True Scary Stories Volume 76

Step into the shadows with this episode, where real people share their most chilling encounters with the unknown - tales of the supernatural, encounters with evil spirits conjured by Ouija boards, terrifying experiences from those who work the night shift, and unsettling moments with creepy people who seem just a little too close for comfort. These stories will keep you checking over your shoulder long after the lights go out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire Crew, Let's get it on Notes in the
Backpack by Anonymous. When I was in middle school, I

(00:26):
would wake up early and walk up to the school
to hang out with my friends. The doors didn't open
until around seven fifteen, so we just hung around outside.
One of those days, I left my backpack out there,
and I didn't remember it until halfway through my first class.
That was art, so I didn't really need anything from
my backpack, but my teacher allowed me to go outside

(00:49):
and get it, and before I went back into the school,
I rummaged around in it to make sure everything was
still there. While going through the things, I noticed a
piece of paper with some writing on it that wasn't mine.
I can only assume that the person who used the paper,
because it was read to the available in my backpack,
obviously meant that they had gone through it. I don't

(01:12):
quite remember exactly what was written, but I do remember
that the KISSI n G song was written, except kissing
was replaced with fucking. I assumed that it had to
have been mailed because they signed a male name. Then
it detailed things that a person wanted to do with me,
and I even remember my address was on there. Like

(01:34):
I was going to come for you soon kind of thing. Honestly,
it quite terrified me, and I didn't know what to do.
I'd never really been told what to do in a
situation like that. All I'd ever been taught was that
if someone tried to touch me, I should tell someone.
So I didn't know if I should just ignore this
or what. And it's quite obvious now what I should

(01:57):
have done, but as I was only eleven under twelve
at the time, I didn't really think about it. The
thought that someone was trying to scare me, a tactic
to make me not forget my backpack again also crossed
my mind. I realized now that only someone sick or
sadistic would have done that. If an actual responsible adult

(02:18):
had found it, I most likely would have been lectured
and told not to forget my backpack outside. But I'm
rambling here. There's more to this story. Well, I didn't
tell anyone. Stupid, I know, and it was for a
stupid reason. I didn't want to get into trouble, and
I thought that if I had told someone, I would

(02:39):
get into even more trouble than I would have if
I had not gotten a note. Yeah, I don't know
where I got my reasoning on that at all. Anyway,
A few days went by, and one would think that
I would have forgotten about it, But the truth is
is I agonized over it. Thinking about it made me
physically ill. Even now just thinking about it gives me

(03:01):
a sick feeling. I was afraid of whoever this person
was and what would happen to me if someone had
found out. I kept the note actually and hit it
somewhere in my room. I don't know why. My sister
and I shared a room, and our beds were on
either side of a big window, and she liked the
blinds to be opened so that she could see outside.

(03:23):
She liked looking at the night sky. The window was
always locked, though, and I thought it would be important
to share that. One day, it had rained, but by
the evening the clouds had cleared up. The rain is important, though.
I'm a pretty light sleeper, and I woke up to
a rustling noise. Sometimes animals would get really close to

(03:45):
our house, so I didn't think anything of it right away,
But when I looked up at the window, I saw
a man standing there wearing a mask, looking in a
mask like somebody would wear on Halloween. He was staring
right back at me. I screamed and scrambled off my bed,
still screaming. My sister woke up and started screaming as well.

(04:09):
Whether because I was screaming and I startled her or
that she saw this guy too, I don't know. But
as soon as we started screaming, this man turned around
and started running away from the house. My parents came
into the room and the lights went on, but my
sister and I kept crying. It took a while for
us to cal him down enough to get an explanation

(04:31):
out to my parents. By that time, the man was
well and truly gone, but my dad called the police,
and whether our help gave them a description. When they came,
they took a look around outside and said that someone
had been standing right outside my window. I think it
was because it was slightly muddy and they could see

(04:52):
that his shoes had made an indent in the mud.
There There were apparently tracks leading up to and then
away from the house as well. You know, I still
didn't tell anyone about that note. I know I should have,
but I didn't. I'm pretty sure the guy who wrote
the note was the same guy who was peeping through
my window. But after that, the police couldn't find anything

(05:17):
else and told my dad that if he saw anything
else weird to call them immediately. On the inside, though,
I wasn't sure if this guy was finished with me.
I'll never know if he is, because shortly after this
we moved for unrelated reasons. I'm assuming the guy never
found out my new address, as I didn't have any

(05:38):
other creepy encounters after that. But boy, what a doozy.
I'll never forget that creeper. Where did they come from?
By anonymous In the late seventies and early eighties, great

(06:00):
uncle was the county sheriff of the county where my
hometown was. As a matter of fact, all three of
his sons also worked for the sheriff's department, and one
of them is still employed as a deputy. My great
uncle passed away a few years ago from a heart attack.
He smoked cigars every day for years. After he retired
from the force, he started up a contract security company

(06:23):
because he still had that itch to be doing police
like work. At one time, the company itself was very
well off in the county, and they contracted security staff
to lots of places, mostly factories in our local hospital,
but they'd also get offers to do private rallies to
assist with high profile figures that came to that part
of the state. It was extra manpower if and when

(06:46):
it was needed. I got a job offer from my
uncle just a few days after I graduated high school.
The offer was to begin working at our hospital as
a contracted security officer. So I accepted and started in
late June of two thousand and two and worked there
for five and a half years before the hospital redid
policies and decided to go in house with security. They

(07:10):
didn't renew our contract. My chief during that time was
an awesome, awesome guy, and I still talk to him
often to this day because he's just a good person.
He's worked for the sheriff, the highway patrol, the regular
police department, and he hated dealing with all the assholes
around there, so he took the position of head of
security for my uncle. My uncle was basically just a

(07:34):
pencil pusher at that point, signing checks, etc. So my
chief ran the basic day to day operations of everything.
My chief was a hilarious guy, but when things got rough,
he was also no nonsense and I'll knock your dick
in the dirt type of guy. I worked solely at
our hospital and was never sent to any other facilities

