October 9, 2025 • 62 mins
Step into the shadows with this volume of True Scary Stories, where real people share their chilling encounters with the unknown. From eerie happenings deep in the woods to spine-tingling interactions with the paranormal and unsettling run-ins with creatures that defy explanation, these are the stories that keep you looking over your shoulder. Turn down the lights, press play, and prepare for the kind of fear that feels all too real.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire crew, let's get it on backpacking in Alabama
(00:24):
by Anonymous. This happened about six years ago. I was
about twelve and my brother was twenty six at the time.
My brother had been serving in the US Army for
several years when this happened, and was deploying to the
Middle East on his second deployment if I remember correctly. Also,
(00:45):
of note, he was a Green Beret and had recently
three or four months prior to this trip completed the
Army Special Forces Qualification Course Robin Sage and all that.
By then he was an active duty SF Engineer sergeant.
Definitely not someone you'd want to fuck around with. Given
that we both grew up with a passion for the outdoors,
(01:08):
he thought it would be nice to take me out
a backpacking trip in northern Alabama the Sipsy Wilderness for
those familiar with the area. This was before he left
for nine months. The trip had gone smoothly up until
the third night we were camping out around eight pm. We
had our camp set up, eight dinner and were sitting
(01:29):
by the fire talking about typical boy shit, you know, guns, girls, etc.
For some reference, our spot was about fifty yards from
a large stream and about fifty yards downhill, adjacent to
the large path our camp. The stream and the path
formed a triangle of sorts. This was summertime in Alabama,
(01:52):
so it wasn't quite dark yet when two guys who
looked to be in their late twenties wandered up and
asked if we had seen any hogs while we were
hiking around, given that that was rural Alabama. Given that
it was rural Alabama, we actually had seen some farther
into the wilderness area and told them so. Even though
(02:13):
they were relatively polite, my brother called them good old boys.
I got a seriously creepy vibe from them. Dirty clothes,
greasy hair, scraggly facial hair, et cetera. Honestly, they looked
like they belonged in the movie Deliverance. They kind of
hung out for a few minutes, maybe a little longer
(02:35):
than they should have, looking around, asking us questions like
how long we'd been out there, how long we were staying,
and we got the vibe they were kind of sizing
us up. Then they abruptly said goodbye and walked away.
I didn't necessarily feel threatened by them, and I know
for sure my brother didn't, but I still felt uneasy
(02:55):
about the whole thing. Fast forward three or four hours.
My brother and I had gone to sleep and were
nestled in our tent when I woke to the sound
of multiple dogs barking. I've always been a heavy sleeper,
and they sounded like they were only about one hundred
yards away. My heart immediately started pounding, and I kicked
(03:17):
my brother through my sleeping bag and asked if he
was awake and heard the dogs. He responded, I'm awake.
They've been getting closer for the past hour or so.
Just lay still and don't make any sounds. Needless to say,
twelve year old me was about to shit my pants.
(03:39):
We would also hear sporadic shouts from several different sources,
but neither came any closer. A few minutes later, my
brother whispered, they're just hunting for hogs. They used the
dogs to pin them down and then they shoot them.
That gave me some relief, but not much. Somehow managed
(04:00):
to fall back asleep, and the fact that they were
doing it at night was a huge red flag. My
brother later told me, but I think he was just
trying to keep me calm. Fast forward again another three hours.
Around two am, I had managed to sleep pretty well
after first hearing the hog hunters when I woke up
to my brother squeezing my shoulder firmly, saying, wake up,
(04:24):
put your shoes on quick and follow me. Be as
quiet as you can. My heart immediately went back to
racing because I heard the dogs and voices in the distance,
farther away than before, but still distinct. Not asking any questions,
I did what my brother told me, and as soon
as we were out of the tent, he told me
(04:45):
to get on his back, and this was a breeze
for him. After rocking with god knows how much weight
in the army, we snuck about fifty yards into the
woods towards the junction of the path and the stream
and crawled into some bushes. It was up a hill,
so we had a pretty good elevated view of our campsite.
I remember as we were laying there, how loudly I
(05:07):
was breathing, and how quiet he was. When I heard
the very distinct sound of a pistol slide racking. I
looked over and my brother had his pistol and hkusp
that he gave to me a few years after this
story took place, and he was watching the campsite and
surrounding area. I started to whisper to him when he
(05:27):
put his hand over my mouth and pointed at our campsite.
The group of hunters had been steadily approaching our camp,
and by that time, thirty or so minutes had reached it.
There were five of them and like three or four dogs.
They all looked relatively young, but two either had rifles
(05:49):
or shotguns, and the dogs were going crazy, obviously having
smelled our scent. For those of you who aren't backpackers
or campers, nobody who up on a random camp in
the middle of the night with dogs and guns has
good intentions. I knew this, and my brother knew this.
I was scared shitless. I couldn't make out what they
(06:11):
were saying, but my brother later told me they were
talking about us, although he hadn't heard any specifics either.
They lingered for about twenty minutes, shining flashlights around and
talking to themselves, when my brother put his mouth to
my ear and whispered, if they come towards us, I
want you to turn and run as quickly as you can.
Don't stop, don't look back, stay off the trail, and
(06:34):
look for the flashing lights. I didn't know what he
meant by that, but I'll explain that later. I knew
I could make it back because he had taught me
land nav pretty well. He then handed me a flashlight
and told me to not take the red filter off.
He told me later that the red filter helps preserve
night vision and cuts down ambient light, so it would
(06:56):
be harder for someone to see from a distance. At
this point, I was so scared I almost started crying,
But at the same time I had a rush of
adrenaline and what I think now was confidence that he
thought I could handle myself. We laid there for a
while longer went out of nowhere. They started screaming where
(07:19):
y'all at and firing into the woods at random. My
brother dragged me back behind the crest of the hill
and threw himself on top of me, and thankfully our
position on top of the hill was protected from any gunfire.
They shot maybe five or six more times and then
started walking back the direction they had come. They got
(07:39):
maybe a hundred yards away when I heard a blaring
siren and saw our emergency lights flashing through the woods.
Turns out my brother had called the Forest Service office
on a satellite phone my family has for emergencies. He
did that while I was asleep, and they, in turn
had sent out Forest Service officers and game wards to
our area of the worldness. The Sipsy Wilderness is about
(08:03):
twenty five thousand acres in size, so it took them
a while to get there on the dirt roads. When
we saw the game warden truck, my brother signaled them
with the light and pointed them in the direction the
hunters had gone, and the guy sped off, shining a
spotlight through the woods. As soon as they were all gone,
we went back to our camp, packed up our shit,
(08:25):
and waited by the path for the game warden to
come back, who then gave us a ride in his
truckbed back to the main staging area. On the drive back,
my brother told me how brave I had been, and
that we would talk about it with our parents the
next day if I wanted to. I asked him not
to do that, because I thought they might never let
(08:45):
me go camping again. So, creepy rednecks in the woods,
let's not meat again. You might get shot next time.
Follow up. We never got any definitive information on what
happened the rednecks we encountered. I have many friends who
have gone out to the Sipsy area and had a
great time with no creepy stuff going on. However, it
(09:10):
truly is a wilderness area, and law enforcement response, if
you can even reach them, is slow. I was lucky
that my brother was there and reacted so quickly. Otherwise
who knows what could have happened. We also got lucky
that whatever their intentions were, they either reconsidered or lost interest.
(09:31):
I'll note that when they left our camp, the game
ward showed up pretty soon afterwards, but I didn't see
what the guys and their dogs did. If I remember correctly,
they headed in a direction parallel to the stream, away
from the trail, inaccessible for any kind of vehicle. Maybe
the warden continued on and took another trail to try
(09:53):
and cut them off. We waited around another thirty minutes
for him to come back, and he said there were
other officers outlooked. There are only so many paths that
you could take a truck or a quad bike down,
so any thorough search effort would also have to have
been done on foot. Wuija Amy by Kelly l I
(10:25):
graduated from high school in nineteen ninety two. My best
friend Ann and I had more or less already begun
the process of parting ways. By the time we were eighteen,
we were already very different people, and looking back, I
think we maintained our friendship and bond out of boredom.
And left for college in the city in September following
our graduation, and I stayed closer to home because I
(10:47):
had a job and hadn't yet decided where I wanted
to attend college. Right away, she met a girl from
out of state who I despised. Lisa was into drugs
and obsessed with I thought she was a freak, and
she resented me simply for being alive and relatively happy
in the height of the grunge movement and the peak
(11:09):
of our angry youth phase. I actually wasn't all that angry.
I didn't visit my friend all that often. By their
second year in college, they had not only become best friends,
they'd also become roommates and moved into a newer, but
extremely creepy apartment complex. I hated it there. However, after
much begging on Anne's part for me to come and
(11:30):
spend a week with them. I gave in and went
to this day, I can't say what the purpose was,
other than a last ditch effort to salvage our dying friendship.
We've been friends since the age of thirteen. I guess
it was just hard to let go of what was familiar.
Lisa and I managed to be civil to each other,
(11:50):
but it grew old quickly. She was blatantly resentful of
my presence, secretive, and always worried that I would go
through her things or something. I could have cared less
about her or things. I just looked at her and
saw a loser. The point of all of this is
that it is important to know that Lisa and I
knew very little about one another. By the end of
(12:11):
my week visit, we were all irritable. Aboard, Ann suggested
that we take the train to a toy store and
purchase owija board. We all agreed to chip in for
the cost, and it was different and it got our
minds on something other than our misery. So we treked
across town, purchased a board, and returned to play with it.
Lisa and I volunteered to go first as a just
(12:33):
wanted to watch for the first round. We put our
hands on the plan chat and asked, is anyone here?
We immediately began getting the infinity sign. I initially suspected
that Lisa was behind the movement. I spoke out, what
is your name? And the board spelled out poweer. Lisa
(12:59):
said some to the effect of power, Huh, what the
hell kind of name is that? She gave me the
impression that she was not moving the plan chet, and
I admit at that point I was a little spooked.
I then asked a really dumb question, do you know us?
The plan chet paused, all movements stopped. I asked again,
(13:23):
do you know us? It spelled out k Nwamy no Amy.
That made no sense to me. Before I actually had
a chance to take a look at Lisa's face, I
blurted out something to the effect of who the hell
is Amy? At that point, Lisa cussed pushed the board away,
(13:45):
declaring that she was done. So I was just left
sitting there with the board completely confused, so I asked
Ann who Amy was. Anne quietly said Amy was Lisa's
older sister. She died in a plane crash. Lisa refused
to use the board anymore. I think she may have
(14:08):
suspected that I had known about her sister, but I
had no prior knowledge of her sister, and even if
I had, it never would have occurred to me to
mess with her mind like that. I will never know
who or what we tapped into, but it did leave
me wondering and more than a little shaken. Urbek's Mission
(14:36):
gone south by Kind Supermarket in twenty seventeen. Twenty eighteen,
I was working long shifts in the restaurant business, averaging
fifty hours a week. It was a relief to get
four days off. In cooperation with my childhood best friend,
we would invest our spare time in our Urbek's hobby.
(14:58):
Over the course of a few years, we completed twenty missions.
Some were just circling the area, and others lasted a
few hours and required some creativity to get in, some forgettable,
most a little scary, and a couple put the fear
of God into us. One quiet autumn morning, I drove
(15:18):
to my friend's house with my urbeks gear in the
middle of a weekday. We researched locations, and he announced
the Little Flower Mansion. Reading the bio mentioned that it
was an antebellum mansion with colonial features. Possibly one of
our early presidents passed through its doors. Was only twenty
minutes away according to GPS, so we street parked a
(15:41):
few blocks down. The property was tucked behind an active,
functioning nursing home, so we snuck around the back entrance
and took advantage of a man shaped sized hole in
the chain link fence. The slave quarters that were separated
from the main estate. It was a small ninety degree
hallway that led to a dried up fountain in another hallway.
