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- [00:00]
Narrator
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you'd like to hear more stories like these with a different background sound, please check the description to check out my other two podcasts. And if you want to get rid of all of the ads, you can subscribe for just $2.99 a month. Last thing, I really appreciate you being here and I'd really love if you would follow the podcast and come back again soon. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy. What you are about to hear is a warning. I beg you, I implore you, please do not go hiking in the woods around Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I know those woods like the back of my hand. I was playing with my little brother among those trees when I was still in single digit ages. So trust me when I say that something has been changing out there and not for the better. I first noticed something was horribly wrong during a hike a few weeks back. In early spring, birds migrate from the warmer southern climates to their northern territories en masse. Thousands upon thousands of tiny songbirds occupy the trees around Mount Greylock during the month of March, each singing a sweet, chirpy song that is in reality a bellowed war cry, a call for challengers to step up and knock them off their perch. Yet as I trudged through the previous winter's leaf litter, I couldn't hear a single thing. No birds, or any other animals for that matter, seemed to still call the forest home. This made me nervous for two reasons. One, animals have an uncanny ability to detect dangers that are imperceptible to humans. Their sense of smell, hearing, and general atmospherics are far superior to our own. If the wildlife had fled the area in such a hurry, or at least refuse to return, that could mean something awful was about to happen. And two areas of woodland turn exceptionally quiet when there is a large predator around. Wood pigeons will become deathly quiet and still, hoping a black bear or mountain lion will just pass them by. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But either way it would be hideously unsafe of me to wander around while one was prowling the area. So naturally I started making my way back towards my car when something real peculiar happened. I feel I should remind you at this point that I had been playing in the woods around Mount Greylock since I was like 7 or 8 years old. But thanks to our bikes, we had a pretty large area to roam when it came to those long summer breaks. The point being, I know those woods really well. But someway, somehow I managed to get lost. It first came to my attention that I had managed to get myself turned around when I felt my head begin to throb with a dull ache. I stopped walking for a moment, rubbing my eyes and the bridge of my nose to try and massage away the ache. But when I opened my eyes again and looked around, I felt a faint flash of panic running through me. I did not recognize my surroundings, and I cannot understate how jarring that was for me be somewhere I had been visiting all my life, only for it to feel utterly foreign to me. I actually had to take a moment to take out my compass just to try and get a bearing of where I was headed. But to my surprise, the compass needle kept slowly moving around. Even when I got it to sit still on a supposed bearing, it slowly began creeping around again. Now, this was much less of a problem than it might appear. Sure, it was unnerving, but there are ways around a faulty compass. Like for one, moss mostly grows on the north side of a tree, the side that gets the most sunlight. So that provided an easy way of determining which way was north. At least it usually would, because as I inspected various tree trunks, I realized the sun was hanging in the southern portion of the sky. That or the moss in the area grew mostly on the south section of the tree trunks. I get that it's not entirely out of the question, but that was yet another detail that just seemed to fry my brain. Nothing made sense, and the less it did, the more the feeling of pure panic began to bubble up in my chest. But to panic in that situation, in any kind of situation, is to welcome defeat, degradation, and death. I kept myself calm, told myself there was a rational explanation for everything that was occurring, and walked off in the direction I was almost sure the nearest highway was. It was then I came across something I had never, ever seen in those woods before. Something that seemed so out of place that it was frankly terrifying. In all the years I had spent roaming those woods with my brother as a kid, I had never seen anything like the old run down cabin that stood before me. And I mean, it was old, as in there was no way it could have been built any later than like 1979. So just how me and my brother had missed this place was utterly beyond me. The obvious thing to do was to knock on the cabin door, see if anyone was home, and as much as I might find it humiliating, ask for directions. But as I walked closer and closer towards the rustic front door, I felt the most unusual sensation. I put it down to general tiredness. Maybe my blood Sugar was low. I'm not entirely sure, but for whatever reason, each footstep that took me closer to the cabin seemed more and more difficult. By the time I was actually bringing a closed fist up to knock on that old wooden door, it felt like something was physically repelling me from it, whispering directly into my brain. Leave this place and never return. Don't look back. Never look back. When I finally knocked, the door creaked open slowly, slightly revealing the dilapidation behind it. Whatever bolts or locks that were on the door had long since been worn away, and the inside was just as run down and rotten as the outside was. It was evidently abandoned, but there was a curious order to the furniture that led me to believe that every so often, the cabin did actually receive some visitors aside from me. But something in the corner of the cabin drew my attention. I saw. What I am about to attempt to describe is, quite frankly, indescribable. I know it was a wooden idol of some kind, a small statuette sat atop a stone altar. But, and I appreciate this, it is intensely confusing. I could not make sense of what I was looking at. It was like my brain was completely incapable of computing the information my eyes were feeding it. And with that, my headache returned again, along with a kind of anxiety so crushing that I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. Don't ask me how I know, but that wooden idol, a mess of twigs and vines and moss, was a representation of pure, unfiltered