(07:55):
to work. Our main desk was located in one of
the newer buildings, as the hospital had been renovating for
a couple of years. The building they used to sit
at that location was built around the mid eighteen hundreds
and it housed the original psychiatric department for the hospital.
Before the late seventies and early eighties, many psychiatric hospitals

(08:16):
had very, very poor treatment of patients, and our hospital
was no different. There were pictures of the old psych
ward with electro shock chairs, water treatment torture tables with
chains and straps, and all sorts of other shit that
looked like it was straight out of a horror movie.
That building had been torn down about ten years before

(08:37):
I began working, and the new one was built. The
new building was going to house what would become the Diagnostics,
Cancer and Heart Center, and as I mentioned, I began
work in two thousand and two. After about a year
of employment, I was at the front desk where our
cameras were housed, and I got a call in the
radio from my chief informing all units that a man

(08:59):
and woman had been spotted getting on the trauma elevator
that was in the building. I had just described that
particular elevator was right down the hall from me, so
I responded and took the stairs up to the third
floor and began scouring for unauthorized people. There were cameras
on the floor because the renovations were underway, and no

(09:20):
one other than certain staff I eer security and maintenance
departments were to be on the third floor for any
reason at all. If you tried to enter the floor
where most of the construction equipment was, you wouldn't be
able to open the door elevator, as you needed a
key pass to get to that location. But I checked
everything out anyway, but didn't find anything. About a month later,

(09:46):
my boss pulled me aside to talk to me about
the situation. He showed me the video of the floor,
and you could clearly see me come out of the
hallway where the elevator opened up. I went around the
corner to the right began walking towards the cameras. The
video captured me unlocking, entering, and checking each door in

(10:07):
that section of the floor. Two doors on the right,
three on the left and inside those doors were just
big empty rooms with drywall hanging up and tons of
tools and shit lying all over and nothing else, basically
just being used as storage. But the video didn't stop there.

(10:28):
As I came out of the last room, I continued
down the hallway, going towards the camera and eventually passing
it and exiting through the emergency stairwell and continuing my
search on the second floor. About two minutes after I disappeared,
a man and a woman came into focus coming down
the hallway toward the camera. They looked like a typical

(10:50):
couple mid forties or so. The man was dressed in
jeans and a blue sweatshirt and the woman had an
old style gown that our hospital no longer dins used.
They entered the rooms on the left via the middle door,
the door I had just opened minutes before, with a
key that only security and maintenance had access to. They

(11:14):
entered the room, the door closed, and nothing else showed
up on the camera at all. For the rest of
the day, those people never came out of that room,
and my boss watched the footage through the next day.
Nobody ever left that room. To this day, we still

(11:35):
don't know who it was or how it happened. He
told me stories of things that he had encountered on
that floor after the new building had been built, including
having a chair slide across the floor at him as
he was coming out of a room on a normal round.
He told me that he'd heard his name whispered in
his ear, and having something changed the stations on his

(11:55):
handheld radio on several occasions when he'd enter that floor.
I haven't worked there since two thousand and seven, and
I only know a couple of other people who still
work at the hospital. But as far as I know,
we were never able to figure out who or what
had found its way into that area of the hospital.

(12:23):
We never said goodbye bye, Anonymous. I've always been a
fan of the paranormal, always trying to be the next
ghost hunter, and one night back in twenty twelve, a
couple of friends and I got the idea to play
with a wija board in our local cemetery. At first,
it was just a big joke, I admit, I tried

(12:44):
fucking with people by claiming to be Jack the Ripper
or the alleged Penny Penny sisters that have a history
in that cemetery. After almost giving up, we got a
hold of this girl that called herself Lucy. We asked
her stupid questions like how she was, and she said
that she was eight. We asked if she was good
or bad, and she said both. One of my friends

(13:08):
got scared at that point and said they were done
and left in the only car, leaving me, my girlfriend
at the time, and my best friend there in the
dark by ourselves. Luckily, my girl only lived about a
mile from the cemetery, and my best friend and I
both lived on the other end of town, so we
hastily left the cemetery and headed to my girl's place.

(13:31):
I will say that we all felt like there were
eyes on us for that mile walk. My friend and
I would take turns walking ahead while the other would
stay back to see if anyone was following us. Ever
once did I see or hear anything, but I could
feel breathing when I started walking. We finally made it
back to my girl's house, and I assured her that

(13:53):
i'd be back after I made sure my friend was
home safe too. I had a feeling that something was
very but I just couldn't put my finger on it.
As the two of us left my girl's house. We
had to cross a large, open baseball field with no
lights besides the cloudy sky. My friend stopped halfway through,
almost dead in his tracks, and he yelled at me

(14:15):
to stop, but I was so focused on crossing that
I hadn't noticed him stop. Walking between us was a
black figure. I mean, how did I miss that? I
thought to myself. Both of us stared at the figure,
just breathing slowly and totally unable to move. As I

(14:36):
looked at it, I couldn't make out a thin smile.
And as I made out this strange smile that seemed
to hold me in place, the shadow thing giggled and
whispered something softly to my friend, but I couldn't make
it out. He broke into a dead run and screamed
at me to follow, and we started running and didn't

(14:57):
stop until we made it to his house, trying to
catch our breath. We both looked at each other and
I asked what was that all about? And all my
friends said was that thing said that. We didn't say goodbye.
We sat there for a few minutes, and when I
told him that I had to leave, he kept saying

(15:18):
over and over don't go, but I had promised my
girl that i'd be back. I mean, he begged me
to stay, but I told him I had to go.
He finally let me leave his house when I said
I would call if anything like that happened again, and
he made me swear it on our friendship. So back
into the night I went, knowing that I had to

(15:39):
get back to my girl, and as I ran from
street light to street light, eventually the baseball field was
all that was between me and her, so I looked
to see if I could sneak by it or around
the open field, fearing that that thing would be coming back.
There was a forested area around it, and I chose
to go that way. It did add a little bit