(16:04):
At the end of that was a kitchen and pantry
corridors of the mansion. So after turning through the kitchen,
we walked into the main corridor. The ceilings were twenty
feet high and some of the original furniture was still
in place. A wide U shaped staircase was on our
left and a basement door was on the right. I
(16:25):
mean this building had to have been magnificent in its prime.
After over years of neglect, the ceiling had collapsed and
beneath it grew a murky puddle that stretched about fifty feet.
We turned up the wide staircase and practiced some photojournalism
and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. We made
(16:46):
it to the other side of the building, where we
found a prayer room and the curious things inside were
a marble altar and ostensibly a homeless person's habitat His
belongings included a pipe, a PS two control, a sleeping bag,
and some recent trash, and the front door was strongly
bolted and bordered shut. So we doubled back and went
(17:09):
to check out the basement. The basement wasn't as creepy
as we expected. It had a low ceiling and pipes,
and it was clearly not suitable to live in. We'd
been out there for over an hour and decided to
make our exit. Throughout our time, the mansion was motionless.
I mean, all we heard was the ceiling dripping and
(17:30):
the occasional gust of wind. The oh shit moment is
when we heard the most blood curdling scream from a
woman upstairs. Reflexively, we ran out of there like Scooby
Doo and Shaggy. While panicking trying to find our way out,
I yelled, it's through the kitchen, and I led the way.
(17:51):
We circled around the property and noticed the driveway had
a surveillance camera. I'm not sure if what we heard
was paranormal or just a squatter, but we didn't return.
(18:12):
Black Wolf by Greg h. I'm still not sure what
happened at this house in Germany, but I am very
definitely sure that it happened. My wife and I were
married in April of nineteen seventy two, and at the
time I was reassigned to duty at Sambach Air Base Sembach, Germany.
(18:34):
By the winter of nineteen seventy three, we had rented
a beautiful old house from a wonderful couple named Karl
and Alfrida Jacob. The house was located in Mohastras Munschweiler, Germany.
This was just a few miles from Sembach Air Base
and was generally located in the south of Germany near Kaiserslautern.
(18:56):
At the time we lived there, the house was one
hundred and sixty years old. I'm sorry that we lost
touch with Carl and Elfrida. They were some of the
nicest people I have ever known, as far as that goes.
We were the only Americans living in that village and
the people there were top notch, and we lived a
quiet existence. Our first child, a boy, was born while
(19:18):
we lived there. His coming seemed to manifest a presence
that my wife and I were really not aware of.
There had been a few noises and such, but we
really didn't think much about it. Sometimes it would feel
as though we were being watched. As our son grew
through the first months of life. There were many occurrences,
and this is only one of them. Our baby was
(19:40):
about six or seven months old, as babies of that
age sometimes do. He was crying and seemed to want
to My wife was letting him cry it out for
a little while, and he was in our bedroom in
the crib. Our bedroom was on the back side of
the house. There was a small walkway beside the house
in a concrete wall. The backyard was on the side
(20:01):
of a hill, and the ground was at a level
at the top of that wall, just about even with
the bedroom window. The walkway was less than two feet wide,
and the house had upstairs bedrooms, but we hardly ever
used them. From the backyard, one had to go down
some steps beside our bedroom and then open an arch
door and an eight foot high brick wall to reach
(20:23):
the front yard. We were blessed to have grass, and
this was the outside passage. Front to back. The arch
door was wrought iron and covered with plexiglass and had
an iron dead bolt that latched it once in the
front yard. There was another wrought iron fence at the street,
and the yard itself was about two and a half
feet higher than the street, and the fence was about
(20:45):
four feet high. Our neighbors to the right were the
last house before the trail up to the woods, and
the backside of both our houses was open to fields.
My landlady had instructed us that it was very important
that we and lock the wooden shutters all over the
windows and lock the dead bolt in the outside gate
every night. It was after dark, around nine o'clock the
(21:10):
evening when the baby was crying when we heard something
in the backyard outside our bedroom window. Whatever it was,
it was making an eerie sound and mimicking the baby crying,
and whatever it was, it was big. We could hear
it drawing breath into its lungs and wailing with a
sound that would chill you right up your spine. Standing
(21:34):
in the backyard by the window. Put it just about
two feet away from the shutters. I didn't have a gun,
being a foreigner in Germany. The thing both frightened and
angered me, and we listened to it for about ten
or fifteen minutes. I finally decided that I would take
out my bowie knife, throw open the shutters, and attack it.
(21:56):
My yelling at it through the open window and through
the wooden shutters had no affen fact, and we then
decided that giving it access to the house in that
fashion was probably not a good idea. I then thought
that I would go out the front, since we had
no back door, and go around the house and take
on the brute. My wife didn't want me to go,
(22:17):
but I found out later that she just didn't want
to be in the house alone. Like I said, by
the sound it was making, this thing was big. Its
whale was a high sound, almost a scream, and in
between screams and whales, we could hear low guttural growls
similar to that of a lion or some other kind
of big cat. I finally exclaimed, I'm going out. We
(22:42):
need some relief. I grabbed my knife and headed for
the front door, and I also took a hiking staff
with a metallic pointed end. It took two full turns
of the giant skeleton key to get the door open.
By this time, I had redirected my fear to an
attack attitude was prepared to jolt the damn thing like
it was doing to us. Just as I opened the
(23:05):
front door, I could see the thing coming out from
beside our house. It looked like a wolf. It was
jet black and had long course looking fur, and it
was just over three feet high at the shoulder. It
glanced at me and then ran across the front yard
about forty or fifty feet and leaped over the wrought
(23:26):
iron fence. As it landed on the sidewalk, it took
off at a run and disappeared past my neighbor's house
and up the track to the woods. And I walked
around the house and into the backyard. The wrought iron
door stood a gate. To this day, I have yet
to figure out how that thing opened that iron dead
(23:48):
bolt latch on its own. Pacific Crest Trail, Washington, odd
encounter by Absom. I was through hiking the Pacific Crest
(24:09):
Trail PCT southbound. At this time I'd flipped from northbound
to southbound part way through the Sierra Nevada. As twenty
twenty three was California's history. Snow You're on record, and
when I was there it was still snowing. That's when
I had a creepy encounter with a self described day
hiker mail on the trail. I was hiking towards the
(24:33):
Cracker Barrel also known as the White Pass in Washington.
The area before White Pass is quite boggy, and it
was a sunny, warm day in July of twenty twenty three.
While I was hiking, I bumped into a day hiker
at one of the trail junctions with the PCT in
a side trail. He popped out of the trail, a
(24:54):
white man with fluffy, short white hair, eighty style mustache,
maybe around five eleven or so, and very short cargo
shorts and a huge square JanSport backpack of a sort
which was making jangling noises. He immediately asked me if
I was a pc T hiker, and I said yes,
(25:15):
and then he quickly asked me if I was hiking alone.
I was about thirty at the time, I'm five one,
and I had not showered in seven days due to
the remote stretches of Washington prior to this. Asking a
female if she is hiking alone is not cool, and
I technically was hiking with another hiker. He was just
(25:35):
a few miles ahead of me. I said, no, that
some one was just up ahead, which was true when
he asked me these questions. They were in quick succession
of each other, and he seemed incredibly excited. Something about
the encounter. The vibes in general was off, and I
had that blood going cold, stomach dropping feeling. I proceeded
(25:57):
to walk faster down the pc T. The man followed me,
making some comments about a female all alone out here,
and because I was well over a thousand miles into
walking that year, I was in good shape and began
to haul some serious butt, assuming he would not be
able to keep up. The man started lightly jogging behind
(26:19):
me to keep up, getting so close to my seven
days unwashed hair and back of my head that he
could practically have grabbed or sniffed the hair fuzzies. His
backpack was exceedingly large for a day hiker, was not
a hiking backpack, which is fine, it just didn't fit
with how oversized it was. Like I said, it was jangling.
(26:39):
There were metal things banging around inside his backpack, and
loudly too. As he was becoming out of breath to
keep up with me, and after making comments about my
seemingly solo hiking, he immediately said to me, this is
the part of the trail where all those hikers went missing,
and that's when I freaked out. He then started talking
(27:03):
about the bogs and how bodies could just disappear, and
about a PCT through hiker who had disappeared in that
exact area in twenty eighteen. However, he also mentioned something
about missing women in the area too. To this day,
I can't find any info on who that might have
been or how far from White passed. He was referring
(27:27):
the way he was describing missing people and missing bodies
in bog or whatever made my stomach do backflips. I
only had trekking polls at the time, and now I
carry bear spray because of encounters like this. But I
gripped them in my hands and readied myself to whack
them in the face if I needed to. I don't
(27:47):
know how to explain it, but it was not normal.
He was excitedly discussing these missing people and also telling
me that he one knew the sheriff on the case,
and two volunteered to help look for this missing PCT
hiker in twenty eighteen, and he knew where they looked,
which was apparently all in the bog area. He talked
(28:09):
a lot about his time volunteering to search for missing people,
and I realized, however, I did not want to preemptively
tell him to fuck off, because making him angry felt wrong. Instinctually,
I wanted him behind me, not ahead of me where
he could ambush. So I kept him behind me and
asked him details of his supposed volunteer work with the
(28:31):
local sheriff and looking for whoever the missing people were,
plus the missing PCT hiker. How I know he was
bad news was when we came upon the guy I
was hiking with. My hiking companion was getting water by
a pond and saw me hiking it four more miles
an hour, and this creepy dude literally breathing down my
(28:53):
neck out of breath. My hiking companion's eyes got huge,
and I was gesturing to him with my eyes that
something was wrong. I turned around finally and scared the
creep behind me and said with great satisfaction that I
was not hiking alone, and here was my male hiking partner.
(29:13):
The creepy man's eyes got so wide, and he said, oh, right, well,
nice to meet you, and said nothing to my hiking
partner other than that, and he took off fucking running
down the trail, I mean not hiking and not jogging,
but running. We hiked very fast after him, but he
(29:35):
totally disappeared, no trace of him, no footprints in the
mud as we approached the trailhead, I mean nothing. There
were no other side trails he could have taken. And
my hiking friend and I stopped to eat as I
was shaking, and I told him about the man and
his talk of bodies and the strange backpack, and we
both agreed something was off, especially as the man had
(29:59):
taken off running for his life away from my male
hiking partner. Had I been actually hiking alone, I have
no idea what would have happened. We were close to
White Pass, but still a couple of hours away. I
reported the encounter to a ranger via phone, who then
reported it to the Cracker Barrel, along with the older
(30:19):
man's description. Perhaps he was just a strange guy, overly
interested in the missing hiker case and local missing people,
and way interested in my hiking alone, seemingly, but the
whole thing felt so so so wrong, at least say
my instincts. I now carry spray when I later did
(30:44):
the Continental Divide Trail, for example, because of situations like this.
I'm curious if anyone else has had weird encounters in
that area of Washington. Zip Lady by rick E. When
(31:09):
I was a little boy around the age of six
and a half, making it around nineteen eighty nine, I
lived in a small Lincolnshire village in a relatively new
three bedroomed house. At the time, I had very bad
earaches in my left ear, which continued over a month,
and that ultimately led me to needing gromets to be inserted.
(31:29):
This seemed to solve my major pain problem, and sometime
after it fell out while I was in the bath,
all was well and good with the world, or so
I thought. After said ear problem, I still had sudden
and slight aches, which didn't really bother me but made
me constantly suffer heavily from the common affliction of sleepwalking.
