B (7:31)

Shocked but angered at her threat, I told her that we were not an item and I didn't break up with her because there was nothing to break. We dated casually and it didn't work out. That's all. There was no label, no title to our relationship. I could see in her eyes this was a shock. Her eyes read as if we had been dating for years and I cheated and then coldly left her. My blood chilled at the expression on her face. Angrily, she yanked open her car door, practically threw herself in the car and sped away. Something told me that that was not the last time that I would see her and I couldn't have been more right to spare some time. Now that I have given plenty of context to how this started, let's talk about how it officially ends. About two weeks after the car battery and windshield wiper event, she continued to text me threatening messages and leave obscene and threatening messages on my voicemail. Not all were threats. Some were pleading and begging me to talk to her, to go out one more time and let her show me how great our companionship could be. At the advice of a friend, I didn't block her because my friend warned that that could potentially escalate things. He suggested that I simply just put her notifications on silent and continue to ignore them. And that's what I did. I closed the store down one night and left around 10:15pm Typical time for closing the store. On the way home, I considered ordering a pizza, taking a shower and relaxing watching some movies. I did have the next day off so I could stay up and enjoy the wind down after work. Walking into my apartment, I locked the door behind me and grabbed the pizza coupons I hung in the fridge and decided after ordering the pizza, the guy told me it would be about 45 minutes considering it was a Friday night and they were busy and were short a delivery driver. I told him if the pizza was hot when I got it that it was fine by me. This allowed me some time to shower. I began taking my clothes off as I made my way to the bathroom. Who doesn't do that when they're home alone, right? Starting the shower and setting up my speaker to play some music. Knowing that if the pizza arrived while I showered, they would leave it at the door so there's no rush. I stepped in the shower and let the water run from head to toe, just enjoying the feeling of my muscles relaxing in the warmth. I started my typical in the shower washing routine, leaving my face for last. It's a habit, rubbing the face wash in. I closed my eyes and put my face under the streaming water, enjoying the cleanliness that I was feeling. I pulled my face out and ran my hand over it and opening my eyes, I nearly slipped and broke my neck as a silhouette was framed standing on the other side of the shower curtain. I called out in a panicked voice asking who was there and that they better leave now or I'm gonna call the police. The silhouette then held up its hand to show me that it was holding my phone. I could see my chest pounding with every rapid heartbeat. When the silhouette finally spoke, it was her telling me that I needed to go ahead and step out. As she passed my towel to me without opening the curtain, I wrapped my waist, not even drying myself, and slowly began opening the curtain. She stood there, my phone in one hand and the largest kitchen knife I had ever seen in the other. Your pizza's on the counter. Let's Eat, she said, directing me that way with the knife. I followed her instructions, thinking to myself, she obviously is unhinged, but I must get myself out of this situation and preferably alive. I walked into my living room, that is one open space with my kitchen only divided by the bar that is there and on the counter sat the pizza. I grabbed the box and she directed me to the couch where candles were lit and a movie was pulled up to play. I asked her how long she had been here and how she got in here. She told me she had been here since this morning, waiting for me to come home to her and that she had copied my key the night we slept together for the first time beside myself. At this point I'm not sure how this was going to go or more matter of fact, how this was going to end. I asked her if I could please put some clothes on before we eat. She dropped her eyes to the towel around my waist and smirked. I felt objectified and shuddered, passing it off as feeling a tad cold in only my towel. She agreed, but told me that she was coming with me so that I don't try anything. Still wielding the knife, she followed down the hall to my room and waited, sitting patiently on my bed and watching my every single move. I was horrified. I could not at this moment figure out how I was to get out of this situation safely. It wasn't only my safety I was concerned for. I also did not want her to get hurt, even though