(16:01):
of time, but I felt I could deal with it,
just to maybe not see that figure again or hear
that creepy giggle. But as I started walking through the trees,
I started hearing a small whine like a child would make,
or something.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Like that.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Being who I am. I looked around because I didn't
know if it really was a child in pain or
scared or what. I walked deeper into the trees following
the cry, but as I stopped to look. I saw
that figure again, with that strange smile on its face.
I could see it a little bit better this time,
since the clouds had cleared a bit, and it had

(16:40):
a face which seemed to have no eyes. All I
saw was darkness in the space where eyes should have been.
But this thing seemed to be looking right through me,
as though I was little more than food to a predator.
I can only describe that weird smile as terrifying. I
stepped back slowly as this figure, in a whispering voice, said,

(17:04):
you never said good bye. I froze. This thing started
towards me, growling like a rabbit dog, and I turned
and ran, And as I did, I could hear its
heavy breads and footballs running right behind me. With each
pound to the ground. It seemed to be going faster
and faster. And I got back to the open field

(17:26):
and halfway through it, and I turned just to see
it point a finger at me and laugh this crazy laugh,
a scariest laugh I had ever heard. I finally got
to my girl's front step and could still hear it
cackling off in the distance. I have never been able
to stand the dark since, and my girl and I
refused to live on that side of town anymore. The

(17:48):
one friend that ditched us never spoke to us again,
and nobody believes my story except my friend and my girl. Oh,
we all dropped the paranormal shit, and I burned Theluiji
boar and put it back in the earth. It had
been years without even a hint of that figure that
bothered me at the baseball fields, and I've moved a
couple of times since, never really felt like that thing

(18:10):
was bothering me wherever I went. I now live in Wyoming,
close to the Utah border, and it's been about six
months since i've been there. She came to me again
last night. And this is not a joke. I mean,
I have no proof, but I swear it's no bullshit,
one hundred percent true. Last night I was upstairs in

(18:33):
my man cave playing video games, and I have noise
canceling headphones, so I can only really hear the game.
Suddenly a picture fell off my wall and it hit
the ground so hard I could feel the vibration. I
turned and with where I was, I couldn't quite see anything,
so I thought, yeah, whatever, there's nothing around me. I'm

(18:54):
home alone. I continued playing, and ten minutes or so
went by when I felt air on my neck. My
little man cave doesn't have any windows, so I know
it wasn't a draft. This confused me because when it
blew on my neck, it made every hair on my
body's stand up, I mean arm's legs, back, even my chin.

(19:16):
I took my headphones off and decided to listen for
a minute and figure out what it could have been.
That's when I saw the picture on the ground, and
the next thing I knew, I heard what sounded like
footsteps running down my stairs. I jumped up and chased
it down, thinking that there was someone in my house,
But when I got downstairs, there was nothing in any

(19:37):
of the rooms. The kitchen light was on, but because
I never really have gotten over the fear of the
dark since that night, I kept it on. The hall
light was on as well. As I looked around, I
heard the steps going up this time, and I ran
to the staircase and told whatever was making the noise,
there's no way out from there. You should run out

(19:59):
when you can. I was doing my best not to
sound slightly scared. At the bottom of my stairs, behind
the closet door, I kept a bat so I grabbed
it and went upstairs, thinking that I would scare it
out by tapping the stairs as I went. About the
time that I got to the top, I realized that
the hole upstairs was dark and that I hadn't shut

(20:22):
the lights off up there. When I went down, I
started from my cave then to the other two rooms,
turning the lights on as I went. I walked into
my entry room, then to the bathroom and spare bedroom
across from my man cave, and I heard the light
switch flip in my man cave. I turned around and said,
I know where you are, and I'm armed. Get out

(20:45):
of my house and I'll forget you were here. I
waited in silence for what seemed like hours, but it
was only seconds. I was listening for any kind of movement,
and then I heard that creepy laughed that I know
that I would never forget, and I froze, unable to
move it all. The laughing continued, and finally I said

(21:09):
fuck this and ran down the stairs and out of
my house. I got a motel last night at the
opposite side of town, and I haven't been back to
the house since. I have a pretty good idea. What
paid me a visit last night, and I'm not going
back there, at least not alone. Scruffy old man by Anonymous.

(21:39):
This happened a long time ago, eleven years ago actually,
when I was eleven and my friend was ten. It's
one of those what if moments that's been going over
and over in my mind for years. Back in the
early two thousands, I lived in a nice house in
the country and a tiny farming village surrounded by fields
and woods. It was a great place to grow up

(22:01):
as a kid because we had loads of little bins
and secret places we could fix up and hang out in.
One of those places was a makeshift tree house and
trees that ran across the side of a field. One day,
me and my best friend Mitch were hanging out there
with my new puppy that I had only gotten just
a couple of weeks before. We thought we'd take her

(22:22):
for a walk through the fields. We were halfway across
one of the fields that joined on to the estate
we lived on when we spotted a scruffy looking older
man on a bike. The old man stopped in his
tracks when he spotted us and stood there staring for
what seemed like a good thirty or forty seconds. He

(22:42):
then proceeded to get off his bike, rested it on
a fence, and started walking towards us slowly while smiling.
Keep in mind, we were in the middle of a
field that's kind of a blind area where no houses
faced towards. He kept walking towards us, grinning. I started
to panic a bit due to the fact that I

(23:03):
knew what some grown up people did the little boys
from stories that my parents had told me. So I
told Mitch to follow me, and we changed direction and
started walking sideways across the field. The man also changed direction,
following us and picking up the pace. He was now
kind of jogging and walking at the same time, if

(23:24):
you know what I mean. Alarm bells went off in
my head. All of a sudden, a woman walking her dog,
a Golden Retriever, appeared on a dirt path not far
from where this man was. As soon as he spotted her,
he turned back and ran toward his bike before quickly
riding off. I decided we needed to get home as

(23:47):
quickly as we could before the woman with the dog
left the area, so we ran onto the estate and
bolted for my house. Which was maybe eighty meters from
the fields where we were standing. I told my dad
about what happened, and he put on his shoes and
ran out toward the field, but there was no sign
of the man. Mitch and I both decided we shouldn't