(31:50):
I would, so my mom tells me, walk downstairs from
my room and just start walking around the house picking
stuff up, cleaning the night's dishes up, and I would
go outside in the dark to hose the plants or
vacuum the dining room. One time I randomly played three
blind Mice on our piano mean loads of weird kids stuff.
(32:11):
Once I actually left my house in my danger Mouse
pjs without my parents realizing. It was around eleven o'clock
at night, and I walked halfway across the village barefoot
and knocked on the door of some old lady's house
that none of my folks knew, asking her the now
famous family question, where has the bubble gone? Yeah? That
was very, very embarrassing, and still is. My parents watched
(32:35):
me do this night after night and didn't wake me up,
fearing that old urban legend that suggests it's dangerous to
do so. Or maybe they were just enjoying me being
a cute little sleepwalker. I mean, they did have pictures.
In this zombie state. I would occasionally mutter annoyance and
swipe at the Zip Lady, my imaginary friend that darted
around my head. I would say out loud, telling her
(32:58):
to leave me alone, and I want to go to
bed and go away, missus Zip and more bizarrely, for
a six year old, get the ludden number inside for
Heaven's sake, no one knew what Lawden number meant, and
there were many other odd utterances too, Although in this state,
my mom said that MY voice sounded different, more deeper
and not grown man deep, but it was as if
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I had a bad cold and my throat was sore
and deeper. This apparently made her feel the most uncomfortable,
and if I persisted with this odd voice, and if
my dad wasn't right there at night, she would have
to shake me awake, at which point I eventually would
be awake but screaming, and then just fall under her arms, crying,
remembering none of it. In the morning. Normally, though, after
(33:43):
a night's sleepwalking, I would make my way back upstairs,
through the hallway and into my bedroom and into bed
without a problem, all in the dark other than a
dim orange light of my smurf nightlight, although nine times
out of ten in the morning, my covers would be
folded at the bottom of my bed and I would
be fast asleep, just shivering in a fetal position, And
nights could be pretty cold as I slept directly under
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a window. In one corner of my small room were
my collection of toys. The strange thing that something was
playing with my toys, and it was always the same toys,
always my action figures. Things started with my ThunderCats figures,
you know, lion O wedged into either the left or
right bottom corner of my room, followed by Panther I
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forget their real names, then the two will E kids,
the one who threw bombs, and followed by the cat
I think his name was Snarf. All of these would
be crushed together as tightly as possible, and it was
sometimes difficult to wedge them out. On top and around
the ThunderCats was then the he Man figures. Normally he
Man would be resting on top of Liono and one
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of the wild kids with Mamra on he Man's shoulders.
These strange structures that I was not building were then
surrounded concentrically by WWF old school wrestling figures of which
my brother had many, and finally the whole area was
littered with battle beasts in an odd pattern. We realized
it wasn't me doing it in my sleepwalking, and it
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became a fun game for me and my folks to
note the different positions of the different figures every morning,
and I even have an old scrap book with some
of my old scribbles of the patterns. Never were any
of my other toys used, such as my Transformers, Muscleman,
or monsters in my pocket. So, like I said, my
parents knew it wasn't me doing that to my toys,
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but my midnight journeys continued. Okay, this is what I
remember best as I can, Bearing in mind I was
six and a half years old and half asleep, but
I can say that everything was always like a semi
lucid dream. I mean, I knew I was asleep, but
also not quite in control. After a while, I would
(35:53):
start to wake up and see this zip lady floating
around normally above my bed, smiling. I was never were
scared of this imaginary friend as I thought she was,
and I kind of liked her. There used to be
a BBC program that they played in the early afternoon
on TV in my local infant school called and I
think it was called Words and Pictures. It might have
(36:14):
been something else, but I can't remember. The program was
your basic educational affair for five year olds, but had
a cartoon character that floated amongst real life presenters Roger
Rabbit style. This character was half the size of an
adult and shaped like a guitar body. It was white
and had tiny black legs with little brown boots, in
(36:34):
a very very wide blue mouth, and gave instructions on
how to write letters, etc. I can't recall what they
called it, but because of the big mouth, I knew
it as the Zip Lady, and it had a big
zip for a mouth. That's exactly what I saw when
I was sleepwalking. But this thing used to bother me.
First of all, when I was waking up as I
(36:55):
was just getting to sleep by shouting my name like
there was an echo in the room. Then it would
drag the covers off of me, very slowly, but enough
that I would have to wake up. Of course, I'd
fight back and keep hold of the covers, but when
I got tired, this Zip Lady would pull harder and
the blankets would fly out of my hands. Sometimes in summer,
(37:16):
when it was hotter, I wouldn't care if she had
taken my covers away, but when I wouldn't react to her,
she would start to throw items of clothing at me.
And after that, the only way I knew I would
be able to get some sleep would be just to
give in and follow her. Yeah, follow this Zip Lady.
Every time that I gave in to her demands, things
(37:37):
would go hazy, and that's when I would begin sleepwalking.
And you know the rest. That's how I remember the
Zip Lady, A strange cartoon friend that appeared in my
dreams occasionally like a pixie, and always teased me enough
that it made me sleepwalk. When I was older, my
parents finally told me what I thought about her at
the time, and this is what I told them. When
(37:59):
I was round six, I used to say that she
came out of one of the corners of my room,
usually the darkest corner. She would grow larger and larger
until she was bigger than my father. She was very
skinny and wore a long black dress and had her
hair up big and tied up. She had a frilly
collar on her dress and that was fastened to her nose.
(38:21):
It like she didn't want me to see her mouth.
Her dress was always zipped from her belly all the
way up to her nose. She seemed to be holding
some kind of bottle in one hand. I always remember that,
and she didn't have any black bits in her eyes.
I think I meant pupils and that her eyes were
completely white. As I mentioned, when she would appear, I
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would try to hide under the covers, but she again
would pull them down slowly, and when I would look,
she would be standing there in the darkest corner. That's
when if I didn't look at her, the toys would
start to fly around, hit walls, and then be thrown
at me. Usually when she appeared, my night light would
eventually short out. Shortly after that, I was always compelled
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to follow her because I was scared of the dark,
and then again my sleepwalking would begin. It's strange how
I am remembering all these things that happened to me
as a child. I still only think of the Zip
Lady as a friendly cartoon mate. But from what my
folks tell me, the way she appeared and the way
she treated me, she might have been something much more sinister.
(39:27):
Shortly after all of this happened, maybe about a year,
we moved and the Zip Lady never paid me a
visit again, and I grew out of that sleepwalking phase.
At first, I thought I kind of missed her, as
I was young and had too many dreams to mention,
where we had flying adventures over fields of corn and
hidden castles from unseen villains, and despite the fact that
she would wake me up, make me sleepwalk, and kind
(39:50):
of attack me, I always thought we were friends to
the end. My parents didn't see things the same way
and were glad that when we moved, the Zip Lady
didn't follow us. Electric Shadow People Submitted by Suzanne Hass.
(40:18):
This horrible, frightening set of events happened to me almost
one year ago. I fell off my horse on August
twenty fourth at about seven am in Los Angeles, California,
and basically shattered the left side of my body due
to two different horses spooking and bolting. There had been
a death of a rider who got disemboweled and died
(40:40):
in a young girl who almost lost her foot. This
was a few days before I fell right in the
stables next to where I boarded my horse, So it
was two gruesome events I had never heard of while
pleasure riding, especially not happening in the same place. As
a matter of fact, another horse had to be put
down the day before in my stables, exactly where my
(41:02):
horse spook bolted. Something absolutely terrified my horse to the
point and he went crazy for about fifteen minutes. Even
after I fell. They couldn't calm him down, and I
have in thirty years of riding, never seen anything like
it before. It certainly almost cost me my life, and
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I think an entity was wreaking havoc that weekend, as
three people almost died in a two hundred yard radius.
And I also feel that whatever it was scaring all
these horses followed me home. No one knew the extent
of the damage to my body as they were taking
me to the hospital, but it turned out I did
(41:45):
need to have surgery, and especially for a shattered humorous
but they took me to a hospital where you had
to pay the surgery cost instead of the county hospital,
which was thirty thousand dollars. So I basically was sent
home with no set broken bone and told I needed
surgery and to go to the county I mean, how
with nine broken bones do you get to another hospital? Anyway.
(42:11):
During that time that I was bedridden, and about a
week after I fell, something came in my window through
a crack on the left side of it, right next
to the air conditioner fitter. The fitter wasn't quite wide
enough to fill the entire space between the air conditioner
and the window. So there was about a half inch
of space there. I would often stuff a rag into
(42:32):
it or a piece of cardboard, but for some reason,
nothing ever stayed to keep it plugged up. Well. Whatever
flew into my house flew in with such force that
it made my blinds fly from the window at a
forty five degree angle and bashed loudly back down to
the windowpane. My daughter and friends Kathy and Barrett saw
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this happen too. I mean immediately I could feel an
angry presence, like someone had just stormed into the room
in a rage. I was trapped in my bed with
this thing and my twelve year old daughter in the room.
It's the most frightening thing that has ever happened to
me and my daughter. Our haunting lasted for the next
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four months, and almost right away my computer quit working.
My daughter happened to be using it. Our VCR and
TV quit, as did the microwave and air conditioners. That
really sucked because it was ninety or one hundred degrees outside.
I had just put three thousand dollars into my car
and lent it to a friend, and even had a
(43:37):
new battery installed before I fell. But after this thing
showed up. I had to get the car towed four
times and buy another battery. I should have saved my
money for the day. I almost died falling from my horse,
you know. Come to think of it, even my phone
lines went dead. I was trapped in bed and had
(43:58):
so many problems fixing all this broken stuff. I mean,
everything electrical, it seemed, had just died. Books came flying
off of shelves, and nothing would stay put on top
of the refrigerator. Once we actually saw this shadow person
or whatever fly from the smoke detector to the VCR,
and I mean right into the VCR. It was this
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very quick trail of black just zipped and gone. For
some reason, I got the idea that whatever this thing was,
it lived off of or in our electrical appliances. At
first I thought it was a ghost. You know, our
bed is metal and hollow, and while we were trying
to sleep, we heard and felt scratching on the bed,
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and then a few other times it would hit the
bed from underneath really hard. This thing actually pushed boxes
out from under the bed and pushed them around the
room while we were sitting in the bed. A few
times we would see it. It was a very dark shape,
formless really, no arms or legs, just like a shadowy shape.
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We would watch it dart from the closet Florida under
the bed at night, and then the scratching and banging
would start. One night, after we had witnessed this shadow
go from the closet to under the bed, a lamp
fell and crashed and broke on my head as I
was lying in bed. Immediately after that, our ceiling fan
(45:25):
went on. It was very fast, and it was way
faster than any speed that we actually could set the
fan to. I could tell when something was going to
happen from these things because there was also an awful
pungent smell that came before it. It was very localized
and the smell would only move around if this shadow
(45:46):
thing moved. There was a bunch of other stuff that happened.
But the point is is that at first I was
sure it was a ghost, but after reading about shadow people,
I kind of believe that this is something else, may
be not necessarily a ghost. I mean, I've seen this
thing moving around my room almost in the shape of
(46:07):
a person wants and I felt it was mail. But
I knew more than anything this thing was evil, and
I always just felt a presence. After about four months,
we didn't see it any more and everything stopped. What
do you guys think? I truly believe that this thing
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could have killed me if it wanted to, And if
my friends and daughter hadn't witnessed this whole haunting thing
with me, I might be doubting my own mind now.
