Your True Halloween Stories III

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Listen to the Astonishing Junk Drawer exclusively at patreon.com slash astonishing legends. Getting used to the Brady Bunch factor. I've been to Point Pleasant twice, but I've never been to the festival. Someone made a joke about the Mothman. For the guys on this screen, except for you, Matthew, you know, the 90s were like yesterday. The guy that directed the Lost film was the creator of Earthworm Jim. Dr. Napal told them that Steven Spielberg had said to him, when you're done with this, I'll take a look at it. It's so hard to explain this and not sound like I'm crazy. I'm impressed Scott found that. Astonishing Legends will like to thank BetterHelp, Kalshi, Mint Mobile, our contributors at patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. Welcome back, legenders. It's that magical time of the year again when we dive into the eerie and unexplained with our now annual tradition. Your True Halloween Stories, 2024 edition. This year, we've sifted through a dark treasure trove of unsettling tales you've shared, and we've handpicked six of the most captivating accounts to bring you tonight. Our storytellers will take you on a journey from mysterious objects materializing in a thin air to the heart-wrenching tale of a ghostly child lost between worlds. But that's just the beginning. Prepare yourselves for encounters with everything from elementals to demons, and uncover the strange paranormal connection linking two of our storytellers, individuals who've never crossed paths. For those seeking resolution, we'll conclude with a haunting that offers something rare in these eerie encounters. Closure. So, dim the lights, draw the curtains, cast your protection spells, and make sure your spiritual doors are locked tight. Tonight, we're trading trick-or-treaters for your own chilling, astonishing legends. Let these unsettling stories be your companions as we delve into the darkest night of the year. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. I glanced around the room before noticing something odd. A hand reaching around the doorframe and resting on the wall, palm flat. It was like a void and had long, pointy fingers. One of tonight's guests, Damon. Join us tonight for Your True Halloween Stories, Volume 3. And we're back. That we are, folks. A quick reminder, we're throwing a 24-hour digital Halloween bash in our Facebook group on October 31st, kicking off at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. That'll be a full day of fun with tons of activities. We'll have fun discussion posts, our top spooky recommendations for what to read and watch, and the opportunity to win some prizes. Join our riddle hunt every Tuesday leading up to Halloween for a chance to win a $75 AL gift card and a blog feature. And all you have to do is figure out the exact spot the riddles are leading to. And we'll also have contests for the best costume, decor, and AL-themed food or drink. So post your entries on Halloween and vote for your favorites. Each winner will receive a $15 gift card to our store and a spot at our wrap-up blog post. And Tess is still posting daily for the 2024 Blog Astonishing Season. So visit AstonishingLegends.com to see what we call the most prolific paranormal blogger on the internet. If you send in a topic, check to see if it's on the blog. Yeah, and if you have questions about how to join the party, feel free to reach out to Facebook moderator Jennifer Rafferty or Tess Feivel. And lastly, an announcement we've been waiting over a year to make. Oh, that's right, folks. On Tuesday, October 29th, we're premiering a new weekly show called The Astonishing Dead Letter Office, where we'll be reading the emails and stories you've been sending us for the past decade. On each episode, we'll share one listener's story and discuss it afterward. If Astonishing Legends is your main paranormal course, consider The Astonishing Dead Letter Office your weekly appetizer. Yeah, folks, we're super excited about this. We've been waiting a long time to roll it out. So for those of you that want to hear from us weekly, it's about to happen. All right, Forrest, let's get into these stories tonight. All right, folks, we would like to welcome Kamal to the show. Kamal, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to have you share your story with us. Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Before we dive in, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your background to the extent that you're comfortable without doxing yourself if you don't want to. But like maybe tell our folks a little bit about where you live and what you do and maybe how long you've been listening to the show. Yeah, I live in Southern California. I'm an attorney, lived here for a really long time since I was 18 years old. I'm originally from Florida, from South Florida, and I was actually born in Jamaica. So I've kind of lived all over the place. And I live with my wife and two kids and love it out here. How did you stumble across Astonishing Legends? What made you think to send this story to us? I love paranormal podcasts in general. So I'm always looking for interesting stuff to listen to. And I found you guys a couple of years ago, actually. You know, I don't keep up with it as much as I can. I have two young kids, so it's hard to keep up. But I definitely, you know, try and listen whenever I can. I've heard the Halloween episodes before, so I said, oh, why not submit? What year is this, and where did this take place? So this took place in South Florida back in 1997. My mom had bought a house for my grandma, who was living in Jamaica at the time, and then she came up to the U.S. The house was a really nice house, about four bedrooms, two baths, a couple miles from where we live, so, you know, pretty close by. And so my grandma moved in. Almost from the beginning, I remember hearing from people like, you know, they'd hear voices in the house, or they'd hear just weird sounds, just weird stuff like that. My aunt who lived there told me that she one time went to the master bathroom and found a sink filled up with water, and there was grass on the ground and, like, a half-eaten roll of, like, Oreos or something. And it was really weird. And she was like, and nobody bought those in the house, right? Because we would have known. We were thinking maybe someone broke in, but there was no signs of a forced entry. And, you know, who would just fill up a sink and leave Oreos? It was a weird situation. But we were just like, okay, stuff happens. Maybe someone forgot, who knows? And I had an aunt as well who spent the night, and I remember she slept on the couch, and she said that she felt like, you know, something was on top of her. And it was like, she said it was like a dog or something. Oh, something weird. And, like, she just felt very oppressive, basically. You know, a lot of people said they would just hear voices. It was eerie stuff in general. My mom even had, like, a medium come by and, like, a ghost hunting crew to investigate. And, you know, they kind of concluded that there were some spirits in the house. So my grandma said that when she slept in her room, she would go to bed at night, and then she'd wake up in the middle of the night, and she'd see, like, a tall white man and a little blonde girl standing next to him at the foot of the bed. And she said she wasn't afraid of them, but they would kind of show up pretty regularly. Some background, you know, my mom is Indian, my dad's Chinese, so we don't have anyone like that in our family who looked like that. So after my grandma died, my mom and one of my aunts went through all of her stuff and decided what they wanted to keep and give away. And then one thing they found was a collection of old family photos, like about 35, 40 photos of friends, family, you know, from over the last decades. You know, my grandmother passed away in 2013. They kept the photos in, like, a bag, you know, like a plastic bag, and they put it in a drawer in her old, in my grandmother's room. And my aunt, one of my aunts, loves looking through old photos, so she'd pull them out every now and again every few months and just kind of flip through them just to look through them because she likes the nostalgia of it. And so a few years ago, my mom, you know, was getting ready to sell the house, and so they were cleaning it up and taking stuff out, just trying to get it in order for the staging. And so one day they were working, and, you know, they took a break, and my aunt pulled out the bag of photos because they were there, and they're like, oh, yeah, let me look through these again. She started going through. So as she was going through the photos, she found two old photos. One photo was a black and white of a tall white man with a little blonde girl, and the second was of a gravestone with the name Ryan on it. And there was also some writing on the back of each photo, you know, people's names and some dates. And also it was surprising that the man and the girl had different last names. They didn't appear to be related to Ryan, whoever that was. Of course, my aunt was like, what are these doing here? They're just in the middle of the stack of photos. And she'd never seen them before. I mean, you know, she'd gone through these photos several times over the last, you know, many years, and she'd never seen the photos before. And she had no idea, like, where these came from. She asked my mom. She's like, yeah, I don't know who these people are. And so, of course, you know, my mom brought up the fact that grandma, like, when she would see the figures at nighttime, it'd be the tall white man, a little blonde girl. And, you know, now these photos were here. So it just doesn't make any sense because, like I said, our family's Indian and Chinese and Caribbean. So I'm the first one to grow up in America. So we, you know, we didn't recognize these people. And also, too, I mean, we're trying to find a rational explanation. Like, maybe the photos were just left over randomly. But, you know, we don't in the house since 1997. So, like, long, long time, like 20 years, basically, over 20 years. And, like, we never came across these photos before. Also, too, it's like, it'd be weird. It's weird they were stuck in the middle of the pile. Like, who would put them there? Like, even if one of my family members found them, they would have brought them to my mom and said, hey, I found these. They wouldn't have just stuck them in the middle of the pile. It just doesn't make any sense. So it got pretty weird for us because we were wondering, like, why do we find these, like, now when we were trying to move out of the house? Right? Like, and I made a joke, like, maybe they wanted to go with you guys. Maybe they didn't want to be left behind. So, you know, over the years, I've had friends who I've told the story to and they've tried to track down who these people were or the family or whatever. You know, they made a little progress here and there. I've tracked down a potential relative. But really, it was just kind of a dead end. And so we just didn't know, like, I don't know, it was just left as a mystery. So my mom just ended up leaving the photos there. She didn't want to take them with her. So she left them at the house and, you know, she eventually sold the house. She snapped a couple of photos of them. So I still have pictures of what they look like. But we just really can't figure out where the hell they came from. Wow. Did anybody talk to anybody that lived in the house previously? Any of the families from before? She spoke with a, it's like an Italian family, Italian last name. I can't remember the last name. But they didn't recognize the names of the people because she actually reached out to them because she did know them and said, hey, are these your photos? And they said, no, we don't. That doesn't sound like anyone in our family. You know, and the house was built a long time ago. I mean, like, since I think maybe the 40s, 50s. Like, so it's a little older. So, I mean, you know, those photos would have been, you know, who knows how long they've been around. Right. But one of the photos was dated 1951, the black and white photo of the tall white man and the little blonde girl. What else was written on the back of the, on the photo? It was a Kodachrome print. And it was, I guess this particular one was printed the week of July 30th, 1951. And it just has the people's names on it. Does it have the name of the man and the little girl on it? Yes. Yeah. They both have the same last name. So that last name, though, is different from the name that's on the headstone in the color photo. Correct. Yeah. The one on the color photo says Ryan on it. And that's different than their last name. So as far as we know, they seem unrelated. And I really don't know why they would, you know, have these photos together in the same place. I mean, to our, and, you know, as I said, I've had a couple of friends now who are very smart people trying to sleuth and dig into this and look at genealogy things. I had one, my father-in-law actually has a good friend who's really into this stuff. And he found on a genealogy site, like, I guess someone who's related to the man and the girl. And like, he emailed an introduction to me and her. So I followed up just to introduce myself, but I never heard anything back. Well, let's assume for the moment that these photos somehow were a ported or come from the other side or were put there by some unseen spiritual force. And as a message, perhaps of who was there or to let people know your family know, essentially who was there making an appearance to grandma quite frequently. And so you feel though, that the photos are connected in some way that there is a, they're not just two different random photos that showed up. I think so. I mean, just because based on what my grandmother was saying about, you know, what she saw at nighttime and, and the fact that, you know, she'd mentioned it on and off for years. I mean, I just sort of heard it here and there. And then it is weird. And as I said, we've never seen these photos before. So to have that sort of connection happen and she died in 2013. So for them to pop up in like 2019, it was, it was very weird. And so to be clear though, she'd never seen those photos. The only thing that she'd seen are the apparitions of the, of the man and the girl. As far as we know, even if she'd never seen the photos. Yeah. Obviously she's telling that story. If there were people that she would have known somehow from her own past or whatever, she obviously would have pointed that out. Right. I would think so. I mean, cause she would have said, oh yeah, that's my cousin or something, but yeah, no it was. And, you know, as I mentioned, like that was just, you know, her particular experience. But as I said, there's other people, like I had a cousin who stayed at the house and he said that he'd like be sleeping at night and feel like somebody like pushing him or something in bed. Like, you know, like it was just, you know, just a lot of weird, just random stuff like that. But it was very, I don't know, very rarely have I heard anything this specific, you know, like someone say like, yeah, I saw this kind of person, that kind of person. And then we find a picture of it. This is very weird. Yeah. Usually only in the movies, but that does happen where photos seem to be placed in the path of the living as a statement from the other side, or somebody wanted you to see that somebody wanted you to know who that was, I believe. And it's interesting. They didn't pop up or those photos didn't appear until way after she had passed away. And did anybody else see these two figures, the man and the little girl? Not that I know of. Part of it too, as I mentioned, I think it's something to do with the fact that they were moving out of the house, that they were leaving. It was weird timing because, you know, it had been what, like six years, seven years since my grandma passed away. It's like, why now? You know? And it was just weird that it popped up at that moment when they were packing and getting stuff out of there. And where did they leave the photos in the house for the next people? My mom found this random crevice and sort of like, okay, I'm putting these right here. No. Okay. So you took all your grandma's photos, but you just took these two out and she snuck them into a spot in the house for the next people to find. I mean, yeah, we don't know these people. Yeah. You know, I mean, my mom, I guess my mom is, you know, she's like, you know, I don't want them following me back to my house. And, you know, so she's like, better just to leave here. Cause it's, I mean, this is where they're from. Right. So. Yeah. So nobody's seen them since then. I take it. I don't think so. I mean, she talked to the new owners. She knew the new owners. I don't know if they found them or not, or I don't know what happened from there. I don't want to dox anybody, but of course I'm curious about who these folks