(24:10):
hang out in the fields or woods any more, and
we didn't. About three weeks later, I was sitting playing
games on my PC when our next door neighbor came
banging on our front door. My dad went down to
answer and invited our neighbor in. After maybe twenty minutes,
my dad shouted me down because he wanted to speak
to me. I went into the kitchen and he sat

(24:33):
me down and he asked me what the man who
had been walking towards us in the fields weeks earlier
looked like. I told him, and he and my neighbor
looked at each other, and then my dad told me
something that sent shivers up my spine. There had been
loads of reports on the estate the past couple of
months of a scruffy looking man coming into people's back

(24:56):
yards and stealing underwear from their washing lines. It was
a kind of man lurking around in the bushes during
the nighttime, so the police decided to have a look
around for the guy one day, and they found him
in our tree house, surrounded by men and women's underwear,
empty vodka bottles, and weapons like knives and hammers. Not

(25:20):
only that, it turns out the guy had tried to
rape a young boy who was kind of disturbed, and
that was about a year or so beforehand, and he
was technically still on the run from the police. I
just keep thinking of what could have happened if that
woman walking her dog had decided to never take her
dog out at that exact time we were out there,

(25:41):
or worse, what if we had decided to go back
to the tree house that day by ourselves. Things were
worse than they seemed. By Anonymous. I used to be
a CNA at a hospital in Missouri. Our general job

(26:05):
description was to take vitals at specified times of document
input and output, and that just helped patients with whatever
they needed. But occasionally we would have to be a
sitter for someone, which usually meant the person was being
crazy or on suicide watch and needed to have someone
with them at all times. Being a youngish and relatively

(26:28):
average looking female, I've had my fair share of creepy
and weird hospital patient stories. I've been bitten, kicked, groped,
you name it, but this particular story is probably a
moment that actually made me realize that people can be
terrifying creatures. The hospital I worked at was hit by

(26:49):
a tornado in May of twenty eleven, and some time
after our behavioral health facility was relocated to a much,
much more secluded area very close to the border of
Missouri and Kansas. Though only a few miles from town.
You could see all the stars outside out there, and
here coyotes in the distance. I mean it seriously felt

(27:10):
like the scene of a potential horror movie during my
smoke breaks. When I was out there, I worked overnights,
and though I was usually assigned to cardiac, I had
been called over to behavioral health to be a sitter.
So I was already a little creeped out just because
of that. I remember thinking about what would happen if
the power went out and stuff, which actually did happen later,

(27:33):
but I wasn't there for that. The biggest problem was
that all the doors auto unlocked, but no one escaped.
I got to work upon receiving a report on our
patient that I had to sit with the daytime tech
told me this, and I honestly don't know why he
even needed a sitter. He was so nice and polite.
He called me ma'am and held the door for me

(27:55):
and stuff. He did sort of get in a fight
with another patients, so that's why he had to have
a sitter, but the other patient started it and he
wasn't even there anymore. I told myself, you're gonna have
an easy night, girl, and I sat next to the
guy and tried to relax. I honestly wasn't that worried

(28:17):
about being in the man's area because generally the woman's
ward was much more known for causing trouble and having
violent outbursts and stuff. Also in Missouri, most patients are
just bipolar or schizophrenic and off their meds, or maybe
even drug addicts and people who admit themselves because they
can't afford the help they really need. Again, this guy

(28:39):
I was sitting with was really super nice. He was
totally polite and asked about my tattoos and enthusiastically showed
me the bear that he had tattooed on his arm
and stuff like that. His time passed the night continued
to be relatively uneventful, and his bedtime came around nine pm.
The guy simply got inn to bed and went to sleep.

(29:03):
Sitting in his room. I situated myself on the floor
in the corner near an outlet, so I could read
my kindle with my back against the wall. Keep in
mind here, though, while I had worked at the hospital
for a while, I had only worked in behavioral health
one other time and never really got the specific kind
of training that the psych techs got, like how you're
always supposed to walk behind everyone in the like, so

(29:25):
your back is never to anybody else safety measures like that.
We did have alarm buttons that clipped onto our scrubs,
but they were apparently pretty flimsy, because when I took
lunch at three am, I noticed mine was on the
floor slightly under the patient's bed. The guy slept fairly
well until around one am. Around that time, he started

(29:48):
to wake up and just sat up in his bed
staring at me. I didn't want to appear nervous, and
I wasn't really allowed to leave his room anyway, so
I just said hi. I told him what time it was.
He tested that he still had some time to sleep
before breakfast. He had such a weird, blank expression on
his face, and he would stare and then ask if

(30:09):
he could call his parents because he had some things
he needed to discuss with them. I just reiterated what
time it was and told him that he could call
in the morning. Around three am, I had lunch with
the nurse who was assigned to my patient, and while
we were eating, she told me she couldn't believe I
was brave enough to sit in that room all night,
all things considered. I asked what she was talking about,

(30:32):
and since he only needed someone to sit with him
for fighting another guy, I wasn't really that worried. That's
when the nurse proceeded to tell me that the man
was admitted because he kept threatening to murder his parents.
The incidents kept escalating him from making telephone threats to
actually bringing a gun to dinner with them, until finally

(30:54):
they brought him in when he started leaving corpses of
violently slaughtered animals on their front doorstep. The nurse told
me that when they went to his trailer, there were
a bunch of gutted and dead animals. Inside the trailer.
There was blood and feces smeared all over the walls.
So I don't know if the daytime girl didn't know

(31:14):
all that, but after that I definitely had myself cornered
in that guy's room. I'm just five four and I
was in the spot, literally the furthest place from the door,
with an alarm bun that had fallen off from me
half the night earlier, with a guy who had so
many serial killer symptoms it wasn't funny. And I was

(31:36):
told he only needed extra care because another patient had
instigated a fight with him. Yeah. Right, let's just chalk
that up to another one of the hospitals lies. I
got through the rest of the night without incident, but
on my way out, I took one last look at him.
It was the last time I would ever see him,

(31:57):
and I realized how close to evil I really had come.
The note passer by Anonymous. I went to a private
Catholic school from kindergarten to third grade, and while I

(32:18):
have fond memories of playing with my friends in the
massive yard and climbing trees, I also have a memory
of something that bothers me to this day. When I
was in the third grade, I started getting anonymous notes
on my desk. I remember the first one was written
on construction paper and it was wedged between my books.