As I said, it finally left, and as I got better,
a friend told me that I had to order it
out of the house in the name of God, which
my daughter and I did, and you could actually smell
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it and feel it go out of the door. Then eventually,
bit by bit, everything that had been broken without us
repairing it worked again. I don't know what that thing was,
but I hope I never have to experience anything like
that again. Something in the Forest submitted by Anonymous. I
(47:24):
had a close encounter in twenty fourteen, and at the time,
due to my ignorance then I just told myself it
was something else. I knew very little about bigfoot. I
was always under the impression that they were way out
in a northwestern US and Canada, that is, if they
were even real at all. Now I know that people
(47:45):
have run into them in all corners of our country. Today,
my life is just about perfect. I have a new wife,
a new house, and two new baby girls. I retired
three years ago at the young age of thirty, and
I'm a stay at home father who is living the dream.
But just five years ago my life fell apart all
(48:07):
at once. I lost my job, my place to live,
and my vehicle in the matter of one week. This
was in the last week of November twenty fourteen. The
one thing that I did still have was a full
set of camping gear and just enough money to buy
a junker vehicle. I had gone into the woods on
(48:28):
the edge of a town in southern New Jersey and
set up a stealth camping site for myself to sleep
in at night. In the morning, I would make the
short walk into town and meet my girlfriend and take
her to work in her car, and then spend the
days using her car to find a job, look for
another vehicle, and go to the gym to get a
shower and shave. My little camp was near a finger
(48:49):
of the Pine Bearns, right next to a brand new
residential development that was still being built. I set my
camp up right off a path through the woods that
locals would use to walk their dogs and in warmer months,
ride their off road vehicles. I had found a spot
that was very well hidden, and you could easily have
walked within a few yards of my tent without even
(49:10):
noticing I was there. I pitched my tent on the
other side of a large mound from the path and
covered it with a camo tarp and surrounded the area
with piles of brush. When I was in the tent,
I had the path behind me, a few homes maybe
a quarter mile straight ahead. Looking out my tent entrance,
the new development another quarter mile to my left, and
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thousands of acres to my right the Great Egg Harbor
River Swamp. The nights were cold, and like clockwork, a
pack of coyotes would gather right outside the front of
my tent at about eight thirty each night. They would fight, howl,
and run around doing god knows what for a few
hours before finally heading into the deep woods. They didn't
(49:54):
seem to be scared of me being there, and they
never gave me any trouble. But I would sleep with
a twenty six ins full tank short sword in my
hand each night, just in case. By day five, I
had set up a new job that started in a
few weeks, and had bought a nineteen ninety six Ford
Explorer that I was to pick up the next day
once my new insurance was active. I had gotten to
(50:16):
my tent that night right as the sun was going
down around five point thirty. It was going to be
a cold night, so I put on some warmer clothes,
I ate some snacks, and puffed on my vape and
settled in for the night. At eight pm, the coyotes
showed up and were raising hell. They were so noisy
that they had lots of the neighborhood dogs barking like
crazy off in the distance too. But all at once
(50:41):
they went from super noisy to running off. I could
hear them whining and yelping as they ran to my
right off into the deep woods. I was laying on
my back, ready to fall asleep, when an unbelievably powerful
stench filled my tent. And it was bad. I mean
read it was a mixture of unpleasant aromas, a combination
(51:05):
of really nasty bio feces, skunk, and most of all,
smelly feet. I sat up in my tent and thought,
what the hell I was confused. I cannot overemphasize the
absolute power of that stench. It was completely overwhelming and
I could barely stand it. I tried breathing through my mouth,
(51:27):
and that was even worse, as it was so strong
that it seemed like I could taste it on the
tip of my tongue. After maybe twenty seconds or so,
I decided I needed to open the tent up and
get out of there and hopefully escape the smell. Right
as I was unzipping the tent, I heard someone coming
down the path. Then I heard them slowly walking off
(51:49):
the path into the woods to my left. It was
the unmistakable noise of a person cautiously walking through the woods.
I slowly zipped the tent back up and froze. My
heart started pounding. I figured it was the police or
maybe some local homeowner, and then my stomach dropped. I
(52:10):
had made it all weak, unnoticed, and now someone was
going to cause me grief that I really couldn't afford
on my last night out there. Life was hard enough
at the time, and the last thing I needed was
trouble with the cops or some guy breaking my balls
and then calling the cops. And the footsteps came closer.
They came around the mound that was hiding my tent
(52:32):
and to the left side of it, still about twenty
feet away. I gathered the footsteps then made their way
to where the coyotes had been a few yards directly
in front of my tent, and then suddenly stopped. I
was still as a statue, and I could hear deep,
hoarse breathing, like a large man catching his breath. Then
(52:55):
the footsteps came forward and right up to the very
front of my tent. With the tarp covering the whole thing,
I couldn't see anything, but whoever it was was right
there breathing. The footsteps then continued around to the right
side of my tent and stopped again. Then this thing
(53:17):
leaned its face right up to the tarp and started
trying to smell what was inside. I could hear big,
long sniffs, each followed by an exhile through the mouth.
At that point I was not so sure it was
a person anymore. I mean, no man could smell so powerfully,
and also, why would a person be sniffing my tent
(53:37):
in the first place. As unlikely as it seemed, I thought,
Oh shit, bear, I mean, bears are very rare in
the pine barrens, and I was positive that whatever had
walked into my area was on two feet. But what
else could it be? Right At that point, I decided
to say something. If it was indeed a bear, there
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was a ninety nine percent chance it would run for
its life as soon as it heard a human's voice.
So I said loudly, who's there, and whacked the right
side of my tent heart with a backhand. It took
two steps back and then let out a long, very deep,
and terrifying growl. My blood ran cold, and I gripped
(54:22):
my blade tightly and poised for some kind of attack.
Then this thing simply walked off into the forest. I
could hear its two legged footsteps crunching through the leaves,
getting further and further away, until it was finally gone.
I started to breathe again, and that putrid stench began
to fade. After about a minute, I heard the loud
(54:47):
snap of a branch breaking, followed by the sound of
wood hitting wood twice. I sat there, catching my breath
and wondering if it was a monster or a bear.
I mean, nothing made sense. Black bears don't have a
strong odor, even during their mating season, and I am
sure that it would have run like hell as soon
as I had opened my mouth. Sasquatch never even crossed
(55:11):
my mind again. I thought they only existed in far
away places, and certainly not on the edge of a
town in New Jersey. Once the adrenaline wore off, I
was exhausted. I don't know how, but I remember sleeping
well that night, and the next morning I packed everything
up and got the hell out of there. I should
(55:33):
mention that the year before my incident, a horse in
the area had been attacked and killed not too far away,
within walking distance of my experience, and the horse had
been disemboweled and its organs were missing. When the body
was found well a few months later, I had gotten
my life squared away and all but forgotten. That night,
(55:54):
I just shrugged my shoulders and told myself that must
have been a bear. Of course, course, now I know
exactly what it was. Creepy man followed me at the
(56:14):
grocery store by safe Wealth. Recently, I went into my
local grocery store at around six pm just to grab
a few things. I was by myself and the store
wasn't super busy, but enough people were around. Normally, I'm
not as aware of my surroundings because I like to
listen to music while I shop, but this time I wasn't,
(56:36):
and honestly that paid off. As I was walking through
an aisle, I nearly bumped into a tall, heavy set
man looked to be in his forties with oliver tanned
skin and a gray shirt. He had a cart. I said, oh, sorry,
and he said sorry too, but then he stopped, looked
me directly in the eyes, slightly leaned in and smiled,
(56:59):
and said, how is your day to day? The way
he said it immediately set off alarms in my head.
For context, I'm a young adult male but pretty androgynous
in appearance and don't have a hypermasculine fashion sense. Strangers
mixed my gender up all the time, so at first
I figured maybe he thought I was a woman. But
(57:21):
I also have a pretty deep voice, so once I
thought he heard me speak, he'd back off, but nope.
I gave a quick I'm fine and then walked a
few steps down. Seconds later, he was behind me. I
noticed it and thought it was weird, but figured we
were probably just headed toward the same area. I took
(57:43):
a u turn to another aisle without grabbing anything, and
there he was behind me again. When I turned to
look at him, he pretended to look at the groceries nearby,
but didn't have anything in his cart. At that point,
my heart was literally pounding, and I just felt something
wasn't right. I thought I could be reading too much
into it, but my intuition was screaming that this was
(58:06):
a dangerous situation and I didn't have a good feeling
at all. I left my cart and went straight to
a cashier and quietly asked if she could walk with
me because I felt someone was following me. She didn't
immediately know who I meant, but she started telling me
about her own encounter with a creep who'd been in
the store before, a man who had told her he
(58:26):
was from Australia. That line immediately brought me back to
a few months ago at that exact same store, when
my mom, my sister, and I were loading my car,
A man had approached us the same build and same look,
asking us about our day, saying he was from Australia
and new to the area. And keep in mind, he
(58:49):
had no Australian accent at all. My sister and I
immediately got in the car because we both had super
creepy vibes, and my mom carried the conversation on for
a bit and then finally joined us. We figured at
the time we were overreacting and that he was probably
just a bit odd and trying to make friends, but
standing there with the cashier, it hit me that this
(59:11):
was the exact same guy. If I hadn't gone over
to talk to her, I probably never would have made
that connection. Then, while I was still talking to her,
the man nearly ran into us again, smiled and said sorry,
and that's when we both looked at each other and
realized we were in fact talking about the same person.
(59:33):
I was so thrown off I couldn't even think straight
about what else I needed to buy, so I just
decided to go check out early. He checked out at
the exact same time and right next to me. I
finished first, but waited a bit because he was having
issues scanning his items and I did not want my
back to him if I was leaving. After a bit,
(59:54):
I decided to go, and the cashier offered to walk
me to my car. As soon as we went to leave,
he also left at the exact same time. I exited
out the far right door because I didn't want him
to know where my car was. I also didn't know
if he had a weapon on him. For comparison, I'm
five to five and one hundred and twenty pounds and
(01:00:14):
this man was probably about five ten and maybe two
thirty or two forty five. The cashier and I walked
around a bit to fake him out, and sure enough,
he ended up having to walk to his truck, which
was parked all the way on the opposite side of
the store. That completely confirmed to me that he had
been following me, because why would he exit the same
(01:00:34):
door as me when his vehicle was on the other
side of the parking lot. Thankfully, the cashier stayed with
me until I got to my car safely. The whole
thing shook me up. I've always been socially anxious, but
something in me just clicked and I went straight to
the staff for help. I wanted to share this to
(01:00:55):
raise awareness for anyone shopping alone. Of course, we see
this happen constantly with women, which is just horrible, but
today it made me realize that even guys aren't immune
to these kinds of encounters. Whether I was overreacting or not.
It's better to be cautious than to regret not saying something.
Please be aware of your surroundings and do not be
(01:01:17):
afraid to ask local staff for help if you fear
being followed. Hey, gang, thanks for listening to this episode.
(01:01:39):
If you have a true scary story of any nature
that you'd like me to narrate, I would love to
hear from you. Email Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at
gmail dot com. I read them all, just reminding everybody
we're getting closer to this year's Halloween extravaganza. I've got
a couple of stories in the kitty, but would love
to have more from you. Again, submit your stories to
(01:02:01):
my email Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com.
I've repeated it twice. I think we're done with that.
If you're not following me on social media, please do
links to that or in the description. And if you're
following this on YouTube and you like what you heard,
why not give the video a thumbs up. If you're
not a subscriber, why not become one. Tell a friend.