really were. Yeah. This is another reason I pointed this story out to Scott because now he's going to be obsessed with finding out who these folks are using his own genealogical detective skills. My personal family tree has almost 4,000 people in it. I worked on it for years. I've had a lot of time on, but I'm not a professional, but it's interesting, all the stuff that you can find these days when you start digging back. But like in the picture that you showed us, which obviously people can't see, but you showed us that you had on your phone through this video while we're talking to you. It's very iconic looking. The little girl's got like a kind of a Shirley Temple vibe. I was about to say, she does look a little bit like Shirley Temple. Yeah. Curly hair. And then the man looks like every old white haired banker from the fifties. Yeah. It looks like a, it's a very typical photo. It looks like a lot of folks, old white relatives. If you have any from the 1950s, but it's interesting. You have a date and a name. And so it's enough information. Again, looking at it just story-wise, if it were just the picture of the old man and the little girl, and there were no names on there, it's even more of a mystery, but it sparks, you know, maybe less curiosity. I think in this way, because there are names, and again, let's assume that it was placed there by an unnatural force or a non-logical force, and it was there to show you, the family that had been sharing that house with them, who they were. Now you have a name to go with the image with grandma's stories. And so it's interesting though, that it didn't make an appearance while she was living there. And did your grandmother pass away in the house? She died at the hospital, but she lived there till the end, but you know, all the way. We always talk about this. We don't know what the rules are. We haven't brought the rules up in quite some time, but like, isn't there an implication for us if the old man and the little girl are standing there together from the other side that they both passed at the age they are in the photos? Well, I mean, that's another good question. Why are they together? You know, is she still a little girl? Or, you know, of course we always talk about how you never know what you're truly interacting with anyway. It could just be something pretending to be the people from the photo, but then the photos mixed in with the family photos, it's a weird case. Well, like many paranormal stories, it brings up more questions than answers. But in this case, it's the start of a mystery of sorts and not nothing bad or terrible. It's just like, who are these folks and why are they there? And then you do wonder, yeah, did they pass away at the same time somewhere near the house? Obviously, in talking about the rules, I wondered about this myself. Did they sadly pass away together at the same time? And that's why that photo is significant. He looks older. He looks to be, well, from that 1950s era, he could be anywhere from his mid-60s to early 70s. People often looked older back then, betraying their age. You know, so he may have passed away and she lived a full longer life into her 60s or 70s and had different lives. But they're kind of in the spirit world, cemented together at those ages and as such in the photo. And so that's part of the mystery for me is that they appear from the spirit world together as they were in the photo. So it does make me wonder, yeah, did they both pass sadly together and they're kind of locked in at that age? Then you wonder, why are they there making an appearance to your grandmother, although it was her house and she's the matriarch? What did they want to express to her? Because I think, you know, again, that is part of not the rules so much, but just the predilection of those who have passed that they have a message to relay or they want the living to know something. And so they keep making an appearance to her. They keep trying to reach out and they can't communicate well. And as everyone's going to leave, it's like one last little memento, don't forget us. And I don't think your family ever will from this point on. But there is still a message to me that that has to be relayed. I think this is a mystery that wants to be solved. And my grandmother said that she didn't find them scary or frightening. She said they felt friendly. She wasn't frightened by them. So, I mean, yeah, who knows? I mean, or maybe because there are definitely other things that happen in the house that were scary to people, but this wasn't one of them. So maybe, you know, they were just trying to, I don't know, make everything kind of more cool and copacetic. And actually, I pulled up an email that I just remembered my father-in-law mentioned his friend likes to look at this stuff. And he did some digging and he was able to track down the woman who's a first cousin of the little girl in the photo. And he confirmed with her that that is her cousin and that's the grandfather. And then the family is actually from Arkansas. And it's weird that, you know, the photo is in Florida for some reason, but we had no idea. Was there any indication with that? Who did you say this was? This is your father-in-law? A friend of my father-in-law. A friend of your father-in-law. So is there any indication as to how either one of those two folks might have passed whenever they did? He didn't find out because he actually put me in touch with the cousin and I emailed her, but I never got a response. Oh, she's the one you mentioned. Yes. And you never heard back. Yeah. Wow. That's wild. The guy, my father-in-law's friend, he wasn't able to establish any kind of connection between the two families. Okay. Okay. So he tried that. Okay. He looked it up. This guy's after my heart here. He works the way I would. Yeah. He was going real deep. He said he did find that there was a Ryan family that lived in Palm Beach, but that was like a hundred miles from where my grandma lives. And then at the bottom, it said something about Molly's great, great grandparents. I don't know who Molly is at all. Have you had any urge to talk to the people that moved in after you folks? I mean, like I said, my mom is not thrilled about this whole thing. So I don't think she wants to go dig that up with them and be like, hey, by the way, you know, so I think she's as happy to let sleeping dogs lie. All right. And the obligatory question, has anything strange happened to you since that time? Not me personally. You know, fortunately the house, we bought this house like three years ago and it's no sign of being haunted, thankfully. But, you know, but you know, the thing is, like I said, I do love the paranormal stuff and it's interesting. I just, I don't want it in my house, but you know, I would definitely, I like learning about it and stuff like that. And, and fortunately my mom said nothing subsequently has happened. I mean, they haven't found any other weird photos or anything. Yeah. Right. With the possible exclusion of your grandmother, did she consider herself kind of gifted or psychic or anything like that? I've heard stories about my family growing from when they were living in Jamaica and just, you know, supernatural, like weird things that happened down there. And, and they had definitely some relatives who kind of were new about that kind of thing. And I've heard stories, you know, and, but this is definitely the most tangible thing I've ever come across that's happened, you know? Yeah. I have a feeling that as this story percolates in our feed and then later in our archives, that some kind of affirmation might come percolating forth that connects these two, or there might be somebody out there. You'd be surprised. We do get emails after something's aired where it's very surprising fact that somebody's dug up or connection or like, Hey, I know that person. We also have incidents over the years where it sometimes seems like the end goal of the story was to get onto the show so that we could share it with, you know, a hundred thousand people and see if someone does hear something. So that's the next thing that sometimes happens. It's weird. Definitely. Like I said, I'm willing to talk to like, you know, one-on-one with anybody who might have some information. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Well, great. Well, thank you for your time, Kamal, and I hope you can come back to the show after your kids get a little older. I know what that's like, but thanks for listening and sending this in. We appreciate it. Oh, thanks for having me. So now we'd like to introduce our next guest, Holly, who has a fascinating story that is cinematic for a couple of reasons, not just because of the telling, but also the imagery that comes up. I was picturing a movie in my mind and in one of the dreams you're going to relay, it was almost like watching a movie as well, wasn't it? Oh, it was definitely like a movie. Most of the time you have dreams, you're kind of a character in that movie, but this was strictly like I was just watching it, Vince Unfold. And so you started listening to Astonishing Legends, April of 2023. You had heard other people's stories and finally decided to share your own. Had you heard of any other story from any other person or any other source that was somewhat like this, or is this kind of a standalone in your experience? As far as like I've heard, I haven't heard anything exactly like this. I mean, there's a lot of stories that I've heard where, you know, somebody's had like an imaginary friend and they're not quite sure, you know, if that friend is actually there. Right. But this was just really different. That's why we loved it. So to get going here, why don't you set us up with a little bit of backstory? This happened about 16 years ago. So my mom, sister and nephew lived just a couple of blocks away from me. So we would kind of visit each other, you know, take turns, who was cooking dinner, just spent a lot of time together. So it was just your family, your mother, sister, nephew, I believe. And there were a couple of older kids. And was this in a hotel that you all lived in at the time? Well, I lived in, it was, it kind of looked like an old shop. There was like this huge, you know, the big shop windows that takes up kind of like a whole wall and they had converted it into like a two apartment house. So like upstairs, they had one apartment and then I was the downstairs apartment. My mom, sister and nephew were in a, it was like a really old hotel that supposedly had been around since I think it was like the early 1900s. Wow. And then what part of the country is this in? Central California. It's around San Joaquin Valley. And so out of this group of family and friends, your nephew is, is the youngest child. Yeah. Cause we were pretty much the only family. There were some other kids who lived in the hotel, but they're older kids. They were like pre-teens, a teenager. My nephew was probably about three or four at the time. And then one of these nights though, you have a very strange and vivid or lucid dream, which was unusual for you because it was in black and white. There was like hints of color here and there, but for the most part, it was black and white. I dreamed that there was like this family. It was a man, a woman, and a little girl. They were outside this really big building. Everything looked older, like maybe like 1950s, 1940s, like the vehicles and everything, their clothing's older. This little girl was dressed in kind of like a school uniform. It was kind of like the white button up tops with like the fake pearl buttons. She had darker hair, like maybe shoulder-length black hair. And she had on a plaid skirt and like the little, like the little white socks with the ruffles. She was a little bit older than my nephew. So she wasn't very old at all. She was pretty small and she looked like she was just really young. She was sitting like on the steps outside this building. I'm guessing her mom and dad were trying to get her to leave and she didn't really want to leave. So they were trying to get her to go over this old car. Instead of just going over and getting in the car, she ran out in the street and she was hit by a car. I woke up kind of startled and I thought it was really weird that, you know, I just dreamed about this random little girl and it was really just like watching a movie because I wasn't like a part of this at all. I was just watching it happen. So I just woke up suddenly and was kind of weirded out by it. Like it just seemed extremely real. Like I was like standing out on the street watching it happen. I have odd dreams from time to time, but like I said, most of the time I'm like a character in that dream. So I interact with things and I'm not usually just standing there watching things happen. Do you dream about people that you don't know that often? Like strangers like this that weren't familiar? Not usually. Like a lot of times if I have a dream, it's like the kind of characters or stuff, either be people I know or maybe from like somebody from a movie or TV show to where like the faces are all familiar. But this was the first time I was just complete strangers. I had no idea who these people were. Like I'd never seen anyone like them before. So what happened next after you had this dream? So a couple of days later, I went over to visit my family and just kind of like hang out and catch up to see how everybody was doing. My mom was sitting and watching TV. So I was sitting down talking to her and she mentioned that my nephew suddenly had a new friend. And I was like, oh, well, you know, did somebody new move in? You know, is there some new little kids? And she kind of got this weird look on her face and she's like, no, she's like an imaginary friend. She's not there, but he talks to her. And I thought that was really weird. A little bit later, my sister and nephew came in and I started asking about this little girl. He said her name was Victoria and they like to play. And I asked him what Victoria looked like and he's like, oh, she's got dark hair and she's got a white shirt with little buttons and she has a skirt and it's got checkers on it is how he described it, like squares. And I thought that was really weird because that's exactly what the girl in my dream was wearing. It was a little bit chilling that suddenly he has this imaginary friend that fit the description of the girl in my dream. What was going through your mind in terms of like realizing that it was the same little girl? Like, are you thinking, what, what am I going to, should I say anything to anybody or I don't want to freak my nephew out or what? I just thought it was really odd. Like, it's a really strange coincidence that he described somebody who looked exactly the same as this little girl. So I thought it was weird and I didn't really think too much of it like at first, but I thought it was kind of odd. It just seemed like a really bizarre coincidence. And so then the whole thing leveled up, though, when he told you that this little girl, his imaginary friend had an opinion about you. Yeah, after we kind of talked a little bit, he said that she liked me and that she'd come to visit me before, which kind of freaks me out a little bit more. Like I got goosebumps. I'm thinking, okay, maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe it was like, you know, she was sharing her memory or something like that. And I started kind of asking him more questions about her because I'm thinking, okay, if she's visited me and he described this little girl that was exactly like the girl in my dream, you know, maybe there's more to it. So I started kind of asking him questions about who she was and what happened to her. And he told me she got hurt. How did she get hurt? He's like, she got hit by a car. I was like, how did she get hit by a car? He's like, she ran out in the street and she got hit by a car. I was like, okay, what happened after she got hit by a car? And he kind of stared off behind me like he was looking at something and he's just like, I can't say. It was just really bizarre. Or like, even like when he was describing what she looked like, he was looking at the same like space, like kind of off behind me, off to the side, which was really strange because it was almost like he was looking at her trying to describe what she looked like. So you thought she might've been present for that conversation basically behind you. Yeah, because he kept looking to the same spot in the room. So he wasn't like looking around in the room or, you know, looking at the ceiling or anything. He was like looking at the same spot beside and behind me. After you asked the question each time, it was like he would look over to her to see what the answer was or if it was okay to answer. Yeah. Especially when I asked him what happened to her after she got hit by a car, he would kind of like pause for a second. And it was like, he was waiting for her to give an answer. What I gathered from this though, is that, uh, it's kind of fascinating because he did not have an answer or Victoria, the