← Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
157. "Something Is Mimicking My Sister" and Other Terrifying True Stories From Listeners
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Kaylan Moore
Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I'm your ghost for this very haunted episode. Kaylan Moore it's that time of year once again everyone. The time where we follow the age old Victorian era tradition of telling ghost stories around the holidays. And I am so excited to share with you the scary ghost stories of Christmases long long ago. Maybe you're new here this year and this is your first time partaking in this tradition with us. I actually just looked at our Spotify wrapped numbers for the year and I was honestly shocked to see how many of you are in fact new this year. Well, each year we we all gather around inside of the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters, the very old and very haunted mansion where I tell these stories from and we light a fire and listen to some ghost stories. And this year these stories are Coming directly from our community, you guys. Now we have a very darkly curious community here. People who work in morgues and hospitals, people who like to spend their free time walking through cemeteries. So it makes sense that a lot of very scary and supernatural things happen around you all. So to start, I want to tell you a story from a listener named sky that stopped me in my tracks. I had heard that paranormal activity can pick up if you spend a lot of time talking about ghosts. You can attract a certain kind of energy, they say. But sky suggests that even the mere act of listening to heartstarts pounding can increase the paranormal activity in your home. So when might want to listen to this one with care? Sky writes. So I think my house might have been haunted from the start. For some context to my ghostly encounters, me and my family live in a three bed, three bath, two story home and have for a while now. My father's office is on the second story and he has this window cut out that lets you peer down onto the first floor where my mom's office and the front door is. For a while now my mom has said that late at night she's been hearing footsteps from upstairs. She usually sits in the dining room, scrolling through Facebook where my bedroom is located directly above her. She just chalked it up to my creaky bed frame. But I know it's not that. My brother also told me that one night during December he peered downstairs through the window cutout that I told you about earlier and he claimed he saw a red figure that he didn't recognize. It looked like it was almost rummaging under our Christmas tree. He joked that it was probably Santa Claus. It never really left my mind. Then about a year ago I found your podcast and I started to binge your episodes. And that's when it started. Imagine the sound your nail would make tapping on the circular doorknobs most houses have on interior doors. Well, almost weekly that would happen to my bedroom door. I'd be laying down when I would hear a handful of nail taps on the doorknob coming from outside my room before stopping. And then I wouldn't hear any footsteps indicating that someone was doing it on purpose or actually standing outside of my door. It could happen at 5am, 5pm noon or midnight, but it would always happen. Then one night after using the restroom, I paused by my dad's office and heard the front door's locks being fiddled with down below. It was like someone was trying to get inside. With my heart in my chest, I peered downstairs and there was Nobody there freaked out. I went back to my bedroom and I tried to go back to sleep. Eventually I got busy with life stuff and stopped watching your podcast as much. I'm sorry. I opted instead just to listen to music and lo and behold, the nail taps stopped and the late night footsteps vanished. It surprised me, but I just thought the ghosts had their fun and left us alone. But I was wrong. Last month I was working on a project and I got hooked back onto your podcast. I started binging episodes again while I worked on stuff and then last week I heard it again. Three taps on my bedroom doorknob and no footsteps walking away. It was like something was outside of my door waiting for me, but I never went to check on what it was. I haven't stopped thinking about it since then and I think your podcast might be a ghost magnet. I up to you if that's good or bad. Anyways, yeah, that's about it. Have a good day or night Kin and the Hearts Arts Pounded community. Ooh, what do you guys think about that one? Have you ever heard a tap at your door or heard footsteps in your hallway while listening to our show? Maybe you felt the sensation of someone watching you. Well, it might be that this very podcast is the thing that's driving the hauntings around you. How exciting. Please let me know if that's the case. As always, you can send me your very scary personal stories either via Raven or by using the form on our website heartsarts pounding.com I personally prefer when you send me ravens. They make incredible companions, but the website works just fine as well. Okay, our next story comes from a listener named