True Scary Stories Volume 72

This episode of True Scary Stories takes you deep into the shadows where danger lurks in many forms. From chilling brushes with the paranormal, to eerie run-ins with cryptid creatures and ordinary people with sinister intentions, these stories remind us that sometimes the unknown is closer than we think. These are real experiences from those who have come face-to-face with forces, both seen and unseen, that will leave you questioning what’s really out there.

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. Ex Husband Haunting
by Elna g. This story is true. Not one item

(00:28):
about it has been changed or exaggerated. I'm relating it
exactly as it occurred to me due to a paranormal
experience that happened to me about five years ago. I
spent two years as an apprentice to a psychic. What
do you think we're all born this way? I'm really
a normal person other than this particular eccentricity. I work

(00:52):
in medical research and I'm actually quite happy at it.
But that's another story. If anyone ever wants to hear
about it, the apprenticeship, that is, I'd be glad to
share it. It seemed like frequently that whenever we would
have a lecture in class on a particular topic, I
would have a practical problem presented to me through no

(01:12):
effort on my part and very little option available to
me as to whether I wanted to turn it down.
It was almost like having a laboratory to the lecture,
only in metaphysics. It was very weird. We had a
lecture on ghosts, entities as they're known in the trade,
and what to do about them. I remember being buggy

(01:34):
and disinterested in class, thinking that I would never have
a practical use for that stuff. I just figured nobody
got haunted anymore. But I came to find out very
differently that very weekend. That Friday, I had taken off
from work as a vacation day, intending actually just to
hang out and do nothing. An older friend of mine

(01:56):
dropped by and off the coff asked me out to dinner.
During dinner, he mentioned that he would like to visit
his daughter and her family, who lived in an older
section of Detroit. He mentioned that his daughter had since remarried,
but that she had had a bad time the last
two years. Apparently her first husband, David, had become increasingly

(02:17):
mentally unstable, with the usual scenario of threats, physical abuse, kidnapping,
the kids, the whole nine yards. He sounded like a
fun guy, and she finally managed to divorce him, but
as you can guess, that only escalated the situation. His
enduring fixation was his son, who was then turning three

(02:40):
years old. Attempts to kidnap him and or threaten to
kill the child in himself for things they had to
deal with every day. Police and injunctions proved irrelevant and
he was finally diagnosed schizophrenic and hospitalized a number of times.
There wasn't anything that had much effect on him. The

(03:01):
whole thing finally culminated in his breaking into their house
one day while they weren't there, and they were supposed
to be, of course, but he put a forty four
magnum in his mouth and pulled the trigger. End of
his story, or so I thought. When we arrived at
the house, it was in an uproar. The house itself

(03:23):
was one of those huge houses they used to build
in the suburbs of big cities that was so big
that it had been split into a duplex. Nothing particularly creepy,
just lots of wood cabinet space, two floors in an attic,
probably built in the twenties. The next door neighbor had
just that morning left the house in her night clothes.

(03:44):
She left oli her belongings, including her kids, inside the
house and absolutely refused to go back. She left her kids.
It sounded like her elevator didn't go all the way
up to the top with that one, I thought. She
he said she had seen a blonde, longish haired man
at the top of her stairs. The main problem, however,

(04:06):
was that he had a hole in his head, a
big hole, with his eyes all sunken back in what
looked like blood all over him. Apparently that hadn't been
the only occurrence, just only the last, and a long
list of incidences. The little boy claimed to have seen
his father a number of times next to his bed,

(04:27):
and always at night. Things around the house had been
broken as if thrown, and worse still, small fires had
broken out under mysterious circumstances. In one instance, a portrait
of Elvis had been torn off the wall and thrown
across the room, shattering the glass and leaving holes in
the wall. Apparently this woman's ax had been incredibly jealous,

(04:51):
but I couldn't say I blamed him on that one.
The family was in a panic. They were planning to move,
but couldn't move yet. I would have been out of
there so fast that would have broken records. The woman
actually called the church for help, but the Catholic priest
the daughter called just laughed at her when she said
she needed an exorcist and hung up on her. Suspecting

(05:16):
what was going on, the daughter had taken a picture
of David to the neighbor, who was at a hotel
the woman went into hysterics and had to be taken
to the er and sedated. It was the same man,
of course, just without the ventilation job he done on
his head. She asked me if somehow I knew of

(05:36):
anyone who could remove this whatever it was. Oh, for
Pete's sake, I thought somebody up there really has a
sense of humor. I told her, well, yes, fully intending
to recommend her to my teacher. I really had no
intention of getting involved with it. I was just a
student and this wasn't my specialty. Anyway, it sounded to

(05:58):
me like this guy was dead serious. I'm sorry for
the punt, and far more powerful than I wanted to
mess with. My teacher had impressed that on us, you'd
better know what you're doing and be completely confident in
your abilities before you dive into anything. I wasn't convinced
that I was either of those. I was about to

(06:19):
give the woman my teacher's card when she told me
that there had been further complications. Her little boy had
come to her after a nap that afternoon in hysterics,
bleeding from the mouth and gums. He gave a garbled
story about his father wanting him to go with him,
and the child refused to go back in his room
for any reason. He showed the most sense I'd seen

(06:41):
in the family. Yet that did it. I reasoned that
if this guy, this asshole, had that much balls, then
there was no accounting for what he might do between
now and the time my teacher could get there. So
I was sort of beholden to do something right then, ever,
thinking this is just great. I'm shaking just remembering this happening,

(07:04):
so bear with me. One of my strongest abilities lies
in feeling or sensing the presence of spiritual entities. It's
kind of like passing a magnet through iron filings. I
kind of get oriented towards it. So I know I'd
be able to locate this guy, and the big question was, though,
of course, his removal. The power to do these things

(07:28):
exists in the mind, which can be as powerful or
as weak as you tell it to me. Building up
the energy and keeping it pumped up can be difficult,
and I had never applied it to this kind of
problem before. However, the thought of that little boy being
harmed forced me to try. The trick is this Essentially,
what you do is try to make it uncomfortable for

