S1 Ep4: Deployed Trickster

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Tonight's episode, Deployed Trickster. What's on the menu this evening, sir? Oh, that takes me back. Train spotting, right? I believe so, sure. Wow. This one comes from a former member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, Forrest. It involves a troubling entity that seemed to haunt the tent where he and his fellow soldiers were stationed during a deployment. Well, we have received a fair amount of stories from the military, which I find fascinating because they're usually in unique, exotic locations in unusual circumstances. And especially if they're in the Middle East, the djinn up here, the effete. You have all different kinds of people that are not normally in these areas, but soldiers are everywhere. They got to go wherever their deployment takes them. So we've heard a handful of stories. One comes from a very close and dear friend of ours that happened to her father in Vietnam where he was in a tent, I think by himself. And he wakes up to see this pair of mystical, giant, glowing, creepy eyes staring right down at him from the apex of the tent that comes shooting down right at him. He lets out a yell. This thing evaporates. Also, what I love is that military people are, you know, by nature, tough, strong, independent, not afraid of much, but even then they get rattled. And this one was no different. Here we have some rangers in the middle of a deployment experiencing something that shakes them to their core that certainly rattles them. By the way, we want to hear more soldier stories if you have stuff like this. So start sending them in to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com and we'll check them out. All right, Forrest, this one is a little shorter tonight. Why don't you do the honors? All right, thank you. Well, this email tonight comes from listener Steven. It was my first deployment with the 75th Ranger Regiment back in 2012. Where we were at, we lived in these tents that housed roughly eight to ten guys. Inside, we had individual rooms made with plywood walls that made shelves and stuff easy to add on. For the door, though, we normally just had blankets or sheets draped over the doorway. I was in my little plywood room browsing the very slow internet while it was still up when one of the guys in the tent burst into the room yelling at me to stop. I was confused and asked him what he meant and he went out to tell me to stop pressing my face against the sheet covering his room and running away. I told him that wasn't me and I had no idea what he was talking about. Another guy wakes up and comes out and says, wait, you've seen that too? Everyone in the tent came together and all, except me, had seen a figure pressing their face against the blankets in their doorway. Well, we all decided it was creepy and hesitantly went back to bed. The next day, I just got back from a mission and started changing back in my room when I looked up and saw a figure pressing its face up against my doorway. I asked, who's there? I moved forward and it's like out of a movie. I ripped the sheet to the side and nobody is there. I went and grabbed my tent mate and we talked for a while and decided to just ignore it until our deployment was over. People started having really bad dreams and the entrance to our tent flew open, which was weird because you needed a code to get in. There was so much more happening to each person in that tent, we decided to reach out to the chaplain to come by and help us. That's a freaky story. You know, whenever I think of a face like pressing up against fabric, I always go back to the earliest version of that I can think of in the movies, which was Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, I think, when they were like this pushing through the walls and stuff like that when they first figured out how to do that with CGI. But it's scary. This would be the kind of thing that you would think, oh yeah, this would be a good prank. But if it was, it sounded to me like whoever was doing it pretty much had everyone in that tent riled up. Yeah, I remember that effect happening. And as you were talking about CGI becoming more sophisticated and I think a hand coming out of the TV. Yes, coming out of the wall. Yeah. Right. So faces are creepy coming out of anything, a hand coming out of the TV a la poltergeist. But this reminds me also in a military context, again, a story, and we're going to reference this or I'm going to often hear because I've heard some of the best ghost stories from Jim Harold's Campfire, but it was from a soldier who was part of the military police detail, I believe, at the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Hermiston, Oregon, I think, just across the southern Washington state border as well. And they were on patrol and they were coming up to one of these bunkers with a heavy steel door that houses these chemicals. And we're talking like VX nerve agent and mustard gas, horrible things like that. They eventually destroyed, so they said, but they were inspecting this door, making sure it was closed and this face pressed out of it. And we're talking steel, just a face came out of it. They're like, what the, you know, unexplainable, freaked them out. They had to do their job and continue making the rounds, but they swore a face, him and his buddy swore that a face kind of came out of the metal. So that reminded me of this, but this is a lot easier to pull off. However, the face was still there and he pulls back the sheet and there's nobody there. So it's not like somebody could duck out. It's not the dog. You've seen the, you've seen the dog prank where you, you throw up the sheet and duck around the corner and some dogs are like, and then others are like, I don't care. I don't care about this. Right. This is creepy in that there's something about that tent apparently in that very small space. And again, we're talking about guys who are armed and there's another. Yeah. And I, you know, I want more detail, Stephen, if you hear this and I know that you must've given us permission way back, this came to us in 2019, but we'd love to hear a little bit more follow-up. Like if you can say where you were deployed and if you can't say that, what happened after the chaplain came by? That's what I want to know. Did the chaplain do anything? Did he take it seriously? Did whatever he do, a prayer here and there, did that help at all? Or what happened after that? It could have been a one-off, a very strange thing, but that's a very odd, specific motion by a spirit, you could say, just pressing their face so you could see that. And, you know what I'm saying? Not appearing. It obviously had the intention of scaring them. Whatever it was doing, it's like, you're not, that's not like, hey, I'm in here with you. I want to talk to you. I'm a departed, whatever. It's like the whole goal there is to mess with your mind. Well, even if it was a prank by one of your fellow soldiers, it was good enough that it creeped out his, uh, his bunkmate there. Like, stop doing that. Yeah. Like it's just, it's just a creepy enough kind of thing. So he was yelling at him to stop. And, and then I like also that the narrator here, Steven, everybody else had seen it. And then finally he saw it. Yeah. It was the last one. He was the last one. So he had to get his turn. Yeah. Steven, uh, we'd love to have more details on that. If you hear this, drop us a new email and let us know what else happened. And, uh, we hope you're back in the States and not dealing with anything like this. Cause that would be another unsettling thing. If you came home and something like this followed you home. Update. When we reached out to Steven, he got back to us to let us know that the chaplain explained that while he wasn't sure what it was. Okay. Okay. Okay. I love that impression. It's probably my favorite impression. You can, you can go back to your normal voice. Okay. You've had enough. You're saying you've had enough. All right. Well, thank you so much for that. I'm glad I could amuse you. Well, anyway, the chaplain pointed out that he was a Christian and therefore he recommended that the guys in the tent pray about it. Steven did so and also said he started simply drawing his curtain to the side, which helped just a little. Just take away the medium. Take away the format. Exactly. Just make it slightly more difficult. Or as I would like to think, it's like, oh, you want to do that? Well, here's making it a little more difficult. Show me something. Show me a little extra. Yeah. Let's see if you can close this and make a face. It just, it can be a small, simple thing just to annoy whatever's annoying you and scaring the crap out of you. Well, it did appear that the praying helped reduce the issues others were having, but as we often know, it did not totally eliminate them. Steven, thank you so much for sending your story into the Astonishing Dead Letter Office. The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel. The show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. The theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music, arranged by Alan Carissia, who composes all the other music in the show. Tommy Beaver Design created the logo. The announcer is John Bolton. That's me. Stories are lightly edited for length, content, and readability, but otherwise presented as they're sent to us. We're always looking for more dead letters, so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share, email it to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com. Please include how you would like to be credited. First name only? First name last initial? Anonymous? A pseudonym? Let us know. Due to the number of emails coming in, we often cannot respond, but we do read them all. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. 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