I'd appreciate all of that, and it really helps out
(01:02:23):
the algorithms. Everyone be excellent to each other 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.
Hey, campfire crew, let's get it on backpacking in Alabama
(00:24):
by Anonymous. This happened about six years ago. I was
about twelve and my brother was twenty six at the time.
My brother had been serving in the US Army for
several years when this happened, and was deploying to the
Middle East on his second deployment if I remember correctly. Also,
(00:45):
of note, he was a Green Beret and had recently
three or four months prior to this trip completed the
Army Special Forces Qualification Course Robin Sage and all that.
By then he was an active duty SF Engineer sergeant.
Definitely not someone you'd want to fuck around with. Given
that we both grew up with a passion for the outdoors,
(01:08):
he thought it would be nice to take me out
a backpacking trip in northern Alabama the Sipsy Wilderness for
those familiar with the area. This was before he left
for nine months. The trip had gone smoothly up until
the third night we were camping out around eight pm. We
had our camp set up, eight dinner and were sitting
(01:29):
by the fire talking about typical boy shit, you know, guns, girls, etc.
For some reference, our spot was about fifty yards from
a large stream and about fifty yards downhill, adjacent to
the large path our camp. The stream and the path
formed a triangle of sorts. This was summertime in Alabama,
(01:52):
so it wasn't quite dark yet when two guys who
looked to be in their late twenties wandered up and
asked if we had seen any hogs while we were
hiking around, given that that was rural Alabama. Given that
it was rural Alabama, we actually had seen some farther
into the wilderness area and told them so. Even though
(02:13):
they were relatively polite, my brother called them good old boys.
I got a seriously creepy vibe from them. Dirty clothes,
greasy hair, scraggly facial hair, et cetera. Honestly, they looked
like they belonged in the movie Deliverance. They kind of
hung out for a few minutes, maybe a little longer
(02:35):
than they should have, looking around, asking us questions like
how long we'd been out there, how long we were staying,
and we got the vibe they were kind of sizing
us up. Then they abruptly said goodbye and walked away.
I didn't necessarily feel threatened by them, and I know
for sure my brother didn't, but I still felt uneasy
(02:55):
about the whole thing. Fast forward three or four hours.
My brother and I had gone to sleep and were
nestled in our tent when I woke to the sound
of multiple dogs barking. I've always been a heavy sleeper,
and they sounded like they were only about one hundred
yards away. My heart immediately started pounding, and I kicked
(03:17):
my brother through my sleeping bag and asked if he
was awake and heard the dogs. He responded, I'm awake.
They've been getting closer for the past hour or so.
Just lay still and don't make any sounds. Needless to say,
twelve year old me was about to shit my pants.
(03:39):
We would also hear sporadic shouts from several different sources,
but neither came any closer. A few minutes later, my
brother whispered, they're just hunting for hogs. They used the
dogs to pin them down and then they shoot them.
That gave me some relief, but not much. Somehow managed
(04:00):
to fall back asleep, and the fact that they were
doing it at night was a huge red flag. My
brother later told me, but I think he was just
trying to keep me calm. Fast forward again another three hours.
Around two am, I had managed to sleep pretty well
after first hearing the hog hunters when I woke up
to my brother squeezing my shoulder firmly, saying, wake up,
(04:24):
put your shoes on quick and follow me. Be as
quiet as you can. My heart immediately went back to
racing because I heard the dogs and voices in the distance,
farther away than before, but still distinct. Not asking any questions,
I did what my brother told me, and as soon
as we were out of the tent, he told me
(04:45):
to get on his back, and this was a breeze
for him. After rocking with god knows how much weight
in the army, we snuck about fifty yards into the
woods towards the junction of the path and the stream
and crawled into some bushes. It was up a hill,
so we had a pretty good elevated view of our campsite.
I remember as we were laying there, how loudly I
(05:07):
was breathing, and how quiet he was. When I heard
the very distinct sound of a pistol slide racking. I
looked over and my brother had his pistol and hkusp
that he gave to me a few years after this
story took place, and he was watching the campsite and
surrounding area. I started to whisper to him when he
(05:27):
put his hand over my mouth and pointed at our campsite.
The group of hunters had been steadily approaching our camp,
and by that time, thirty or so minutes had reached it.
There were five of them and like three or four dogs.
They all looked relatively young, but two either had rifles
(05:49):
or shotguns, and the dogs were going crazy, obviously having
smelled our scent. For those of you who aren't backpackers
or campers, nobody who up on a random camp in
the middle of the night with dogs and guns has
good intentions. I knew this, and my brother knew this.
I was scared shitless. I couldn't make out what they
(06:11):
were saying, but my brother later told me they were
talking about us, although he hadn't heard any specifics either.
They lingered for about twenty minutes, shining flashlights around and
talking to themselves, when my brother put his mouth to
my ear and whispered, if they come towards us, I
want you to turn and run as quickly as you can.
Don't stop, don't look back, stay off the trail, and
(06:34):
look for the flashing lights. I didn't know what he
meant by that, but I'll explain that later. I knew
I could make it back because he had taught me
land nav pretty well. He then handed me a flashlight
and told me to not take the red filter off.
He told me later that the red filter helps preserve
night vision and cuts down ambient light, so it would
(06:56):
be harder for someone to see from a distance. At
this point, I was so scared I almost started crying,
But at the same time I had a rush of
adrenaline and what I think now was confidence that he
thought I could handle myself. We laid there for a
while longer went out of nowhere. They started screaming where
(07:19):
y'all at and firing into the woods at random. My
brother dragged me back behind the crest of the hill
and threw himself on top of me, and thankfully our
position on top of the hill was protected from any gunfire.
They shot maybe five or six more times and then
started walking back the direction they had come. They got
(07:39):
maybe a hundred yards away when I heard a blaring
siren and saw our emergency lights flashing through the woods.
Turns out my brother had called the Forest Service office
on a satellite phone my family has for emergencies. He
did that while I was asleep, and they, in turn
had sent out Forest Service officers and game wards to
our area of the worldness. The Sipsy Wilderness is about
(08:03):
twenty five thousand acres in size, so it took them
a while to get there on the dirt roads. When
we saw the game warden truck, my brother signaled them
with the light and pointed them in the direction the
hunters had gone, and the guy sped off, shining a
spotlight through the woods. As soon as they were all gone,
we went back to our camp, packed up our shit,
(08:25):
and waited by the path for the game warden to
come back, who then gave us a ride in his
truckbed back to the main staging area. On the drive back,
my brother told me how brave I had been, and
that we would talk about it with our parents the
next day if I wanted to. I asked him not
to do that, because I thought they might never let
(08:45):
me go camping again. So, creepy rednecks in the woods,
let's not meat again. You might get shot next time.
Follow up. We never got any definitive information on what
happened the rednecks we encountered. I have many friends who
have gone out to the Sipsy area and had a
great time with no creepy stuff going on. However, it
(09:10):
truly is a wilderness area, and law enforcement response, if
you can even reach them, is slow. I was lucky
that my brother was there and reacted so quickly. Otherwise
who knows what could have happened. We also got lucky
that whatever their intentions were, they either reconsidered or lost interest.
(09:31):
I'll note that when they left our camp, the game
ward showed up pretty soon afterwards, but I didn't see
what the guys and their dogs did. If I remember correctly,
they headed in a direction parallel to the stream, away
from the trail, inaccessible for any kind of vehicle. Maybe
the warden continued on and took another trail to try
(09:53):
and cut them off. We waited around another thirty minutes
for him to come back, and he said there were
other officers outlooked. There are only so many paths that
you could take a truck or a quad bike down,
so any thorough search effort would also have to have
been done on foot. Wuija Amy by Kelly l I
(10:25):
graduated from high school in nineteen ninety two. My best
friend Ann and I had more or less already begun
the process of parting ways. By the time we were eighteen,
we were already very different people, and looking back, I
think we maintained our friendship and bond out of boredom.
And left for college in the city in September following
our graduation, and I stayed closer to home because I
(10:47):
had a job and hadn't yet decided where I wanted
to attend college. Right away, she met a girl from
out of state who I despised. Lisa was into drugs
and obsessed with I thought she was a freak, and
she resented me simply for being alive and relatively happy
in the height of the grunge movement and the peak
(11:09):
of our angry youth phase. I actually wasn't all that angry.
I didn't visit my friend all that often. By their
second year in college, they had not only become best friends,
they'd also become roommates and moved into a newer, but
extremely creepy apartment complex. I hated it there. However, after
much begging on Anne's part for me to come and
(11:30):
spend a week with them. I gave in and went
to this day, I can't say what the purpose was,
other than a last ditch effort to salvage our dying friendship.
We've been friends since the age of thirteen. I guess
it was just hard to let go of what was familiar.
Lisa and I managed to be civil to each other,
(11:50):
but it grew old quickly. She was blatantly resentful of
my presence, secretive, and always worried that I would go
through her things or something. I could have cared less
about her or things. I just looked at her and
saw a loser. The point of all of this is
that it is important to know that Lisa and I
knew very little about one another. By the end of
(12:11):
my week visit, we were all irritable. Aboard, Ann suggested
that we take the train to a toy store and
purchase owija board. We all agreed to chip in for
the cost, and it was different and it got our
minds on something other than our misery. So we treked
across town, purchased a board, and returned to play with it.
Lisa and I volunteered to go first as a just
(12:33):
wanted to watch for the first round. We put our
hands on the plan chat and asked, is anyone here?
We immediately began getting the infinity sign. I initially suspected
that Lisa was behind the movement. I spoke out, what
is your name? And the board spelled out poweer. Lisa
(12:59):
said some to the effect of power, Huh, what the
hell kind of name is that? She gave me the
impression that she was not moving the plan chet, and
I admit at that point I was a little spooked.
I then asked a really dumb question, do you know us?
The plan chet paused, all movements stopped. I asked again,
(13:23):
do you know us? It spelled out k Nwamy no Amy.
That made no sense to me. Before I actually had
a chance to take a look at Lisa's face, I
blurted out something to the effect of who the hell
is Amy? At that point, Lisa cussed pushed the board away,
(13:45):
declaring that she was done. So I was just left
sitting there with the board completely confused, so I asked
Ann who Amy was. Anne quietly said Amy was Lisa's
older sister. She died in a plane crash. Lisa refused
to use the board anymore. I think she may have
(14:08):
suspected that I had known about her sister, but I
had no prior knowledge of her sister, and even if
I had, it never would have occurred to me to
mess with her mind like that. I will never know
who or what we tapped into, but it did leave
me wondering and more than a little shaken. Urbek's Mission
(14:36):
gone south by Kind Supermarket in twenty seventeen. Twenty eighteen,
I was working long shifts in the restaurant business, averaging
fifty hours a week. It was a relief to get
four days off. In cooperation with my childhood best friend,
we would invest our spare time in our Urbek's hobby.
(14:58):
Over the course of a few years, we completed twenty missions.
Some were just circling the area, and others lasted a
few hours and required some creativity to get in, some forgettable,
most a little scary, and a couple put the fear
of God into us. One quiet autumn morning, I drove
(15:18):
to my friend's house with my urbeks gear in the
middle of a weekday. We researched locations, and he announced
the Little Flower Mansion. Reading the bio mentioned that it
was an antebellum mansion with colonial features. Possibly one of
our early presidents passed through its doors. Was only twenty
minutes away according to GPS, so we street parked a
(15:41):
few blocks down. The property was tucked behind an active,
functioning nursing home, so we snuck around the back entrance
and took advantage of a man shaped sized hole in
the chain link fence. The slave quarters that were separated
from the main estate. It was a small ninety degree
hallway that led to a dried up fountain in another hallway.