evil. And I ran from it. I'm not in the least bit ashamed to admit that I ran like a scared child from that cabin and into the night. The night. You heard that, right? When I walked into the cabin, it was still daylight. I couldn't have been there for more than a couple of minutes. At least that's what it felt like. Only when I burst through that wooden door, it was pitch black outside. I ran until I found the highway, ran until I found my car and drove like a madman until I was safely back at home. I haven't been able to bring myself to talk about what happened to me that day. Until now. I tried to tell a hunting buddy of mine once, but the words just wouldn't seem to come out. But please, if you're hearing this, heed my warning and do not go hiking in the woods around Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I have been reading a lot of stories recently about how Mother Nature is basically reclaiming the land since this whole lockdown thing went into place. In particular, one story that's come out of the UK which talks about how a giant herd of wild goats has essentially taken over a small Welsh town. It's pretty charming, detailing how these rare Kashmiri goats have seized the opportunity that's been presented by people staying indoors to roam down from the hills to wander around neighborhoods devouring the contents of flower boxes and front gardens alike. There are also those stories about the swans returning to the canals out in Venice beach, but you can go read up on them yourself as I've got a point to get onto here. So a little side note, has anyone else noticed how nice the weather has gotten since the lockdown started? It's been so frustrating shut indoors while the weather went from gray and windy to warm and sunny in like, what must have been a matter of days. In all of my life, I've honestly never seen spring slam into winter with such a dramatic transition. It's been tough on my little girl too. She's been dying to get out to the local park to play on the jungle gyms, and telling her no, not to mention explaining why, has been harder and harder as the weeks have gone by. I can't tell her the truth because I know it would absolutely terrify her, breaking down that there are little creatures living inside of us waiting to be transmitted to someone she loves, like pap pap or Nana, which could end their lives. How do you even say that crap to a child without them totally freaking out? So our story starts with Heard watching. I know, super boring, but try telling that to my daughter. She burned through all her DVDs and favorite YouTube channels in like a week, and despite some of them having palpable rewatch value to them, she quickly grew tired of staring at the screen for hours on end. And it got way, way worse when we started having to tell her no about going to the park. It seems like once you hold something out of reach of a kid, it's all they want from then on. The forbidden thing. Anyway, I found a happy compromise with her in that if she stayed inside, she could look at the garden all she wanted. And the bonus was that if she stayed super still and quiet, that all kinds of birds and other critters would wander into the garden for her to look at. And you know what? It actually got kind of fun after a while. I finished an old Native Birds of the Upper American east coast that I'm pretty sure was my grandpa's at one point, and we got to work ticking off each one we saw working our way through the book as common and rarely seen birds alike landed among the flower beds of our backyard. One evening, I'd swear I saw something larger moving among the trees at the back of our yard. But I figured it was just a trick of the light, maybe a neighbor's dog moving against their back fence, casting shadows into ours. But a few days later, I discovered it wasn't just my imagination. I was doing some laundry upstairs while my daughter busied herself with bird watching. I had ordered a cheap pair of kids binoculars from Amazon and those things really had paid for themselves by the evening of the day they arrived. My kid was obsessed with them. She had them practically strapped to her face for the entire day, looking at everything and anything up close and being amazed at the results. So she was only too happy to sit in front of the patio window doors and for hours checking out the wildlife at close range through her new binoculars. And thankfully, because having to keep an eye on her day in, day out was meaning housework was mounting up and at the top of the list was laundry. So I'm working through the piles of dirty clothes, calling down to her every so often to see how she's doing and everything seems to be going fine. Every so often I would rush down when she claimed to have spotted a new kind of bird in our garden. Often I would have to point out that it was one we had seen before. But once or twice we actually locked eyes with a lesser spotted woodpecker, A bird we most definitely had not spotted before. Only when I heard her cry out kitty. I figured she must have gotten bored of watching for birds. At first I was a little worried. The last thing I wanted was for my little girl to witness a full on bird murder in our own backyard. But I was quietly reassured by the fact that all the neighborhood cats were fat and spoiled. They wouldn't be finessing at backyard birds anytime soon, that was for certain. Suddenly I heard a kind of thump against the window doors like my daughter had hit her head against the glass super hard. I called down to her not to hit the glass as it would scare all the birds away and they might not want to visit. Her answer made me drop the laundry basket and hurtle downstairs. I didn't. It was the kitty. But that thump was loud, bigger and louder than anything a simple house cat could make. It's so weird to tell about it now, but I distinctly remember just not thinking at all, just sort of flying into action. And what do I see? The moment I turn the corner into the TV room, I see my daughter standing at the glass door, staring an actual mountain lion in the face. The huge cat had its paw half cocked as if I didn't already have an idea that it was the one making that banging noise against the glass. I ran towards my little girl with such speed and aggression that the mountain lion jumped back for a second. Danger that she seemed to be completely unaware of previously caught up with her and hit her like a freight train. She started bawling, screaming, realizing in a white hot moment that kitty did not want to play. Kitty wanted to rip and tear. The kitty wasn't a kitty at all. Once it realized I'd taken away its intended prey. The mountain lion took a few more swipes at the glass and