(32:39):
Looking back, it seems more like an adult attempting to
mimic a child's handwriting. The note said that I was
pretty and they wanted to get to know me better.
I asked my friends if they saw anyone at my
desk before class started, and they all said no. They
all had breakfast at school and I always ate at home,
so they were in the classroom much earlier than myself

(33:00):
and they would have noticed the four of us sat
together in a square. Over the next few weeks, I
received a note about once a week. My best friend
teased me saying that I had a secret admirer, but
the whole thing made me feel wrong. Once these notes
were accompanied by oranges, my favorite fruit, or chocolate. Usually

(33:24):
I would find the note in my desk and I
would crumple it up when no one was looking and
throw it away in the trash can in the hall.
I asked my friends many times if they were pranking me,
and they always denied it. As the months went by,
the notes became more sexual and suggestive. They were always
written on construction paper, but about a month in the
notes also began to have pictures of women in laingerie

(33:46):
cut out and pasted to them. The notes were always
short and would say things like you're so sexy. I
want to see you when you're in your underwear. I
bet you look better. And then things progressed to my
admirer professing his love and talking about touching me. I
was obviously totally freaked out, but I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
What to do.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
I never responded. I just threw the notes away. My
best friend at that time stopped thinking it was funny
and seemed just as scared as me. Around that time,
I started getting them every day and it was so unnerving.
One day I found one while reaching for my spelling
book in the back of my desk, and it fell
to the floor right in front of my teacher. She

(34:33):
meant to pick it up, and whatever she read made
her eyes go wide. She looked at the note, looked
at me, and at the note again, then took a
deep breath and told me to see her at recess.
At recess, she asked me a lot of questions, like
when I started getting the notes and if I knew
where they were from, I told her everything I knew,

(34:55):
which wasn't much, and she assured me that I wasn't
in any trouble. She went through my desk and found
three more notes. I guess I'd missed a few, and
every time she read one, her eyes got wide and
her face got red. She ended up calling my parents
in for a meeting, and I still don't know what
they talked about, but the notes finally stopped, or my

(35:18):
teacher was intercepting them, I don't really know, but that
was a very creepy time in my life. Something in
the Basement by Anonymous. This happened to me and my

(35:39):
best friend Nicole, six years ago when we were about fifteen.
When I was younger, my dad had bought an acre
of land in a small town in Washington to build
a house that we simply called the property. The first
thing that he built was the garage, which was completely
separate from where our house was located. While he was
building the house, my family was running a shitty house

(36:01):
in a neighboring city, and one day we got an
eviction notice and we only had thirty days to leave.
Since our house wasn't done being built, we had to
move into the garage. Basically, it was my parents, me,
my sister, and our dog all crammed into this garage
on our property. Since I was a teenager and desperately

(36:22):
wanted to have a sleepover. My dad finally did let
us sleep in the living room of the unfinished house,
me in the front door locked. The house had electricity
and it had a working bathroom. That's all we pretty
much needed in there, so my dad, being the guy
that he was, put in a couch, an air mattress,
and a TV. Then it was a fun hangout spot

(36:43):
where we could be as loud as we wanted then
stay up late without my parents knowing. So one night
I invited to coal over and we were hanging out
being stupid like normal teenagers. I think we stayed up
until about one or two in the morning, and while
we were winding down getting ready to go to bed,
we heard loud bangs coming from underneath us. Directly under

(37:06):
the living room was a huge basement and it sounded
like someone was throwing all of my dad's tools against
the walls and banging the ladder against the ceiling. Nicole
and I froze with fear and just stared at each
other all I could think was there was somebody in
the basement and we needed to get out of there
right then. The coal began to panic, and so did I,

(37:30):
but I tried to hold it together as best I could.
We got up from the couch and crept down the
hallway towards the front door, and I was in front,
and she was holding onto my arm as tight as
she could. We were both shaking, and it took all
my strength to keep walking. As we reached the front door,
the top of the stairs that led down into the

(37:51):
basement was right to our left. I peered over the
staircase and didn't see anything but darkness. There were no
more banging sounds, just our terrified breaths and the sound
of my heart beating in my ears. All of a sudden,
I heard the door at the bottom of the stairs
swing open and slam against the wall. I heard heavy, angry,

(38:14):
fast footsteps running up from the darkness towards us, and
my heart sank and I took action. I didn't want
to wait to see what was headed straight for us,
so I just swung open the front door and shoved
the coal out onto the porch.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Run.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
I yelled, and I slammed the door shut behind us,
and we ran barefoot through the pitch black yard into
our garage. My mom heard us freaking out and got
out of bed, yelling what's going on. At that point,
Nicole and I were in tears, hyperventilating and trying to
tell her what had happened. And all I could say
was there's someone in the house. There's someone in the house.

(38:50):
I could tell. My mom only half believed us, but
she tried to calm us down and said, when your
dad gets home, I'll have him go take a look.
My dad was working graveyard shift at that time, so
he wasn't going to be home until six am. Nicole
and I laid on a couch at our garage, not
speaking or sleeping, just waiting for my dad to come back.

(39:11):
But everything kept replaying in my head and I was
completely terrified of whatever had come after us. We eventually
fell asleep, and I woke up to my mom telling
me that my dad had gone into the house to
look and nothing was out of place. The downstairs door
to the basement was locked, and nothing had been thrown around. Nothing.