she was holding me at knifepoint in my apartment. Once I finished dressing, I walked back towards the living room. She followed. I waited for her to tell me where she would like us to go to sit and eat. While watching the movie, she directed me to sit where the arm of my couch was and she was going to adjust herself against me in a cuddling position. It occurred to me then this was my way out. Smiling at her, I sat down and patted the cushion next to me. Her eyes shifted at the invitation and I could read on her face that she was confused by my smile. So I let it fall slowly off my face to seem as innocent as I could. I told her that I'm just gonna try to make her feel more comfortable with me. I didn't want her to think that she needed a knife to protect herself around me, pretending to play the fool to the real reason for the knife. At this she smiled to herself and sat. At first she was stiff and then she began to cry. I watched her in utter disbelief that in this moment she felt she was the one that should be crying. A selfish thought, I know, but she was holding me hostage. As she was crying, she looked at me and began telling me that the reason she had the knife was not for her protection but because she was going to kill me. Her entire plan was released. Between hysterical sobs and bouts of random laughter, she planned to break in, force me to spend some time with her, and then once it was over, we would go to bed and she was gonna stab me to death in my sleep. I was in shock. I couldn't even figure out a word and emotion or anything to acknowledge what she was telling me. As she talked, she began to relax and slowly and subconsciously, she laid the knife on her knee, still wrapped up in her spill about living her life, knowing that I was loving and caring for another woman that wasn't her and was not something that she could even fathom. A thought of it drove her wild. Made her crazy, she was saying. She shut her eyes to sob loudly again and I lunged, pushing her against the back of the couch with one arm and grabbing the knife with the other hand. Her eyes flew open in a rage and she was grappling with me to get the knife back. The entire time. I am reassuring her that she does not need to do this. We barely know each other. She will find someone better. All those things that I thought were the right things to say, none of them were any consolations to her. Finally, I threw the knife down the hall and rolled her onto her back. As she took her fingers and began trying to pry my eyes out with her manicured claws. Pain surging through my face and eyes, I put all my strength into subduing her arms and pinning her to the floor. She kicked and squirmed, screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs. It was then that my front door burst open and in ran my neighbor from across the hall. I had never been more excited to see him in my life. Not realizing how the situation looked and caught off guard at his emergence, I froze. She then kneed me in the forbidden area and then climbed on top of me, hitting and beating me in the head as hard as she could. Let me tell you something crazy doesn't hit like a girl. The impact of each hit felt more and more like she was trying to bash my brains out of my skull. It was then that she pulled another small knife out of her waistband and lunged it into my side. The indescribable pain of that moment was followed by another directly in the center of my chest. I could feel the cold metal as it entered my body. She then lifted the knife above her head and was about to plunge it into my face when my neighbor lifted her off me and held her pinned in his arms as she fought and screamed, kicking and squirming, I grabbed my phone as quickly as I could and dialed the police. Bleeding and terrified for my life, I helped my neighbor hold her in place. For the police when they arrived, it felt as though it took them hours. But it wasn't more than 10 minutes when the first two officers ran, weapons drawn, into the door of my apartment. Immediately, she began sobbing and yelling that I tried to assault her and she was just defending herself. The first officer grabbed me and took me down. I protested, trying to get my story out, but I was being detained and they were having none of what I was saying at the time. I was infuriated. But after some thorough investigating, the police uncovered that she had a violent past that included stalking, falsifying a police report, assault, and one dismissed charge of attempted murder. Rushed to the hospital for my injuries, I was treated and thankfully, she was a few centimeters shy of taking my life that day. The doctor said she missed a main artery by a little under 2cm. There is no moral to this story, just the fact that it happened. I'm alive and she is in prison.