only rushed out of the backyard since I started back banging pots and pans together real loud, just like my grandpa had showed me years before. I guess this was just a long winded way of saying to keep a real close eye on the woods and green spaces. When this lockdown is over, it might not be entirely safe for our kids to be playing in places that have obviously been reclaimed by wildlife. And dangerous wildlife at that. I want you to picture the middle of nowhere rural Kentucky. An iconic country home, ranch style. The owners are wealthy, the closest neighbors live 15 entire minutes away. The closest gas station is a half an hour Walmart 40 minutes away. Those are the circumstances under which I was raised. Then there's me, a pretty typical 20 year old who was born and raised in a relatively wealthy family. I was lucky enough to have been born to a father who owned a store in a mid sized city. City. The city itself saw major population growth in the 10 years after my father had purchased the store and it produced enough income that we immediately became the 1% in the state. Probably the entire country too. My father took the money that he made from this store and used it to purchase real estate which produced more money. So we kinda had bucks, buckets of money laying around. For some reason or another, my father thought the ideal life was away from civilization, which is why he built this ranch home out in the middle of nowhere. It was always a bit of an inconvenience living life. After all, all the money in the world means nothing if you don't have stores to spend it.
- [19:49]
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- [20:19]
Pet Owner
Don't chew on that, Max.
- [20:20]
Dog Owner
Cooper loves that chew too.
- [20:22]
Advertiser
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- [20:28]
Dog Owner
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- [20:37]
Pet Owner
Looks like we're switching to Blue Blue
- [20:39]
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- [20:49]
Dog Owner
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- [21:15]
Narrator
the older I got, the more my father educated me on finances. He also said that he didn't want us being corrupted by metropolitan living. I didn't really agree with him, but I respected him. There were many nights that I spent at the home alone. I was always a fairly mature kid, so my parents naturally gave me a lot of responsibility. The first time I was home alone, I must have been 12 years old, and considering we had a house full of expensive weapons, alcohol and hunting equipment, you can understand how much trust my parents really had in me. There wasn't very much in the world I wasn't prepared for, but there was one experience in particular. Something that happened a few weeks ago that I still think about all the time, sitting in my memory, haunting me. It happened one night when I was alone. My father had a busy meeting on a Saturday morning, so we got a hotel Friday night in the city with my mom. This left me alone to watch the Castle by myself again, something I have done a million times and never thought twice about it. I have always been interested in business ventures online. The thing I have been experimenting with that night was video marketing. I was interested in making something go viral. Over the course of a few weeks, I probably had created six or seven solid viral video attempts, but only one of them Accumulated any attention and it was a measly hundred thousand views. Anyway, I remember sitting in my home office working on a cat video. On the far side of my room is a window. I can see the backyard. There's a mountainous structure in our backyard. Basically a really big rock. It's pretty tall, probably about 50 or 60ft. And in front of it is all farmland. My father grew wheat, although he paid people to do most of the work. But here's the thing. There was a very strange shadow on the rocks. There were some lights from the electrical posts in the field. And it was as if someone was moving around them or something. This was absurd. You guys know how tall those electric posts are? The idea that someone would climb on top of one or that there was some kind of animal or something on it really freaks me out. But it's absurd. I really didn't want to lose electricity either. As I was really into that cat video. I looked out the window to see what was going on. And all I could see was a shadowy figure on the light post near the light. My immediate thought was that there was some kind of freak that came out here and climbed on top of it. But I could not imagine why anyone would do that. I put my horror movie based fear to the back of my mind and rationalized that it must have been some kind of animal that had climbed up there. Maybe a large cat. It was far away enough that I could not give you a rough size. Could have been a bear, could have been a person or a cat. For a all I knew. I just knew something was up there. Just to be on the safe side, I grabbed a weapon and my flashlight to go check out the situation. I made my way out there slowly. I got more nervous as the moments went by. Each step seemed to bring me closer to the unknown. My fear grew with the increasing distance between me and and my house. The grass outside was dry. It was warm out. I slowly got closer and closer to the pole. By the time I got close enough to see the figure up there, I noticed that it was gone. I stood there in silence for a moment contemplating what it could have been. I looked around to see if whatever animal may have been up there had fallen. I didn't see anything in the general vicinity. I always hated leaving animals to die like that. I got down on one knee to say a prayer for whatever animal had been up there. I couldn't imagine that it didn't die, whatever it was. While I was praying, I heard a hiss behind me and felt it scratch. Claws dug into My back. I reacted the only way I knew how and flung my body around. I thrusted my elbow against whatever was behind me. I hit it really hard in an almost instinctual way. I got away from it and immediately began firing my weapon in its direction. I must have gotten five shots off. By the time I stopped and realized what I had done, I had obliterated a raccoon. It still freaked me out. The entire experience was kind of traumatic. Silly, I know. Staying home alone was never quite the same. I called my dad and told him what happened before driving myself to the hospital. I had to get a rabies shot, unfortunately, which may have been the most painful experience of my life. I discovered the next day that I had inadvertently shot two of the windows out of my mom's suv. My parents made me pay for that with my