little girl did not have an answer. It was kind of like either she wasn't allowed to say, but more like perhaps after she got hit by the car, she didn't really know what happened to her. Yeah, it definitely could be that. I mean, he just didn't seem to have an answer and she didn't seem to have an answer or just didn't want to give one. And you're dealing with a very young child at this time. So it's like, it's like, you can't drive them into an interrogation room, shine a light in his face or whatever. You gotta, you gotta break the conversation off. Yeah, exactly. He was really small. So it's like, you know, little kids that small, they can't really describe too much. So as this conversation, this line of questioning is unfolding, what is your mom and sister doing? Are they, they also kind of weirded out? They're just kind of like weirded out, like, you know, what's going on. And that's when I explained that, you know, a couple of nights before I'd had this dream about this little girl and said what she looked like and reiterated the events of like what happened and how she ran out in the street instead of getting into her parents' car. And they were kind of weirded out. They'd been weirded out a bit with him suddenly having this imaginary friend. So you had the dream again, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that? It was just really vivid again. And only this time when she was going to get hit by a car, I suddenly heard this little girl's voice saying, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Almost like she was trying to stop me from like seeing that part. And I like felt like my foot being shaken. And I woke up. There was nobody there. It was in the middle of the night. I thought, okay, maybe it's just the dream. I kind of got up, looked around because there I am at, there was a lot of people kind of out on the street sometimes. So I thought, okay, maybe there's a child out there. Something's going on. Looked around, nobody really around, no kids out there at all. So I had a cat at the time and he was just kind of like chilling in the window, looking outside. So I thought, you know, it was just part of the dream. And I went back to sleep. This turns out to be the beginning of a series of ongoing events related to Victoria. Yeah, there's multiple instances where I was woken up like that. Sometimes it was shaking my foot. Sometimes it was shaking my arm. A couple of times my cat was on the bed at the time. And whatever space I could feel like her touching me, he was staring like in that same spot. So if it was, he was on the bed and she was shaking my foot, he was staring at the foot of the bed. She was kind of shaking my arm or the side of the bed. He was staring like at that side of the bed. He never seemed to like kiss or get like upset. He would just stare. And what about the tent? You had a tent set up for your nephew? My nephew, like I had a play tent set up in the living room for him with like a bunch of toys and like a little sleeping bag. So that way, like if he was over and he wanted to take a nap, he could just kind of play in there and have his own little space. One night I was laying in bed and trying to get comfortable and fall asleep. My cat was like laying on the bed next to me. And then I heard it was kind of like almost like a scratchy noise or like something brushing against the tent because it was just like one of those nylon tents. So, you know, if you run your hand across it, it kind of makes a little bit of a noise. And the cat took off in the living room while I went in there, because I was afraid maybe, you know, there was like a mouse or something had fallen that brushed up against it. He started staring at the corner of this tent and he was just not moving. So I kind of moved things around to see if there was anything there, if anything had fallen, if there was like, you know, a mouse or something like that had gotten in there. There was literally nothing. I kind of like walked around the tent. There was nothing there. So it was like really weird. Well, the next day I happened to call up and talk to my mom and my sister. And I asked him, just because everything that happened so far with Victoria, I asked him, you know, if he knew where she was. And he said, well, she was at your house last night, Nancy. I was like, OK, well, what did she do at my house? Well, she was playing in my tent, which I didn't say anything about the tent. And I didn't say anything about like anything happening with the tent, but he knew that she was in the tent. Well, well, this is not the first time the nephew confirmed the story, because getting back to the first time where it seems Victoria in the dream, the ghost girl shakes your foot saying, wake up, wake up, wake up. You felt like a child shaking your foot, that kind of light motion from a kid. And so the next day, though, you called your mom and then you asked her if your nephew was there. And then what did you ask him then? I always ask him, like, if he knew where Victoria was or what she did. And he said that she woke me up. There's other times, like when she'd woken me up, I asked if he knew where she was. And she always say, like, a lot of times it was either she wanted to play or maybe I was having a bad dream and she woke me up. There was another instance where I walked into the kitchen to make myself some dinner and feed my cat. I had one of those like cheap office swivel chairs that always kind of like squeaks when you sit down in it and move around. All of a sudden I heard the chair squeaking and I turned and looked and the chair was like swiveling back and forth, kind of like a little kid just kind of like rocking back and forth in it, which freaked me out a little bit. And I kind of like stood there for a second just watching this chair move. And it's like I waited till after it stopped and I called my mom and my sister and I asked for my nephew. And I was like, do you know where Victoria is? And he's like, yeah, she's at your house, auntie. What's Victoria doing at my house? Oh, she was playing in your chair. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. 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I mean, it was kind of down the street and around the corner. It wasn't very far at all. Nothing to a ghost. I'm just curious though, like how is he getting the information? Is he seeing it in his mind's eye? Or is he being told by Victoria? Like does he just suddenly show up? I never asked him directly about it. I mean, he was so small. I don't know if he would have really had an answer. Right. But it's like, he always knew exactly what happened. So if something moved in my house or if she woke me up or anything, like he always knew exactly what she did, where she was like the whole incident with the tent. Like I never mentioned anything. I didn't give a hint to, Hey, was Victoria playing in the tent or anything? It was just, do you know where Victoria was last night? To a young child, the world is still magical and magical things happen. And that's just part of it. Or that's part of the reality. It's possible. Did he ever mention how Victoria showed up or what he thought about that? Because, you know, most other living human beings just don't appear or, or just kind of like pop into the house or just vanish. No, he never really mentioned it at all. And my mom, my sister said she just showed up one day and he was playing with her. They kind of had like a little play area in the backyard where they were. There was like kids toys and stuff there. They had like a little play house and they would say he would play in the play house with her and they would even have arguments sometimes. So I'd be out there playing and they would have like these little arguments and they started getting concerned just because of how interactive he was with her. Like she was like a real child. He would talk to her. Like I said, he, they would have arguments. They would play in the play house and with toys. And it really worded them out, especially with all the things I was telling them about, you know, he could say exactly where she was and what she did. And I was having things move around and the cat would always stare at whatever place she was. He could see her somehow. I mean, I know they say animals can kind of see spirits and things, but he'd always notice her, but I never actually saw like any kind of, even a shadow or mist or anything like that. So weird things happened for a few months after this incident. Yeah, it was like a few months. A lot of times it would just be her waking me up. Sometimes something would move or it's like, I got so used to it after a while. I didn't pay too much attention to it. I mean, it just became like a regular occurrence. After a few months, I hadn't really had anything happen for a while. And I happened to ask my mom, my sister, you know, what happened? Is he still talking to Victoria? And my mom said, he said, she just went away. And I asked him about it. I'm like, did she say where she went? And he's like, no, she just said she had to leave. So he didn't say where she was going or why she had to leave. She just said she had to leave. And then she was gone. After that, I didn't have anything else happen. He didn't talk to her see her again. A lot of questions about this. Well, firstly, I wanted to ask you, you know, this is your nephew who's now, you said this was 16 years. So what, he's 20 something now? Yeah, he's gonna be 21 next month. And does he remember any of this? Yeah, I, he came out to visit me summer last year. And we happened to get a, on a conversation just about like odd things and everything. And I asked him if he happened to remember Victoria. And he kind of got this look on his face. He's like, yeah, I remember everything. He's like, I don't like to talk about it though. Really? I really wanted to ask him more, but he just seemed like he was kind of uncomfortable with it. So I don't know if something happened or maybe it's just uncomfortable to thought that he was friends with like a little ghost girl or something. Yeah, I can see. I don't blame him for that. I mean, has he ever said anything about any other activity that he's had in his life of that type? No, he never mentioned anything else. Like as far as I heard about like really seeing anybody, you're talking to anybody. My mom, my sister never mentioned anything else all about any other like imaginary friends or him saying like, he sees people who nobody else does. I mean, that's his right. It's his experience. It's his right not to talk about it. But boy, do I, I would have a lot of questions for him. Oh, trust me. I wanted, I wanted to ask him more, but he just seemed really adamant about, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. Yeah. Well, did you ever get the sense that, and it's hard to get into his head about this, but maybe he was, was he embarrassed or scared or did he get told not to talk about this? Do you ever get any inkling or what's your gut tell you? I know my mom, my sister really kind of uncomfortable with it. They never really mentioned anything about like seeing anything move as far as like, you know, in their places at all. They just mentioned like the way he would talk to her, like she was like an actual little girl there. And like I said, they have arguments and everything and he would get upset. And so it's like, I don't know if they maybe got really uncomfortable and just like, you know, Victoria has to leave now or anything like that. They never mentioned anything specifically to me. You're saying that nothing really supernatural or paranormal happened to the family other than this one incident here. And it was happening to you while Victoria was visiting. There seemed to be some ghostly activity, some spirit activity, but do you know who this Victoria was? Did you ever try and find out why did this dream come to you? What's the connection here? No. And it's like a lot of the buildings around that area were pretty old. Like I said, the place I was living, it was like an old converted shop. Nothing that I saw in that area really matched the building, nothing at all. Um, we'd never really had like any big fires or anything that I ever heard about where like the building could have burned down. So it's like, I have no idea what the connection was. Like, it was just really odd. It wasn't like, she didn't look like a member of our family or anything like that. So it just didn't seem like there was any connection. I always thought it was just weird that she just randomly showed up and then just left again. Yeah. She just randomly picked you to appear in a dream or, or you were shown the dream in kind of a lucid cinematic fashion for some reason. And then for some other unknown reason, she picked her nephew to go, uh, hang out with. And again, it's not like he's living in the same building or even, you know, in the same apartment or house, he's a few blocks down the street and you have no feeling at all. Like why suddenly, I mean, other than just, he's another little kid that she just went to go play with him, but he is somebody who is related to you. Yeah. It was just, it was strange because there seemed like there should be no connection at all. It wasn't like any other kids in the building had seen her, you know, it wasn't like the place that I saw her in front of was like the place I was living or where they were living. And it seemed like it was so far in the past. Like it wasn't something that just happened to where like she would have shown up or was just really strange. Anything else, uh, happened after that or since then? Not with Victoria. Like I've had some other strange things occur. Uh, my husband and I were with a ghost hunting group for a little bit. And my husband has a son who's a year younger than my nephew. I don't know if you guys have heard of Preston Castle before. It's an I own California. It was like a former boys school. There's like a lot of paranormal groups that have done trips there and investigated. So the ghost group you were with at the time you're going to do a nighttime tour there. And my husband and I had never been there. So we took his son on like a daytime tour. Cause they do daytime tours all the time. His son was maybe about five or six at the time we were going through. It was kind of like an auditorium areas, like their big cafeteria area. And all of a sudden he looks up at the, the rafters. Cause it had, it was like a really huge open ceiling and they had like these big beams that were the rafters. He looks up and he points to the ceiling. He's like, there's a little boy up there. And we're like, little boy. He's like, yeah, there's a little boy out there. So we thought that was really weird. Well, touring some of the areas where it was like the living area where they had their beds and everything. He kept having little kids come up and talk to him. And his son has had like a lot of instances like that where he's had like stuff come up and talk to him. A couple of days later, we started having stuff happen in our apartment. We were sitting and watching TV. His son started pointing towards a cabinet and getting like really freaked out. And we turned and literally the cabinet door just swung open. And we kind of sat there for a second, kind of weirded out. And we went into the kitchen and we like closed the cabinet door and checked and make sure there was, you know, nothing in the way or anything. It didn't swing back open. It didn't like move at all. Well, after that, we kept having cabinet doors. Like one morning I got up to get ready to go to work. All the cabinet doors, all the doors were pulled open. And this kind of like went on for like a few weeks and his son was getting scared all the time. He said, this little kid kept trying to talk to him. And we just kept telling this little boy that he just had to leave. And finally it stopped, but that's probably about the only other really big thing that's happened. That's enough. That kind of activity. Do you think your family is more open to these kinds of things? It runs in the family or there's, there's some kind of familial connection here that allows people to see these kinds of things or just more open to them? Could be like when I was a little kid, we actually lived in a haunted house. Things would like move around time to time. We had a couple of shadow people in one of the rooms that we could see like every single night. It was like this taller man and a shorter man walking around. We had a closet door that never wanted to stay closed. After that house, we like lived with my grandma for a while, but we never really had anything happen there at all. It's funny. You're just very casual in the telling of this story, but in terms of a haunting and like physical manifestations, and then also the connection to your nephew, knowing exactly what's going on, this is a pretty intense situation. And I think you guys are fortunate that she was, seemed to be a pretty benign. Oh, definitely. Yeah. And, and was what she appeared to be, which is not what you always get. Oh