D (18:54)

Close your eyes. Exhale, Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

C (19:01)

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh. They're so fast.

D (19:09)

And breathe.

C (19:10)

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.

D (19:18)

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D (19:26)

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D (19:33)

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D (19:38)

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D (19:43)

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E (19:54)

Disney wants to know, are you ready?

B (19:56)

Yes.

E (19:58)

For Marvel Studios, the New Avengers, now streaming on Disney.

D (20:03)

Let's do this.

E (20:03)

One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streaming on Disney.

D (20:07)

Hey, you weren't listening to me.

E (20:10)

I said thunderbolts. The New Avengers is now streaming on Disney.

A (20:14)

Neat.

D (20:15)

The New Avengers.

B (20:17)

That's cool. Then.

E (20:18)

Marvel Studios Thunderbolts. The New Avengers, rated PG13, now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney. Plus.

B (20:29)

I am a physician out of Western Massachusetts. Unfortunately for me, I started as an officially licensed Doctor, fall of 2019, meaning that the pandemic is where I had to get my sea legs for being a hospitalist, so to speak. Being a new physician during the pandemic was harrowing for a lot of reasons, but this experience was by and away the most disturbing I have had since I started practicing. I have never completely understood why people have such an intense fear of oblivion. If you were kidnapped, tortured and eventually killed by Albert Florida Fish, would you truly be interested in an afterlife where you retain that memory? Death is often very merciful because of its true erasure. You no longer have to live with the terrible pain or haunting experiences. Trauma lives on for only those who can remember it. And as for hell, I think we are able to create something much worse than fire and brimstone, even with the best intentions. That is where this story comes in. During the height of the pandemic, a lot of non ICU staff were being asked to help run the ICU because the volume of critically ill patients was so unbearable. Normally I only work with hospitalized patients on the regular wards floor, but In December of 2021, I was drafted to be a pseudo ICU doc. Much to my own dismay. The vast majority of our ICU patients were intubated. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this means that they had a breathing tube in because their lung tissue was completely non functional. Despite what you might see on tv. Most patients who were intubated are given sedating medications. They essentially sleep sleep through their experience. This is both humane and therapeutic. We generally don't want people who are intubated to be trying to breathe on their own. It can essentially overinflate their lungs. The day this happened, it was like any other normal shift. The patient in question was a 60 year old woman with no past medical history. She had been intubated for two weeks because her immune system had essentially shredded her lungs trying to eliminate her COVID infection. Pretty much the same story as everyone else. And like many others, she was slowly recovering. Her blood pressure, however, had really been a difficult thing to control. It had been dangerously low intermittently throughout her entire admission. Because of this, the sedating medication that we used primarily was ketamine, which generally does not have an effect on your blood pressure. If anything, it actually makes it a little bit higher, but it can be associated with dissociative reactions, which is a type of psychosis. When you've been on the ventilator for that long, your trachea actually starts to become Rigid and inflexible. If that change happens, you can't really breathe without a ventilatory tube. Your body has essentially molded around this foreign instrument. Because of this, two weeks or so is when we decide whether or not you need to have a tracheostomy performed. Think the smokers with a hole in their neck. This often has a very negative impact on a patient's life. So in an effort to see if she could breathe on her own, we began lowering her sedation. Thirty minutes later, I heard it. Initially, I couldn't recognize the sound. It was like if you recorded the sound of a blender and then listened to it on cheap headphones. The sound was high in pitch, but at the same time it was a bit muffled and coarse. When I turned around, I saw the patient sitting up straight in bed. I gasped and moved back slightly. That sound I heard was her screaming into her ventilatory tube. Not yelling, not hollering. She was screaming bloody murder through her tube. Her eyes were bloodshot and bulging. It looked like she was also crying, but that may have been the artificial tears. Blood was also starting to leak down the corners of her mouth. Laryngeal trauma from her screaming so vigorously. Since she had Covid, there was no one in the room with her when she initially started screaming. This was part of infection control. In order for us in healthcare to not contract Covid, we needed to essentially be in hazmat suits to interact with a COVID patient. We all rushed to get the proper equipment on to enter her room. In that time, she managed to to completely pull out her ventilatory tube to our conjoint horror. I will never forget the things she said. When we got to the bedside, she was pleading with us. Please send me back. Please, please. This is all wrong. This is not who I am anymore. I don't want to be here. It hurts and it's wrong. I don't want them to notice I left. I don't want them to notice. I want to go back. Please, please, please send me back. Mind you, she was saying this through the blood that was now leaking down her throat and up through her mouth from the trauma of removing the tube. We did eventually get the tube back in after we gave her some emergency sedation, but the damage was already done. She died a few hours later. One family member was able to visit her at bedside while she passed. We didn't have the heart to explain in full graphic detail what happened. We only said that she took her breathing tube out and it caused a lot of damage. I don't know where our consciousness lies when we are sedated for that long. But I am afraid of that place. Death is permanent, but it is also balanced and equal. Everyone rests in oblivion, unbound from the traumas of life, the hells that we can create. However, those places do not seem nearly as merciful.