own money. And no, I was not nearly as rich as them. The only money I had to my name was the money I made from my personal business ventures online. It was lame. My dad always hammered into my head that the bullets I fire are my responsibility no matter what. It's not a bad lesson to learn. When I got out of the hospital, I went home and finished making that cat video. It only got 3,000 views. You can't win them all, I guess. But yeah. The moral of the story is that even rich people who are secluded in the middle of nowhere still have to deal with stupid stuff like this happening to them. Those dang raccoons. This began a few days before last year's Super Bowl. The cable box in our living room had been cutting in and out for almost a month. Under normal conditions, I wouldn't have paid much attention to it. I don't watch much television these days, even football. Besides, it worked most of the time. But my wife had invited some people over from work to have a Super bowl party. I learned long ago, if I keep the wife happy, she'll leave me alone to fiddle around in the wood shop. I called into the cable company early in the week and made an appointment for after lunch on Thursday. When the day came, the repairman showed up right before the family was going to sit down for dinner. For a moment, I thought I saw smoke coming out of my wife's ears. There are only a few things she hates more. I knew better not to say a word. After I showed the guy the location of the tv, we sat down to eat. After a quick meal, I retreated to the living room to watch the cable guy and help if needed. He checked the box first and then moved on to the cables. He asked for access to the attic, and I led him to the hall and lowered the stairs. About 10 minutes later, he returned with a frayed section of cable. It appeared that some critter had been chewing on it. Once he replaced it, everything was fine. I thanked him and he asked to use the restroom before he left. I said sure, and pointed him in the direction of it. My son and I were in front of the tv fiddling with the channels for a while before I remembered the repair guy was still in the john. I didn't want to badger the fella, but he had been in there for a really long time. So just to be safe, I politely knocked on the door and asked if all was well. No reply came, but a few seconds later, I heard a man's voice echoing from my daughter's bedroom. Naturally, I was curious and leaned over to peek in. The repairman was talking to my daughter at the connecting door. This scene slightly peeved me, but it seemed innocent enough. He was a young kid, after all. But she was barely 16 years old, so I stepped in and shut it down. He kindly excused himself and made his way out of the house. From that moment, he ceased to exist in my mind. That was until April of of the same year. I was on my way home from work when I got a frantic call from my wife. It took a minute to figure out what she was saying, but eventually I realized someone had tried to grab our daughter on her walk home from school. When I made it home a few minutes later, the cops were already on the scene and talking to her. My wife and I were both so frazzled, they asked us to sit calmly and listen while they questioned my daughter. I did my best, but when it came around to identifying the guy, I almost went through the roof. She described how she and another girl were just a few blocks from home and a truck pulled up to them. The driver said hello, and my daughter recognized the guy. She walked up to the truck and started talking to him. She said he seemed really nice in the beginning, but when he asked her to go with him and she declined multiple times, he got mad and attempted to pull her into the truck. Only because she fought so hard was she able to get free and run away with her friend. Finally, the officer asked her who the guy was, and she said that it was the very same cable repairman that was in our house now. I was beyond furious. I had treated that kid with respect and he tries to kidnap my daughter. I could have thrown him out on his butt when I caught him talking to her, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and think back to how it was when I was young. Even after I let him know that she was still too young for him, he tried to force himself on her. The officers did manage to calm me down and left to continue the investigation. The wife and I did our best to shift our anger into helping our daughter deal with the shock and trauma from the incident. We were all relieved to hear when the scumbag was arrested later that night. He had been spotted and pulled over by highway patrol that had heard the apb. Although he had done something very stupid, he was wise enough to take the offer put forth by the district Attorney. Hopefully when he comes out in three years, he will have learned to take no for an answer. Since the legal proceedings wrapped up, the rest of the family have made it our goal to help my daughter move past this. In addition to attending counseling alone, everyone else has joined her in two separate sessions to learn best how to make her healing process go as smoothly as possible. We all plan to be in attendance for her upcoming graduation. Providing her with this show of support in such a hard time is the best way I can think of to let her know that we've got her back. There was a time not long ago when her achieving this milestone was in question, but I attribute her same will to fight that saved her that day with driving her to move forward. I have never been more proud to be her father and I hope she knows I will always be there for her no matter the circumstances. This happened to me and my mom in 2015 when I was still a teenager. We were heading to our beach house which was two hours away from my hometown. My mom liked to drive at night because there was no traffic. I didn't mind and loved to listen to music or sleep during the trip. I remember it was a very chilly night, perhaps during winter. It wasn't unusual though since we liked to stay at the beach no matter the season. So there we were driving on a regular road. It was after midnight and I was listening to my ipod. I remember hearing my mom say that the car was almost out of gas, but predicting we could still make the drive anyway. That didn't worry me much. So since my mom is a great and responsible driver, she always handles her car very well and never had any issues until this creepy, daunting night. After a while I opened my eyes and knew exactly where we were. We've been driving along this road for as long as I can remember. Therefore, I knew by heart that we were about to take a sharp turn. In a few moments I closed my eyes again.