(07:51):
the entity to continue living in a place, and then
persuade it to go to the light. At that point,
it has to make its own choice as whether it
should go across or whether it wants to stay where
it is. Sometimes these people just don't know they're dead.
Other times they're so bound to unfinished business that they
stay to finish it, seemingly like this guy was. The

(08:15):
fact that this guy was severely mentally disturbed when he
died didn't help my confidence levels any The first thing
we did was have a prayer vigil in the kitchen
while I went around and mentally covered everything with ultra
violet light. This is God's color and He is the light,
so nothing can penetrate such a shield. I covered everything,

(08:37):
the house and family, the pets, the appliances, their cars, everything.
We then went down to the basement, which was open
to both apartments, and we blessed all the doors and windows,
all of them with olive oil. In Jesus's name. I mean,
whether you believe in him or not, he was one
extremely spiritually powerful person and negative entities don't like him.

(09:01):
They can't stand him. So we went through the entire house,
both sides laboriously blessing every door, window and mirror in
the house, and all the while I was building up
the energy to make the place as light filled as possible.
The place seemed cool to me in the basement, even
though it was kind of old and creepy. But as

(09:23):
we went farther and farther upstairs, I started feeling more
and more aware of the energy being pulled into the
attic and knew where he was. And he definitely knew
where I was and that I was coming to get him.
I was fervently hoping he'd split before I got there,
but the thought of that little boy really forced me

(09:45):
to stay with it. I mean, how can you tell
this without sounding crazy. I had come to the conclusion
that I had come there that day for a reason
and to just go with things. The sense of presence
was strongest, of course, in the little boy's room, which
had a trap door in the ceiling up to the attic.
The whole front of my body was tingling, particularly my

(10:08):
face and nose. I could palpably sense the misery, hatred,
and insanity coming from just above me. How I managed
to get up there and that trap door open, I
have no idea I was running on adrenaline, but at
the same time I wasn't really frightened. I'd gathered my

(10:29):
guides and angels around so tightly I think I nearly
glowed in the dark at that point. I honestly think
I really was in an altered state. Something fell or
flew from somewhere and landed at my feet. It was
a headless, naked child's doll. I remember thinking coolly, huh,

(10:50):
how cliche, And another level, I was wondering how I
had gotten myself into this. In the corner, it was
absolute blackness and what I was looking for this I knew.
Someone began speaking, and after a second I realized it
was me. Now, David, you know that you really have

(11:14):
no place here. You're dead, and your family needs to
go on with their lives, particularly your little boy. Let go, David,
I know you're miserable. Let go and go to the light.
There is peace there. Wouldn't you like that. My guides
and angels are here to take you there. Go with them.

(11:37):
This house is completely protected now everything, and I'm sure
it's very uncomfortable for you. If you don't go, you
know who I'll invoke. So go with the guides. Now. Ultimately,
my feeling for this poor lost soul was one of pity,
and I can't express to you the level of misery

(11:59):
and pain exist in it. Suddenly I got a sense
of release of tension, almost like a wind blowing, and
the room became somehow less menacing, less dark. I stayed
there for a minute longer, just until I was sure
I wouldn't fall down the ladder trying to get down,
and then my analytical mind kicked in and responded by

(12:22):
wanting to pass out. When I got back down, I
told the family that he was gone, but they would
have to believe that he was gone and reinforce that daily,
where all my light work would disintegrate and he would
come back. That's the thing about this kind of work.
If they don't go to the light and you don't

(12:43):
reinforce your shields, they can come back. They haven't had
any other problems in that house for quite some time,
although I had heard from a friend later that David
did come back, so apparently he still has not found peace.
The next door neighbor she never set foot in that
house again. So there you are. Sometimes I wonder if

(13:07):
it actually happened, and uncomfortably the answer is always the same.
Other strange things have happened to me as a psychic student.
The thing is, I'm not even half trained yet. It
makes me wonder what's next. The Things You See in

(13:32):
the Woods by mister Redmond. First of all, let me
start off by saying that this story is from almost
thirty years ago, when I was a kid. I've told
very few people the story, dude to not feeling like
anyone would believe me. Like a lot of kids in
the nineties, I was hanging out over a weekend with

(13:52):
a close friend of mine and staying at his house
with him and his family. We lived in rural Virginia
and he lived in a small town like I did.
We spent a lot of time riding four wheelers and
exploring the nearby woods that were across a soybean field.
One weekend I was visiting and it had snowed an
average amount for Virginia, four to six inches or so.

(14:16):
We were beyond excited to take the four wheelers out
to the field and tear it up a little bit.
And after we were bored of that, we parked at
the edge of the woods and walked in a ways.
Now we'd been in the woods quite a bit and
had seen a lot of things. There was a lot
of old equipment and even old rusted out cars spread
throughout an area of the forest. Being teenagers, we thought

(14:38):
this was really cool and would often go check those out.
That day, we decided that we were going to start
building a ford of sorts back near the debris. I
often carried a small hatchet on me when we were
riding trails in case a smaller tree fallen across the trail.
I walked back to the four wheeler and got it
and started to chop down a smaller tree to use

(14:59):
as the base a wall. For the life of me,
I could not find another tree of the right size
after that one was placed, so I started walking around
the area without my friend. It was then that I
stumbled upon a rotting deer carcass That didn't bother me
growing up in rural Virginia, I mean, friends and family

(15:19):
were hunters, and I had eaten my fair share of
venison in my life. However, I noticed that the deer
had what appeared to be claw marks on it. Was
this prey for another animal that didn't stick around for
its meal, and what kind of animal could catch a
deer out in this forest. I went to get my
friend to show him the carcass, and he was as

(15:41):
puzzled as me. Well, we just kind of let it be.
I returned to building our fort, and as I was
using some rope to tie two of the smaller trees together,
something caught my eye about fifty yards away. What I
saw was just the silhouette of a person. However, it
was rounded off and blurry, almost like what you would

(16:01):
see in a comic book or video game, indicating an
unknown character. Startled, I simply yelled, hey at it. It
was then that it darted behind a tree, and I
was now acutely aware that we were not alone. I
yelled for my friend and he came walking over and
I let him know what I had just seen, and

(16:23):
he laughed it off. But as he was laughing, I
stood up from my squatting position and saw the same
shadow over his shoulder, no more than ten yards away.
I screamed, oh shit, and immediately took off running for
the field. As I yelled at my friend to follow,
I heard him following me and his footsteps growing closer.