C (27:07)

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B (27:39)

When my older cousin Harper was younger, he had a pretty sketchy encounter with two people on the trail in broad daylight. This happened in the middle of summer a few years ago. He used to be quite the avid athlete, often running from town to town via the network of trails that cut through the fields and concessions throughout the county. At that time, the town was in an economic lull and things were rough for many people. While this was long before the opiod crisis, the whole region had experienced a significant influx of opiates, mostly notably OxyContin. With the cheap rent in the surrounding semi rural community, the recession brought in an influx of newcomers from the cities. I don't mean to generalize. Most people who relocated were good, honest individuals who commuted long distances to their jobs in the city but struggled to make ends meet in an urban setting setting. Unfortunately, with this influx came many social changes that people didn't exactly like, the most prominent of which was drug abuse and vagrancy accompanying a struggling job market. Like a line of dominoes set to fall, some of the town's most beloved shops closed down, their windows boarded up. Panhandlers became a common sight along the sidewalks, and the scuffling and occasional arguments of squabbling junkies echoed through the alleyways. Concerned preachers from paranoid congregations seemed to preach about the evils of sin and vice on every corner. Times were tough and the town became no stranger to newfound cracks in its once solid foundation. Theft became a regular occurrence. Shoplifting, burglary, and even muggings started dominating the local gossip. My cousin often ran the main trails in the conversation area, and despite the paranoid stories from parents and local gossip circles, he frequented them daily. Like many of us, he loved spending time in this beautiful and symbolically important region. He enjoyed seeing and feeling the transitions from forest to meadow and back to the cool tree canopy of the dense wooded valley which led the local river to the shoreline of the nearby lake to the south. While it was common to see people enjoying the wilderness along the trails, you could also spend hours in the countryside without encountering anyone as you ventured into the forest. Summer days, however, tended to bring people out of their houses and onto the trails just to get free fresh air or cool off in the evening breeze through the aged groves and whispering grasses of the meadows that wove through the lush greenery of the countryside. One day, as Harper jogged along the trail, he noticed two men off in the distance who seemed to be slowly making their way towards him. They were aimlessly wandering back and forth along the trail, doing something he couldn't see clearly. They were so far away that they appeared as mere specks on the horizon, growing larger as he approached. As he got closer, he saw that one man was meandering down the path on a chopper style bicycle and the other was some distance behind him, waving what seemed to be a large branch at the grass along the trail. As he drew nearer, he realized the two men were blaring music from a loudspeaker. The man on the bike, who was tattooed from head to toe, gave Harper a crooked smile and a tough guy nod as he approached. Harper, wanting to avoid interaction, slowed down and pretended to browse through his playlist as an excuse to disengage. As he passed the first man, he glanced up discreetly and noticed that the man with the stick wasn't waving a stick at all, but a large machete. Harper's heart began to pound as he scanned the second man and he went into fight or flight mode. His sense of time seemed to slow as his sense of danger intensified and he tried his hardest to remain as disengaged and inconspicuous as possible. He walked by silently, trying to stay calm. The man with the machete seemed to be in a daze, waving the weapon around in a bizarre display. Harper wasn't sure if they were looking for something or pretending not to notice him. Whatever the situation was, he was just glad to pass by unnoticed. Once he had put about 30ft of distance between him and the men, he started to pick up his pace and went into a full sprint. As he kicked up gravel behind him, the man on the bike shot shouted to the man with the machete, what about him? I bet he asked something. Harper heard the man turn around and yell something at him as he sped away. But he didn't look back and kept running for dear life from the two strangers that he had narrowly escaped. According to Harper, when he was about 150ft away, he veered off into the low hanging branches of the box elders lining the trail and took a sharp left onto a narrow path where the trail branched off. Without hesitation, he leapt over the thicket like a deer fleeing from encroaching predators. As someone who frequented those trails regularly, he knew the woods like the back of his hand, and he could navigate them even in complete darkness. As he made his way down into the valley, he slowed to a stop to find his bearings and squatted low behind the thick trunk of an old tree in the midst of uprooting. As his heart began to settle, he could hear the two men coming up the main trail, shouting at each other and trying to figure out where he had gone. But it was no use. These men were unfamiliar with the woods. The forest was dense, some of the trees were ancient and wide enough to hide behind, and by the grace of God, he had found a point in the valley where he could make his way down relatively safely, despite the stinging nettle of thornbrush that kept most people away. He sat there in the middle of the woods, waiting until he could be sure the men had moved on, mindful of the noises above him. He must have been sweating heavily in the sticky, humid summer heat, even as the sun began to set and the choir of bullfrogs and crickets started up. The seasonal heat lingered, especially after an afternoon of running or hiking, although he wasn't clear on the exact location within the conservation area where the events took place. Once you're down in the valley, you can follow the riverside straight into town, if you don't mind getting your feet wet or your clothes muddy. As it happened, I ran into Harper that night as he was coming into town. It was late, and he had come up the pathway through the park that adjoins the conservation area just on the edge of town. It was well into the evening and the sun had set hours ago When I saw him, he looked absolutely exhausted, covered in sweat, caked with mud, and soaked from the knees down. He had a stunned look on his face, wide, vacant eyes, and a weary demeanor. I immediately recognized where he was coming from, though I wasn't expecting his explanation for why he was in such a state. Oddly, it took a while for him to tell me, but I can still remember the shock of hearing his account of the events that led him to walk the riverside back into Town Town. This was the first time I recall hearing about a real verifiable encounter with vagrants on the conservation trail.