- [35:42]
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- [35:59]
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- [36:28]
Narrator
So good.
- [36:29]
Advertiser
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- [36:31]
Pet Owner
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- [36:40]
Narrator
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- [36:44]
Pet Owner
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- [37:00]
Narrator
Then I was suddenly shaken awake by my mom. Still groggy, I looked at her and at once could see she was worried. Maybe even a little frantic. That was very uncommon since she's a very level headed person and keeps her cool most of the time. Confused, I focused on what she was saying. She told me she had taken a wrong turn and there had been no way back. For miles and miles I scanned our surroundings. We were on a large dirt road with no signs of civilization in sight. The right road we should have taken would have been a busy highway, but this was a desolate narrow path with only trees around us. I tried my cell phone. No signal. I tried resetting the GPS my mom had for emergencies, but got no signal. With that as well, we had absolutely no idea where we were or where the car was headed to. The only familiar path was the road we had missed. We knew nothing more than that, never having been to the surrounding areas. As we drove deeper into the unknown, the road became narrower and more treacherous. The branches of the trees on either side of the road brushed against the the car, creating an Eerie and unsettling atmosphere. Anyone who has ever driven through woodsy areas at night knows the feeling I'm talking about. I could sense my mom's unease as she tried to navigate the car through the tight space as well as keep an eye on the low fuel notice on the dashboard. She turned the AC off and the car got really cold. It seemed like the road had deep ditches on both sides and our car was going to get stuck at any moment. We tried discussing what to do, but by then I couldn't keep calm anymore. The isolation and fear of an empty tank were too much for my panicky personality. I felt a lump in my throat and cried silently while my mom tried to evaluate our meager options. After what felt like hours of driving, we finally reached a kind of clearing up ahead. My mom was relieved, thinking we had got somewhere with more cars or literally anything else. But as we continued down the road, we realized it was only a dead end. True, it was a bit wider than the rest of the path we were on, but there was still no way to turn the car around without risking getting stuck in the ditches. Panic set in as we realized we were decidedly trapped. We were alone in the middle of nowhere, with no way to call for help or easily get back on track. I kept trying my cell and the gps, but to no avail. My mom was also trembling by this point. She's very tough and prepared, but never anticipated getting stuck somewhere like this in the worst possible moment. We heard a rustling in the bushes. I was so terrified that I couldn't focus on the trees at first because I thought I would see something horrifying and collapse right there. My mom said something about turning off the car, hoping to remain hidden, but she didn't. We sat in silence for a moment, waiting for any sign of what was out there. It was terrifying. We were an easy target. Two women stranded in a car with low fuel and no weapons of any kind. Those were my thoughts while I finally studied the woods around us. Illuminated by the weak headlights, I saw no path, no opening, nothing. No sign or indication that this was someone's property. It had to be the wind or maybe an animal that was making that unnerving swishing sound. I still remember how the non stop chills ran down my spine as that feeling of dread consumed me. I was bawling my eyes out by that point, believing we would be attacked, die, or just never be found. Honestly, I really hope to never feel this vulnerable and frightened again. When we heard another noise coming from the trees. My mom quickly changed her mind and began to back up. Breathing deeply and fueled by a sudden useful fear, my mom finally managed to turn the car around. It was a sheer demonstration of control and driving skills since that patch of road was so narrow and full of rocks that I could never have pulled it off. She then sped down the road. We came. The fuel was almost gone and the car was freezing from the lack of ac. I was shaking not only because of the cold, but also the pure terror we both cried from indescribable relief. We did discuss about how to prevent these things from happening next time, but the truth is it could happen to anyone. I guess people should be prepared for all of the worst possible outcomes when driving. The beach was near enough now and we spotted a gas station in the distance, but it was closed. Eventually though, we did manage to arrive at our house literally running on fumes. My mom made it to a gas station in the morning and got the news that she almost ruined the car. Thankfully everything turned out okay. I will never forget the horror movie vibes of that dark, isolated, ominous stretch of road. The way it led to seemingly nowhere was also creepy and I will never understand why it exists in the first place. Not only that, but the thought of all the unspeakable things that could have happened in the middle of those woods will forever haunt us when driving at night. This happened for about two weeks in the summer of 2021. Back in 2021 my sleep schedule was very messed up. I'm talking about staying up till 3 to 5am almost every night, then waking up at 10am it was awful. I mention this because I probably would have never even seen this strange woman if it weren't for my awful sleep scheme schedule. It was either Wednesday or Thursday at around 2:30am I was downstairs on my couch scrolling on my phone when I heard some type of clacking and speaking outside on the sidewalk right outside my house. I turned around and peeked through the blinds