Co-host/Commentator (19:01)
So it's the summer of 1999. My neighbors and I are outside playing. It's something we did all the time, from sun up to sundown. Just be playing basketball and just be outside. On this day, as we're shooting hoops, we can look down the street, and out of the corner of our eye, we can see two people peeking into houses. First, we see them try to jump onto a windowsill, and then we can see them go around trying to peek into windows that might have been open. Definitely wasn't people that we knew from the neighborhood. So we go inside, and we were only 15 and 13 at the time. So we went in to get our moms to tell them, you know, something's going up down the street. As our parents come out, the people are gone. There's no sign of them. All of a sudden, around the other corner, you see the people come back out, and we're like, see, we weren't lying to you. There's actually people peeking into these windows. And the same thing. They start peeking into the windows. They start trying to jump onto the windowsill. But at this house, the old man that had lived there was still home. He came out, and we could see him arguing with them. We couldn't hear what they were saying, but we could see, like, their arms flailing. So there was definitely some type of argument being had. Our moms now believing us, you know, also started watching to see what might go on. And my mom at this time had her phone with her just in case, you know, something had happened. So we're sitting there, and the old man seems to go. And the two people that were peeking at the houses looks like they leave. And we continue playing basketball. All of a sudden, we look up and we realize that those two people didn't leave. They were actually coming down the street towards us. So the two of Them start walking towards us. And where I was, I was at the top of the driveway. And he makes his way down and he puts out his hand for a handshake. Instinctively, I reach out and grab his hand and just regret it. As soon as I grasp it, his warm, sweaty palms just like, squeeze tightly onto my hands. And I hear him say, hi, I'm Bobby Corey. He says it with a tone that I should know exactly who he is. I shake his hand and he says, I used to live down the street and my daddy won't let me in. We were just looking in the windows to see if our friends were still there. So don't be afraid. You guys don't have to be afraid of me. And he says that a few times to us, like, don't be afraid. We're not scary. Don't be afraid. He starts asking us, where's your daddy? Does your daddy live here? Is your daddy still around? And at this point, our moms come up and, you know, they are trying to, like, pull us away. But Bobby is still shaking my hand at this point. As we're talking, he notices that my mom has a phone in her hand. And he sees a cruiser come down the street. And he gives her a look like, did you call the cops? And it turns out that the old man who had just started walking down yells, nope, nope, that was me. So the police come down and they start talking to the adults. All of us kids go down to the back. I notice that they pat down Bobby and his girlfriend, and he's getting into the back of the cruiser. No Miranda rights, no cuffs. And the cops go over to the adults. They start talking to them as well, telling them what's going to happen. And the cruiser takes off. All of us kids are a little shaken up. I mean, this man was extremely creepy. His girlfriend was just whispering at him and giggling. So we had no clue what was going on. The adults come to us and tell us that he's gone now. He's gonna get dropped off at the next town over. He has a brother. His brother's gonna come and pick him up. The old man proceeds to tell us that Bobby did live in the neighborhood. Bobby Corey lived down the street for years. And his whole house with his brothers and sisters were trouble. Bobby, years ago, had possibly started a fire in the house that had claimed life of one of the kids. Bobby Corey had either been locked up or put away for some unknown reason. And that's why he was home now. And his dad wasn't gonna let him in. So with all this excitement, you know, we stay outside for a little bit longer and my mom decides we'll all stay together, we'll have a little cookout. Now let's go get some hot dogs and hamburgers and stuff. I ride with my mom and we're just going to go down the street to go pick up some hamburgers and hot dogs and, you know, try to just enjoy the rest of the nice day and try to forget about what just happened. And as we're driving down the street, it's about three quarters of a mile long and it's straight woods and it's a straight shot. We get almost to the end and we see two people walking with a brown paper bag. I sink into my chair, try not to look at them. And my mom obviously can't sink because she's driving, drives past them and they give a little stare down and my mom realizes, oh my God, we have to get back home. So we go up another like probably 10 seconds, pull a U turn and start driving back. And as we start driving back, there was nobody on the street. This street had no driveways, no other roads. It was a straight 3/4 mile of just woods. So we get back to our house, we gather up our neighbors who are outside still. We bring everybody into our house and we just sit in our living room. I had a ranch style house with a big bay window up front. So we all sit there and just wait to see if anybody comes walking down the street or if we can hear anything. After about 10, 15 minutes, we can start hearing faint singing and then it gets louder and louder and then we can see them coming out down the street. Bobby Corey waving an American flag, singing God Bless America, marching with his girlfriend in tow, giggling right behind him, also holding an American flag, parading in front of my neighbor's house and then our house. And you can hear God Bless America back and forth, horrible toned right in front of where we were sitting. We never saw him peek into our window, but there he was, marching right in front of us, probably no more than 20ft, holding his paper bag, holding his American flag, going right past our driveway and then down the road we cracked the window a little bit so we could hear and we could hear him getting fainter and fainter. And when we thought it was okay and safe, we all got out of the house and