Abe. Abe writes to us from Texas with the story of a house that may have held onto some of the dark energy from a former tenant, abe rites. In 2014, I had bought a 1900 square foot home in the Fort Worth, Texas area. I knew it was too big for me, but I loved the original design and architecture of the house, especially the spiral staircase that led up to the second floor. The second floor was more like a studio apartment with its own living room, bedroom and bathroom. I thought things were fine when I first moved in. Well, mostly. I did notice that occasionally up on the second story, it looked like there was someone in the window looking down at me. It would be just a flash out of the corner of my eye, and at the time I thought that it was maybe my reflection in the window in the dark evening. Sure, the angles didn't really make any sense, but I didn't think much more into it. If only I knew then what I know now. After about three years, I moved to the Houston, Texas area to be closer to my family and I rented the house out to a couple. After about six months, I got a really strange message from them. They contacted me to ask if anyone had died in the house. I responded, no, I don't think so, but I can check for you. I went to go ask the realtor if there had been any, let's just say, incidents within the house in the past. And that's when she told me that several years ago there had been a fire. She didn't know a lot of the details about the event, and when I pressed harder, the she let me know that no one had been injured. Later I would question that, but I took that new information back to the renter in the hopes that it would make them feel a little bit better. It didn't. After a little while, the renter texted me a photo. She had just finished installing a flat screen TV above the fireplace and took a photo of it to show to her husband. In the picture, you can see the freshly mounted tv, but if you look closer, that's when you can see something you shouldn't. There in the center of the black screen is her reflection centered in the middle. You can see her clearly holding up her phone. But behind her is what I can only describe as a tall, dark figure. It seemed to lean in behind her a bit. There was no face, but the head and shoulders were clearly visible. And the second I saw it, I recognized looked just like the dark figure peeking into the upstairs window years earlier. About two months later, she informed me that she and her husband had another experience. This time they were laying in bed when she heard her husband get up. She watched as her husband walked by and entered the attached bathroom, only to roll over and see that her husband was still in bed with her. They quickly moved out afterwards. Not long after that, I had to move back into the place. Though I admit I was a little freaked out. I adopted a dog named Susie, a mix of a golden retriever and something else. She was a very loving dog. After about a week of us being there though, I took her out for a walk and we went to the back of the house. She looked up at the second floor and constantly barked at it. Matter how much I tried to get her attention, she wouldn't stop barking at the second story window. I took her back to the front and she did not want to go back inside of that house. Every time after that, I would have to drag her back inside. She did not want to go in there. And then about a month after that, I was resting in bed in the master bedroom downstairs. It was about 10pm I was relaxing and watching TV. Over the TV sounds I heard noises not belonging to the show I was watching. They sounded like squirrels or raccoons in the attic at first. And then I realized there's no attic in the part of the house I was in. I turned off the TV and to my horror, I heard fingers scratching on the roof. Human fingers. This was not an animal. That was my final straw. Something had to be done. Two weeks later, I had a pastor and church members come and bless the house. I mean, I was that desperate. They prayed, sprinkled holy water around each room and along all of the doors and windows. They told me that this should help, that the space should finally be cleansed. I shouldn't have believed them. I think this only made the dark figure even more angry. Because a week later, I was laying in bed and I began to hear the footsteps of someone walking above me. It sounded as if they were wearing dress shoes. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Whatever was happening was outside. I was safe, I told myself. But no, the shoes were not on the roof. They were on the ceiling. Whatever was there was in the room with me and it was walking right above me. A month later, I decided to move to another town and never return to this house. No other incidents have ever occurred around me. So whatever it was, it definitely was attached to that house. This episode is brought to you by no cd. Have you ever noticed how in paranormal stories, the scariest part isn't always the ghost. It's not knowing what's real. That uncertainty leaves you unsettled. With your mind racing to fill in the blanks you now imagine if your thoughts felt like that all the time. A terrifying unwanted thought hits you