B (35:54)

This took place a long time ago for me, so admittedly it is a little difficult to recall, but I'll try. I grew up in Canada, just south of the city of Brantford in rural southwestern Ontario. The area that I grew up in is proudly rural and is comprised of scattering of small towns and hamlets amid a seemingly endless expanse of fields, farmland, forests and roads leading you anywhere else but here. While it is historically farm country and very much reflects that reality, it isn't entirely rural. My hometown is a small town in the twilight of its heyday. What was once a bustling place for my parents generation and earlier is now surrounded by sprawl and a hollow downtown core. Things have changed, but in communities like this you could paint over the most weather beaten facade and it would still be the old barn behind a quaint bed and breakfast exterior. In short, people are set in their ways. They want the same old things and seek no change for growth. There are very few jobs left and in this age there isn't much merit in town like that for someone trying to carve out a life. Nobody young for around here sticks around for long after high school. If you have any sense or a pull greater than your sense of nostalgia to seek better things, you go. And nobody blames you. It's not that anybody really hates it here. The vast majority of people who grew up here have a myriad of great memories of a mostly tight knit community. Most of us love the outdoors and many live by hunting and fishing. Farming is still the backbone of the region and you would be hard pressed to find people who don't have agricultural experience or at least a love hate relationship with farm culture, culminating in pride if nothing else. But sometimes you have to go elsewhere to seek your fortune and that's what most of us ended up doing. Since leaving home I have more moved around the province, working and gaining experience, practical knowledge and perspective for wherever life took me. It never ceases to amaze me just how small the world really is. If you pay attention, you'll run into people from your childhood everywhere you go. Like a patchwork quilt, the small town diaspora is interwoven into the fabric of every quilt corner of the province, country and indeed the continent. You never know where you will end up, and more often you never know where your path will cross with others and with whom. When I do happen to run into people from home, they often share the same sentiment. Thoughts quickly turn to Old houses, old neighborhoods, parks, and old woods. Woods. What fascinates me is that more often than not, these conversations tend to turn toward paranormal. Whether it's a hotspot or just country boredom permeating our lives, who knows? But as time goes on, I find myself in similar conversations more frequently, which leads me to want to share my own personal encounters Growing up. If there were ever a town that was haunted in its entirety, its home, the overwhelming majority of people I know have at least one story about personal ghost encounters, creepy experiences, house hauntings, and hand me down stories from elder relatives. Obviously, I'm no different. The house I grew up up in was small and relatively new. There was nothing particularly spooky or seemingly haunted about it. The first family to live in the house, and presumably the family that built it, were recent immigrants from Portugal, probably in the 1960s or 70s. Like most of the houses in our neighborhood, it was a three bedroom bungalow with a concrete foundation. My mother would call it quaint, we would call it small. The property was along a small dead end side street next to a gully that led into a woodlot. On the other side of the woodlot was a park and a baseball diamond bordered by a massive hill where all the neighborhood kids would toboggan down in the winter. The house itself had a simple layout. The front porch led into the entryway and the living room and the hallway passing through the living room by the kitchen. Stretched to the far wall of the house down the kitchen stairs and around a winding set of basement stairs was the laundry room and two large rooms in the basement. One was converted into a secondary kitchen and pantry area with a living room and a fireplace adjoining it, and the other was an unfinished space intended for storage. Originally, this basement kitchen would have been the main area of the house, which when it was a Portuguese household. Traditionally, many rural Portuguese families homes center around finished basements with kitchens, fireplaces, and ample space for living and dining. At one time, this would have been where families escaped the summer heat and kept warm during the winter months. Naturally, this is where the bulk of the activity would have occurred. And incidentally, any odd occurrences during the time I lived in that house happened from the vantage point of the basement. For the first couple of years, nothing particularly abnormal happened. The kitchen in the basement had long since been disconnected and the appliances were removed before we moved in. In those days, the old kitchen