(16:45):
But then I heard his footsteps going farther away. I
turned and looked, and he had split off onto a
different path, And at that point I really didn't care
and just kept running. As I reached a large ditch
that was roughly five feet or so deep, I just
jumped across it in a panic. And I later discovered
how far of a jump that was and have no
idea how I cleared it. As I reached the field

(17:09):
and got out of the woods, I saw my friends
standing about thirty yards down the line, of them, hunched
over and breathing heavily. I checked behind me and saw nothing,
and I started to walk towards him and asked, you
saw that, writ, to which he responded, why do you
think I'm out of breath. We jumped down the four
wheelers and headed back towards his house, not saying a word.

(17:33):
When we got back, I asked him what he saw,
because I wanted to know if it was the same
thing that I saw. He described it perfectly, and we
tried to talk to his parents about it, but they
both just laughed it off and said, and guess you
better stay out of those woods. He had the idea
to go talk to his grandmother, who lived a couple
of blocks away, and had lived in town her whole life.

(17:57):
We asked her if she had ever heard anything strange
about the woods over there. She then began to tell
us about an old sawmill that had exploded back in
her time. She said how much of a tragedy it was,
and that nearly everyone had lost their life. That explained
the old equipment had explained the old cars rusting out.
They had cleaned up parts of the accidents, likely the

(18:19):
dangerous ones had just left the rest. We then told
her our story, to which she just smiled and told
us how people don't realize that we aren't alone in
this world. Absolutely horrified at that point, we left. Neither
one of us ever returned to those woods. My hand
axe is still sitting back there somewhere. I had terrible

(18:43):
dreams for years about the incident, and still, thirty ish
years later, have a random dream about the incident from
time to time. And I don't know what we ran
into that day, but I'm certainly not going back to
check parking lot. Incident by Anonymous A few nights ago,

(19:10):
I had gotten up in the middle of the night
to get some water after waking up coughing. As I
walked into the kitchen. I saw the time on the
microwave and it was around two AM. As I poured
water into my glass, I heard car doors slamming outside
the front room window. I live on the first floor
of an apartment building near the main entrance. As I

(19:31):
walked back to my bedroom, just out of curiosity, and
I'm still not sure why I looked, since I'm not
a really nosy person, I looked out from behind the
curtain and saw a silver sedan with its lights off
but running and just sitting at the front steps to
the main entrance of the apartment building. Two women had

(19:52):
just gotten out of the car and were talking to
the person behind the wheel through the still open front
passenger side door. I didn't have the window open, so
I really couldn't hear them. The two women looked about
middle aged, both dressed in black coats and black dresses
that went to just below their knees. They had dark
shoes on, and both wore beret like hats. The strange

(20:14):
part was they both wore sunglasses and it was the
middle of the night on an overcast and drizzly night
at that The only light came from the light above
the doors of the entrance to the lobbryary of the building,
and I also found it strange that there was no
light on inside of the car, because normally the interior

(20:35):
light goes on when you open your car doors, and
I guess maybe it just wasn't working. After about five minutes,
one of the women walked into the apartment building and
I could hear her walking down the short flight of
stairs to my level and then trying to open the
door to the hallway just outside the door of my apartment.
You'd need a key to open it. She tried pulling

(20:58):
on it a couple of times, and then I heard
her walking back up the flight of stairs and go
back outside of the car and her companions. By that time,
the other woman was back in the front seat of
the car, and I couldn't make out the driver at
any time. I saw the woman open the door to
the back seat behind the woman in the front seat,

(21:19):
and before she got into the car, I saw her
gaze more directly towards where I was standing hidden behind
the curtains. I couldn't tell if she was actually looking
at me because she had the dark sunglasses on, but
it felt like it, and the hair on the back
of my neck stood up for some reason as she
got into the car. Strangely, I noticed the body of

(21:42):
the car noticeably dropped slightly, as if something extremely heavy
was being put into the car, but it was just
the woman getting in and slamming the door behind her.
The car sat there for another few moments, and I
could barely make out the three figures in the car,
but they appeared to be completely motionless. Then, suddenly, causing

(22:04):
me to jump slightly, the car pulled forward and drove
slowly out of the parking lot without turning the lights on.
The car paused again for a moment before pulling onto
the empty street. Then it turned left slowly and then
just drove off down the street again. I'm not sure
that there's anything paranormal or scary about this incident, but

(22:25):
it definitely didn't feel all that normal to me either,
and left me feeling a bit weirded out and took
me a while before I was able to fall back
asleep that night. Secret Possession in the Family by Skyler.

(22:49):
Growing up, I heard stories about how my mom was
a little odd for a few years when she was
a kid. These stories were always short and intriguing, but
extremely mist serious to me. I would be told a
story one day and the next day they would say
it was never true. However, over the years, I felt
like I found so much evidence that it's hard to

(23:10):
believe there isn't some sort of truth behind it all.
My grandma said when my mom was around four or five,
she would have these spells where she would sit legs
straight out, with her back facing this mirror that was
built into their trailer at the time, and just blankly
staring at the distance. She said she would go up

(23:31):
to my mom and shake her, yell at her, literally
anything she could do to get my mom back to reality,
but she said she would just stare back. She always
described it as my mom looking through you instead of
looking at you. Obviously, as parents, their first concern was
that she was having seizures or some sort of neurological condition,

(23:54):
so they allegedly took her to the doctor to get
some scans done. My grandpa would tell me that my
grandma was crazy and liked to exaggerate stories. But about
three years ago I found a polaroid in my grandparents
basement of my mom the same age as the story,
lying on a hospital bed with wires hooked up to
her head. I asked my grandma about it, whose memory

(24:18):
isn't always the best, but she tries, and she said
they must have cleared her because they never went back
for that again. They went home, but the spells continued.
A cousin of ours, who was about five years older
than my mom, said she remembers her telling the other
kids that she was scared of the monsters in the mirror.