out of nowhere and suddenly your brain spirals into the worst case scenario. These thoughts feel so real you can't ignore them. You might find yourself avoiding things, constantly asking for reassurance or spending hours researching online. Yet the thought keeps coming back louder each time. If that sounds familiar, you might be experiencing ocd. OCD isn't about being neat or organized. Real OCD is about intrusive, unwanted thoughts that feel painfully real and the behaviors you do to try and escape them. But trying to push those thoughts away only makes them stronger. The good news? OCD is highly treatable when you get the right kind of therapy. What works for OCD is a type of specialized therapy called exposure and Response Prevention Therapy, or erp. And that's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's largest OCD treatment provider with licensed therapists who specialize in treating OCD with ERP therapy. Therapy with no CD is 100% virtual, covered by insurance for over 155 million Americans and includes support between sessions so you're never facing OCD alone. If any of this feels familiar, go to nocd.com and book a free call to learn more about how they can help. That's n o c d.com to learn more and get connected to someone who can help. This episode is brought to you by Bioma. What is one thing about your health you wish that someone had told you years ago? For me it was maybe that a happy gut equals a happy you. It turns out the beneficial bacteria in our gut depletes as we age, so we can just start feeling worse and worse over time. Byoma believes that the gut is the foundation of overall health and vitality. It's not just about digestion. The gut affects everything from your energy levels and mood to weight management and even longevity. Most gut supplements contain probiotics or probiotics and prebiotics at best, but Bioma contains all three essential ingredients. Your gut needs prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, and each ingredient is science backed and third party tested. You take just two capsules before breakfast and that takes all the guesswork out of feeling your best. Also, one of the Bioma ingredients, Bifidobacterium lactis, was found to reduce belly fat by 7% in just eight weeks in a clinical trial. And now we have a special offer for our listeners. You can go to bioma.comheart and use code HSP to get Byoma with an extra 15% discount. This is a limited time offer. You don't want to miss out. Claim your extra 15% savings today by going to byoma.comheart and using code HSP did you know that you may have to disclose your house is haunted if you're selling it? The Ghostbusters ruling, which was a 1991 New York Supreme Court case, ruled that a house in upstate New York was legally haunted. A man that bought the 18 room Victorian mansion and only learned it was haunted after he bought it. And now, unlike some of you, he was not very excited to learn this and he wanted to back out of the purchase. So the New York Supreme Court ruled that he could because the house was, by all intents and purposes, haunted. On a side note, if any financier listening to this wants to go in on an 18 room Victorian mansion in upstate New York. Heartstarts pounding.com or send me a raven. But Abe, I feel for you. Clearly most people would not voluntarily live in a haunted house, and I'm glad you were able to get out safely because whatever was in that house was not a friend. I can tell you that much. Okay, our next story is a wild ride, and I mean that quite literally. It comes from a listener named Cinny and she titled this email A Road that Only Appeared Once she writes when my daughter was five or six years old, I worked a lot. Four jobs actually. So on my only day off I would take her to go see her father. We would have lunch, they would play and hang out a little bit, and then on the way home the two of us would play a game. I would be driving along, coming to an intersection, and I would ask her which way she would want to go. She'd pick a direction, we would explore a little bit and then we'd go home. This particular Sunday afternoon at around 4pm as we were driving, I got to an intersection that even though I had driven this way at least twice a month, I did not recognize. My daughter said to go to the left, and so we did. I didn't recognize the road at all, and it was somewhat incongruous to the area. We were smack dab in the heart of the suburbs, with housing developments and stores everywhere. But this was just a long, long stretch of farmland, pastures and fields. No houses or stores, even though it was still the early spring, still muddy and small piles of snow the color of dirty laundry everywhere along this road. It almost appeared to be late summer. Tall grass stood in clumps alongside the road. The trees were deep green and fully leafed out, not the timid green of spring but but robust summer colors, and in the fields it looked like wheat was growing tall and golden. I found myself wondering if I had ever seen a field of wheat near here, when all of a sudden the steering wheel tried to jump out of my grip and I realized I had blown out the front passenger side tire. I managed to pull well off the