yeah. I've, I've heard some bad stories about, you know, oh, it's a little kid, but it's not a little kid. And yeah, I never had any sense of like malice or anything from her. She didn't never, like, I never got bit or scratched or anything. It was just like a child. Like she would just play with things and move things around. Like my nephew was like never bit or scratched or had anything like bad happened to him. So I don't know. I just never felt threatened at all by her. I have a strong gut feeling that Scott's going to be doing some research on the internet here. I'm already looking around a little bit. Looking out for car accidents. Yeah. Around that time. It's a tragic number of headlines of, that say little girl hit by car, by the way, but none of them, I have not seen Victoria so far. The buildings and things you saw in the dream didn't match anything in your local area? No, not at all. It was almost like, I don't know if it was like her school that she was at, because it was like this really big building and it kind of looked like maybe a school or some kind of, it was just like very large and like maybe a school or a hospital or something like that. Okay. But it was this big long street. It was just like a lot of old buildings. And like, I don't remember seeing any homes at all. It just looked like kind of like a, kind of like a main street or office area towards like this big building and just like a lot of like smaller businesses and things, but it didn't look like anything in the area that they were at. And you felt like it was the fifties. Yeah. It looked like maybe forties or fifties. Yeah. Cause it was kind of like the car that they were going to was kind of like, I don't know, I see maybe like an old Buick or something like that. Are you going to tell him that you came on our show about this or not? I think I'll tell him you are going to tell him. I don't know if he listens to podcasts at all. The reason we'd like to talk to him, it's a little like when kids talk about past lives and that those memories by about eight to 11 years old, they start to fade. And then, because I don't think you're meant to remember those past lives, it's kind of a glitch and you're meant to live the life you're living. But it's significant that he remembers very clearly and distinctly what that time was like, what Victoria was like. And, uh, you know, again, he may not for his own justifiable reasons may not want to come on and talk about it, but just what the experiences is like from what he can remember, because we don't often get those stories. It's like you ask somebody when they're adult, it's like a dream. It fades after a while. It's like, you remember certain things about it. But the fact that if he says, uh, that he remembers it very clearly, uh, just what that experience is like, because most of us, uh, haven't had an imaginary child or if they were truly imaginary and you're just, you know, they're just showing up when you want to play and taking on that role. But the fact that this is kind of confirmed as a, an entity of sorts that makes it very interesting. Sometimes when people come on our show and talk about stuff like this, it, something gets rekindled. So please let us know if anything starts to happen again. Do you have, do you have any pets now? Yeah, we've got a two cats and a dog. Two cats and a dog. So you've got a bunch of, uh, psychic eyes in the house already. Yeah. Has, has your husband witnessed anything unusual or anything since this time? Well, if anything comes back, just certainly let us know right away. Let us know. Keep us posted. Also, thank you for taking the time to come on the show and tell your story. We really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. All right. Well, our next guest, I was excited to talk to because upon reading his email a while back, there were elements to it that I like to say are from a trained observer. So I'd like to welcome Zach to the podcast. Hey guys, pretty crazy getting to talk to you now. I've been listening to you for years. I know it's weird and it's also weirder seeing us. That's a lot of, that freaks a lot of people out more than the stories they're going to share. You've been sitting on this story for a while and you meant to send it in, never got around to it. What made you decide to finally write all this out? Because we'll be getting to possibly some other strange things that have happened in your life since around this time. I've told the story to a few different people. I was listening to the Halloween listener episodes last year and I was like, seems like a good story to have on the podcast. I thought you guys would like it. Well, thanks for sticking with us. We appreciate it. How do people react when you do tell them this? And do you tell to fellow military personnel or what type of person do you share this story with and how do they usually react? Yeah, I've told this to some friends in the military. A lot of my close friends on the civilian side too. They generally believe it, I guess. I've heard some stories from other people too, actually, who have had similar experiences. Well, why don't you go ahead and set the stage for this? Where did this take place? When did this take place? What was going on in your life that led up to this? I'm in the Army National Guard. We were deployed to East Africa, Djibouti specifically. We were security forces at a base out there. So just out there in the desert, there really wasn't much out there. The base itself was pretty sparse. It's kind of a sensitive location. Air Force base, but Army was running security for it. Most of the time we were just in watchtowers doing guard duty or manning the front gate, checking IDs as people came in and out. So this was 2021 that we were there. The base actually used to be a French airfield back in the day when Djibouti was a French colony. They had built it. The United States military basically came in and rented the land from the Djibouti government who allowed them to use this airfield. On the base, just kind of scattered all over on the base, off the base, there were graves. So these graves were marked by these big rings of stone. Basically, if you picture someone had dug a hole in the ground for a coffin and then built a big ring of stones around that hole, enough to basically circle the whole thing, that's what it looked like. And they'd be in these big clusters all over the place. We weren't allowed to go anywhere near them. And we didn't really know how old they were either. We had this area that we lived in. It was called the LSA, Life Sustainment Area, something like that. I don't remember exactly. And then we had kind of our chow hall, which is just a tent. It was about a five-minute walk to get there. And there's really nothing in between them. It's just a couple of small hills, dense brush. And so one night, not long after we got in country, I was walking to the chow tent to go get dinner. And it was dark at this time. As I'm walking along, I start to hear this rustling in the brush off to my left side. I heard a noise that sounded a lot like a child laughing. Basically, what it sounded like, but pretty faint coming from the brush. And so that really took me off guard. I was like, what is that? Just pulled out my phone flashlight, and I'm shining it over there. I'm not seeing anything. But I was armed, so I felt pretty safe. Kept on walking. The rest of the time, I was walking to the chow area. Just kept on hearing this rustling in the brush that was kind of like following me. A little while after that, I actually heard a hyena for the first time in person. And I was like, that sounded a lot like what I heard. I had also heard stories after that about how they had actually caught a hyena on base about a year before. It had managed to sneak on somehow. So we were on day shift at the time, but day shift started at 4.30 a.m. So it was still dark out for about an hour. Sun rose around 5.30 at that time of year. I was in our watchtower. The guy that I was in there with actually came from our sniper section, but he attached to us for deployment. He's been to ranger school, so he's super experienced, super knowledgeable. The two of us were on guard duty together in this tower. So in the towers, we had these thermal scopes. They're actually designed to be mounted to a machine gun, but we just kind of used them as spotting scopes just to scan the sector. In addition to that, we had a smaller thermal that was made to be mounted to your helmet like night vision. We'd also just use that like a spotting scope as well. And then we had our night vision goggles, which not really a goggle. It's more of a monocular single eye, but we would keep those attached to our helmets and just have those at hand in case we needed to throw them on. So this is just after we got on watch. So just after 4.30 a.m., the two of us are sitting in the tower together. I grab one of the bigger thermal scopes. I'm doing a sector scan, just looking out over the desert. It's pretty flat, mostly just brush. And these scopes were pretty sensitive. Like you could see folds in people's clothing. You could see objects and pockets just based on variances in temperature. So I'm doing the sector scan and I see this guy walking across the desert. So the thermals were in white hot mode. So anything that's hot shows up bright white, like hotter than the surroundings. And you can see like the foliage and everything of like all this brush. You can see like even variations of temperature in those. So usually a person shows up glowing bright white when it's in white hot mode. And then it'll be like a little bit darker, like where their clothing is, but like anywhere there's exposed skin, it's bright white. I see a person and they should be glowing white, but for some reason, they're pitch black, like the darkest thing on the thermal. And that would mean they're, they're ice cold. And for them to be pitch black, the same color across the entire surface, they either had to be extremely cold, like just walked out of a deep freeze or they would have to be the same consistent temperature across their entire surface. So this person's just walking across the desert, maybe 50 meters off our fence line. And I'm looking at them like, this is really weird. I don't know what's going on here. And so I cycled the thermal from white hot to black hot to see if maybe it was a, an issue with the thermal and same thing. Now they're glowing bright white, which means they're cold and everything else is showing up brighter, like warmer than them. We'd see people out there ever once in a while. Uh, this was while that big civil war was going on in Ethiopia. So we'd have lots of refugees coming from Ethiopia and they'd walk past the base as they're headed to Djibouti city. So we'd see people out there every once in a while. Sometimes they get pretty close to the fence line, but because we were guests in the country, we didn't really have jurisdiction outside of the base, uh, beyond a certain distance. So if they were, they were getting too close to the fence line and they were acting suspicious, we would call the Jean Don Marie, which is like their national police there in Djibouti. And they'd come and pick them up and question them. So it's not too unusual to see someone there. It was just the fact that they were cold. So I handed him the thermal that I was using and I told him where to look. And so he picks up the thermal, looks through it. And he was just like, what is that? Super confused. And like I said, this dude's a sniper. He's, he's used to using these kinds of technology. And so he's like confused by it. He's cycling through the different modes to like zooming in and out. And he's like, that's so weird. And so while he's doing that, I grabbed the other thermal scope, the large one, the same that he was using. And I turned it on and started looking through it thinking like, maybe it is just a problem with that particular scope. And so I turn on the other one and it's the exact same thing. He's still showing up as ice cold, solid pitch black, ice cold. So there was a large cluster of graves right near that tower, as well as some just outside of the base near that tower. One of the particular ones that that was near this tower, it was a bit different. It had just a giant pile of rocks on top of it, like chest high. And so thinking back to that, that it kind of like, made me think of something that one of our interpreters told us, he was telling us that when someone out there kills a black mamba, because they were they were all over the place out there. When someone kills a black mamba, they'll actually dig a hole. They'll put the black mamba in there, they'll burn it, and then cover it up with a pile of rocks. Just to warn people, we killed a black mamba here, because they were so afraid of the venom. You know, like they didn't even be afraid it would like poison the ground. And so this one particular grave kind of reminded me that there's just a giant pile of rocks on there. So I was like, were they trying to keep something in there where they were trying to like warn people away from this specific grave? So I grabbed my night vision, put it on and flip it down. And I'm looking at that exact same spot. I don't see anything. And so the night vision works by basically just amplifying whatever light is there. That doesn't mean that's like there wasn't anything there. But like whatever was there, like if there was something that wasn't giving off any light. I'm not seeing anything on the night vision, I switched back to the thermal still there, switch back and forth between the two a few times and they're on the thermal but not there on the night vision. At this point, it was getting pretty close to sunrise. So we kept on just watching the area watching this person walking, and he ended up walking behind this big berm and never came back out from behind it. And so the two of us just kept on watching that spot until the sun rose, and we didn't need the scopes anymore. Watch that spot for the next few hours and never saw anyone come out from behind it. This thing, whatever it was, it was existing. It was existing as a temperature variation, but it was not existing in the real world, which is why the night vision didn't see anything. Essentially, yeah, that was my opinion. How long were you observing it before it disappeared behind the berm? I'd say a good 10 minutes. And then you wait, sun comes up, you guys are still on duty, nothing ever comes out from behind the berm. Nope, never saw anything else there. And at no point did this seem like, you know, something that was trying to approach the base or that was armed or had any paraphernalia or anything. It was just a figure. Yeah, just a human silhouette, nothing in their hands, nothing suspicious other than the temperature. It was just like the shape of the human body, basically. Again, speculation on my part here, totally. But essentially, for all intents and purposes, this thing's invisible to the naked eye. And you do wonder when people report feeling like their eyes upon them, feeling that there's a presence there, feeling a rush of coldness come through, but they don't see anything, that they get all the other effects. And you wonder, with the technology had available, that in some form, you were able to see something that would normally be invisible. And if you were next to it, you might feel the cold coming off this thing and be freaked out, but never really understand what was just walking by, minding its own business to a degree, and then disappearing. It just, yeah, unless that somebody's out there, then what would be the high for the daytime temp out of that perimeter? Pretty hot. It would get up to the 120s, high humidity too, so the fuel would be up in the 130s, 140s sometimes. So if somebody just out there camping, taking a snooze, it would be very uncomfortable. It would, yeah. Did you remake a report? No, we didn't make any kind of report. You know, usually when we saw people walking by, if they weren't doing anything suspicious, we'd maybe call it up and say someone was walking by there, but no kind of report or anything. That's what I wondered about the administrative part of this, is that if you had to file a report, like, what would you say about that? Because it's inconclusive, and there'd be more questions from commanding officers, I would imagine. But this is not the only strange thing that was seen there by personnel, right? About a month later, something else happened? Yeah, so about a month later, I ended up in a different tower. When they would take us to the towers, we'd basically load up in trucks, and we'd go and get dropped off at the towers, swap out with the crew that was there before. They'd go back and shower up and get ready for bed and everything. So one night, we were on night shift at this point. We'd get relieved, and we're in the truck headed back to our living area. And we were kind of not super short-staffed, but just like a little bit understaffed. So every once in a while, someone would end up in a tower