(24:39):
My mom's older brother remembered sitting next to her and
holding her hand while she would have those episodes. He
said he wasn't afraid of her, but he was scared
for her. I can't get many valid stories out of him, though.
Every time I ask, he just describes the Exorcist movie.
So many people that were around back then remember being

(24:59):
freaked out by her, but no one could tell me
exactly how or why they felt like that. Keep in mind,
my mom remembers little to nothing about her childhood until
about age six or seven, so I can't confirm any
of this with her or I would have. The story
that truly made me believe that this might have been

(25:21):
a possession of some sort was one day they were
having Bible study in the living room my mom included
when the radio came on, shouted shut up, and turned
right back off. This was not a time of Syrian Alexa,
where people could fake their way into scaring people. This
was the late eighties and the family was poor. There

(25:43):
were multiple people there, and I've had a lot of
them tell me they fully remember it happening. My grandpa
he was always one of those tough guys with tattoos.
You never see him cry, and he knock out anyone
who came after his own. But something happened one day
where he ran out of the house and left my
mom there alone. He apparently ran to a neighbor's and

(26:07):
said he wasn't going back in there by himself. In
the twenty two years, I was blessed to spend with
my grandpa. I had never seen him be afraid of anything,
and he never told me what he saw, and it
drives me insane that I'll never know what happened that day.
I'm not exactly sure what the correlation was, but my

(26:28):
mom was given a teddy bear once and apparently all
of this started happening after that. They ended up having
a pastor come cleanse the house, and the teddy bear
and everything came to an end with my mom. After that,
she was back to the normal little girl they had
known and loved once again. I didn't know any of

(26:48):
this until I was about ten, and of course I
asked what they ended up doing with the bear, and
I remember her pointing at my closet and saying, it's
up there, so casually, I haven't been unknowingly sharing a
space with her possessed bear my entire life. I was
already very interested in the paranormal. I mean I watched

(27:09):
all the ghost shows. I thought Zach Baggin's was the Shed,
and I knew I was connected with spirits in some
way somehow. When I found out about my mom, I
became obsessed with figuring out what the hell was going
on with her during her childhood. In the last ten years,
she has remembered a couple of reoccurring dreams she used

(27:29):
to have. They aren't necessarily scary, but I find them unsettling.
The first one, she said, she remembered being on a
hospital bed with a bunch of people surrounding her. She
described her skin as being the texture of a bagel,
and the people around her would continuously poke her with needles.

(27:50):
The second dream, she remembered just sitting with her arms crossed, humming,
not a song, just a flat tone and rocking back
and forth intensely. And that was it. Flash forward to
my teenager and adult years. I had had more paranormal
experiences than almost any one I'd ever met, and I'm

(28:11):
talking everything from Little Knox to Mimick encounters. I can't
help but wonder if somehow this is all connected, or
maybe the things that have happened to me are a
result of what happened to my mom. I'm so confused
about it all, and I've been trying to connect the
dots for years, but there's so much to unpack. Funny story.

(28:34):
Last night, my mom and I were setting up for
a yard sail and we had a special guest to
make a surprise appearance, the bear. Tonight, my mom had
a little bit of an accident and ended up cutting
her foot pretty badly, resulting in blood all over the floor.
I mean, probably not related, but isn't that a weird coincidence?

(28:54):
The day after finding the bear, I'm going to bring
the bear back to my house and keep tabs on
it for a little while. This origin story about my
mom's possession constantly runs circles around my head and sometimes
I feel like I'm Dalton from Insidious. If you've made
it this far, thanks for listening to my ted talk.

(29:17):
I hope you have a wonderful and spooky day. Werewolf
in Colorado submitted by Anonymous. I'm from Colorado Springs, Colorado,

(29:37):
and this story happened to me when i was about
thirteen years old and I'm twenty three now, so ten
years ago one evening, my brother, his friend and I
decided to drive up to this area that has a
cool view of the city and it's right next to
a church. The area is more developed now, but back
then the area to the east of the church was

(29:58):
the foothills, with only one how built there about a
half mile east of the church. The church itself overlooks
the city in the rocky mountains. Of course, it's built
on a foothill, and below the hill is a neighborhood
as well to the immediate south, north, and west of
the church. Our neighborhoods no more than a quarter of
a mile away in each direction except east. The overlook

(30:20):
is looking towards the southwest. Anyway, The area is somewhere
we'd gone before with friends because the overlook to the
southwest before the neighborhood begins as an area that's very
shrubby and rocky. We go exploring down there and hang
out in this cave type area. We were kind of
board teenagers, but on this night, my brother, his girlfriend,

(30:44):
and I decided to just go park up there and
enjoy the view and hang out. We'd only been there
maybe a few minutes, and I decided to get out
and have a cigarette. I got out and walked to
the back of my brother's car and then turned back
toward the view. Something caught my eye to the right
of the car. There was something there about fifteen or

(31:07):
twenty feet from his car, and it was moving towards it.
It looked like a huge black dog, but blacker than
the night because I could see its outline. It was
like the size of a wolf, but much thicker. I
got scared because it was only about twenty five feet
away from me. I took a lighter out of my

(31:29):
pocket and started to flick it, thinking maybe i'd scare
it away. And this all happened in about twenty seconds. Then,
as this thing was moving or walking, it morphed up
into a human shape. I was standing there scared, like,
what the hell is this when I heard a voice
behind me say, hey, you you're not allowed to be

(31:51):
up here. You need to leave. Two men from the
church were walking over to us. I guess they had
problems with people hanging out up there, and anyway, when
I looked back, the thing wasn't there. I got back
in my brother's car and we left. Another one of
the times we were hanging out in that area, near

(32:12):
the lookout, down in the shrubs and stuff, my best
friend saw something. We were playing hide and seek at
night up there with about five or seven of us,
and we were walking through a bunch of scrub oak
and my best friend, who was in front of me,
stopped walking in froze. She said that standing in front
of her was what she could only describe as a werewolf.

