of my closet door into my room. I saw
a dark shadow move past my window. My bedroom is
on the second floor, so I had to rub my
eyes to see if I was really seeing something. I
told Jay what I had just seen, and he said,
hang on a second. And when he spoke again, he said,

(01:58:28):
holy shit, I just saw the same thing. We were
both freaking out and trying to talk each other out
of both the things we had heard and seen, but
we both knew that we had heard and seen those things.
Just then, I heard a bunch of noise outside my room,
and my parents had jumped out of bed and were
moving down the hallway. My parents went into the bathroom

(01:58:48):
and my father said what the hell, and my mother
said she was going downstairs to check what was going
on at both my house and Jay's house. Was every
faucet and every toilet or flushed or turned on at
the same time. While I was trying to tell him
what was happening in my house, he was trying to
tell me what was happening at his house. I told

(01:59:10):
him we needed to talk about it tomorrow. Even though
I wanted to run to his house right then, we
figured we should just get back into bed so as
not to make our parents think we were doing something stupid.
That's what we did, and it was a good move,
as my parents came into my room right after they
had run around the house turning all the taps off.
The next day, I asked if I could go over
to Jay's house and my parents said, okay, but nowhere else.

(01:59:34):
That was a rule going on in every one of
our houses. We were allowed to go to one another's homes,
but absolutely nowhere else. We also had to call our
parents the minute we got there and the minute we
were leaving to come home. We all ended up at
Jay's house except for Carter for obvious reasons. And this
is where it gets even more fed up. The same

(01:59:57):
thing happened to all of our friends that night. They
all got phone calls on their cells, and all of
our faucets and toilets had turned down or flushed at
the same time. The exact same thing happened in every house.
We later found out that it didn't happen at Carter's house.
We sat in Jay's backyard not knowing what to say,

(02:00:18):
and we all promised not to say anything to Carter
or his family. But we all wondered if it would
happen again. It didn't, and the next few days were
a blur of getting ready to put little Kurt to rest. Obviously,
Carter was a mess for a long, long time. We're
still friends to this day, and I know he is
still hurt by all of this. I mean, we all are,

(02:00:39):
but it was his little brother. Now here's the last
weird part. The water thing started happening to Carter, I
mean all the time, but not to us. Every month
of the same day number when Kurt left us. Wherever
Carter is, all the taps turned on and the toilets flushed.
No matter where he is, It's happened to him in

(02:01:02):
his home. It's happened to him when he was at
summer camp much later in life. It's happened at his
grandparents' house. It's happened to him in hotel rooms. It's
happened when he stayed over at a friend's house. I'm
now twenty three years old as I'm typing this. I
have no explanation for why this happened to me and
Jay and my friends, and all we can chalk it

(02:01:23):
up to is that maybe it's Kurt's way of showing
us that he was asking us for help. As for Carter,
maybe it's a way of reminding him that he wasn't
being the big brother he should have been and stopped
Kurt from going in the water.

Speaker 1 (02:01:37):
I don't know, and I.

Speaker 2 (02:01:38):
Guess I'm rambling at this point. All I know is
is that this still happens to Carter. He's gotten used
to it, but I know it still bothers him very much.
I know he'll never get over losing his brother kind
of the same way we feel, as we all treated
him like our little brother.

Speaker 1 (02:01:55):
Every month.

Speaker 2 (02:01:56):
I hope it's the last month that this happens to
Carter and that Kurt finally lets go. Dakota was always
the weird one in our group and always into weird
shit and said we should have some kind of seance
or whatever when we were younger. He wanted to see
if we could contact Kurt to ask him to stop,
but none of us believed in that stuff. Like I said,
I just hope it ends soon for Carter's sake. Wherever

(02:02:20):
you are, Kurt, rest in peace, little buddy. We all
miss you, and we all wish to God we had
moved faster and stopped you from getting into the creek
so many years ago.

Speaker 3 (02:02:31):
We love you, man, Hey Yang, thanks for listening to
this episode. If you have a true scary story of

(02:02:52):
any nature that you'd like me to narrate, email it
to Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com.

Speaker 1 (02:02:59):
I read them.

Speaker 3 (02:03:01):
And if you have a true scary story about Halloween,
please send that in immediately. Looking forward to another great
Halloween extravaganza this year. Follow me on social media. Links
to that are in the description. And if you're catching
this on YouTube and you'll like what you heard and saw,
why not give it a thumbs up leave a comment.

(02:03:21):
I'd love to know what you thought of the stories.
And if you're not a subscriber, hey, become a subscriber today.
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Everyone be excellent to each other and until next time,
be wary of things that go bump in the night.

(02:03:42):
It could be anything a ghost, a monster, or a
guy next door.