to see who would be walking around at 2.30am but when I peeked through I saw this very sky skinny blonde woman walking down the street whilst talking on the phone, but she was walking like her limbs were spongy. It was by far the most unsettling unnatural thing I've ever seen. I was freaked out and the last thing I wanted was for her to look at me or something. I thought maybe she's just drunk or something and she's headed home. And the next day I told my friends about it and then forgot about it. Fast forward four days later. It was probably around 4 or 5am I was playing video games in my room. I got really hungry, so I removed my headset and prepared to head downstairs to the kitchen. But as soon as I removed them, I heard an almost cartoonish meowing. We have two very friendly stray cats in my neighborhood, so I assumed it was one of them. I was worried one of them was hurt since they never meow like this. So I look out my window to see if they're out there, but I almost gasp when I see her. She's inhumanly hunched over and meowing, scratching at the concrete. I can see her backbones poking out of her dress and her arms seem so long. She must have seen the sudden increase of light coming from my window as she snapped her neck around towards me. Her eyes. She had them open freakishly wide and her jaw dropped to its fullest extent, almost as if she was trying to scream, but nothing came out. Then, before I can even take all of this in, she sprints on all fours into my neighbor's backyard and disappears into darkness. I am scared beyond belief and think I am dreaming. At this point, I just sit in my bed, frozen until the sun starts to rise. I then fell asleep. I haven't seen her since, but the day after I went to the side of my house and I swear I could see some slight marks in the concrete. The following week I heard her heels clacking but saw nothing. I haven't seen or heard her since those two summer weeks in 2021, and man, I really hope I never do again. My dad has some family in Mexico City and my cousin who lives there was getting married. I'm not very close to my family in Mexico. I rarely see them and those cousins are much older than me. My parents said I could stay home alone for two weeks. They decided I could stay home so I wouldn't miss school and be bored out of my mind. At 14 years old, this was a big deal for me, and my Aunt Dede and godmother would drop by a couple of times and make sure everything was okay and jokingly say to make sure I didn't burn the house down. Everything was normal until this one week. It had been raining and it was one of those storms with a torrential downpour, large hail and very strong winds. To be honest, I really enjoyed storms like this. I was in the basement at the time. Since a tornado warning was issued and Chicago isn't prone to tornadoes, I figured it was better to be on the safe side. Our ring camera kept chiming and I assumed it was the wind setting it off, so I didn't bother to go check. All of a sudden I heard a crashing sound outside, and thinking the patio furniture may have fallen over or something, I went upstairs to check it out. That's when I saw a person standing in the yard looking directly at our kitchen windows like they were trying to see if anyone was home. Since all the lights were off, our eyes met and the smile the person gave me was so evil. And they started pounding on the window like they were trying to break in. I grabbed a knife and hit the alarm to call the police. Within minutes, the police showed up and told the person in the yard to drop the weapon and get on the ground. The cops pulled pulled off the hood of the person and it was a distant cousin who had a falling out with a family. She kept yelling that we stole her house, that we owed her money, and that she'll be back. And then she looked right at me and said, you. You'll be sorry. Do not forget this face. I knew she was on something. She. She has a long history of drug use, and when she's on drugs, it's like she's insane. I told the cops my parents were in Mexico, but they called my aunt and godmother, told them what happened, and they came to stay with me. While my parents were disturbed by what happened, they were proud of how calm I was, and I did stay home alone again from time to time. Turns out this cousin had arrest warrants in another state, and she was transferred out of state to be charged with arson and armed robbery. It's been years since this happened, and I never saw my cousin again. Last I heard, she was in Texas with her biological mother, and I honestly hope she's doing better and changed her life. Around. A few years back, I was really into caving, or to give it its stupid name that no one uses, sperlunking. I really didn't think I would be into it when I first tried it. Like I'd have considered myself mildly claustrophobic, the kind of guy who always felt a little anxious zipping a sleeping bag up the whole way. But I don't know whether it just woke something up in me or it was the rush of getting over a fear or something to that effect. But I took to it like a duck to water. You're somewhere you shouldn't be. Exploring parts of the world that very few people see. Relying on people, truly relying on them to ensure your safety and theirs. It's a rush, that's for certain. But it's not without its danger dangers. So every year, my family and a few close friends head out to a national park or something along those lines to spend some time with nature. And one particular year, I managed to convince them to go out to Mammoth Cave national park over in Kentucky, which is home to the more than 400 miles of passageways, making it the world's largest known cave system system. The cave system is located within the Green river valley, and its winding chambers, pools, and limestone labyrinths are equal parts beautiful and eerie. Ten different tours offer guests the opportunity to explore the decorated historic and dripstone areas. The cave complex is especially well known for its natural entrance and Gothic avenue, a passageway filled with