(16:04):
At the end of that was a kitchen and pantry
corridors of the mansion. So after turning through the kitchen,
we walked into the main corridor. The ceilings were twenty
feet high and some of the original furniture was still
in place. A wide U shaped staircase was on our
left and a basement door was on the right. I
(16:25):
mean this building had to have been magnificent in its prime.
After over years of neglect, the ceiling had collapsed and
beneath it grew a murky puddle that stretched about fifty feet.
We turned up the wide staircase and practiced some photojournalism
and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. We made
(16:46):
it to the other side of the building, where we
found a prayer room and the curious things inside were
a marble altar and ostensibly a homeless person's habitat His
belongings included a pipe, a PS two control, a sleeping bag,
and some recent trash, and the front door was strongly
bolted and bordered shut. So we doubled back and went
(17:09):
to check out the basement. The basement wasn't as creepy
as we expected. It had a low ceiling and pipes,
and it was clearly not suitable to live in. We'd
been out there for over an hour and decided to
make our exit. Throughout our time, the mansion was motionless.
I mean, all we heard was the ceiling dripping and
(17:30):
the occasional gust of wind. The oh shit moment is
when we heard the most blood curdling scream from a
woman upstairs. Reflexively, we ran out of there like Scooby
Doo and Shaggy. While panicking trying to find our way out,
I yelled, it's through the kitchen, and I led the way.
(17:51):
We circled around the property and noticed the driveway had
a surveillance camera. I'm not sure if what we heard
was paranormal or just a squatter, but we didn't return.
(18:12):
Black Wolf by Greg h. I'm still not sure what
happened at this house in Germany, but I am very
definitely sure that it happened. My wife and I were
married in April of nineteen seventy two, and at the
time I was reassigned to duty at Sambach Air Base Sembach, Germany.
(18:34):
By the winter of nineteen seventy three, we had rented
a beautiful old house from a wonderful couple named Karl
and Alfrida Jacob. The house was located in Mohastras Munschweiler, Germany.
This was just a few miles from Sembach Air Base
and was generally located in the south of Germany near Kaiserslautern.
(18:56):
At the time we lived there, the house was one
hundred and sixty years old. I'm sorry that we lost
touch with Carl and Elfrida. They were some of the
nicest people I have ever known, as far as that goes.
We were the only Americans living in that village and
the people there were top notch, and we lived a
quiet existence. Our first child, a boy, was born while
(19:18):
we lived there. His coming seemed to manifest a presence
that my wife and I were really not aware of.
There had been a few noises and such, but we
really didn't think much about it. Sometimes it would feel
as though we were being watched. As our son grew
through the first months of life. There were many occurrences,
and this is only one of them. Our baby was
(19:40):
about six or seven months old, as babies of that
age sometimes do. He was crying and seemed to want
to My wife was letting him cry it out for
a little while, and he was in our bedroom in
the crib. Our bedroom was on the back side of
the house. There was a small walkway beside the house
in a concrete wall. The backyard was on the side
(20:01):
of a hill, and the ground was at a level
at the top of that wall, just about even with
the bedroom window. The walkway was less than two feet wide,
and the house had upstairs bedrooms, but we hardly ever
used them. From the backyard, one had to go down
some steps beside our bedroom and then open an arch
door and an eight foot high brick wall to reach
(20:23):
the front yard. We were blessed to have grass, and
this was the outside passage. Front to back. The arch
door was wrought iron and covered with plexiglass and had
an iron dead bolt that latched it once in the
front yard. There was another wrought iron fence at the street,
and the yard itself was about two and a half
feet higher than the street, and the fence was about
(20:45):
four feet high. Our neighbors to the right were the
last house before the trail up to the woods, and
the backside of both our houses was open to fields.
My landlady had instructed us that it was very important
that we and lock the wooden shutters all over the
windows and lock the dead bolt in the outside gate
every night. It was after dark, around nine o'clock the
(21:10):
evening when the baby was crying when we heard something
in the backyard outside our bedroom window. Whatever it was,
it was making an eerie sound and mimicking the baby crying,
and whatever it was, it was big. We could hear
it drawing breath into its lungs and wailing with a
sound that would chill you right up your spine. Standing
(21:34):
in the backyard by the window. Put it just about
two feet away from the shutters. I didn't have a gun,
being a foreigner in Germany. The thing both frightened and
angered me, and we listened to it for about ten
or fifteen minutes. I finally decided that I would take
out my bowie knife, throw open the shutters, and attack it.
(21:56):
My yelling at it through the open window and through
the wooden shutters had no affen fact, and we then
decided that giving it access to the house in that
fashion was probably not a good idea. I then thought
that I would go out the front, since we had
no back door, and go around the house and take
on the brute. My wife didn't want me to go,
(22:17):
but I found out later that she just didn't want
to be in the house alone. Like I said, by
the sound it was making, this thing was big. Its
whale was a high sound, almost a scream, and in
between screams and whales, we could hear low guttural growls
similar to that of a lion or some other kind
of big cat. I finally exclaimed, I'm going out. We
(22:42):
need some relief. I grabbed my knife and headed for
the front door, and I also took a hiking staff
with a metallic pointed end. It took two full turns
of the giant skeleton key to get the door open.
By this time, I had redirected my fear to an
attack attitude was prepared to jolt the damn thing like
it was doing to us. Just as I opened the
(23:05):
front door, I could see the thing coming out from
beside our house. It looked like a wolf. It was
jet black and had long course looking fur, and it
was just over three feet high at the shoulder. It
glanced at me and then ran across the front yard
about forty or fifty feet and leaped over the wrought
(23:26):
iron fence. As it landed on the sidewalk, it took
off at a run and disappeared past my neighbor's house
and up the track to the woods. And I walked
around the house and into the backyard. The wrought iron
door stood a gate. To this day, I have yet
to figure out how that thing opened that iron dead
(23:48):
bolt latch on its own. Pacific Crest Trail, Washington, odd
encounter by Absom. I was through hiking the Pacific Crest
(24:09):
Trail PCT southbound. At this time I'd flipped from northbound
to southbound part way through the Sierra Nevada. As twenty
twenty three was California's history. Snow You're on record, and
when I was there it was still snowing. That's when
I had a creepy encounter with a self described day
hiker mail on the trail. I was hiking towards the
(24:33):
Cracker Barrel also known as the White Pass in Washington.
The area before White Pass is quite boggy, and it
was a sunny, warm day in July of twenty twenty three.
While I was hiking, I bumped into a day hiker
at one of the trail junctions with the PCT in
a side trail. He popped out of the trail, a
(24:54):
white man with fluffy, short white hair, eighty style mustache,
maybe around five eleven or so, and very short cargo
shorts and a huge square JanSport backpack of a sort
which was making jangling noises. He immediately asked me if
I was a pc T hiker, and I said yes,
(25:15):
and then he quickly asked me if I was hiking alone.
I was about thirty at the time, I'm five one,
and I had not showered in seven days due to
the remote stretches of Washington prior to this. Asking a
female if she is hiking alone is not cool, and
I technically was hiking with another hiker. He was just
(25:35):
a few miles ahead of me. I said, no, that
some one was just up ahead, which was true when
he asked me these questions. They were in quick succession
of each other, and he seemed incredibly excited. Something about
the encounter. The vibes in general was off, and I
had that blood going cold, stomach dropping feeling. I proceeded
(25:57):
to walk faster down the pc T. The man followed me,
making some comments about a female all alone out here,
and because I was well over a thousand miles into
walking that year, I was in good shape and began
to haul some serious butt, assuming he would not be
able to keep up. The man started lightly jogging behind
(26:19):
me to keep up, getting so close to my seven
days unwashed hair and back of my head that he
could practically have grabbed or sniffed the hair fuzzies. His
backpack was exceedingly large for a day hiker, was not
a hiking backpack, which is fine, it just didn't fit
with how oversized it was. Like I said, it was jangling.
(26:39):
There were metal things banging around inside his backpack, and
loudly too. As he was becoming out of breath to
keep up with me, and after making comments about my
seemingly solo hiking, he immediately said to me, this is
the part of the trail where all those hikers went missing,
and that's when I freaked out. He then started talking
(27:03):
about the bogs and how bodies could just disappear, and
about a PCT through hiker who had disappeared in that
exact area in twenty eighteen. However, he also mentioned something
about missing women in the area too. To this day,
I can't find any info on who that might have
been or how far from White passed. He was referring
(27:27):
the way he was describing missing people and missing bodies
in bog or whatever made my stomach do backflips. I
only had trekking polls at the time, and now I
carry bear spray because of encounters like this. But I
gripped them in my hands and readied myself to whack
them in the face if I needed to. I don't
(27:47):
know how to explain it, but it was not normal.
He was excitedly discussing these missing people and also telling
me that he one knew the sheriff on the case,
and two volunteered to help look for this missing PCT
hiker in twenty eighteen, and he knew where they looked,
which was apparently all in the bog area. He talked
(28:09):
a lot about his time volunteering to search for missing people,
and I realized, however, I did not want to preemptively
tell him to fuck off, because making him angry felt wrong. Instinctually,
I wanted him behind me, not ahead of me where
he could ambush. So I kept him behind me and
asked him details of his supposed volunteer work with the
(28:31):
local sheriff and looking for whoever the missing people were,
plus the missing PCT hiker. How I know he was
bad news was when we came upon the guy I
was hiking with. My hiking companion was getting water by
a pond and saw me hiking it four more miles
an hour, and this creepy dude literally breathing down my
(28:53):
neck out of breath. My hiking companion's eyes got huge,
and I was gesturing to him with my eyes that
something was wrong. I turned around finally and scared the
creep behind me and said with great satisfaction that I
was not hiking alone, and here was my male hiking partner.
(29:13):
The creepy man's eyes got so wide, and he said, oh, right, well,
nice to meet you, and said nothing to my hiking
partner other than that, and he took off fucking running
down the trail, I mean not hiking and not jogging,
but running. We hiked very fast after him, but he
(29:35):
totally disappeared, no trace of him, no footprints in the
mud as we approached the trailhead, I mean nothing. There
were no other side trails he could have taken. And
my hiking friend and I stopped to eat as I
was shaking, and I told him about the man and
his talk of bodies and the strange backpack, and we
both agreed something was off, especially as the man had
(29:59):
taken off running for his life away from my male
hiking partner. Had I been actually hiking alone, I have
no idea what would have happened. We were close to
White Pass, but still a couple of hours away. I
reported the encounter to a ranger via phone, who then
reported it to the Cracker Barrel, along with the older
(30:19):
man's description. Perhaps he was just a strange guy, overly
interested in the missing hiker case and local missing people,
and way interested in my hiking alone, seemingly, but the
whole thing felt so so so wrong, at least say
my instincts. I now carry spray when I later did
(30:44):
the Continental Divide Trail, for example, because of situations like this.
I'm curious if anyone else has had weird encounters in
that area of Washington. Zip Lady by rick E. When
(31:09):
I was a little boy around the age of six
and a half, making it around nineteen eighty nine, I
lived in a small Lincolnshire village in a relatively new
three bedroomed house. At the time, I had very bad
earaches in my left ear, which continued over a month,
and that ultimately led me to needing gromets to be inserted.
(31:29):
This seemed to solve my major pain problem, and sometime
after it fell out while I was in the bath,
all was well and good with the world, or so
I thought. After said ear problem, I still had sudden
and slight aches, which didn't really bother me but made
me constantly suffer heavily from the common affliction of sleepwalking.
(31:50):
I would, so my mom tells me, walk downstairs from
my room and just start walking around the house picking
stuff up, cleaning the night's dishes up, and I would
go outside in the dark to hose the plants or
vacuum the dining room. One time I randomly played three
blind Mice on our piano mean loads of weird kids stuff.