(39:34):
Nicole and I looked at each other in shock. My
mom thought we were lying about someone being in there,
and she said, you girls need to stop watching horror movies.
That'm making you paranoid. Nicole and I are still friends
and still sometimes talk about what happened that night. They
were still terrified and confused about it. We know what

(39:55):
we heard about. A year after that happened, my dad
completed the house and we moved in in earnest. I
continue to experience creepy stuff in that house up until
I moved out on my own, but those are stories
for another time. Creepy Night Shift by Anonymous. The hospital

(40:25):
where this happened was built around nineteen ninety eight. We
got a call that a kid we were looking for
was living in an abandoned part of the hospital. The
hospital had been replaced with a new facility and a
building was bought by a local university for dormitories back
in the seventies. We called the university police and gained
entry into the building. So picture this. We had two

(40:48):
cops and two people from my agency, all going through
this creepy old building with no electricity. We went into
the little cafeteria area and off to the side was
an office, and inside that office were gallon Mayo jars
from ceiling to floor, probably one hundred or so of them.
In the office, they were all filled with urine. Some

(41:11):
crazy guy had been living there and storing his own pee,
which turns out as a fairly common thing to do
with paranoid whack jobs. So I was pretty on edge
and we were walking the halls and looking into the rooms.
A lot of the rooms still had old beds and furniture.
The nursery still had incubators and plastic baby beds, you know,

(41:33):
they're the kind that had the green sea through sides.
Just a really creepy vibe. We cleared out the top
four floors and decided we'd better check the basement area
real quick. The basement contained the morgue. The cops turned
on their flashlights and the whole basement was empty except
one metal bed with chains attached to it. At that point,

(41:57):
one of the cops flashlights started going really dim, and
the other cops flashlight just went out completely. We were
standing in an abandoned morgue with the dimmest flashlight in
human history. And obviously this is before smartphones. So we
all really quickly went to the double doors and they

(42:18):
were locked. I mean seriously, they locked behind us. When
we came in, we could see the other door on
the other side of the room kind of slightly with
some light coming through it. So we started crossing the
room and the second flashlight went completely dead as well.
We all started running.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
To the door.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Imagine four grown men running like scared little kids through
a dark morgue. On the other side of the morgue,
you could still smell death. I mean, dead bodies have
a really weird smell. It's kind of hard to describe,
so I'm not going to try. But it turns out
that the crazy guy who had been storing his urine

(43:01):
had fallen down an open elevator shaft and his body
was still at the bottom. The exit of the morgue
was right next to where the elevators were. It was
like someone or something wanted us to find the body
that night. Creep in the car by Anonymous. So this

(43:30):
happened to me today. While I was walking up the
hill to the park. It was broad daylight with a
few construction workers and gardeners around, and I stopped to
admire the view of the canyon. On the sidewalk off
a very busy street, A dark greenish gray, old Toyota
truck drove past me going the opposite way, and I
turned around when I heard the car break and make

(43:52):
a very sharp and illegal U turn, and I watched
as the truck pulled right up beside me. Eight man
in his fifties with white hair, a white shirt, and
a German shepherd in the passenger seat was inside. The
man leaned over and held his hand out the window
toward me. Then he held out two pieces of paper

(44:13):
with rainbow colored stripes and funky white text that said
fun pass on them. He whistled at me, grinned, and said, hey,
come here, these are for you. I shook my head
and scowled. Come here, he repeated, and he reached for
his glove compartment with his other hand. He looked to

(44:35):
be in a hurry, trying to make his encounter with
me as brief as possible. But really, a sick man
with sick motives really wouldn't have wanted to have been
seen for very long. So I shook my head again
and began backing up, thinking of the other kidnappings in
my city, where a guy pulled out a gun once
he got close to the car and threatened some girls

(44:55):
to get in or he was going to shoot them,
and this really was quite possibly the same scenario. My
heart raced and I gripped my phone, preparing myself to
run and scream for help. The man had an immediate
change of plan, as though he realized that I knew
what his intentions were. It seemed like he cursed to himself,

(45:16):
but he hit the gas, did another U turn, and
then sped off down the street. I only managed to
get a few numbers off the license plate, but I
called the cops and gave them a description. Who knows
what his intentions really were, but I think it's pretty evident,
pretty scary for my young self to experience. The nursing

(45:43):
home by anonymous. My parents split when I was four
years old. My dad had a history of substance abuse, thievery,
and cheating, and in our small town in western Tennessee,
he had no chance of keeping it a secret for long.
My dad ended up with a lady named Ellen, who

(46:03):
had a degenerative disease that eventually took her mobility. Allan's
mother was in one of the two nursing homes in town,
and being as I spent every weekend with my dad.
I spent a lot of time there. I'd been around sicker,
elderly people for my entire life at that point, so
I'd grown accustomed to helping anyone who was less fortunate

(46:24):
than myself. I would help out with anything that I could,
feeding residents who couldn't grip silverware, wheeling them back into
their rooms, et cetera. I really enjoyed it there for
a while, and I think that it was partly due
to my siblings being nine and ten years my elders.
By the time my parents had me, their marriage was

(46:44):
in a shambles and my dad was out partying all
the time, and my mother was just tired. She did
the best she could, but she ended up a single
mother working a full time psychology job and just didn't
have enough time to do everything she needed to. So
needless to say that I enjoyed the attention in praise
of the residence of the nursing home, well most of

(47:06):
them at least. The first time I ever felt uneasy
there was when I had been going for maybe a
few months. On that particular day, my dad and I
were huddled around the dining table with Ellen and her mother.
They frequently discussed things that were boring and beyond my
five year old comprehension, such as her mother's will and estate.

(47:28):
So I was blankly watching the rain pepper one of
the Florida ceiling windows. When Ellen's mother had her fill
of dinner. I quickly jumped up to take her tray
to the dish area, and she thanked me with a
grin and said, we need more youngsters like you. She
said that quite frequently. I was about half way through
the cafeteria when I was startled by a very raspy voice.