(32:36):
She always saw things. I rarely saw them, but more
so felt them. But anyway, I always wondered if what
she saw and what I saw were somehow connected. I
don't really know if werewolves exist, but we both saw
something strange out there in Colorado. Church Stones by Rachel h.

(33:08):
My ancestors are romani on my mother's side, and I
suppose that may explain why I've always had this sensitivity.
I've had many experiences of the supernatural, and I'm used
to it now, and I do accept it's a part
of me. It was Christmas in the late seventies as
seventy eight, as I recall, and I was ten years old.

(33:29):
My father was a builder, and he saw an advertisement
in the Manchester paper about a two hundred year old
church about to be demolished. The natural stone was for sale.
My mother had been hinting at one of those fireplaces
with a mini bar for our living room, which was
very in vogue then, so he procured the stone and
set about building it. The first night after it was finished,

(33:54):
my mother was awoken by a noise that sounded quite
low key, with many voices speaking and indeed singing in
what appeared to be a foreign language. She told me
she looked at the bedside clock and it was a
little after midnight. Thinking that one of us had left
the TV or the radio on, she proceeded to go downstairs,

(34:16):
and at the bottom of the stairs she realized the
voices were speaking and singing in Latin. My mother knew that,
having been brought up in a convent in Ireland. Although
quite frightened, she opened the door and the voices, which
by now were reaching a crescendo, abruptly stopped. There was

(34:36):
no TV or radio left on. My mother recalls that,
in her words, the room was as cold as a morgue,
and feeling understandably shaken up, she ran up the stairs
and on passing my bedroom, I was to be heard
shouting in my sleep in Latin, which, being brought up
in Sulford, I couldn't possibly have any knowledge of. My

(34:58):
mother came in to comfort me in that scenario proceeded
to occur for another week. I became ill and told
my mother and father I was having terrible nightmares about
two sets of people and hooded cloaks pulling me from
one end of the living room to the other. I've
always been a lively child, and the change in my

(35:19):
personality suddenly became significant. The local parish priest was called
for and he was under the impression I was speaking
in tongues, and he immediately blessed the house, and those
things never happened again. Perhaps what we were experiencing were
lost souls and they just needed some guidance. I like

(35:41):
to think they're now at peace. It was only the
beginning of my encounters with the other side, but I
find a certain serenity from it all. It's nice to
know there's something more, don't you think. Mapleton Mountain by

(36:04):
oz Girl. The spookiest place I've ever lived was in
a tiny place called Mapleton Mountain. I was around twenty.
There were heaps of strange things that happened to me there,
But as there is too much to tell all at once,
I'll just focus on the accident we had coming down
off the mountain to Namboor. We my boyfriend, our friend

(36:27):
and myself went in our friend's Tudor Uc torana Is.
We weren't too keen on taking the Valiant anymore after
another weird incident that happened in it previously. At this time,
there were another two cars on the road, one in
front of us and one behind. All of a sudden,
the car lost all control. The steering didn't work and

(36:51):
the brakes didn't work, and we were coming on to
a thirty kilometers per hour bend. We hit the embankment
and we all had our hands in front of our
face because we were about to go through a giant
wall of dirt. The dirt wall disappeared on impact, and
the brake suddenly kicked back in. We stopped right on
the verge of the cliff. For want of a better word,

(37:14):
I had been sitting behind my boyfriend and we both
looked over on to the ground. One wheel was over
the edge of the cliff, but we had stopped. No
sooner than we'd breathed a sigh of relief, the car
toppled down the side, rolling over and over nine times
in total, and hit every rock on the way down.

(37:36):
I remember sitting right back in my seat and watching
glass from the side windows fly past in both directions,
and hoping upon hope that none of it would hit me.
But I didn't see the beam of wood our friend
was using to hold down the spare tire flying for
my head. Luckily our friend did else I wouldn't be
here today. But anyway, we came to a stop at

(37:58):
the bottom. We all rashed back up to the l
antenna to the side of the road, half expecting the
car to blow up. It took a while for me
to figure out how to get out because I was
dizzy and in the back seat of a two door
car that was sitting on its roof. But I did
notice that none of the windows were missing. The glass
was still in place, cracked and smashed, but it had

(38:22):
been held there by the tint. I still to this
date don't know why I saw a glass flying past me.
The car behind us had stopped, but not the one
in front. When we got to the top of the embankment,
we told the man from the car behind what had happened,
and he said that he had lost his brake since
steering too. Not only that, but he saw the wall

(38:45):
of dirt rise up out of nowhere and go again.
And then he told us that after we'd stopped on
the verge, he saw the whole back end of the
turanna get lifted and thrown over the edge. We ended
up seeing the man from the car in front of
us the next day, and he too said he lost
his breaks in steering. He said he tried to stop

(39:08):
when he saw us go over the edge, but he
couldn't because something had control of his car. Whenever we
went to the pub after that, everyone would clear out.
They thought we were ghosts, which I still find funny.
Apparently no one's ever survived going over Mapleton Mountain before,
but I can't vouch for that. We found out later

(39:31):
on that that might have been a ghostly reenactment of
a previous car race years before between two teenage boys.
The boy in front didn't see his friend go over
the edge and roll over the cliff to his death.
But why we lived when that boy died, I don't know. Incidentally,
the date of that day was Friday, the thirteenth of