counter was where we kept the box TV next to the disconnected sink that we used to store all our cartridge video games for systems like the NES and Nintendo 64 we would spend hours, sometimes whole days down there in the dark basement, endlessly trudging through whatever video games we were playing. We would often have friends over for sleepovers and set up in the basement, sprawling out our games and staying up until 4:30 in the morning, just being kids and getting up to our usual shenanigans. I was always the kind of kid with a wild, overactive imagination. I was prone to hearing all the little bumps in the night. The rustling of the tree branch on the neighbor's shed outside my window, the creaking of the old exhaust fan in the kitchen, the gradual settling of the floorboards in the house as the dead of night passed while everyone else was fast enough sleep. I was accustomed to having regular nightmares to the point where it was something I just expected. Over the years, like any other kid, I was told by my parents that it was normal, that there wasn't anything wrong with that, that I just had an overactive imagination. I gradually came to accept that the noises and their origins were just in my head. So when my friends who had stayed over the previous weekend approached me at school on a Monday morning, I didn't know what to think when I heard what they had to say. Hey, I know you wanted us to come over next weekend, but how about we stay at Rowan's house instead? Uh, yeah, that's fine. That's fine by me, I replied, a little confused because Rowan's house didn't have that much space for the whole crew and his parents were a bit more uptight height than mine, so all nighters were definitely out of the question, which was our usual M.O. but why? I asked, trying and apparently failing to hide my disappointment. Oh, well, you know, we don't really go there that often. I could tell that my friend was dodging the question, so I persisted. No, just tell me. Just tell me why. It's fine. Look, we know how you are. We just didn't want to say anything, but your place is starting to give us all the creeps, man. While you were sleeping Saturday night, Rowan woke up to what he said sounded like creaking, something like that coming from upstairs. It freaked him out so much that he woke me up. And I heard it too. I heard it. It lasted for about 20 minutes, man. I couldn't help but let out a small laugh and a subtle sigh of relief. It was most likely the old exhaust fan in the kitchen. It had been a little rainy that night, and sometimes when the wind hit it at the right angle, it could be kind of loud and a little eerie. I told him that, but he shook his head No. I know what you mean. You've pointed that out before. I'm telling you, this was different, man. I mean, this was really, really loud. It sounded like something dragging along the floor and then stopping over and over again, like a body or something. Perplexed and a little creeped out by what my friends had experienced, I shrugged it off and told myself that it had to be them playing some kind of prank on me. After all, I had been friends with these guys for years. We grew up together and as they said, they knew how I could be when it came to this sort of thing. The bell rang and like yearling sheep, we herded ourselves into the school and into our respective classrooms. I got on with my morning, my day, and the grinding monotony of my school week as it dragged on. By the time Friday came, it was all out of my head and I was relieved to be done with school for another weekend of sweet freedom. To be honest, it had been a rough week and I had elected to stay home and do my own thing that weekend. Rowan's house was always pretty cramped and I was allergic to their dogs. I had gone out to rent a video game from the local corner store, as these were the days before you could download games, and after supper I quickly got into my game as the sun set and my Friday night began to unfold and waste away. Busy trying to get through some long introductions and tutorials, I ended up immersed in the game I had rented for a few hours. Before I knew it, it was the early hours of Saturday morning and I needed to binge on some snacks. At this point in my childhood, my parents didn't really mind if I stayed up late, but if I was loud at this time of night I would have gotten an earful. So I quietly crept up the basement steps and into the kitchen, trying not to make a sound as I gently opened and closed the cupboards and stood in the glow of the refrigerator, trying to spot edible food in a fridge full of groceries. I always made sure to leave no trace when I went on my late night snack raids, until tonight was no exception. I tidied up and silently descended back into the cool, dark basement and the warm static embrace of the old box television we used for gaming. It must have been about 40 minutes later when something seemed off. I perked up to better sense what had caught me off guard. It was then that I heard it, a faint creaking and dragging sound followed by what seemed to be soft, deliberate footsteps from directly above me on the main floor.