(47:52):
I'm done too. I jumped and dropped a fork off
the dinner tray, and I turned on the spot to
find the source of the voice. That was the first
time I'd ever seen Chester. Chester was an elderly Caucasian man.
His hair was short, gray, and usually uncount I remember

(48:13):
thinking about how small he seemed. He was short and
had unhealthy skin. The pale skin seemed to barely stretch
over his skull, and I just remember being generally unsettled
by him. I wasn't really sure what to do, so
I just picked up the dropped fork gave the dinner
tray to a cafeteria worker who thanked me with a wink,

(48:34):
and then I sped back to my dad. I refused
to look at Chester again as I walked past, but
I heard a deep chuckle and his eyes followed me
as far as they could. I stayed glued to my
dad for the rest of that visit. I mean, I
was thoroughly creeped out. But as I was there at
least once a week, I continued to help out other

(48:56):
residents whenever possible, and I quickly became a big with
staff and residence alike. Nurses would ask me to do
small things for them. I mean, who wouldn't love a
naive kid doing parts of your job for you while
you reap the benefits. But I'd always happily oblige. I
actively avoided Chester during my visits. He hadn't tried to

(49:18):
speak to me since the first day I'd seen him,
but I always knew he was watching me if I
was in a common area. It felt like his eyes
burned with a hunger that I didn't understand at that age.
Now that I'm an adult female, though, I think I
could take an educated guess at what he was thinking.

(49:38):
One night, the nursing home had a dance for the residents,
and they played old music that some people dance to,
and their children or grandchildren that attended the event with them.
I particularly remember a lively elderly man John, having a
wonderful time dancing in his wheelchair. I was enjoying watching
the residents in such high spirits, and even got to

(49:59):
dance with my dad for a while. When he got
tired of me standing on his feet, he placed me
back on the ground and spun me around a few
times before calling it quits. When he began to spin me, though,
is when I noticed Chester's eyes glued on me. He
was just a few feet away. I hadn't noticed it

(50:19):
before that moment, but he had a menacing look on
his face. It was as if the anger in his
eyes was burning holes in my skin. I tried to
get my dad's attention, but he only mumbled something about
stepping out for a smoke and walked away. I should
have run after my dad, but I didn't. I was

(50:40):
so afraid of Chester that I was rooted to the spot,
and I don't know how long I stood there staring
back at him. I don't even think I blinked until
he finally said, laughing what's the matter with you, girl?
You look like you've seen a ghost. I gulped. My
five year old brain had no idea what to say
or do. I kept telling myself to run outside to

(51:02):
my dad, but I was so terrified of the dark,
and I didn't know exactly where he went at that point. Well,
aren't you going to help it? Old man back to
his room? Chester growled everything in me screamed that that
was the last thing I needed to do. As I
stood there deliberating, a nurse told Chester that his medicine

(51:23):
was on his bedside table and that he should go
back to his room whenever he was ready. She then
hurried off to the opposite side of the room to
wheel another resident back to their bed. Chester looked at
me as though his prayers had been answered. I see
you helping out a lot with the patience here, kid.
All I'm asking is to be wheeled.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Back to my bed.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
At that point, my little brain had determined that quickly
taking Chester back to his room was the lesser of
two evils compared to venturing out into the darkness to
find my dad. I just wanted to get it over with,
so I walked quickly over to Chester's wheelchair, and I
heard him moan softly as I leaned down to unlock
his wheel brakes. Thankfully, the walk to his room was short.

(52:11):
When we arrived, I barely pushed him inside and turned
to walk toward the windows to find my dad, but
Chester quickly stopped me. I need to be closer to
my bed, girl. My medicine and water are over there,
and I have to take it now. I was terrified
to actually go into his room with him, and I
had seen him walking around from time to time. It

(52:33):
was afraid that he would just stand up and grab me.
I pushed him a bit further towards his bed and
night stand closer. He barked repeatedly until I was so
nervous that I almost pushed him right into the night stand.
He growled almost inaudibly, and then sprang up from his
wheelchair quickly. When he stood, he turned around to face me,

(52:55):
and my horrified eyes looked down to see that he
had an erection, although I wasn't totally sure what it
was at that age. I ran and finally found my dad,
and that night was the last night I ever went
back to the nursing home. After that, arsonists freak by Anonymous.

(53:27):
We have a park at the end of our street,
and a few houses have their back fences along that park.
Up further into it, there are some beautiful, big houses,
but they're a bit cut off from the streets, so
you never really see the people that live in them.
My mother and I knew a few of those people
because they would walk their dogs at the same times
we would, and we would get into a bit of

(53:49):
neighborly chat while the dogs played, so they weren't exactly
total strangers. One day, I came home to the strong
smell of smoke, and I noticed a fire truck and
two ambulances on my street. My mother informed me that
one of the houses up by the park had been
lit on fire, and they still weren't sure of the cause.

(54:12):
Nobody was killed, but a woman we knew who'd lived
there was badly injured, and an old man that also
lived there got some bad smoke damage. There were five
sons that lived in the house as well, that they
were all out at the time. A few weeks later
we learned that the old man, who was the boy's grandfather,
was suspected for starting the fire, and that he had

(54:34):
escaped the hospital. I had seen the old man around
quite often, walking up and down around the park. He'd
always watched me and a few of my neighbors, who
were girls around my age. He was quiet and he
was always alone. A few months passed and we didn't
hear anything else, but we did know that they had

(54:55):
all moved out of the house and it was practically
abandoned for the next year until it eventually went on sail.
I guess they were just taking their time figuring out
all the legal stuff. So with that knowledge, my father,
my neighbor's father, and my neighbor, another girl my age,
and I decided to go and check it out to
see if there was anything good we could salvage. The

(55:19):
back window had been shattered, so we got into the
backyard through that, and then the door to the house
was opened, so we just walked right in. The house
was scary as hell. The ceiling was burnt and bubbled,
and mirrors were smashed. Some things were half burnt and
other things were fully burnt. The first place we went

(55:40):
to was the basement, where we found open tin cans
and bottles of petrol and lighter fluid. They had been
placed all around the room, on the window sills, on chairs, tables,
even in the cupboards. Obviously this fire hadn't been an accident.
We scoped out the rest of the house and found
few cool things, but just as we were leaving, we

(56:04):
noticed a face outside the windows. Our dads were carrying
something down the stairs, so they didn't notice, but my
friend and I ran outside to see.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Who it was.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
But as soon as we got out there, whoever it
was had vanished for some reason. I got an idea
and said, hey, let's go, and my friend followed me
as we ran back to the park and we saw
that it was the old man that had once lived there.
He looked at us and yelled at us about how

(56:35):
we shouldn't be in there. Then he threatened to rape
and kill us. That's when our dads came out and
saw him. The old man fled, but my dad called
the cops. Our fathers took us back to our houses
and waited for the police, and they finally caught the
man running down a main road near our street, trying
to catch a bus. We later found out the man

(56:59):
had been put in first for lighting the fire and
secondly for being a registered sex offender who after the
fire had been on a spree of harassing and abusing
young women. I was so scared I didn't even dare
to walk by the house alone or even if I
was with a friend. This past year, the house was

(57:19):
finally sold and the new owners had been renovating it.
I feel that I can now finally walk past it
without fear, because it looks different, and I know that
that horrible man who once lived there is now in prison.