(39:53):
January nineteen ninety five. My creepy true Craigslist roommate experience
by just an average Jess trigger warning. I speak briefly

(40:13):
about past abuse and the roommate experience contained sexual elements. Okay,
So I found a room to rent on Craigslist, and
this was about fifteen years ago, when it was still,
you know, kind of safe. When I met the gentleman
who owned the home, I made it very clear I
was just looking for a safe room to rent and

(40:35):
that I was not interested in a relationship of any kind.
That also brought my mother with me for safety. I
needed to find a place pretty quickly, so I moved
in the next day. Everything seemed fine for the first
week or so. It was clean, there were no other roommates,
and we seemed to get along well, but then he

(40:57):
started to act kind of strange. I also started to
find weird things around the home that I hadn't noticed
at first. Don't worry, I'm beginning into all that in
a second. He did have his seizure disorder, but that
would only leave him temporarily unable to speak for about
ten seconds. He could still move around and operate a vehicle,

(41:18):
et cetera. The seizure didn't make him convulse, he just
appeared dazed for a few minutes. I chalked up the
slightly erratic behavior too, just a symptom of the seizures
that he had. Unfortunately, I had been raped by a
man six months prior to moving into this house, so
I was beginning to exhibit symptoms of PTSD. But I

(41:40):
felt safe around the man. He didn't go out of
his way to try to make me feel safe, and
I just, for some reason though, felt like I could
trust him. He didn't end up forcing himself on me,
So if that's a trigger for anybody, it doesn't get
like that. There is a reason I bring this up,
but it's for a slightly more innocent reason. One day

(42:00):
he began telling me about the last girl that had
lived there, and he decided to tell me that he
would pay her for sex, or I think he would
charge less rent. I don't remember the specifics, but it
was definitely not legal. I told him that I was
very upset about that, because I made it very clear
that I was not looking for anything sexual or any
kind of relationship. He didn't know about the attack that

(42:23):
had happened to me, but I was still very angry
because he had sworn up and down he wasn't looking
for anything like that, and he really just needed help
paying the bills for the next month or so. I
just avoided him as much as possible, and occasionally he
would bring up weird little sexual things and then apologize.

(42:44):
He did have a traumatic brain injury, which is also
why he had seizures. I still don't know to this
day if he was lying about all of that or
what was going on, but I didn't really get upset
and start screaming at him. If he literally didn't remember
what he had just said, I would just want again
reiterate that I would need to move out in a month.
I was renting month to month, and that was if

(43:05):
he continued bringing it up. He then asked if I
wanted to play with him to get half of my
rent discounted. I declined and reiterated that I was not interested.
And then a day that I will never forget happened.
I was smoking a cigarette in the backyard and noticed
that there was a tool shed that I hadn't really

(43:27):
paid any attention to. Well, that day, I was bored
and I decided to just peek inside. I found some
strange looking tools and thought nothing of it, and then
later found out they were antique gynecological tools. Yeah, you
heard that right. Naturally, I thought this man was committing

(43:49):
horrific crimes in his backyard, but when I spoke to
him about it, he said it was just a weird
fetish collection of his. They actually were quite dusty and
seemed to be in an undisturbed But then the next
day he'd gone to work and had left his bedroom
door open, then he normally left shut. I happened to

(44:10):
notice that there was a cage with a mannequin inside
of it. It was like a BDSM brothel. In there.
He had whips, flogs, sex toys, and even this weird
thing that trapped your arms I actually began documenting things
with my phone. I'm taking pictures and sent them immediately
to my mom and sister. I'm starting to fear for

(44:32):
my safety at that point. Again, since there were no
bodies or anything like that, I figured I would be
okay to spend the night there until my mom could
get me the next day, as she had to drive
down from out of state. When my roommate got home
from work, he went to his bedroom for a moment,
then came out and said, I saw that you were
taking pictures. Then he said, I love the way you

(44:55):
wash your hair and dry off in your bedroom. If
you're a landlord, you can have cameras that are in
common areas and are very visible. But apparently he had
hidden cameras everywhere. He definitely had one in my bathroom
and he had a few in my bedroom as well.

(45:15):
I literally ran outside and called my mom. My mom
said hang up and call nine one one right then,
and that's what I did. Unfortunately, there wasn't much that
they could do. I believe that he removed the cameras
as the police were on the way, because they didn't
find any camera or footage. They said that, yeah, the
cage thing was weird and the tools were weird, but

(45:38):
there was no evidence of crimes or anything. At that point,
I was extremely terrified, especially because of what had happened
to me earlier that year. My mom was scared for
me as well, so she and my dad got me
a hotel room and I stayed there that night until
they could get there the next day. I requested a

(46:00):
police escort the next day, and although I did have
to wait several hours, they came and helped me get
my things out, and my mom and dad made sure
to get me the hell out of there. Desert creature

(46:22):
submitted by anonymous. I was stationed at twenty nine Palms
in the seventies, and one night a friend and I
went driving in the desert towards Joshua Tree National Monument.
We were just enjoying the cool night air and we
were having an animated conversation when suddenly a loud and
repeated knock hit the driver's side door. I thought perhaps

(46:46):
I'd hit a small animal and its carcass was flung
onto my door, so I pulled over and got out
of the car to check. There was nothing there, no
dead animal in the road. Nothing. We got back in
and continued driving, and a few miles down the road,
the same noise hit the car door, but this time

(47:08):
it was on the passenger side. My friend began to
get nervous, but I still thought it was car related.
I mean, maybe I had a blowout and had been
driving on a flat tire which had lost tread. I
stopped it again, checked all the tires and the doors. Nothing.
I started driving again, and that's when the car just

(47:30):
went dead right there in the road. The lights went
off and the car slowed until I stopped it out
of fear in the middle of the road. My friend
and I just sat there frightened, and then when the
car started the lights came on. It was in nineteen
seventy three LTD. And there crouched on the side of