alone. And it was always someone who was super responsible, like, you know, they could trust to be there alone. So this particular time, we had a sergeant who was there. He was in that same tower alone. He'd been there alone for this whole rotation, so about a week. And one night morning, I guess, early morning, we come rolling back into our living area, which we got relieved. And we're just talking, and he seems like a little bit, like, visually freaked out. And someone asked him about it, and he said that he was something about a ghost, basically. Mumbled something about a ghost, but refused to elaborate any further on it. Now, he was also stationed, sorry, he was also on lookout at Delta 9, the same tower you were at? Yeah, he was in the same tower where we saw our, I guess, ghost. There's something going on out there, it sounds like. Did you guys ever go over there, off-base, and check it out up close? Yeah, we did some off-base patrols. Like, we had to stay within a certain perimeter around the base, but we'd go out in trucks and kind of drive around the perimeter every once in a while. And did you go to this area where you saw this figure? Yeah, we drove right through that area. There's no one, like, staying out there in a little shack living amongst the graves for some weird reason? Nothing happening like that? No. And that sergeant never said a word about it ever again. Like, that was it. He just said, I saw something strange, maybe a ghost, and that was it. And he was a real serious guy. You know, he had multiple combat deployments to Afghanistan. Like, and yeah, he was freaked out, but he wouldn't tell anyone what happened. Well, Zach, we want to thank you for sharing these stories with us. The one on the base, especially with the whatever you saw, what's interesting about that is it's a lot of that discussion that comes up around the current UAP hearings in Congress and that sort of thing, and all the flurry of activity around that is that you have sensor data here. You have high end sensor data. You are able to try to identify a ghost with multiple pieces of expensive, best of the best kind of gear. And you should have been able to determine what was out there. That's the whole point of that gear. There's not supposed to be any surprises for you guys. And this thing was a surprise, whatever it was. And it's a non-technical object, some sort of living being that refuses to be identified across all the spectrums. It's just picking one to show up on. And that's a pretty wild thing that, and with the sensor data, that gives us a chance to speculate a little bit on how these things might work, which goes to your whole theory and idea of the possibility of interdimensionality and that sort of thing. It may not have been connected with the nearby graves to where you were. It could have just been something else. Stuff like that is seen on Skinwalker Ranch all the time. Weird things like that, that just show up on one device, but not the other. Yeah. There's plenty of anecdotes, especially in that book. And here's the thing. It's like, if there's reports that there's something in the sky, it's been picked up on radar and it's anomalous, that data is somewhere. It's like the electronic warfare officer, maybe the Princeton that was monitoring the contact point or one of the points in the exercise. He said, as soon as that happened, there's a few basic questions, you get grilled a little bit, and then they basically show up and take the hard drives. And that's the end of the story. Yeah. So all that data, that recording, and you know that they're going to bother to record it, that is somewhere. And somebody knows about it, but the rest of us will probably never find out. So who knows? I hope we do. Me too. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. 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And basically, that's when I started checking you guys out, and I've been listening ever since. So I've been a faithful listener. Well, thank you for not offboarding yourself with all the people who repeatedly told us we were jumping the shark over the past several years. So thanks for writing it out. We're so glad you finally decided to send your story. And I know a lot of folks had the same feeling and attitude as you did. It's like you've always been meant to, life gets in the way, and then you finally decided to pull the trigger and send it in. And another reason that we singled this story out for this year was that it's the unique perspective of somebody who worked as a ghost tour guide. And ironically, I was just talking about this before we started rolling, that the people that are in the thick of it at these haunted locations day in and day out, know the history of it, talk about it to strangers and visitors and guests, will often have a few weird things that they can talk about, little small anecdotes and interactions and things they've seen. And mostly, it seems to me that this kind of stuff happens to the guests, which I guess is you get your bang for your buck there. But you ask them, it's like, yeah, I've seen a few strange things and you talk to the other guys and, you know, they'll have some stories. But your story is significant in that you were extremely interactive and affected by one of these tours that you gave. And so why don't you tell us a little bit about this location, about the setup and how you started working for the company and the three tours I think they give. And this would be in Florida's Gulf Coast around the Orlando area. Back in 2007, I had moved down to Florida for the second time in between jobs and what have you. And I started my own motorcycle repair shop. I needed some extra cash to, you know, help float bills and whatnot. And my friend, who is now my wife, I was basically crashing on our couch. One day, you know, we were going through and we were like, hey, let's go do something in Orlando. And we went on the internet and we found this ghost tour. We went on the ghost tour tour. And that's basically what piqued my interest. Like we've done ghost tours and stuff in the past and, you know, going up to Savannah, St. Augustine, what have you. But this particular ghost tour that we went on, it wasn't campy. Like the other ghost tours are fun, right? But it wasn't campy. This one was steeped in history. And then it gave you, you know, the opportunity to go and actually investigate a haunted location using various equipment, so on and so forth. So we went on the tour. I fell in love at that time. Emilio was the owner of the ghost tour, you know, 2007. Shoot him an email. I'm like, hey, man, how can I be part of your ghost tour? So he responded back. And next thing you know, we're meeting at a hooligans in downtown Orlando. He's interviewing me like it's a job job. And yeah, we hit it off. And next thing you know, I was working there for a little over a year and a half. Okay. So had you ever done like a public facing gig like that where you had to add a performance to it or? Never. Okay. Never. That's where I cut my teeth on public speaking. I think, you know, becoming an instructor where I work now, I was an instructor. And I credit my time working at the ghost tour for my ability to publicly speak. This definitely helped, you know, open me up and, you know, talking to large crowds, especially around Halloween time. Like on my tour, I would have anywhere between 25 and 30 participants and we would, we would stagger them throughout the day. So like Saturdays, Sundays, leading up to, and including Halloween, we were just rocking and rolling. Yeah. It was a lot of fun, you know, walking around. I had my clipboard, my wife, my now wife would walk with me, you know, she would be like my assistant on the really big tours, getting head counts and, you know, collecting money and stuff like that. So, and then I had my clipboard with my, you know, my, my cliff notes on there. And then I would just go through refresh real quick. And then I would give the entire tour, not even using everything from memory. So. Yeah. Were you pretty autonomous where they, they, he just let you kind of develop the tour and the talking points yourself based on research and history that you'd collected? Correct. So what we had to do was as a new tour guide, we had to shadow other tour guides, right. And get a feel of what the tour was like, you know, get a feel of the tempo, key talking points. We would write our own notes and everything. But the one thing that Emilio really stressed was if we're going to be giving this tour, it's got to be accurate. Like the historical information we're giving is accurate information for that time. These things actually happened in the 1880s, 1890s. And then we would go and interview, you know, industry workers, you know, barbacks and hostesses and what have you and get more insight on, Hey, what was going on here? You know, you know, I'm hearing a story about this. What could you tell me? Stuff like that. But one of the things he would have, like I had to do as write a passage, as I'd like to say is my wife and I actually went down to the Orlando library and went through microfiche and went through old historical books on Orlando to make sure, okay, okay. Bumby started, you know, the railroad, built the Bumby block in 1888. This is what these buildings were at this particular time. This was a brothel here. This is the original mortician for Orlando here. And then that building burned down and then they opened up here and Orlando had, you know, its first quote unquote drive-through mortuary and just going through different things. And then, and this is the Orlando tour. And then we ended at the history center, which was the original courthouse burnt down in 19, early 1900s. The new one was erected in 1927. And then it was in operation up until the early 2000s till they decommissioned it and then built a bigger courthouse to accommodate, you know, the influx of people coming into Orlando. So one, we're very impressed with the amount of research you've done for this and very appreciative to when correct historical information is given out. And even if it's just a tour for tourists or something fun to do, we very much appreciate that you went to the lengths and troubles to actually give people the correct historical information, because, you know, again, some of these things are fun. And like you said, they can be campy and that's fun too, but we have a great deep respect for history as I'm sure you do. It sounds like, and how these rumors and legends get started a lot of times based on hearsay and weak research at all, if at all. And I loved starting people out on at least the correct historical information as much as it can be found because legends are going to spring up anyway from these things and combined with people's experiences and anecdotes get blended, but it's good to start off with good information. So anyways, we're glad to hear that. And out of the tours, you said there were three tours that this company offered. One was, these are walking tours as well. So one was downtown Orlando. The other one was at a local cemetery. And the third is the one that you took over. How did you end up with the hotel tour? And tell us about the hotel a bit. So primarily my tours, because I was based in Orlando, my tours were the, it was a two hour walking tour in Orlando. Again, we did one hour of, you know, historical, you know, ghost stories, what have you. And then the second hour is we had a partnership with the history center, which was also haunted. And we would take guests into the history center, look at the old courthouse, go into the judges chambers, do an investigation. And then, and there, so I was doing that tour and I was doing the Greenwood Cemetery tour as well. And we had just finished, it was again, late 2007. So I want to say around this time, early November, we had just finished our, you know, Halloween rush and Emilio calls me. It was like two o'clock on a Saturday. And he calls me up. He's like, Hey, we need some help over at the Bellevue Biltmore. Would you be okay with going? And I said, yeah, what time do you need me there? And he goes, well, the tour starts at this time. If you could get there, I'll pay for your room. You don't have to worry about the room or anything. Just, I want to start cross-training you to start doing this tour. And I said, absolutely. So again, I look at my, you know, my then friend, now wife, and I was like, Hey, let's go. You mind going to St. Pete? It's actually Bel Air, but it's very close to St. Pete. I said, you fancy going to St. Pete? Go stay at a haunted hotel and see if we could, you know, what we could get into. And she was like, yeah, absolutely. So we had never been. So we drive out to St. Pete and we come up upon the hotel and it was this massive hotel on acreage that was right on the Gulf of Mexico. And it was huge. I mean, it was the second largest freestanding wooden structure in the United States from like mid-1920s until it was part of it, which is said was demolished. And I believe 2015, somewhere around that timeframe. I mean, it was just huge. It was something like almost 400,000 square feet. And I'll never forget it, right? Pulling up, you're pulling up, right? We're in Florida. My wife and I are originally from New Jersey, right? So it's like, we're so used to, you know, the fall time leaves, everything, spooky season. It's dark out, it's cold, it's dreary. And it was that quintessential long driveway going to the giant mansion, which was a hotel. And we're driving up and we were both like awestruck, like wooden structure, giant white building, green roofs, balconies. I mean, oak trees all over the place. I mean, it was just gorgeous. It was interesting because we're driving up this long driveway. And in the nineties, the hotel was bought by a Japanese corporation. And at that time they did like a facelift to the hotel and they put this rotundo on the front of the hotel, which was completely out of place. So you had this building that was built in the 1890s. And then you had this modern day rotundo on the front of it. And we were like, what the heck is this? But then you get in and it was just beautiful. So anyway, they wound up taking that down later on, right before they shut their doors. But anyway, we pull up and it was just beautiful. There's only 38,000 square feet of the original 300 and whatever thousand square feet left. So it's a shame because again, it was a beautiful location. They demolished most of the building, left a portion. The developer that purchased the property actually moved the building that was remaining to a different location on the property and then built condos and everything, uh, where the original structure stood. What they kept from what I've seen, we haven't been back since, but pictures I've seen, they did a really good job of restoring it. Wow. Yeah. Your notes here say, uh, built in 1897, roughly 350,000 square feet and Tiffany glass and manic gardens. And yeah, I guess, you know, you, you look at the photos online and you can just kind of feel what it's like being there. It's a, as you said, inspiringly beautiful, but, but also haunted. Yeah. So we show up to the hotel. I meet the other tour guides, my wife and I meet the other tour guides. We introduce ourselves and we're starting to, we had a, we had to go back down to the lobby. We were there for about 15, 20 minutes or so. Went back down to the lobby and we picked up our first tour group and it was about 15 or so people. And I'm there with my notebook and everything. I'm taking notes, you know, we're walking around, they're giving the tour. Uh, we finish up with that tour group and we're sitting, just conversing in the lobby. And one of the other tour guides comes down, he goes, Hey Joe, would you be interested in helping me out with this private tour? Excuse me. And I said, absolutely. Like, what are we doing? He goes, well, we're going to go up the tour that you just went on is what we normally do, which is you go around the ground, you walk through the parts of the hotel that are, you know, refurbished, right? What we're going to do is we're going to go up to the fourth and fifth floor. We have rights to go up there. Not everybody goes up there. We only take select tours, groups, small groups up there. And we go through the servants quarters and then the original children's quarters. So one of the things about that hotel that really made it interesting is that in the winters, the elite from up north, northeast would actually come down on, on the train and spend the winters at that location. So there was teachers on premise, there was playgrounds, all that stuff to accommodate these families. So that the families could stay there for the winter and then in the summer, go back up north. So the fourth and fifth floor is where we were spending most of our time. So we go on the tour and, you know, this part of the hotel, like I was saying, is completely unrestored. There's no electricity up there. There's, you know, open beams, again, the quintessential haunted house. And we take the group and it was, I