road, checking on my daughter in the backseat in her car seat. She was fine, but she was a little bit shaky, so I was reassuring her that everything was okay. Cell phones weren't really a thing yet, not for people like us anyways, but I did have a spare tire in the back. Now there were no houses in this strange, unfamiliar area. I don't think I had passed one since I had turned onto this road, nor any traffic at all really, so no one was going to help us. I opened the trunk to get out the jack and the spare. I took my daughter out of the car seat and set her up near the fence line, away from the road. In the car she asked me to take her coat off because it was really warm where we were. Then I went back to the car to get her a book and a snack, and when I turned around I nearly jumped out of my skin. A tall, very tall, like 6 foot, 6 inch tall man was standing right behind me. He was big, well muscled, blonde as could be, and right behind me on a gravel road. I hadn't heard a thing. No footsteps approaching, nothing. I looked up at him, but my eyes were having a hard time focusing. Though I noticed how strikingly blue his eyes were, it was like they were translucent. The man wore what I thought of as farmer's clothing, overalls and a plaid shirt, heavy work boots. But before I could say anything, he offered to help me change the tire. I glanced over at my daughter. She was reading her book, but she was watching us too, a really grown up expression on her face, far too weary for her age. I could tell that she was getting a strange vibe from this man as well as waiting to see how I would respond to him. He, however, did not wait for me to respond. He just got to work. My car was jacked up before I knew it, and all of it seemed to be happening so quickly. It was too much. Everything was too much. The sun was too bright, it was too warm for March, and why was everything so green and so golden here? It was like the colors were all off the I tried to tell him that I appreciated his help, but I could change the tire myself, though he just continued on working so quickly. The tire was changed and the flat stowed in the trunk along with the jack and the tire iron before I could protest too loudly. And when the man looked at me again this time I swore his eyes were hazel, like a golden brown almost. His jaw also seemed softer, like the features of his face had been slightly changed since he first appeared behind me. And that's when he said something to me that really freaked me out. He said that I could stay here forever. Wouldn't that be nice? I don't really remember the context in which he said that. I was having trouble processing what was going on by that point, but I remember he reached out his hand to me and I had the overwhelming feeling that I should take it. But then through the fog in my brain. I heard the voice of my dead grandmother telling me to pick up my kid and get the hell out of there. That fully snapped me out of whatever trance I was in. I called my daughter and she was on her feet coming towards me in one second. I scooped her up, I threw her in the back of the car. Her car seat straps were being impossible, but I got her buckled, fearing the whole time that he would grab me from behind. I could feel him behind me and I swore I heard him hiss. But when I turned around, he was gone. There was absolutely no place to hide, just fields and a road I could see for miles, quite literally, but he was gone. I got in the car and made the worst three point turn in history. If a driving instructor had seen me, they would have taken my license. But I just drove. I didn't turn off that road. In fact, I have no idea how I ended up on the road that I knew and I was never able to find that road again. I swear I knew where it was, but it was just never there. After we got home, I stopped freaking out a little bit and I asked my daughter if she had seen where the man had gone and she pointed up and shrugged. That story reminds me so much of the backrooms episode that we did earlier this year, where people seem to accidentally slip out of this reality and into another one. A liminal space that seems devoid of all other people and Pop quiz. But what does each level of the backrooms have? An entity, something evil that lives in that corner of the backrooms and wants you out. Cindy, it almost sounds like you found yourself in a liminal space with its own evil entity. And you're lucky that you can change attire on your own because to my father's dismay, I would have been toast. All right, next up, I have a story sent in from a listener who I'll call cj. CJ also lived in a house where strange things went bump in the night. But what is scarier? When the thing that lives in your home with you is a ghost, or when it's something alive? CJ writes I grew up in the Niagara region of Canada. It's a hugely haunted area and it also has a lot of strange folk in the smaller towns. This is by far the craziest thing that happened to me though. When I was around 16 years old, my mother, brother and I moved into an old house. For context, my brother is four years older than me and he was working at a kitchen job. My mother was staying over at her boyfriend's house most days