(47:52):
the road, on the passenger side, with some kind of creature.
I mean it looked like a Hollywood movie creature, like
a dog of some sorts with an oversized head, like
a howling werewolf. We both screamed and I hit the gas.
This thing stood up on its hind legs and ran
across the road. Almost twenty years later, I heard a

(48:16):
biology professor mentioned something about cryptozoology so I told him
the story. He was a collector of folk tales, and
he told me of the nagua of the southwestern desert.
I don't know what I saw, but my professor said
such a creature has been reported many times. I was

(48:38):
very young back then, and the experience frightened me so
badly that I never went night driving in the desert again.
Foot race submitted by anonymous. I grew up in a

(49:00):
very outdoor environment and spent a substantial amount of my
time in and around woods, day or night. I've lived
in Washington my whole life and have had an interest
in cryptozoology as a child, but I'd never taken any
mention of bigfoot seriously until I had mine encounter. I
was living at my parents house that summer in two

(49:22):
thousand and nine, and I spent many days visiting a
friend who lived about ten minutes away. If I walked
there on foot on a trail winding my way up
and downhill through the woods, I often looked down and
noticed that the brush underfoot was consistently stamped flat. A
lot of people might have been using it, but in
all my time of living in that area, the only

(49:44):
people I ever saw on it were myself and some
of my friends who might have been taking that trip
with me back between our houses. Having spent that night
like many before, and after relaxing on my friend's patio
with several other people, I got up, put out my
cigarette and said my goodbyes and left. I walked out

(50:05):
of his driveway and got onto the trail. That night,
it was moonless, so it was very very dark. It
was probably around one in the morning, and it was
normal for me to not see any cars on my
short trip back to the main road. As I was
on the trail, it was very very still, but the

(50:25):
normal sounds were there for the nighttime, insects, the occasional
rustle off in the bushes of a small animal, and
nothing out of the ordinary. But it was almost pitch
black because of the tree cover. I knew the trail
like the back of my hand and walked confidently forward.
And that's what had happened behind me. To my right,

(50:46):
probably about twenty feet away, I heard movement in the
brush and ferns. I didn't even realize I was hearing
anything until it lasted more than a few seconds, and
I realized it was moving in the same direction as
me breaking sizeable tree branches underfoot. I stopped and listened,
and after a second the rustling came to a stop too.

(51:11):
I could hear faint, slow and deep breathing, like that
of a large animal. It wasn't loud enough to be
from exertion. It seemed natural, as if whatever was behind
the lung capacity was big enough to encompass several of
my breaths and one of its own. I waited for
about a minute and didn't hear anything except the breathing,

(51:33):
slow and even. I took another step and started down
the trail again. And again something moved through the woods
after me, keeping pace and tempo with my movements. Sure enough,
I could hear ferns, ivy and BlackBerry bushes and the
like being pulled or pushed aside, and that slow breathing

(51:54):
started again. I stopped again, and this went on for
another five or so minutes. Before I reached the trail
had scared out of my wits. I still hadn't heard
any individual footsteps. I hadn't seen or smelled anything, and
I don't remember which way the wind was blowing, if
there even was one. I decided that once I hit

(52:15):
the tree line. I was making a run for it,
so as I walked evenly up, this thing followed in
the same way I had been for several previous minutes, and,
trusting my ears as a track runner, which I was
fairly talented at, came to a stop and then bolted
into a sprint down the hill. A moment later, whatever

(52:37):
was following me decided to move as well. As I
pounded down the hill towards the right turn back up
to the street, this thing broke the trees from where
I had the gravel and then ashphalt. Its breathing became
a series of low growls, almost a series of calls
that sounded hoarse and aggressive. It was loud, loud enough

(52:59):
to echo off the surrounding trees, but the moment it
hit the gravel, I knew something was wrong. Of all
the animals I've ever seen in their natural habitat that
are native to western Washington, none of them sounded like this.
There was no lope, stride, or gallop that resembled how
this thing sounded when it moved. One of the more

(53:22):
intense memories I have of this incident was hearing that
noise distinctive impact with the ground on not four but
two feet, and the smacking of bare feet on ashphalt
when it hit the driveway. That was unsettling, to say
the least. But then another thing happened, to my dismay

(53:43):
and confusion. Instead of following me down the driveway on
the asphalt, it crossed over the asphalt and went into
the woods to my right, diagonally away from me. My
first sensation was relief until I realized that it had
increased its be drastically and its calls rang out from
the woods in my direction. Still rounding around the corner

(54:07):
of a street to get up back to my street
level where there were street lights, I realized this thing
was trying to cut me off by getting ahead of me,
cutting through backyards of neighbors across the street from me.
Realizing that, I got a huge adrenaline Russian as I
absorbed the severity of having this thing, whatever it was,

(54:27):
between my house and me. Running as fast as I could,
I cleared the hill and started running on the flat
towards my driveway, off the road a little farther down.
At the same time, behind me, to my right, I
heard this thing pound across a neighbor's grassy yard heavy
and distinct single impacts of a two legged animal. I'd

(54:50):
been able to beat it on the road, but I
wasn't out of trouble yet. As I raced along the road,
this thing crossed the yards, leapt it ten foot ditch,
and landed four feet below on the asphalt road behind me,
all without stopping, tripping or stumbling once. It kept on growling,

(55:11):
calling at me. And I'm guessing from the time it
took for it to reach the road from their back yard,
I figured this thing couldn't have been moving any slower
than twenty or twenty five miles an hour. I'd been
clocked at sprints of twenty two miles an hour before.
Not including adrenaline, this thing pounded after me. I heard
once again the distinct sound of two individual feet contacting

(55:33):
the ground. As I took a turn onto my driveway,
my dog, Guss, a purebred airedale terrier, started going nuts.
I skidded around the corner a little short. Not including
my adrenaline, this thing pounded after me, and I heard
it once again that same sound, distinct feet, two individuals