remember it distinctly. It was these four young ladies and they had all this equipment and they wanted to do EVP recordings and what have you. So we're walking them through. And again, this is my first time walking through this building, especially this part of the building. So we give them the tour. We talk about the building, what they can and cannot do on the tour. And then we basically let them go. So they were going through the rooms and we would monitor like a chaperone, right? We're monitoring what they're doing, making sure they're not messing anything up and what have you. We start on the fourth floor. We walk up to the fifth floor. They're doing their recordings. You know, we're hearing creepy sounds. We're hearing, you know, knocking, what have you. So the tour group's getting all excited because they're getting information and what have you. And then we make our way down to the fourth floor. So on the fourth floor, we're standing there. We go through and just to paint a really quick picture. So the fourth floor, if the building, the corridor that we were in was going from east to west, we were standing on the east side, looking at the west side. So if we're standing in front of the door, we're pointing west towards the Gulf of Mexico. Down that long corridor, again, you have children, paraphernalia, toys, clothes, beds, everything is just strewn all over the place. And it's pitch black. But when you look down the hallway, at the end of the hallway, there was a window. And on either side of the hallway, it was lined with bedrooms. So I'm going to say there was probably about 10 or 15 bedrooms in total, maybe 16, just to make it even, bedrooms lining the hallway. And as we walk from east to west, the tour group went into bedrooms, breaking out their EVPs and meters and everything, and just having a grand old time. And we were just sit back monitoring. I'm not thinking anything of it. You know, my wife's like twiddling her thumbs. You know, we're talking, you know, me and the other tour guide, the three of us, we're talking, not paying any attention. And the tour group makes their way all the way down. And as we're walking, at the corner of my eye, I've always caught things, right? Like when I'm in a room, or in an area, like I've been in places where I'm like, I'm not going in there, because, you know, the hair stands up on my arms, I get goosebumps. And one of my other reactions is my eyes will automatically start to tear. It's fight or flight kind of thing kicks in with me. As we're walking down with this group, you know, we're just meandering behind them, just having a conversation. And I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye, it looked like a black silhouette kind of went past me. And I turn, I look, I didn't see anything. I didn't think anything of it. And we just continue on. So again, the female group, the tour group, they get done, they come back around, and there's a table sitting there. And the girl goes, hey, let's try to do like a seance. And the table was large enough. And I've never done one before. This is the first time I've ever witnessed it. What they did was they all stood around, but there was a gap between. So the two ladies couldn't connect, you know, complete the circuit, right? So my wife was standing there, and they asked her, would you like to be part of this? And my wife's like, she's a little skeptical. She's never had anything happen to her. And she's the type that, oh, I want something to happen to me. And I was like, well, you know, have fun, see what happens. So she goes over, and they all lay their hands on the table, you know, completing the circle. And they start asking questions. Again, me and the other tour guide, we're not thinking anything of it. We're just sitting back watching. As they're talking, and again, I forget what they were saying, but they were talking, asking questions, and what have you. And literally, the table starts to slowly rock. I bumped the tour guide next to me. I was like, holy cow, man, you see this? The table's actually moving. And then the table is steadily rocking faster back and forth to the point that it was tipping on one leg as it was rocking around, going in this circular motion, right? So we're standing there, and we're like, wow, this is really cool. And as that's going on, again, I'm standing at the east side looking west down that hallway. And you have that window at the end of the hallway. And again, it's pitch black, the moon is coming through the window. And I see this black silhouette cross over from one room to the other. And I'm talking about it, I'm getting chills right now talking about it, because I see this black silhouette walk across from one room to the other. And it was kind of like, you know, blink your eyes, you know, give them a quick rub, did I see what I actually just saw? Or is it just, you know, my brain trying to make something because of the darkness, you know? So then I'm standing there, and I'm talking to the, you know, the other tour guide again, and they're still doing their thing, the tour group, my wife are still doing, participating in this whole event. And again, I'm looking down that hallway, and I see somebody, a silhouette of a person peek out, and then go back. And I'm like, man, I'm thinking to myself, and, you know, I didn't want to say anything because you're the other tour guide, because then it's like, you know, that group thing starts to go on, right? It's like, oh, yeah, I saw that too. And I didn't want to say anything until I could actually verify that something was down there. So again, everything's going on, I'm looking straight ahead, and I'm looking down the hall. I see that silhouette pop its head back out again, pop in real quick, and then jet across to the other room. And I'm noticing it's doing this as it's moving closer. I'm leaning against the door, I'm just kind of got my leg up on the door, back against the wall, kind of just standing there. And I'm watching this, and I'm watching this black figure slowly make its way towards me, but using the rooms as cover as it's making its way towards me. So as this figure is getting closer to me, the hair on my arms, my back of my neck, I'm starting to get goosebumps, like that fight or flight mode is starting to kick in, and I'm like, this is kind of creepy. So there was four rooms left out of nowhere. It gets to the second bank of rooms, pops its head out, and then all I see is this black thing rush at me. And I kind of just stood there, and I lifted my arms. I braced for impact, basically. It was like somebody was coming to hit me. I just braced for impact, and I got hit with this pain in my stomach that was so bad that it set me to the ground on my knees, and then I just started coughing, and like somebody or something literally hit me so hard that it knocked the breath out of me. My wife is doing this thing with the tour group. She sees this. She breaks away. The table goes down. She comes over. The tour guide that I was with pulls out his phone, calls the other tour guide downstairs, and says, hey, I need you to come up to the fourth floor. We got to get Joe out of here. And I was like, it literally knocked the wind out. I'm coughing, wanting to vomit. I felt so sick. And I was like, I just like, again, that fight or flight. I was like, I got to get out of here. I got to get out of here. And turn around. They grabbed me. We walk through the back door. We make our way down the stairwell to the third floor. And the minute I got to the bottom of the stairwell, I started feeling better. I got a bottle of water. I was drinking the water. And I was just like, I am not going back up there. Like, whatever that was was violent. And it was me and my wife, the other tour guide. And the other tour guide goes to me, he goes, he goes, I saw it. I go, what did you see? He goes, I saw that figure popping its head out and making its way towards us. And I was like, you saw that? It was elation because somebody else could verify it. He goes, I saw it. He goes, I saw that black shadow come right at you. And it hit you. And like, you just lift it up and then fell right over. It was crazy. I've been back to that location a couple of times after that, but I never went back up to the fourth or fifth floor. Never. I was done. It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. Your fellow tour guide said he saw it go into you. And what he described was a black transparent ribbon going through you as you fell to your knees. Yeah. So the four rooms, the second bank of rooms towards where we were, it was so quick. And I remember it coming out and it came out of the room and kind of did a U and then a B line straight for me. And when it hit again, I was like bracing for impact. It was literally like I was back on the football field in high school, just caught a pass and I'm waiting for that linebacker to give me one before I hit the ground. Like I just, I tensed up. I remember distinctly get raising up on my, on my tippy toes. And then it just went through and I felt it go in and I felt it come out my back. And then that's when I, I hit the ground and I was out. Like I couldn't catch my breath. I was, I was violently ill. Like I was on my knees, literally dry heaving while I was there as this was going on. Did you get any imagery in your head? Any kind of visuals as this was happening? What was going on inside you other than the horribly violent feeling? It was almost like when it was getting close to me, it looked like a caretaker, like a, like a maintenance man from the hotel. I couldn't see eyes, right? I couldn't, there wasn't a mouth, but there was like silhouette and I can remember it. In modern dress or like period? I would say period clothing. Like he had suspended, he had overalls on and like a flannel shirt. Like he was, he was like a, a, like a maintenance guy, right? Like the only thing he was missing was the straw hat or what have you, but I didn't see any eyes. I didn't see a face. It was just a silhouette and I could vaguely make out the clothing that he was wearing when he came up and when he hit the lore from the people who've stayed there and, uh, more so from the people who've worked there at the hotel, there is the legend that this man in black or this black figure, this black shadow is a groundskeeper and he's known as the man in black. Is that correct? That is correct. As the legend goes, the fourth floor was for the children of these, uh, well-heeled Tony folks as they were wintering there in Florida to keep the kids out of sight, out of mind, at least while the parents were enjoying their day. And the fifth floor was for the servants, uh, their servants and nannies and whatnot. And so as the legend goes, the caretaker of the place was not too fond of children and would abuse some of the kids on the fourth floor. I don't know in what way, but basically was not very nice to them and just had it out. I'm sure they were running around causing trouble, maybe breaking things. And he didn't like that while he was working there. So he added out for the kids staying there. And that continues to this day. And as you wrote also in your notes, that people who were working, they were told never to go up to the fourth floor by yourself, especially if you were a woman. Yeah. So it was interesting because one of the things when we were on that tour, the other tour guides were telling me, you know, the lore about the hotel and that women, and even when we were on the tour, the other tour guide specifically told the women, like, there's a strong possibility you're going to get grabbed. You're going to get pushed. Like you're going to feel something or something is going to happen to you because of this gentleman and his disposition. He, he somewhere, somehow, some way, he, something happened with him and the children. He didn't get along with them. You know, lore had that he was, you know, abusive and what have you, to what extent we don't know, but like we would have, you know, psychic mediums go to the locations as well to try to, you know, get in touch with, with whatever spirits were there. And during our own investigations, before we started the tours to just get more, again, try to get more insight as to, okay, what's actually going on. Was that connected to a specific individual historically, or is it just, uh, like word of mouth, apocryphal kind of legendary stuff of this guy or has people looked it up and said, no, you know, it was actually this guy. We do have some evidence of some interaction or that he worked here. Honestly, I think it was more lore than anything because, you know, they, again, we never had a name. We never could pinpoint. There were groundskeepers that worked there that were male, but there was never any real sufficient evidence to back up. We just knew that, okay, there's something nasty up on the fourth floor. And we use that as a piece to, you know, get the, get the curiosity going and what have you. You actually saw this thing. And as you told us before we started rolling here that, you know, all of our memory fades, but everything is pretty crystal clear about that evening still to this day in your mind. Just even talking about it brings me back to that moment when like, I remember it was, it was chilly for being Florida. The moon was out. It was just so dark. Like that's the thing. It was so dark in that building. And all you had was that window. Well, you had other windows, but you know, the moonlight's coming through the window at the end of the hall on the West side and it just illuminated. And again, it literally watching like dust being kicked up. It's like I was there. So what did the owner of the company say? He was excited about it. He was always adamant that I had some type of energy about me, you know, and that I was sensitive and, and, you know, I always felt that I was sensitive to that stuff, but he was, he was always excited when I would report back to him. Cause at the end of the night he would ask, you know, Hey, how was the tour? Right. And I'd tell him, Hey, this was what happened. This is what happened to me. And he would get excited about it. He's like, Oh, this is great. You know, he goes, and talking to him, he was like, that's why I wanted to send you to the Biltmore. Cause I knew that something like you have some type of activity while you were there. And I was like, cool. Thanks. The table and forgive me if you said this too, I missed it. The type, the table was one that you guys had sat there for, for this, for the tours, or it was a, it was a preexisting piece of furniture. What kind of furniture? It was a preexisting piece of furniture that was there. Was it a card table or like a wooden, like a heavier type table? Yeah, it was a wooden circular table. It had a center post with four legs that came out at the bottom. Yeah. So it was, it could have been original to that, that location. And when it was rotating around, I remember it pivoting on each one of the four little stumps that came out of the base. Picture the stem going down to, or, you know, like a cross plank footing system. So as that table rotated around, it was kind of like clunky in its movement, but it was rock as it hit each part of the footing. The main thing that I want to say about that observationally is that this is a heavy table. And there's a big difference between table tilting with something like that and a card table. What did your wife think? Who's a little bit skeptical. And she sees, as you described this, essentially this table is levitating off the floor. She was excited because she was actually finally able to be part of one of these experiences. It was a big table. It took me and the other tour guide, like when they came over and they saw the table, it was sitting closer to the wall and they asked us to take the table and move it more towards the center of the hallway. And it took two of us to move it. You know, it wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to pick this little table up and shimmy it over myself. It took two, me and the other tour guide to pick it up and move it. Do you think the action with the table was connected to the black figure that you saw, or were these two separate events? That's a great question. I never thought of that before. I think it could have been two separate events, but I think the black figure was connected in that he was annoyed that we were in his space, you know, disrupting the quiet or what have you. Because we were making, I mean, we weren't church mice walking through. I mean, we were talking and having fun and, you know, making a little bit of noise. But I think that's where the correlation comes in is that here we have these individuals doing this, having this seance or table activity. And this particular spirit didn't want to have anything to do with it. And I was the brunt of, yeah. When you said it was approaching you and it's doing this kind of almost like the meme with the cat, where you look away and you look back and it's closer and that kind of thing. As it's coming up to you and getting closer and closer, what I was curious about from a spatial perspective, and it's attempts to get closer to you, was it going into a room and then coming out of a room that was closer? Or was it coming out of rooms and zigzagging to the next closest room across the hallway? It was actually doing both. Oh, really? So when it started at the end of the hallway, he went across again from my right to left, came across, and then he was, or I call him he, you know, you'd see his head pop out, it would come back in, and then it would diagonally go to the next room. And it did it towards the end. But as it got closer, as the spirit or the entity got closer to me, it was head out and then next room, head out. And then across the hall, I would see something peer out and then go back in. And then it was when it got to the left side, peered out, that second bank of rooms came out and just did a beeline towards me. In terms of walls and doors and abilities, it was teleporting itself in a way. It wasn't going through what you would classify as openings that a human would need to use. It was appearing in places almost like the Bugs Bunny chasing or whatever, where they're coming out of all different doors or whatever that don't make sense. It was- Yeah, that's correct. As he got closer to me, that's how he started. But I get the sense here, this is intentional with a little bit of subterfuge or he's hiding. The movement describes to me as if somebody were a live physical being. They were trying not to be seen as he was ducking in and out of rooms, poking its head out to look at you guys. Well, it's trying to sneak up on you in a way before it actually just runs at you and tackles you. And so, like I said, instead of just starting off from the end of the hallway in a straight shot running towards you, like, get out of here. I'm going to charge at you. It's trying to sneak up on you. It knows what it's doing. That's what I'm saying. It knows its intention. It knows its abilities. And it knows that if it rushes into you, that it can do this. It can have this effect and cause you some illness or a little bit of harm there and get you to leave. 