of the week, so my brother and I were often left home alone. Now, the house upstairs was a living room. Two bedrooms at each end of a hall with a bathroom and a den in between them. Then there was the kitchen with a door to the backyard, opposite of the doorway to the basement, which had no door. The basement was bizarre, as it was apparently built by the previous homeowner, who was a carpenter and a construction worker. It immediately opened into a room made of white cinder block walls, a white concrete floor, and a white concrete ceiling. There were a series of closet doors at the bottom of the stairs for storage, and a workbench with a large overhead cabinet. The wall that jutted out between the cabinet and storage doors had a small gap between the ceiling and cinder block wall that was pitch black. It then led to a small carpeted space with a door to the laundry room and. And then that opened into a large basement room that was carpeted with office ceiling tiles. Finally, the backyard was a large brick patio area. And then it led down a hill full of dirt and trees into a ravine. Apparently, my mother told me this ravine was right along the old route that Paul Bernardo. Yes, of the Ken and Barbie serial killers would walk along when he was a peeping Tom. Creepy. When we first moved in, the owners told us they would be unreachable for three months as they were going on vacation. They left a number for a handyman if anything happened. And all we were told about the previous owner was that he had worked as a carpenter and then as a construction worker, was reclusive, and that he had sold the house to a company and moved away in his old age. The day we moved in, my mother left to return a key to the previous landlords, and it was my first time since seeing the space and I was exploring. When I went down into the basement, I noticed the laundry room had this wooden cellar door. It opened into a dingy tiled bathroom. There was only a toilet, a bare bulb overhead, and a cubby with hooks on the wall. But then I noticed something that made my heart drop. The back of the door had claw marks on it. They were too high up to be a dog, and the landlords had never mentioned any pets. This weirded me out, but I just told myself it must have been a very big dog. But upon closing the door, I noticed the lock. It was on the outside of the bathroom door. It was just an old hook lock, but it freaked me out. I ran upstairs and told my brother and he just shrugged it off, saying that the previous owner was probably just a jerk who locked up his dog in there didn't really make it much better. I continued exploring into my bedroom at the end of the hall, and I looked in the closet. It had these wooden walls, but it also had a large wooden ledge, Sort of like an outhouse without the hole. But the ceiling of my closet had a hole in the ceiling. I got my flashlight and poked my head up there, and the attic was unfinished. I got my brother to come and see, and we quickly went to the other bedroom. The ceiling looked normal in that closet, but my brother pushed on it and it lifted. It had a false tile and the other side had a handle on it, as if it could be lifted from the attic. When my mother got home, I told her about all the weird stuff we had found, and she just laughed it off. I had a pretty wild imagination as a kid, running around doing ghost hunting and stuff. But this was tangible. I had proof that something was weird here. This was not just me ghost hunting. This felt way more sinister now. The town we lived in was incredibly old, and there were a number of battles fought in the Niagara region of Canada where we were. It was highly regarded as a very haunted region in Canada. But anyways, I digress. Time went on, and over the next few months, my brother and I experienced a lot of weird stuff. We would hear each other in another room, but then see each other in a different room than where we heard them. The storage doors in the basement had a habit of drifting open. You know, the usual weird stuff. One day while I was playing Xbox, I. I heard what sounded like someone run up the basement stairs at full speed and right out of the back door. Nobody came past the window, which would have meant that they went into the backyard. But no one was back there either. So I figured that I had just imagined it. But it took a while for me to calm down. And when my brother came home, I was in the middle of telling him about it, when all of a sudden there was a loud banging from the basement. We froze and then we looked at each other and my brother mouthed, we? What the hell? I grabbed a hockey stick nearby. My brother went into the closet and grabbed a metal pole for the vacuum. All the while, the banging was continually coming from the basement. When we got to the top of the stairs to the basement, though, it stopped. My brother and I slowly descended and all of the doors were open along the wall of storage closets. We checked the whole basement and couldn't find anything or anyone. But then this next thing that happened was even worse. So whenever I went into the basement room, which was my brother's. I always felt uneasy about that pitch black gap on the cinder block