very slowly walked to the top of the driveway and looked down and we couldn't see anything and we could barely hear anything at this point. So we thought, okay, we're in the clear. Just as we thought we were in the clear, a llama comes flying down the street. There are some people in our neighborhood that had animals. I didn't know anybody that had a llama, but apparently there was one, and it got loose and started sprinting down towards us. The cruiser came up to us and told us that the original call that he received was somebody had gone into their backyard and unlatched their llamas from the backyard, and now they were running loose. So somebody else now had called to say that there was a man in their backyard unlatching their animals. And he described Bobby Corey. So Bobby Corey now had gone past us and was letting out animals for whatever reason. That was the last time I thought I would ever hear the name of Bobby Corey. About a week later, I was going over my friend's house who lived pretty close to me. If anybody needed to cut through the woods to pretty much anywhere in this neighborhood, instead of driving down the street or walking wide open, you could just go through the woods and be able to get to all these centralized locations. So I went over his house, and we were going to try to see if any of our friends were around. And maybe I'll try to get together and play a big game of Wiffle ball. So when we got to his house, he unlocked the door, which typically meant that nobody was home. They always locked their house. So we went inside, grabbed some snacks, and we went to go on the computer. This is 1999, so we had to use dial up to get onto computer America Online. So we sat down, and we were going to see if any of our friends were online to get in touch with them. As we're sitting there chatting, we can hear something above us. So my friend yells to his brother, and he goes, hey, Jay, are you home? And we don't hear anything after that. We look at each other. We think it's kind of odd, but it's an older house, so maybe it was just a creek. So we start talking to some friends, seeing, you know, what's going on. When we get knocked offline, we're like, oh, that's weird now. Back then, if you had picked up the phone, you'd get knocked offline. So we go back on to dial up, and we think we hear some footsteps again upstairs. As we're talking to our friends, I tell my buddy, I say, hey, tell them we think someone might be here. And as I say that, we get knocked offline again. So now we're very suspicious that there might be somebody in the house with us. So we grabbed the landline that was next to us, and we decided to call our friends and ask them where they are. Maybe they want to come over because they could come here and help us out. We call them, and as we're on the phone with them, I hear the receiver pickup upstairs. And I look at my friend and I go, someone just picked up the phone. He upped the phone. And me and him look at each other. And we decide that we're gonna go now upstairs to try to see who's here. It could still be his brother messing with us. It's something he would do. So we go to the kitchen. We go up his staircase, which is a very old school, steep staircase. And we go to his bedroom, which is on the left. And we look, and there's nobody there to go to where the noise was. We have to go through a hallway which connects to another hallway. And as we're walking down this hallway, I can see in the room a shadow dart across and go behind the door. And I freeze. And I look at my friend and I go, did you see that? And he nods, and we both go to take one more step, and at that moment, he darts. So I dart, and we run down the stairs, out the front door, and just go to the driveway. We look up to the window of where we heard the noise, and then we look at each other and we go, no, we gotta be braver than this. We have to go back in. So together we go into the kitchen. I grab a serrated bread knife. Just the first thing I grabbed. He grabs a giant butcher knife, and we start walking up the staircase. The hallway that I mentioned before had two doors on either end. As we go up to the staircase, both doors are now shut. So with our knives in hand, we look at each other and we go, all right, on the count of three, we're gonna go in. We're just gonna see who's there. 1, 2, 3. We slam open our door. Across the hall, the other door slams open. He darts, I dart. We run out to the driveway. Now, we know that there's someone definitely upstairs in the driveway. We look down, and we can see that there's four guys working on their car. So we go down and we get them, and we say, hey, if you guys could come up with us, help us. We think someone broke in. It's just us two in the house. We didn't need to give them any more reason. And they ransacked the house. They ran through the first floor looking for anybody they could see. They went Upstairs, they couldn't find anything. We're walking through the house and we get up to the second floor and we can see that the second floor window onto the roof is open. And we walk out onto the roof and look down. And in his mother's flower bed is a perfect body imprint of somebody who had just jumped and ruined all of her flowers and more than likely took off into the woods. We gather ourselves, we call the police just to tell them what had happened. The police come, they take our statement. They say there's not much they can do because there's no one there. And this is now the third or fourth cop that I've seen in town. So now they all know my name. And he tells us just to relax. So that next day, I go back home, my neighbor comes over and he says, oh, I heard you had an exciting day yesterday. And I was like, yeah. And he says, ah. He goes, there must be a full moon going on because I've caught someone the past two nights coming out in the middle of the night from the woods with a bucket and stealing my water. Really? And he goes, yeah. He goes. Brown, greasy hair, dirty. He grabs it and he sprints back into the woods. And at that moment, I looked out into the woods of where the snowmobile paths were and realized it was Bobby Corey. Bobby Corey had been out in the woods this entire time watching us. And I know for a fact Bobby Corey was in the house that day when I was with my friend. And then he escaped back into the woods. It was Bobby Corey.