100% there was purpose and intent by this movement and its actions. I wholeheartedly 100% agree with you on that. For folks that haven't experienced it, people say, oh, it knocked the wind out of me as a figure of speech. But you literally can't. I think what happens in that scenario is that your lungs collapse a little bit and it's hard. They have to reinflate before you feel like you can draw your breath, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that's what this felt like to you. It felt like you had truly been tackled by a physical human being. 100%. You're gasping because all the breath has come out of your lungs, right? So you're kind of having to reset and pull. But in that period of time, when you're trying to get air back in your lungs, it's kind of like your head is jerky and you're gasping for something that isn't essentially there. And then that's when the panic, I don't know if you've ever had the wind knocked out, panic literally starts to set in. Yeah, you feel like you're suffocating. Yes. And that is exactly what happened when I was there. Wow. You know, your wife was part of the table tilting situation and she saw you. You fell to your knees, like down to the ground, right? Yes. How far apart were you from her when this happened? I was against the door. The table probably was about 10 feet away from me, diagonally to my right. So not that far. Yeah, it wasn't that far. It was kind of like almost that superhero pose, right? Like when you see the superheroes hit the ground, like the one leg down, arms, you know, look up. I just didn't have any of that cool look up. You didn't have your cape. I'm searching for breakfast out there and I'm starting to panic. And then that's when my wife broke the circle with the tour group. And that's when the table went down and then she came over and she's like, are you okay? And I was like, I just got to, I got to get out of here. Like once I got, I regained my composure and, you know, filled my lungs, I was like, I got I got to get out of here. I got to get out of here. I wanted to tell you something that's very interesting. Um, in one of the other stories that we recorded, and actually this was an off the air recording. The person who was in it was experiencing repeated visits from something very scary over the years. And one of the things that he said after we stopped recording was that he got a sense of fight or flight whenever he was watching ghost shows on TV. So he would watch the shows and some incidents would trigger a very visceral reaction in him and others wouldn't. And he was very quick to say to us, I'm not saying that I know when there really is a ghost in the scene and when there isn't, it's just sometimes I get super, it's like I'm there. It's like he says he gets pulled into the moment and into the experience, even though it's on a TV show. Right. Well, and tears would stream down his face. That's what I wanted to say. Because when you said your eyes welled up, this one of the things he told us was that he would start crying uncontrollably and it wasn't like a sadness kind of crying. And it's very interesting to me because we only got, I think six, maybe seven stories, five, six, seven stories in this episode. Two of them are from people who both think they might be a little bit connected and you both are describing the exact same feeling and a very particular symptom of being involved with the other side with the eye watering. That's amazing. I have never heard of anybody else having that same reaction when they're in an area that's supposed to be haunted. We got to get you guys together, as they say in Ghostbusters. But unfortunately, he lives across the pond. But still, it's pretty amazing to me. And it's amazing to me too, because we have a very small sample size of stories in this particular episode, but you guys are intersecting in that way. So that's pretty interesting. So when you're having that crying feeling, is that related necessarily to sadness or it's more of an uncontrolled physical response to something that you don't understand? It's a completely uncontrollable response. Again, I walk in and the waterworks just start. And people look at you funny. I've walked into places and we're standing there on a tour and I turn and, you know, again, I get all the symptoms and I'm just literally not an uncontrollable, but a consistent flow of tears coming out of my eyes as we're there. Do you think that's why this spirit picked on you and singled you out? Because again, if you believe the lore, he may have been more prone to attack one of the women that were there in the hallway, even your wife, because he's got something out for women, but you were singled out. I absolutely 100% believe that because on my other tours, there would always be like definitely one person, maybe two people that would, you know, get some type of feeling on the tour. I was always reactionary on all my tours, which is weird. And that's how I knew on my tour that we were going to have some type of activity tonight. One question I had about how the, these effects and the interactions start to happen. There's always a period when you first start that it seems like there's nothing happening or it's not going to, and then it takes a little while for the activity to build up. Is that what you described with the table tipping at the Bellevue Biltmore in that they started asking questions, but it looks like nothing was happening? Yeah, it would depend. It was, it was interesting because it would depend some nights, usually the size of group. And then other nights it would require a little more coaxing to get some type of interaction or what have you. And then other nights I'd walk in, I'd literally walk in and I'd, and I could feel, I was like, there's nobody here. Right. And I would still have, you know, I would say that to myself and we would still do the investigation and, you know, I would take the EMF detector and I would show them, Hey, this is where the electrical box, you could feel, this is where the electricity is in the wall. See how the meter is doing what it's doing. It's not pulsating. It's just staying a certain, you know, color. And then when I move it, it goes down to like red, green, yellow, what have you. And I would use that as my standard. Right. And then I would have them, you know, we'd go through the room and do what have you and do the investigations, but yeah, it depends. And, and sometimes like electrical storm, like when Orlando is notorious for its storms, like we're central Florida is like the lightning capital of the United States. And we would get really bad rainstorms and thunder, lightning. And especially when the energy, like the air was charged from the storm, we would get even more activity that night. As we get towards the end of our discussion here, did they pick up any evidence with their recorders and REM pods and EF, EMF meters, K2 meters when you were attacked or during that evening? And have you seen any of that since then? Did you keep in touch with these people who were investigating? No, I hadn't. I did notice on the tour, when we were giving the tour, that their EMF detectors were going off. They had, they had really fancy EMF detectors for the time where it had its LED, like really bright light at the, at the end of the apparatus. And it would, it would strobe lights and different colors and stuff like that. And there were points, even when they were doing the table, one of the ladies had the EMF detector in the center of the table and it was going off as the table was, you know, slowly gyrating and lifting and stuff like that. As far as did they catch anything when it was coming towards it? And I don't know. It is interesting though, talking about keeping in touch with someone. When I was giving one of my tours in Orlando, my wife and I, you know, we had left, moved up to Wisconsin. We were at this bar in Wisconsin called Uncle Mike's and we're sitting there and, you know, we're having an adult beverage. My wife and I are talking, this is these two couples come walking in and they sit down next to us and me being the chatty Kathy I am, I turn, I'm like, Hey, how you guys doing? We start talking. The lady sitting next to me, her name's Jess, sitting next to me is telling me about how, you know, asking where you're from. And I'm like, Oh, I'm from, we're from Orlando. And she's like, Oh, my friend just got back from Orlando. They went on, they were in Orlando and they went on this ghost tour. And I said, Oh, tell me more. And they're like, yeah, this, you know, the, the tour guide was talking about this, this and that. And then he had this ball and the ball would roll around. And I said, that was me expanded. And she goes, that was you. And I was like, yeah, that was me. And we've been friends ever since. Like it was, it was not like, it was, it was just funny that that was the binding moment that, you know, kindled the friendship. I just find it hilarious that it was her friend who was on the tour and it was me who was doing the tour and we just happened to run into each other at this hole in the wall bar in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. So. Maybe that's not a coincidence. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Well, Joe, we want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and remembering so much detail. And, uh, it's a very compelling story and we're really feel lucky to have it, uh, in, in this episode. So thank you so much for taking the time to send it in and then also to share it, uh, with us on tape as it were. And, um, you know, if anything new happens, you got to get back in touch with us. Absolutely. We're, we're planning a trip to Savannah and I believe January. And we're going to, again, to go on some ghost tours and stuff. If anything, uh, anything happens or what have you, I'll definitely keep you guys posted and let you know. 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You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. Hey, I'm Terra, and I'm listening to Astonishing Legends here in Brazil. Now, let's get back to the show. Okay, everyone, for our next story, we would like to welcome Damon and Fove to the show. They sent in a story that caught our attention, and we felt it was pretty compelling, and we were lucky enough to get in touch with them, and also lucky enough to get them to agree to stay up super late since they live in England. So, Damon, Fove, welcome to Astonishing Legends. Thank you guys for joining us. Thank you for having us. Hi. Can't wait to hear the full background on what was going on there. It was not long after we'd had my first child, and it was around 2009. We'd moved into our first property just by ourselves, because previously we'd been living with parents for a while, just after the birth, you know, to help out a little bit. Things were okay for a while. We'd been there for a few months, and everything was fine, normal, you know, mundane, looking after children, stuff, as you do. And then it was just one night, just completely out of the blue. I frequently wake up at nighttime randomly, because I don't sleep very often. I'm a pretty light sleeper. So I remember waking up and just sitting there for a while, rubbing my eyes, thinking, oh, God, why have I woken up? Because, you know, I've got to be up to feed the baby, and God knows, and over to check what time it was on my mobile phone. And sorry, it was like 3, 4 a.m. in the morning. I just started to get this really strange feeling, like there was more than just me and my partner and the child in the room. Just like a real uneasy presence just out of nowhere. So I just started scanning the room. It wasn't completely dark in the room. We had like a street lamp outside the window that was vaguely kind of shining through the curtains a little bit. And I just saw something in the corner of the room that just made me stop for a second and check it out. Like at first I thought maybe like, oh, perhaps it's like a coat hanging or something like that. And I realized, well, it can't be because there's nothing there that could be hanging. And I looked a little closer at it and I realized it was like a figure. And it seemed to be like really, really tall. I'm not really an accurate judge of like heights or anything, but it must have been approaching like seven foot tall, quite big. But it was like really spindly, emaciated looking from what I could gather because its silhouette was really strange. Like someone had just cut like a hole out of reality. And it was just like a blank void. So I was sort of just staring at it and weird disbelief. And it seemed to be stood there with like really long, sharp fingers, almost imagine like Freddy Krueger fingers, but a little bit thicker. And it seemed to be holding them over its face, sort of like playing like a weird game of peekaboo or something like that. And it was doing, you know, effectively using horror films where they have like a ghost or something like sort of juddering really freakishly and weirdly as though it's like having a seizure or something sort of on the spot. It was kind of doing that. And then the more that I stared at it, it seemed to start to lower its hands as though it noticed that I was looking. And it then sprinted at me from across the room and it was screaming in sort of like different voices, almost like someone had layered a lot of audio on top of each other. And it was like male, female, all sorts. And I was like shaking my partner awake and incomprehensively blabbering about something just running at me. But by the time that she actually woke up and we looked, there was nothing. It just completely vanished. And then that was it. Nothing else happened in that house in terms of like that graphic of a happening. But every time we had a guest who used to stay in like the back bedroom of the house, they always said that they felt really uneasy and weird in that back bedroom. And like sometimes, I think it was like a female friend of ours that stayed over. She said that she felt like something was scratching at the walls and like something was touching her feet during the night, which was really odd. Both me and my then partner never experienced anything in that room ourselves. To be honest, we didn't really want to stay in that room very often. And we lived there for like a year or two and nothing else sort of crazy happened. And then we moved into another property. This was around 2011. And a similar thing happened again. We were there for a little while. Everything was normal. Everything was fine. We unpacked, got settled down. And then it happened again. I sort of woke up randomly in the middle of the night. Same kind of thing again. Sat there rubbing my eyes, checking my phone, seeing what time it was. It was a similar time again, like 3, 4am in the morning. And then I looked over at the corner of the room. So like, houses work. We have stairs come up from the living room. And then it's really