wall. It just always felt like someone was watching me from it. I think my brain put it all together and I walked over to the overhead cabinet above the workbench. I pulled on the corner and it was not fully secured to the wall like we had assumed. It lifted away and was only secured at the top. I let go of it and it made the exact noise that we had heard, that banging sound. I lifted the cabinet again and we looked behind it to see that there was a huge hole in the wall. My brother then opened the cabinet doors and pushed on the back of the cabinet, which was another false backing. It fell and there was a long tunnel. We shined a flashlight down into the hole and could not see the end. We sat around for a little bit, trying to decide what to do. My brother's girlfriend had come over and she freaked out when we showed her. Eventually, my brother, being the madman that he is, decided that he wanted to go inside. So I gave him my hunting knife and he got up onto the workbench and crawled in with a knife and a flashlight. His girlfriend and I watched as he crawled in. A few feet inside, he found these baking sheets on the ground, full of white powder and what looked like weird rubble, not really from the tunnel, but he couldn't tell exactly what it was. He then moved around those baking sheets and went even deeper into the tunnel. It got to the point where we could barely hear him and we were begging him to come back. Eventually he emerged and he said it was a series of tunnels back there, big enough to crawl on his hands and knees, but they branched off in multiple ways and went further back than he could even get. We pulled the powder sheets out and we waited for our mom to get home. In the meantime, we put the metal pole and the handles of the cabinet so that they couldn't open anymore. Our mother called our family friend Jim, who knew a lot about construction, and he said that the sheets did look like they were covered in baking soda, likely to mask a really musty smell. And furthermore, the tunnels were likely old rum running tunnels. We'd always heard the legend that there were old abandoned tunnels under our neighborhood, but I definitely never thought they were real. Jim said that the previous owner likely busted into one by accident and just covered it up rather than put work into rebuilding the wall. And that the very bizarre banging was likely strong wind gusts as it had been pretty windy that day. All of this was still very strange, but it seemed to put everyone's mind at ease. At least everyone except for me, because I was still adding everything up. The basement bathroom, the weird hidden attic path, the tunnels in the basement. A few months went by. No more major events. My mother and brother shrugged me off and said that it was just wind gusts opening the doors and moving the cabinets that day. But the more I looked in the house, the more weird things I found. There were a couple of little hidden cupboard spaces within the actual cupboards. We still heard some weird things here and there. I still got a really scary feeling from that gap in the wall. My brother eventually moved out, and being alone in that house at 17 was really freaky. But being a huge horror fan, I tried telling myself that I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Soon before moving. We only lived there for a little over a year. I was digging in the backyard. I was trying to even a part of a hill to make a little spot to read and hang out in nature. And as I was digging, I uncovered clothes, children's clothes, a little girl's shirt and shorts. I went pale and I felt sick. I ran inside. I called my mom, who just happens to work in criminology, and she agreed that it was incredibly disturbing. But when she got home, she argued that I hadn't told her dug very deep. It was likely just garbage that had blown into the backyard and gotten covered. I argued with her for a bit, trying to get her to call the police, but she waved me off again. But my suspicions were validated, at least a little bit. The only backyard we could see from our house was our direct neighbor. She was a sweet old lady and she would often sit out back on her deck. And she said that she didn't mind when I would smoke on the porch. So we would talk every now and again. All she had to say when I asked her about the previous owner was, oh, I did not like that man. He was a bad, bad man. When I asked her to elaborate, all she said was, some men are just evil. Good riddance. We moved out of that house soon after, and I thought the nightmare was over. Over time, I had started convincing myself that what I had seen was not that bad. It was just a weird house. That was all. But the last realization came years later when I was watching tv. Remember those sheets of baking powder my brother found with the weird rubble? Well, on the True Crime TV show I was watching, the person described finding the cremated remains of someone in their basement. It was like a weird rubble and baking powder. It was described the exact way that my brother described what he found in one of those tunnels. I have no idea what happened in that house, but I think the man that lived there before me was a serial killer.