(32:11):
Once I actually left my house in my danger Mouse
pjs without my parents realizing. It was around eleven o'clock
at night, and I walked halfway across the village barefoot
and knocked on the door of some old lady's house
that none of my folks knew, asking her the now
famous family question, where has the bubble gone? Yeah? That
was very, very embarrassing, and still is. My parents watched
(32:35):
me do this night after night and didn't wake me up,
fearing that old urban legend that suggests it's dangerous to
do so. Or maybe they were just enjoying me being
a cute little sleepwalker. I mean, they did have pictures.
In this zombie state. I would occasionally mutter annoyance and
swipe at the Zip Lady, my imaginary friend that darted
around my head. I would say out loud, telling her
(32:58):
to leave me alone, and I want to go to
bed and go away, missus Zip and more bizarrely, for
a six year old, get the ludden number inside for
Heaven's sake, no one knew what Lawden number meant, and
there were many other odd utterances too, Although in this state,
my mom said that MY voice sounded different, more deeper
and not grown man deep, but it was as if
(33:21):
I had a bad cold and my throat was sore
and deeper. This apparently made her feel the most uncomfortable,
and if I persisted with this odd voice, and if
my dad wasn't right there at night, she would have
to shake me awake, at which point I eventually would
be awake but screaming, and then just fall under her arms, crying,
remembering none of it. In the morning. Normally, though, after
(33:43):
a night's sleepwalking, I would make my way back upstairs,
through the hallway and into my bedroom and into bed
without a problem, all in the dark other than a
dim orange light of my smurf nightlight, although nine times
out of ten in the morning, my covers would be
folded at the bottom of my bed and I would
be fast asleep, just shivering in a fetal position, And
nights could be pretty cold as I slept directly under
(34:05):
a window. In one corner of my small room were
my collection of toys. The strange thing that something was
playing with my toys, and it was always the same toys,
always my action figures. Things started with my ThunderCats figures,
you know, lion O wedged into either the left or
right bottom corner of my room, followed by Panther I
(34:28):
forget their real names, then the two will E kids,
the one who threw bombs, and followed by the cat
I think his name was Snarf. All of these would
be crushed together as tightly as possible, and it was
sometimes difficult to wedge them out. On top and around
the ThunderCats was then the he Man figures. Normally he
Man would be resting on top of Liono and one
(34:49):
of the wild kids with Mamra on he Man's shoulders.
These strange structures that I was not building were then
surrounded concentrically by WWF old school wrestling figures of which
my brother had many, and finally the whole area was
littered with battle beasts in an odd pattern. We realized
it wasn't me doing it in my sleepwalking, and it
(35:12):
became a fun game for me and my folks to
note the different positions of the different figures every morning,
and I even have an old scrap book with some
of my old scribbles of the patterns. Never were any
of my other toys used, such as my Transformers, Muscleman,
or monsters in my pocket. So, like I said, my
parents knew it wasn't me doing that to my toys,
(35:32):
but my midnight journeys continued. Okay, this is what I
remember best as I can, Bearing in mind I was
six and a half years old and half asleep, but
I can say that everything was always like a semi
lucid dream. I mean, I knew I was asleep, but
also not quite in control. After a while, I would
(35:53):
start to wake up and see this zip lady floating
around normally above my bed, smiling. I was never were
scared of this imaginary friend as I thought she was,
and I kind of liked her. There used to be
a BBC program that they played in the early afternoon
on TV in my local infant school called and I
think it was called Words and Pictures. It might have
(36:14):
been something else, but I can't remember. The program was
your basic educational affair for five year olds, but had
a cartoon character that floated amongst real life presenters Roger
Rabbit style. This character was half the size of an
adult and shaped like a guitar body. It was white
and had tiny black legs with little brown boots, in
(36:34):
a very very wide blue mouth, and gave instructions on
how to write letters, etc. I can't recall what they
called it, but because of the big mouth, I knew
it as the Zip Lady, and it had a big
zip for a mouth. That's exactly what I saw when
I was sleepwalking. But this thing used to bother me.
First of all, when I was waking up as I
(36:55):
was just getting to sleep by shouting my name like
there was an echo in the room. Then it would
drag the covers off of me, very slowly, but enough
that I would have to wake up. Of course, I'd
fight back and keep hold of the covers, but when
I got tired, this Zip Lady would pull harder and
the blankets would fly out of my hands. Sometimes in summer,
(37:16):
when it was hotter, I wouldn't care if she had
taken my covers away, but when I wouldn't react to her,
she would start to throw items of clothing at me.
And after that, the only way I knew I would
be able to get some sleep would be just to
give in and follow her. Yeah, follow this Zip Lady.
Every time that I gave in to her demands, things
(37:37):
would go hazy, and that's when I would begin sleepwalking.
And you know the rest. That's how I remember the
Zip Lady, A strange cartoon friend that appeared in my
dreams occasionally like a pixie, and always teased me enough
that it made me sleepwalk. When I was older, my
parents finally told me what I thought about her at
the time, and this is what I told them. When
(37:59):
I was round six, I used to say that she
came out of one of the corners of my room,
usually the darkest corner. She would grow larger and larger
until she was bigger than my father. She was very
skinny and wore a long black dress and had her
hair up big and tied up. She had a frilly
collar on her dress and that was fastened to her nose.
(38:21):
It like she didn't want me to see her mouth.
Her dress was always zipped from her belly all the
way up to her nose. She seemed to be holding
some kind of bottle in one hand. I always remember that,
and she didn't have any black bits in her eyes.
I think I meant pupils and that her eyes were
completely white. As I mentioned, when she would appear, I
(38:42):
would try to hide under the covers, but she again
would pull them down slowly, and when I would look,
she would be standing there in the darkest corner. That's
when if I didn't look at her, the toys would
start to fly around, hit walls, and then be thrown
at me. Usually when she appeared, my night light would
eventually short out. Shortly after that, I was always compelled
(39:05):
to follow her because I was scared of the dark,
and then again my sleepwalking would begin. It's strange how
I am remembering all these things that happened to me
as a child. I still only think of the Zip
Lady as a friendly cartoon mate. But from what my
folks tell me, the way she appeared and the way
she treated me, she might have been something much more sinister.
(39:27):
Shortly after all of this happened, maybe about a year,
we moved and the Zip Lady never paid me a
visit again, and I grew out of that sleepwalking phase.
At first, I thought I kind of missed her, as
I was young and had too many dreams to mention,
where we had flying adventures over fields of corn and
hidden castles from unseen villains, and despite the fact that
she would wake me up, make me sleepwalk, and kind
(39:50):
of attack me, I always thought we were friends to
the end. My parents didn't see things the same way
and were glad that when we moved, the Zip Lady
didn't follow us. Electric Shadow People Submitted by Suzanne Hass.
(40:18):
This horrible, frightening set of events happened to me almost
one year ago. I fell off my horse on August
twenty fourth at about seven am in Los Angeles, California,
and basically shattered the left side of my body due
to two different horses spooking and bolting. There had been
a death of a rider who got disemboweled and died
(40:40):
in a young girl who almost lost her foot. This
was a few days before I fell right in the
stables next to where I boarded my horse, So it
was two gruesome events I had never heard of while
pleasure riding, especially not happening in the same place. As
a matter of fact, another horse had to be put
down the day before in my stables, exactly where my
(41:02):
horse spook bolted. Something absolutely terrified my horse to the
point and he went crazy for about fifteen minutes. Even
after I fell. They couldn't calm him down, and I
have in thirty years of riding, never seen anything like
it before. It certainly almost cost me my life, and
(41:24):
I think an entity was wreaking havoc that weekend, as
three people almost died in a two hundred yard radius.
And I also feel that whatever it was scaring all
these horses followed me home. No one knew the extent
of the damage to my body as they were taking
me to the hospital, but it turned out I did
(41:45):
need to have surgery, and especially for a shattered humorous
but they took me to a hospital where you had
to pay the surgery cost instead of the county hospital,
which was thirty thousand dollars. So I basically was sent
home with no set broken bone and told I needed
surgery and to go to the county I mean, how
with nine broken bones do you get to another hospital? Anyway.
(42:11):
During that time that I was bedridden, and about a
week after I fell, something came in my window through
a crack on the left side of it, right next
to the air conditioner fitter. The fitter wasn't quite wide
enough to fill the entire space between the air conditioner
and the window. So there was about a half inch
of space there. I would often stuff a rag into
(42:32):
it or a piece of cardboard, but for some reason,
nothing ever stayed to keep it plugged up. Well. Whatever
flew into my house flew in with such force that
it made my blinds fly from the window at a
forty five degree angle and bashed loudly back down to
the windowpane. My daughter and friends Kathy and Barrett saw
(42:53):
this happen too. I mean immediately I could feel an
angry presence, like someone had just stormed into the room
in a rage. I was trapped in my bed with
this thing and my twelve year old daughter in the room.
It's the most frightening thing that has ever happened to
me and my daughter. Our haunting lasted for the next
(43:16):
four months, and almost right away my computer quit working.
My daughter happened to be using it. Our VCR and
TV quit, as did the microwave and air conditioners. That
really sucked because it was ninety or one hundred degrees outside.
I had just put three thousand dollars into my car
and lent it to a friend, and even had a
(43:37):
new battery installed before I fell. But after this thing
showed up. I had to get the car towed four
times and buy another battery. I should have saved my
money for the day. I almost died falling from my horse,
you know. Come to think of it, even my phone
lines went dead. I was trapped in bed and had
(43:58):
so many problems fixing all this broken stuff. I mean,
everything electrical, it seemed, had just died. Books came flying
off of shelves, and nothing would stay put on top
of the refrigerator. Once we actually saw this shadow person
or whatever fly from the smoke detector to the VCR,
and I mean right into the VCR. It was this
(44:22):
very quick trail of black just zipped and gone. For
some reason, I got the idea that whatever this thing was,
it lived off of or in our electrical appliances. At
first I thought it was a ghost. You know, our
bed is metal and hollow, and while we were trying
to sleep, we heard and felt scratching on the bed,
(44:43):
and then a few other times it would hit the
bed from underneath really hard. This thing actually pushed boxes
out from under the bed and pushed them around the
room while we were sitting in the bed. A few
times we would see it. It was a very dark shape,
formless really, no arms or legs, just like a shadowy shape.
(45:05):
We would watch it dart from the closet Florida under
the bed at night, and then the scratching and banging
would start. One night, after we had witnessed this shadow
go from the closet to under the bed, a lamp
fell and crashed and broke on my head as I
was lying in bed. Immediately after that, our ceiling fan
(45:25):
went on. It was very fast, and it was way
faster than any speed that we actually could set the
fan to. I could tell when something was going to
happen from these things because there was also an awful
pungent smell that came before it. It was very localized
and the smell would only move around if this shadow
(45:46):
thing moved. There was a bunch of other stuff that happened.
But the point is is that at first I was
sure it was a ghost, but after reading about shadow people,
I kind of believe that this is something else, may
be not necessarily a ghost. I mean, I've seen this
thing moving around my room almost in the shape of
(46:07):
a person wants and I felt it was mail. But
I knew more than anything this thing was evil, and
I always just felt a presence. After about four months,
we didn't see it any more and everything stopped. What
do you guys think? I truly believe that this thing
(46:28):
could have killed me if it wanted to, And if
my friends and daughter hadn't witnessed this whole haunting thing
with me, I might be doubting my own mind now.