(57:41):
Handing out flyers by anonymous. This happened to me when
I was maybe eight or nine. I never told anyone
that this happened, not even my closest friends, because quite frankly,
at the time, I really thought nothing of it. But
for whatever reason, eight year old me remembers this occurrence
quite well. But for whatever reason, the person I am

(58:07):
now remembers this occurrence quite well. The event occurred in
the middle of the fall, while I was helping to
pass out flyers from my church. Originally I was not
supposed to do this. My dad was the one who
volunteered to hand them out. However, we live in Wisconsin,
and my dad was granted the very rare chance to

(58:28):
go to a Packers game and see the crew take
on the Patriots, so my mom, sister, and I filled
in for it. The job that we were to do
was to drive to a few different neighborhoods and put
flyers in people's mailboxes about our church. The city that
our church in has very low violence and is a
quiet area with very little crime. Once my friends and

(58:52):
I when we were fourteen, got stopped by a squad
car when we were walking at night, just for looking suspicious.
They ended up calling four or other squad cars, and
we obviously didn't get in trouble, but that just goes
to show the lack of crime and things to do
in our town. How we ended up doing this is
that my mother would drive and drop us off at

(59:12):
different spots on the long road of houses, and then
we would meet up at the car at the end
of the road and continue doing this until we were done.
All we did really was put flyers in mailboxes and
move on to the next one. I know, real tough stuff.
Everything was going just fine and we were about halfway done.

(59:32):
The street that we were on was normally longer than
the rest, and the area was well wooded. I came
up to my next house, but it had no mailbox.
I thought about skipping it, but I decided I would
just put the flyer on the front porch of the house.
After all, I could see it right through the trees,
so I made the dumb decision to walk up and

(59:53):
put the flyer right in the front door. All was
well and I started walking away, but I would he
stopped by the voice of a man saying, hey, wait,
where are you going. I turned around to see a
man about six foot tall with a gray beard and
decently long gray hair that was pretty messy. He asked
me what's this flyer all about. I told him it

(01:00:16):
was for my church and that we were looking to
gain some more members. I told him he should check
it out, and I had to go hand out more.
A spoiler alert, this is where I made my biggest mistake.
The man said, wait, why don't you come in and
talk with me a bit more about your church. Thinking
that was perfect that I was going to help grow

(01:00:37):
the church, I agreed and walked in. Idiot. I walked
into the man's house. It was very dirty and smelled awful.
The man began to ask about the church, like where
it was in the service times, and that seemed okay.
To me, and deep down I felt like a hero.

(01:00:57):
But then he began to ask questions like how old
I was, where I went to school, and where I lived.
Second big mistake. I never told him exactly where I lived.
I just told him that I lived pretty far from
the church, which was true, we lived in the town
next over. But I did tell him that I went
to the grade school that was supported by the church.

(01:01:21):
Dumb ass. The whole time that this was going on,
the guy never took his eyes off me, and he
never took his hands out of the pockets of his
blue jeans. He seemed really nervous, and surprisingly, he kept
a pretty good distance from me. He asked me stuff
like what I was learning in school and if I
had any brothers or sisters. It seemed normal to me

(01:01:43):
because my eight year old brain didn't really suspect anything
out of the ordinary. I was just talking to what
seemed like a very nice man. Finally, he asked me
one last question. He asked if I was handing out
flyers alone. Now, being an eight year old, nothing was
cooler than doing things by yourself, like picking up your

(01:02:05):
clothes or pouring your own cereal, or staying home alone.
While mom went out for an hour, so I wanted
to continue looking cool. I had it set in my
mind that I was going to tell him that I
was out alone. But for whatever reason, I told him
the truth that I was with my parents. That made
him visibly upset. He frowned and kind of gestured to

(01:02:28):
the door, saying, well, okay, you should probably get back
to them. I walked out and said that I hoped
to see him at church. He didn't say anything and
stared at me until I got to the end of
his driveway. Like I said, I never told any one
about this. It took me years to realize that had
I answered differently, I may not be here sharing this.

(01:02:51):
It's vital to teach your kids to not talk to strangers,
no matter what. My parents always told me that, and
still I disobeyed on this accous as a twenty year old.
Now looking back on it, I see how dumb I was.
I really hope that that man has gotten help and
that he hasn't lured any other kids into his house.

(01:03:14):
Oh and for those of you wondering, he never came
to my church. And on top of it, all the
packers loss to the Patriots.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
That day.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
Hey, gang, thanks for listening to this episode. If you
have a true scary story of any nature you'd like
me to narrate, email it to Uncle Josh True Scary
Stories at gmail dot com. I read them all. Halloween
is right around the corner, and if you have a
true scary story about Halloween that you'd like me to
have on our extravaganza, please send it to me as

(01:04:03):
soon as possible. Final call for the Halloween Stories can't
wait for this year's episode. If you're catching this on
YouTube and you like what you heard and saw, give
the video a thumbs up, leave a comment, let me
know what you thought of the stories, And of course,
if you're not a subscriber, why not become one. Maybe
tell a friend about the channel. I'd appreciate it. All

(01:04:25):
of that does make a difference in the algorithms. If
you'd like to support what I'm doing a step further,
find a link to my Patreon page, and of course,
maybe get some Uncle Josh and can't fire a crew merchandise.
There's a link to my tea public store in the
description as well. Everyone be excellent to each other, and
until next time, be wary of things that go bump

(01:04:47):
in the night. It could be anything, a ghost, a monster,
or a guy next door.