historic stone monuments and signatures from 19th century visitors. So that was just about enough history and photo ops for my mom and aunts. The river could provide hours of fishing for my dad and uncles, all while myself and my cousin could enjoy the caving there. All went well with the vacation right up until the second, third last day when my cousin and I decided to get a little too explorative during a visit to the caves. My cousin was fairly new to caving, so for the first few days, we didn't go too deep or too far. The last thing I wanted to do was freak him out before we had even done anything worth writing home about. But as the week drew to a close, there was no way I was going home without finding something a little more extreme to traverse. So as we were heading back to civilization after an afternoon's caving, we found a slit just less than a knee high in the rock wall of a cavern. You had to get down on your stomach to fit into such a tight squeeze, but if you did, it led to a small crawl space that cut through the entire rock. After a few meters, I noticed that quartz was growing on the passageway's ceiling, and in the light of our headlamps, they glittered in a way that I can't even really describe in words. I mean, it's like something out of a fairy tale, a still from one of those weirder Jim Henson movies. It's just magical. So we entered one at a time. Given that the tunnel was only wide enough for one person, the old claustrophobic me would have thought this place was a living nightmare for real. I would have had a straight up panic attack and probably died of a heart attack before deprivation ever set in. Every single time you took a breath, in some places, you would feel the ceiling of the tunnel on your back. It was that narrow. But the new me just found it thrilling once you get it into your head that these things can't just up and collapse on you. You get this feeling of calm, and then one of exhilaration when you realized you were conquering your fears and going places other men dared to tread. The deeper inside the tunnel we went, the more incredible the scenery became. It was like a whole other tiny world tucked away with the solid rock. But eventually, like most small subterranean tunnels, it just kind of petered out. At one turn, there was a dead end. The other was host to all kinds of stalactites and stalagmites. Those are like rock spike things you usually see on the roofs of caves, only you get them on the bottom, too, in most places. I'm checking out the stalls to see if there's a possibility of us two twisting through them to get to the deeper sections of the tunnel when I hear my cousin whisper something behind me, something that honestly made my blood run cold. He said he could feel water on his back. Something was dripping on him. As it turns out, while everyone was having a good old time outside checking out the statues and whatnot, it had started to rain. Only they neglected to tell us that. So thanks, guys. It's also worth noting that the tunnel we were in had sank down into the rock for a little while before sort of flattening out at the bottom. And to save you all a little geology lecture, I'll get to the point. The tunnel we were in was filling up with water. Granted, it was filling up slowly, slowly. But the position we were in meant that only a few inches of water could effectively drown us. And that's a real bad position to be in if you don't own a pair of gills. Needless to say, we turned around as fast as we could, which took, like, the longest time when you factor in how narrow the tunnel was. Then began the long, slow crawl back along the flat part of the tunnel. It was absolutely horrific. I tried to keep as calm and collected as I could, but hearing my cousin almost cracking up in front of me is something that still makes me shudder to think about. My biggest fear was that he would just lock up, which scared people are prone to do during particularly grueling caving sessions. For some reason, the brain just decides it doesn't want to take the body any further, and that's that they can be stuck down in the rock for hours before they're calm enough to keep going. I was terrified he would just lock up, not move, and be the reason we both drowned down there, dying while our family laughed and joked in their marquee tents. But he didn't. That magnificent bastard kept his cool, relatively speaking anyway, and just pushed on. That doesn't mean it didn't get pretty close. It was horrendous feeling the water slowly rising around us, seeing little drops turn into trickles, each new one causing my heart rate to speed up and my adrenaline to surge. By the time the tunnel started to turn upward back towards the main entrance, the water was open almost up to my lips. Moving made these splashing noises and both of our sets of clothes were completely soaked through. That little incident caused a ton of crap for the remaining two days. My aunt and uncle blamed me for almost getting my cousin killed. And they pretty much took it out on my parents for allowing me such a dumb hobby. We didn't go back into those caves at all. And to be honest, it took me a few months before I even thought about caving again. It hasn't put me off entirely, and I think it did me some good to become a little more safety conscious. But you can bet your butt that I check the weather before caving now, every single time. And if it even looks like it's going to rain, don't do it. It's just not worth losing your life over, no matter how amazing it is. Right after I dropped out of high school and moved out of my parents house, I needed work real bad. I'd have done pretty much anything for rent money about that time in my life. So I'm lucky or unlucky depending on how you look at it. That the local cemetery needed employees. At first, the old timers who had been working there for 20 or 30 years just wondered why someone so young would ever want to be a gravedigger. It was tough work, terrible on the lower back. But I soon adjusted and it turned out to be something more akin to a