As I said, it finally left, and as I got better,
a friend told me that I had to order it
out of the house in the name of God, which
my daughter and I did, and you could actually smell
(46:50):
it and feel it go out of the door. Then eventually,
bit by bit, everything that had been broken without us
repairing it worked again. I don't know what that thing was,
but I hope I never have to experience anything like
that again. Something in the Forest submitted by Anonymous. I
(47:24):
had a close encounter in twenty fourteen, and at the time,
due to my ignorance then I just told myself it
was something else. I knew very little about bigfoot. I
was always under the impression that they were way out
in a northwestern US and Canada, that is, if they
were even real at all. Now I know that people
(47:45):
have run into them in all corners of our country. Today,
my life is just about perfect. I have a new wife,
a new house, and two new baby girls. I retired
three years ago at the young age of thirty, and
I'm a stay at home father who is living the dream.
But just five years ago my life fell apart all
(48:07):
at once. I lost my job, my place to live,
and my vehicle in the matter of one week. This
was in the last week of November twenty fourteen. The
one thing that I did still have was a full
set of camping gear and just enough money to buy
a junker vehicle. I had gone into the woods on
(48:28):
the edge of a town in southern New Jersey and
set up a stealth camping site for myself to sleep
in at night. In the morning, I would make the
short walk into town and meet my girlfriend and take
her to work in her car, and then spend the
days using her car to find a job, look for
another vehicle, and go to the gym to get a
shower and shave. My little camp was near a finger
(48:49):
of the Pine Bearns, right next to a brand new
residential development that was still being built. I set my
camp up right off a path through the woods that
locals would use to walk their dogs and in warmer months,
ride their off road vehicles. I had found a spot
that was very well hidden, and you could easily have
walked within a few yards of my tent without even
(49:10):
noticing I was there. I pitched my tent on the
other side of a large mound from the path and
covered it with a camo tarp and surrounded the area
with piles of brush. When I was in the tent,
I had the path behind me, a few homes maybe
a quarter mile straight ahead. Looking out my tent entrance,
the new development another quarter mile to my left, and
(49:32):
thousands of acres to my right the Great Egg Harbor
River Swamp. The nights were cold, and like clockwork, a
pack of coyotes would gather right outside the front of
my tent at about eight thirty each night. They would fight, howl,
and run around doing god knows what for a few
hours before finally heading into the deep woods. They didn't
(49:54):
seem to be scared of me being there, and they
never gave me any trouble. But I would sleep with
a twenty six ins full tank short sword in my
hand each night, just in case. By day five, I
had set up a new job that started in a
few weeks, and had bought a nineteen ninety six Ford
Explorer that I was to pick up the next day
once my new insurance was active. I had gotten to
(50:16):
my tent that night right as the sun was going
down around five point thirty. It was going to be
a cold night, so I put on some warmer clothes,
I ate some snacks, and puffed on my vape and
settled in for the night. At eight pm, the coyotes
showed up and were raising hell. They were so noisy
that they had lots of the neighborhood dogs barking like
crazy off in the distance too. But all at once
(50:41):
they went from super noisy to running off. I could
hear them whining and yelping as they ran to my
right off into the deep woods. I was laying on
my back, ready to fall asleep, when an unbelievably powerful
stench filled my tent. And it was bad. I mean
read it was a mixture of unpleasant aromas, a combination
(51:05):
of really nasty bio feces, skunk, and most of all,
smelly feet. I sat up in my tent and thought,
what the hell I was confused. I cannot overemphasize the
absolute power of that stench. It was completely overwhelming and
I could barely stand it. I tried breathing through my mouth,
(51:27):
and that was even worse, as it was so strong
that it seemed like I could taste it on the
tip of my tongue. After maybe twenty seconds or so,
I decided I needed to open the tent up and
get out of there and hopefully escape the smell. Right
as I was unzipping the tent, I heard someone coming
down the path. Then I heard them slowly walking off
(51:49):
the path into the woods to my left. It was
the unmistakable noise of a person cautiously walking through the woods.
I slowly zipped the tent back up and froze. My
heart started pounding. I figured it was the police or
maybe some local homeowner, and then my stomach dropped. I
(52:10):
had made it all weak, unnoticed, and now someone was
going to cause me grief that I really couldn't afford
on my last night out there. Life was hard enough
at the time, and the last thing I needed was
trouble with the cops or some guy breaking my balls
and then calling the cops. And the footsteps came closer.
They came around the mound that was hiding my tent
(52:32):
and to the left side of it, still about twenty
feet away. I gathered the footsteps then made their way
to where the coyotes had been a few yards directly
in front of my tent, and then suddenly stopped. I
was still as a statue, and I could hear deep,
hoarse breathing, like a large man catching his breath. Then
(52:55):
the footsteps came forward and right up to the very
front of my tent. With the tarp covering the whole thing,
I couldn't see anything, but whoever it was was right
there breathing. The footsteps then continued around to the right
side of my tent and stopped again. Then this thing
(53:17):
leaned its face right up to the tarp and started
trying to smell what was inside. I could hear big,
long sniffs, each followed by an exhile through the mouth.
At that point I was not so sure it was
a person anymore. I mean, no man could smell so powerfully,
and also, why would a person be sniffing my tent
(53:37):
in the first place. As unlikely as it seemed, I thought,
Oh shit, bear, I mean, bears are very rare in
the pine barrens, and I was positive that whatever had
walked into my area was on two feet. But what
else could it be? Right At that point, I decided
to say something. If it was indeed a bear, there
(54:00):
was a ninety nine percent chance it would run for
its life as soon as it heard a human's voice.
So I said loudly, who's there, and whacked the right
side of my tent heart with a backhand. It took
two steps back and then let out a long, very deep,
and terrifying growl. My blood ran cold, and I gripped
(54:22):
my blade tightly and poised for some kind of attack.
Then this thing simply walked off into the forest. I
could hear its two legged footsteps crunching through the leaves,
getting further and further away, until it was finally gone.
I started to breathe again, and that putrid stench began
to fade. After about a minute, I heard the loud
(54:47):
snap of a branch breaking, followed by the sound of
wood hitting wood twice. I sat there, catching my breath
and wondering if it was a monster or a bear.
I mean, nothing made sense. Black bears don't have a
strong odor, even during their mating season, and I am
sure that it would have run like hell as soon
as I had opened my mouth. Sasquatch never even crossed
(55:11):
my mind again. I thought they only existed in far
away places, and certainly not on the edge of a
town in New Jersey. Once the adrenaline wore off, I
was exhausted. I don't know how, but I remember sleeping
well that night, and the next morning I packed everything
up and got the hell out of there. I should
(55:33):
mention that the year before my incident, a horse in
the area had been attacked and killed not too far away,
within walking distance of my experience, and the horse had
been disemboweled and its organs were missing. When the body
was found well a few months later, I had gotten
my life squared away and all but forgotten. That night,
(55:54):
I just shrugged my shoulders and told myself that must
have been a bear. Of course, course, now I know
exactly what it was. Creepy man followed me at the
(56:14):
grocery store by safe Wealth. Recently, I went into my
local grocery store at around six pm just to grab
a few things. I was by myself and the store
wasn't super busy, but enough people were around. Normally, I'm
not as aware of my surroundings because I like to
listen to music while I shop, but this time I wasn't,
(56:36):
and honestly that paid off. As I was walking through
an aisle, I nearly bumped into a tall, heavy set
man looked to be in his forties with oliver tanned
skin and a gray shirt. He had a cart. I said, oh, sorry,
and he said sorry too, but then he stopped, looked
me directly in the eyes, slightly leaned in and smiled,
(56:59):
and said, how is your day to day? The way
he said it immediately set off alarms in my head.
For context, I'm a young adult male but pretty androgynous
in appearance and don't have a hypermasculine fashion sense. Strangers
mixed my gender up all the time, so at first
I figured maybe he thought I was a woman. But
(57:21):
I also have a pretty deep voice, so once I
thought he heard me speak, he'd back off, but nope.
I gave a quick I'm fine and then walked a
few steps down. Seconds later, he was behind me. I
noticed it and thought it was weird, but figured we
were probably just headed toward the same area. I took
(57:43):
a u turn to another aisle without grabbing anything, and
there he was behind me again. When I turned to
look at him, he pretended to look at the groceries nearby,
but didn't have anything in his cart. At that point,
my heart was literally pounding, and I just felt something
wasn't right. I thought I could be reading too much
into it, but my intuition was screaming that this was
(58:06):
a dangerous situation and I didn't have a good feeling
at all. I left my cart and went straight to
a cashier and quietly asked if she could walk with
me because I felt someone was following me. She didn't
immediately know who I meant, but she started telling me
about her own encounter with a creep who'd been in
the store before, a man who had told her he
(58:26):
was from Australia. That line immediately brought me back to
a few months ago at that exact same store, when
my mom, my sister, and I were loading my car,
A man had approached us the same build and same look,
asking us about our day, saying he was from Australia
and new to the area. And keep in mind, he
(58:49):
had no Australian accent at all. My sister and I
immediately got in the car because we both had super
creepy vibes, and my mom carried the conversation on for
a bit and then finally joined us. We figured at
the time we were overreacting and that he was probably
just a bit odd and trying to make friends, but
standing there with the cashier, it hit me that this
(59:11):
was the exact same guy. If I hadn't gone over
to talk to her, I probably never would have made
that connection. Then, while I was still talking to her,
the man nearly ran into us again, smiled and said sorry,
and that's when we both looked at each other and
realized we were in fact talking about the same person.
(59:33):
I was so thrown off I couldn't even think straight
about what else I needed to buy, so I just
decided to go check out early. He checked out at
the exact same time and right next to me. I
finished first, but waited a bit because he was having
issues scanning his items and I did not want my
back to him if I was leaving. After a bit,
(59:54):
I decided to go, and the cashier offered to walk
me to my car. As soon as we went to leave,
he also left at the exact same time. I exited
out the far right door because I didn't want him
to know where my car was. I also didn't know
if he had a weapon on him. For comparison, I'm
five to five and one hundred and twenty pounds and
(01:00:14):
this man was probably about five ten and maybe two
thirty or two forty five. The cashier and I walked
around a bit to fake him out, and sure enough,
he ended up having to walk to his truck, which
was parked all the way on the opposite side of
the store. That completely confirmed to me that he had
been following me, because why would he exit the same
(01:00:34):
door as me when his vehicle was on the other
side of the parking lot. Thankfully, the cashier stayed with
me until I got to my car safely. The whole
thing shook me up. I've always been socially anxious, but
something in me just clicked and I went straight to
the staff for help. I wanted to share this to
(01:00:55):
raise awareness for anyone shopping alone. Of course, we see
this happen constantly with women, which is just horrible, but
today it made me realize that even guys aren't immune
to these kinds of encounters. Whether I was overreacting or not.
It's better to be cautious than to regret not saying something.
Please be aware of your surroundings and do not be
(01:01:17):
afraid to ask local staff for help if you fear
being followed. Hey, gang, thanks for listening to this episode.
(01:01:39):
If you have a true scary story of any nature
that you'd like me to narrate, I would love to
hear from you. Email Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at
gmail dot com. I read them all, just reminding everybody
we're getting closer to this year's Halloween extravaganza. I've got
a couple of stories in the kitty, but would love
to have more from you. Again, submit your stories to
(01:02:01):
my email Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com.
I've repeated it twice. I think we're done with that.
If you're not following me on social media, please do
links to that or in the description. And if you're
following this on YouTube and you like what you heard,
why not give the video a thumbs up. If you're
not a subscriber, why not become one. Tell a friend.
I'd appreciate all of that, and it really helps out
(01:02:23):
the algorithms. Everyone be excellent to each other 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.
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