(55:56):
contacting the ground. I skidded around the corner, shortly followed
by my pursuer and got to my house with gusts
running up to meet me. He was in full sprint,
legs outstretched, heckles up and growling fiercely. Truth be told,
he was a gentle giant. He only acted this way
towards squirrels, coyotes, and raccoons. He must have seen what

(56:20):
was after me, and it stopped him dead in his tracks.
He went from a sprint to zero in about three
or five feet and started barking crazily. I stopped as
I heard whatever this creature was also stopping, and I
wheeled around to look back for the first time, away
from the street lights on a moonless night, with old

(56:42):
pine and fir trees looming overhead. My eyes couldn't see
a damned thing, but I did see the gravel it
must have kicked up by coming to such a fast
halt land near my feet. I felt some of it
bounce off my shoes and lower legs as I was
turning around. All three of us were frozen in place

(57:03):
for a single quiet moment. Gus was growling, hair raised
ready to defend me, and I was panting, standing straight
and looking straight into the darkness, and whatever this creature was.
It couldn't have been more than fifteen feet in front
of me, growling and breathing deeply enough to raise the

(57:23):
hair on the back of my neck again, even after
being chased the way I was. Gus and I looked
at each other at the same time, and I said
stay with all the gravity I could muster in my voice.
He looked back into the darkness and continued growling as
I dashed in my garage, grabbed a hatchet, and ran back.

(57:44):
I returned to the same scene. Gus and this thing
were having a growl off. I unsheathed the hatchet and
stood ready, waiting, searching the blackness for any sign of
this thing. But all I could hear was its breathing
and the intense sensation that we were making eye contact,
that this thing and I were holding each other with

(58:04):
our eyes for several minutes. Then suddenly I heard crashing
and rustling in the bushes, moving away from me for
a good thirty seconds, and Gus finally relaxed. We both
went inside, and I didn't let him out at night
for a week after that, and after dark he'd sit
by the windows and occasionally growled, as if he'd seen

(58:26):
something He didn't even do that to any of the
other animals. He'd normally go on. Each time he did,
I'd step outside and listen, and the woods would be
filled with an unnatural quietness stillness. Since that night, I
can confidently say that I was stalked, followed, and then

(58:48):
chased by a bigfoot, and was then dissuaded by the
presence of my dog and the light of the house
so close by eight toes by John W. My family

(59:11):
on my mother's side were moonshiners. They lived in a long,
dark hollow called Duncan Fork on Trace Creek of Mingo County,
West Virginia. It was a large family and consisted of
my great grandfather, his wife, and if I'm not mistaken,
twelve or fourteen of their offspring, along with the wives
and husbands of the ones that were married. All or

(59:35):
most of them lived in Duncan Fork and raised corn
and sold moonshine to support the families. This was around
the late twenties or early thirties. My grandmother said that
most of the women would work the fields and watch
for the law. There was always some of them on
guard with rifles. She said. Everything started with one of

(59:56):
my great uncles seeing something while returning from making a
d delivery of shine. The deliveries were always made after dark,
and while coming back across the mountain between Bias, West
Virginia and Dunke and Fork, he heard a loud scream,
like something dying or at least in great pain. When
he stopped his wagon to see what it was, he

(01:00:18):
saw a large, dark animal of some kind on the
opposite side of the hill from him. He said it
was not a bear or anything he'd ever seen before,
and when it started to come across the little hollow
towards him, he shot at it with his rifle, but
it didn't seem to have any real effect. The thing

(01:00:39):
just screamed and ran away. After that, this thing was
seen many times in the following two years or so
around Dunk and Fork. It was shot at many times
but with no apparent effect, and everyone started calling it
eight toes because where its tracks were found they always

(01:00:59):
had eight to I can't remember if there were eight
on each foot or only on one. My grandmother told
me about another time when my grandfather was bringing a
load of sugar across the hill and this thing suddenly
jumped into the trail and swung a paw or arm
or whatever at him. It missed, but he took off

(01:01:19):
as fast as his horse would go, and when he
got home that night, there were four deep cuts across
his horse's side, and the fifty pound bag of sugar
had been torn open. Grandpa said he'd shot at it
with his pistol, but he didn't know if he'd hit
it or not because his horse had been jumping around.
Obviously scared, Grandma told him that the thing had been

(01:01:40):
sent to punish them for the things they were doing.
She said there had been three lawmen killed on Duncan
Fork the day the thing had jumped my grandpa. There
were many accounts of this thing getting after the men
and tearing up their stills while they were either making
moonshine or bringing stuff in to make it, but she
said it never seemed to bother the women. One time,

(01:02:04):
she and another woman were going to draw water from
the well late at night when this thing stood up
behind the well. She said it was at least seven
to eight feet tall, and it stood and walked away
on two legs like a man. She said it was
hard to tell what color was, but she thought it
was a dark brown About two years after the thing

(01:02:26):
was first seen, the law finally did get in to
smash the stills in the head of the hollow, after
killings on both sides. The thing wasn't seen after that.
Maybe it was something sent by whoever to help stop
all the things going on at a time and dunk
and fork uugh, who knows? She just Hey, gang, thanks

(01:03:03):
for listening to this episode. If you have a true
scary story of any nature you'd like me to narrate,
email it too, Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail
dot com. I read them all. If you're catching this
on YouTube and you like what you heard and saw,
why not give it a thumbs up. If you're not subscribed,

(01:03:23):
why not become a subscriber and leave me a comment.
I'd love to know what you thought of the stories.
If you'd like to take your support of what I'm
doing a step further, find a link to my Patreon
page and the description and get yourself some Uncle Josh
or campfire Crew merchandise. A link to my tea public
storefront is down in that description too. Everyone be excellent

(01:03:45):
to each other, and until next time, be wary of
things that go bump in the night. It could be anything,
a ghost, a monster, or the guy next door. Hotel
Cotto and contam contact and foll