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- [36:10]
Kaylan Moore
CJ I regret to inform you that I do agree with your assessment. I also think that something really dark happened in that house. And as a side note, that is absolutely wild that Paul Bernardo used to live in that area as well. Is there something in the water over there? Paul is one of the most depraved people that I've ever read about, and after his Peeping Tom days, he would go on to kill three people with his wife Carla. They were known as the Kennebarbie Killers. All right, I have one more story for you all, a story from a listener that really begs the question, Even when you're looking at someone with your own eyes, can you trust that it's actually them? This listener writes these events took place when I was back in college. Our class was traveling for a team building off site a few hours away from Mumbai in India. We were staying at this old, slightly spooky dormitory that was attached to a church. It seemed like the perfect setting for sharing ghost stories. That night, all of the girls gathered in the common area, huddled together, sharing their experiences with the paranormal. And that's when my best friend let's call her K. Began to share hers. Kay had experienced quite a few strange things in her life, far more than most people I knew, but one particular story she told me that night really stuck with me. I didn't realize it then, but it would later connect to something that happened to me too. When K was younger, she used to share a bed with her little sister, who was about 3 or 4 years old at the time. One night, K Was fast asleep when her sister woke her up and asked for an extra blanket because she felt cold. Kay handed it over, tucked her little sister back in, and turned to face the other side toward the open bedroom door that looked out onto a long hallway. In India, it's quite common for kids to sleep with their doors open. And that is when she saw it. At the far end of the hallway stood a figure. The figure of a young girl who looked exactly like her little sister. K Couldn't see the girl's face clearly, but everything else matched. The same height, the same small frame, the same short dress, and even the same two pigtails that her sister wore every day. The figure then began walking slowly towards the bedroom. Panicked, K Grabbed her actual sister, who was still asleep next to her. And they ran straight into her parents room which was right next door. And as she did this, she saw the figure stop, turn and walk into the kitchen instead. That's where it crouched underneath the dining table. Her parents were alarmed by her panic and they immediately searched the entire house. But there was no sign of anyone being there. Now when I first heard that story, I'll be honest, I brushed it off. She was a kid. Maybe she had imagined it or she dreamt it. Kids see strange things all the time. But a few months later, something happened that made me question everything. So K's parents were traveling and she had the apartment all to herself. So she decided to throw a small party. It was just a few friends, her boyfriend and me. Her parents knew about the party and who was going to be there and they were okay with it since we were all adults. Before I go further, let me explain the layout of her apartment because it's really important. When you enter through the main door, there's a narrow corridor with K's bedroom on the right. The corridor then opens up into a large living room with an attached balcony that runs the entire length of the apartment. From K's bedroom at 1 end, through the living room and ending at her parents bedroom. At the end of K's balcony, near her bedroom, there's a door that leads directly into the building's stairwell. It's always locked from the inside for safety. K's bedroom also has a small window that opens out onto that same balcony. As a rebellious teenager, K used to use that setup to sneak out late at night and meet her boyfriend. She would climb out of the window, walk onto the balcony, and slip out through the stairwell door. This way she avoided the security cameras outside of her main door, which her dad had installed. It sent alerts to his phone whenever there was any movement outside. K's room didn't have regular beds either. Instead, there was a large mattress on the floor where she and her sister used to sleep. To reach the window, you had to walk right across that mattress. Now back to the party. Eventually, after an intense game night, most people left. Only K, her boyfriend and I stayed behind. I was pretty tired, so I decided to turn in for the night and K offered me her room to sleep in since she and her boyfriend wanted to stay up a little bit longer. Sometime later, I woke up to the feeling of someone walking across the mattress I was sleeping on. You know that distinct sinking motion that you can feel even with your eyes closed? I opened my eyes just in time to see K opening the window, climbing out onto the balcony and walking toward the stairwell door. I asked her where she was going but she didn't respond. She just kept walking and then disappeared from view. The next morning I questioned her why she had snuck out that night and Kay looked at me completely confused. She said she never left the house. After I went to bed. She and her boyfriend stayed up talking in her parents room and then they had fallen asleep there. She swore she hadn't even gone near her bedroom that night. To this day I can still picture what I saw so clearly. The figure looked exactly like her. The same height, the same build, even the same pajamas that she was wearing that evening. And I couldn't help but think back to the story she had told me about her sister. Was there really something in that apartment that could take their shape? Well now I turn it back to you guys. What do you think? Was there really something in that apartment that could take the shape of another person? And was it the same thing that K saw all those years ago, pretending to be her little sister? You can leave a comment wherever you listen because I'm just dying to hear your thoughts. Doppelgangers are something that interest me so deeply and every now and then I get stories from you all who have experienced them. But that is all I have for you on this very wintry evening. If you have a bizarre, creepy or strange story that you would like to share with me, you can do so at Heart Starts Pounding and if you want more, our bonus episode for this month is actually going to be an old timey Victorian fiction ghost story. You can join me over on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to listen to that. And if you would like to take part in voting for our bonus episode every month you can join me on the High Council tier on Patreon. We will be back next week with another haunted tour, this time of some of the most haunted castles from around the world, the dark history of them and the ghosts that still reside inside. It's another great one for us to gather by the fire for I will see you there. And until then, stay curious. Heartstarts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heartstarts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our Associate Producer is Juno Hobbs. Sound Design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Chaffee have a heart pounding story or a case request. Check out heartstarts pounding.com give the gift.
- [43:27]
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