free gym membership than an actual job. I mean, I got swole pretty fast if I'm being honest. It only ever felt like work if the weather was bad or we had an actual funeral on site. Otherwise it was just nice to be able to spend some time outdoors. So the way our cemetery was set up was pretty simple. The majority of the grounds were just regular grave sites, all pretty much the same size and same price. But the northwest corner of the grounds was a private site that contained much larger plots. These were reserved for much wealthier families, and the local undertaker made a lot of cash from selling extravagant grave setups to them. I'm talking whole mausoleums, statues of angels, stuff like that. We hardly ever visited that area of this site except for cleaning and maintenance duties, and those were never left to me. I didn't take it personally, but the older guys just didn't trust me with all the cleaning chemicals and whatnot. That kept the marble and brass fixtures looking fresh. Which is why it was so weird when I got a phone call one of my days off asking me if I'd been up to that area recently. Me. My boss was livid. I could hear it in his voice, and he pulled no punches when he asked me if I had been screwing around in the northwest plots. Of course I told him no, that the last time I had been up there was to watch one of the old timers using the marble cleaning chemical as part of my training, and that that had been months back. He sighed, seemed confused, and was confounded. So I asked him what exactly the issue was. He replied that it could wait until the next time I was at work. I was worried, sure, but I was pretty sure that I hadn't done anything wrong. Not deliberately, anyway, and especially nothing that involved the northwest plots. A couple of days later, when I rolled into work, the atmosphere was tense. I knew something fairly serious had happened. All I knew, I wouldn't have to badger anyone to find out why. The boss man walked me out to the northwest plot, silent the whole way, and I knew better than to open my mouth until I found out exactly what was going on. There was already a worker up in the plot tending to one of the graves. That's when my boss told me that if I had been hanging around the area, maybe during my lunch break, eating a few snacks among the opulent grave sites, now would be the time to tell him. I swore up and down that I hadn't, that I knew better than to eat stuff near the graves. As I had been well informed, it attracts wild animals that can in turn do damage to some of the resting places. That's when he broke it down for me. Something had tried to dig up one of the freshly dug graves out in the northwest plots, he said. Something in particular, and not someone, because we each had enough experience to recognize when a grave had been dug with tools or by hand, or in this case, by claw. It was rough around the edges, obvious claw marks in the dirt, as opposed to the straight lines carved out by a shovel. This was something of an emergency. I mean, for obvious sanitary reasons, but for sentimental reasons, too. If local families discovered that wild animals were trying to dig up their deceased relatives, there would be an uproar. Something had to be done and quickly. A meeting was called among the gravediggers and attendants. As far as we knew, the mysterious digging had taken place overnight and was most likely undertaken by some kind of scavenger animal. A coyote, a black bear, maybe even an escaped dog. The solution was obvious. Night watchmen would have to be present in the cemetery every night until the situation was resolved. And guess who Volin told to be the night watchman for the first full week? You guessed it. The young guy, the new guy. Me. The only thing that made the proposal even vaguely attractive was the fact that anyone doing the night work would be paid double the regular rate. And I could definitely have done with the extra cash. The first night of being on watch really sucked. All I had for company was a flask of strong coffee and a.22 pellet gun loaned to me by one of the other workers to take down any varmints. It was long, boring and lonely. But once I adjusted my sleeping pattern, it got a little easier. Then on the 2nd to last night of my watchman duties, I was on a little foot patrol, walking up towards the northwest plot with a flashlight in my hand. That's when I saw it. A flurry of frantic limbs digging at the earth. I could have shouted something, Maybe even fired the.22 into the air to scare the animal away. But something in me wanted to end this whole thing right then and there. If I killed whatever critter was causing us so much trouble, I might be out the extra pay, but at least I would have my daytime life back. I crept up slowly, turning the flashlight off and sneaking stealthily towards the dark shape working away at the earth. I have hunted rabbits at night with my uncle before, so I figured I would use the old flashlight technique to cause the animal to freeze for a second so I could take the killing shot. But when I did, when I aimed that powerful flashlight in the direction of the digging thing, I almost cried out in fear. It wasn't an animal at all. It was a human, crouched on all fours, digging away at the earth with his or her bare hands. I couldn't bring myself to aim the rifle. I was too shocked at what I was looking at. So all I did was start making as much noise as possible, telling them to get out of there, saying that I would call the cops if they didn't comply. They complied alright, but not out of fear. The look in that person's eyes was one of fury, pure anger that they had been interrupted in their obscene little act. I swear, if I hadn't had that rifle with me I honestly don't know if I would be here today to tell this story. Needless to say, the other workers didn't believe what I saw. Some of them told me they didn't doubt that I had seen something, they just disputed what that thing was. And I get that. I really do. But still, I know what I saw, and it was definitely a person. It's.