B (47:46)

What is that? I thought to myself as I scanned my brain for any rational explanation. It couldn't be mice or something along those lines. Maybe somebody was awake upstairs. I listened for a solid 10 minutes, growing more, more and more creeped out as I sat in the silence of the basement, my heartbeat progressively quickening. The sounds seemed to get louder as I tried to figure it out. Eventually, I mustered enough courage to quietly wind up the stairs again and peek my head around the corner into the moonlit kitchen. The pitch dark living room doorway drew my gaze begrudgingly toward it. Silence, stillness and calm. In the dead of night, there was nobody up there. I looked up at the cupboards and noticed they were all open for some reason, and I knew for a fact that I had closed them all and double checked before coming down. I went to close them again and noticed one of the chairs was missing from the dining table. Looking into the living room, I could see the unmistakable, unmistakable silhouette of the missing chair. Light footed and as quiet as I could be, I shuffled into the adjoining living room to grab the chair and put it back in its proper place. At this point, to say I was creeped out would be an understatement. While it could have been just my anxiety surrounding the situation, I couldn't help but feel like I was being watched from the dark, windowless hallway that connected the living room to the rest of the house. I put my head down and scurried through the kitchen and back down the stairs. But when I got down to the basement and turned the corner into the main room, I saw something that I could hardly believe. Though it took mere seconds to get downstairs after putting away the missing chair in the basement stood all four of the kitchen chairs stacked in pairs in the center of the room. For a split second that felt like a lifetime, I stood staring at the chairs, confused and taken aback by the sight of the chairs that I had just seen in the kitchen above me. When I realized that this wasn't right and that this couldn't be anything other than paranormal, I quickly came to my my senses and turned on my heels, bounding up the stairs with no regard for the noise of my feet stomping up each step. As I leapt up the flight of stairs, I heard behind me a multitude of murmuring voices that I couldn't understand. I recognized the language almost immediately. It sounded like Portuguese, but I couldn't tell what they were saying even if I were fluent as the voice voices were all overlapping and almost whispering. A clatter of faint sounds accompanied what I knew to be voices and it seemed to follow me up the stairs. I felt like I was being followed as I stumbled through the kitchen, into the dark living room and through the pitch black hallway to my bedroom. When I closed the door, I practically jumped into bed and buried my face in my arms and pillow. Not even a minute had gone by while I tried to calm myself when I heard something out in the hallway. A faint shuffling, growing louder as it crept ever closer to my bedroom door. It stopped just in front of my door and the floorboards creaked as if someone was standing just on the other side. I lay stiff as a board, trying to remain as cold, calm and silent as possible. I eventually managed to control my breath and started to sink into sleep. Thank God I wouldn't have to be up all night. But as I started to drift off into the liminal dream state of oncoming sleep, I heard the unmistakable giggle of a woman echo through my thoughts as I finally sank into my dreams.

B (51:55)

Morning came soon enough. I awoke to a pretty normal Saturday morning in my house. Everyone was up, my parents were making breakfast and the soft sound of morning talk radio played from the living room stereo. They hadn't heard a thing last night, although they did question me about why all four chairs were brought down into the basement. I had no real answer for this and they wouldn't have believed me even if I had told them so. I just played dumb. I have never experienced anything like that since, and nothing remotely close to that ever happened in that house again while I was there. But for the rest of my time living at home, no matter what I did, I could never shake the sense of doubt that any sound I heard, any creaking flash floorboards or any bump in the night was easily explainable.

F (52:58)

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G (53:28)

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E (54:23)

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B (54:45)

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E (54:48)

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H (54:55)

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B (66:06)

It's.