narrow, steep staircase. And then either side, at the top of the stairs, there's a bedroom. And we used to, our daughter was in the other room. So we used to leave the doors open so we could hear properly. And I noticed on the wall by the door opening, it looked like there was a hand on the wall, palm down, flat on the wall. I noticed it had those long pointed looking fingers again. I just sat watching it for a while. And then I just saw it slowly slide itself back through the doorway. And then it was almost like, again, it was playing like this really strange game of peekaboo. It sort of gripped the edge of the doorframe and quickly peeked its head around and then back again. So understandably, I scared out of my mind that it was this thing again. So I shook my partner awake again. And she sat up and I explained to her what I just saw over by the door. And then we heard footsteps start to creep down the stairs. And they were like wooden stairs. And they were quite old and creaky. So it definitely was like someone was walking down it. It sort of seemed to reach the bottom of the stairs. And then it turned around, sprinted back upstairs. And then our couple year old daughter in the other room started screaming and crying as though she'd been woken up by something. So we sort of ran into the bedroom to check to see if she was okay. And she had scratches on her arms. And she was just bawling her eyes out as though she'd had some like awful nightmare or something like that. Nothing happened for quite a while. The only difference this time is that like nobody said there was a weird vibe in any of the rooms. Everything felt like pretty normal. Life happened and like I ended up splitting up with the mother of our kids after we'd had our second child. It was like a few months after, unfortunately. She ended up moving out of that same house with the children and leaving me behind. I think it was around 2013, 2014. I ended up moving on and dating someone else. And I never told her about any of these stories because quite frankly, I didn't want to think that she thought I was crazy or something. So I just never bothered telling her. And then she woke me up one morning at a normal time in the morning. And she's like, you were something really weird happened last night. I was like, okay, what? I said, well, it was like you were having a really bad nightmare and you were thrashing around and you were sumbling in your sleep and stuff like that. And she said, I looked over in the corner of the room and it looked as though there was this really tall black figure stood in the corner of the room watching you while you were having this nightmare. And she described it like spot on as much as she could for how little detail it actually had. I was just like, oh, I'd never told her about this. I didn't tell anybody that could have possibly told her about it. I just sort of told to myself, didn't really talk to my ex because they didn't like each other. So it couldn't have come from there. Just awful. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified that I was just going to get harassed by this black figure. So I used to sleep a lot less and I was always really tired and just really scared about it all. But again, like the first few times after it happened, nothing else happened for like a long time. This time it was more like quite a few years. The relationship that I was in it, that third experience sort of tapered out and we figured out we weren't really that compatible for each other, you know, as things go sometimes. And the last experience I had with this thing was when I was completely on my own. I was in that same property again, the second house that we'd moved into. And the light switch for the living room used to be across from the stairs to get up to bed. So I couldn't just turn it off at the stairs. I had to walk across the room in the dark first. So I was going to bed one night and I turned the light off. And as soon as I turned around, that same black figure was just in my face, right there behind me. I absolutely bricked it, turned back around and turned the light on and just stayed there, just facing the wall, like absolutely terrified, trying to turn around again. But nothing touched me, nothing else ever happened. I turned around eventually and it was just gone. And that was the last time I ever saw it. I went looking, trying to find some research online about what it could possibly have been, if anybody else had sort of had this experience. There was like the general mention of like shadow figures and all that kind of business as they usually is. But I found one account, which was the closest story. And it was very similar to that second encounter that I had where it had its hand on the wall. It was from this random website where people post like supernatural stuff. And it's like a little bit of a forum website. And it was the story of this girl. She said she was in her teens at the time and she was in bed a lot because she had a heart condition. So she was bedbound a lot of the time. And again, she said she woke up one night and she looked over at the wall and there was a hand on the wall with the long, sharp looking fingers. In her story, she said she'd walked over to it, curious as to exactly what it was. And she reached out to touch it. But she said as soon as she got close to actually touching it, it was like something pounced on top of her and started scratching at her and attacking her. And then she said she blacked out. And when she woke up in the morning, she was covered in scratches all over as though she'd been savaged by something. I've tried to find the story since then to try and sort of maybe add a link or something to add validity. But it's just one of those random websites that just doesn't stick around for very long. You know, they stop paying the domain name and it just fades into obscurity. And I just can't find it again. And I've never found another story that's anywhere close. That's why I reached out to you in Graveyard Tales to see if anyone had ever experienced it as much as to tell a cool story. Do you have any idea what that was? Well, we've certainly heard many other stories that describe something very tall. I liked your description in the email, impossibly thin, like just very wispy, thin, spindly. And the long fingers are something that's also not common with every story and not very common, but certainly not unheard of. Lots of stories have, for some reason, the long spindly fingers, like a Nosferatu type thing, often with long claws or long nails and just very wispy. And the other thing that stood out to me with your description is that a lot of people will describe something that is blacker than black, not really like a shadow, as people are describing, although they're described as shadow people sometimes. But as you said here, a cutout hole of reality, and that this thing was sucking in light and reality and something from our dimension into a void of itself. And so, but we've heard all different kinds of descriptions and from other shadow people that seem to be more 3D, have more shape to them. Scott and I often refer to that old Apple iPod commercial where they had a lot of dancing silhouette characters. And, and the way they do it is that there's not completely just a 2D black cutout is that you can kind of see a little bit of shape to them. And that's often described, but this is different in that this thing, whatever is punching through our reality was having a cookie cutter void of itself and drawing in light like a black hole. Yeah. Yeah. So that was unusual, but yeah, to answer your question, we've heard of many different types of beings and characters and, you know, my conclusion or one of my hypotheses is that, you know, there's a multitude, maybe infinite number of different types of entities and beings there that may morph morph in their own world, in our world, morph coming through to our world and also be specific slightly to the viewer and, and how they see them. So to confirm is that you're seeing the same creature each time in each of these encounters. Yeah. Yeah. It's the exact same thing every time. Right. And they seem to be spaced out nearly two years apart each time, 2009, 2011. Yeah. I mean, it was a couple of years between the first encounter and the second, but then it was a few more years after the second and the third. And then again, between the third and the fourth, it was only like a year or so. It was like a lot shorter of a time period than all the other ones. But at one point this thing attacked one of your children, right? We think so. Yeah. I mean, we never witnessed it, but it happened right after I noticed it did a little peekaboo game around the doorframe. And then it seemed to go down the stairs, run back up. And then my daughter started crying as though she'd been woken up. And she had scratches on her arm? Yeah. She had a few scratches down each arm and they were like pretty long scratches that go from like the crook of the elbow down to like the wrist sort of thing. I think at the time, she'd have been like two years old or something like that, I think. It's horrifying. Were they like parallel lines or just more like random scratches? They were more like random scratches, nothing, nothing parallel. It didn't look like claw marks. It was just as though something had done a little crazy pattern on her arm. Right. Okay. That's like Scott's referring to, or he's getting at, I believe. A lot of times we'll hear about scratches that are parallel lines and usually three. And people will put some significance and meaning towards the three as a mocking of the Trinity or just things in threes, the number of the universe, but also parallel, like they were claw marks coming from the same hand. And the first thing that caught my eye reading your email was that this thing made noise. It had communicated in some way. And you don't often hear that with these types of beings. I would say most often they seem to be silent to people or people will hear voices or communicates telepathically in some way, or they hear something that's in their mind. But this thing, noise came out from it. Yeah. Yeah. Only on the first occasion. The first occasion. And then you said it was, this is what caught me again, screaming in various different voices, low pitch, high pitch, male, female, like a cacophony of different voices, but were they making any words? Was it just kind of random guttural sounds or? Um, it was purely just screaming as though it was really angry. Yeah. Just horrible screaming. I never heard anything comprehensible, um, at least. And then soon after it did, I just dived under the duvet and sort of tried to block it all out. So I didn't catch anything else, but, uh, also the most common response. So don't feel bad about that. That is, uh, and it seems to work. A lot of people will just dive under the covers and eventually it goes away, but I don't know what it is about that. Maybe you break the telepathic link there, the telecommunication link between yourself and the creature by diving under the covers. But, uh, a lot of people will describe that they duck under or hide or close their eyes. They open it up and they're not there again. But in this case, we're all the voices happening at once, or was it one after the other? It was all at once. It was like someone had layered a lot of different recordings on top of each other. And it was just all coming out at once. Uh, it was the most horrible sound I've ever heard in my life. It was truly chilling. If you were to put, you know, the microphone into hell, into the idea of hell, just like tortured souls kind of sounds. Yeah. You could probably say that. Yeah. Sounds accurate enough. I got Sally house vibes from that description. Yeah, I know. It reminds a little bit of our recording, you know, trying to make any sense out of it. Logically, I guess, uh, one thing leading to another, we're trying to put some order into this and reasoning is that you wonder if it's happening one after the other, the voices are concurrent or are they in serial? I guess Scott and I often hear about stories where we often refer to the, the Terminator effect, the end of Terminator two, where it's panicking or it's in a highly agitated state, whatever this thing is. And it's going through all of the caricatures that it knows. It's just trying. It's just like, it's in a panic as well. That's one thing that struck me is that as soon as it started to realize you were awake and looking at it and the jig was up and it was recognized and maybe it didn't want to be, or didn't expect to be that it also was in a way panicking and was frustrated or angry at that. And so it's throwing out this kind of defensive action or this form of defense in that, like an animal or a mantis being, it's just going through like, well, this is what I got for defensive moves. And that is to scare the crap out of you and just start screaming at you. And is it doing that one after the other, trying to just like, this is my library of sounds and I'm just going to throw everyone at you. Or if they're all kind of a cacophony concurrently, is it just a bunch of different things bound up into one figure, you know, just representative of one kind of dark entity that's now kind of screaming at you and coming towards you in an, in an attack. So again, it just kind of thoughts that occurred to me as you're telling the story here. Like, what is this thing when you're trying to answer that question? When I first heard the story that I had to agree with you, that was my first thought was that it wasn't supposed to be seen because it felt like every story was leading up to where the night terror story, whatever it was doing when he was asleep was always the plan. It was never supposed to have been seen. That was my vibe. When I first heard the story that it attacked because it wasn't ever supposed to be seen. That wasn't its plan. We'll finish out this with some various stories that you said you had. Nothing this dramatic, but certainly a lot of other activity and anecdotes. But in this case, I do wonder if, you know, that's the vibe I'm getting as well, is that it was doing its thing. It wanted Damon to be asleep for this kind of communication or interchange. And once it realized you were up, it kind of panicked or it was just angry and that it, you know, it foiled you being awake, foiled its plans for the evening. But on the second time, it was toying with you, like with the hand coming around the corner and the peekaboo. Well, actually peekaboo both times and that it's hands were up above its face. Also, you said this thing had no facial features. It was just kind of a void. Yeah, nothing that I could ever make out. It literally just felt like a complete black hole. Like I couldn't see any sort of definition in like muscle or whether it was any particular gender or any facial features, no eyes, mouth, absolutely nothing. Just the shape. Like you said, like someone had just cookie cutted it out of reality. Yeah. But the hand had enough definition that you could make out that it was a hand. Yeah. Like it had the typical shape of a hand, you know, with the four digits and the thumb, but I could see the fingers were a lot more extended than normal. And they looked as though they tapered off into like a point. The only one with the exception would have been the thumb. Again, the thumb looked longer, but it didn't look as though it tapered out into a point. It just looked like a really long thumb. And it was just the main fingers themselves that looked sort of claw-like. It was really strange. So have you had any other types of paranormal experiences, Damon, that like, or anything since this, or this is just this isolated incident that recurs with this particular being? I've had a few before and after. It seems to be something that happens in my family. I remember my mom telling me a story about when she was first dating my dad. She used to stay around at his house every so often. And she told me she went around there one evening. She started to feel really tired. So he suggested, oh, why don't you go take like half an hour nap in my bedroom? And she said she went upstairs and she opened the door and it was like the bedroom was a completely different decor. Like the wallpaper was different. The carpet was different. All the furniture was different and in different locations as though she just walked into a completely new bedroom. And she said there was a man with a bowler hat dressed in a suit sort of like half sunk into the floor as though only his torso was visible above the carpet. And she said she screamed and ran out of the room. And she told my dad and his mother and father about what she saw. And she described like all of the decorations and the furniture. And she described a bureau that she saw when she walked in. And that sort of made them stop and be like, well, hold on a minute. And they led her out into the garage. And at the back of the garage, they had a piece of furniture covered up by a cloth. And so they took the cloth off and said, is it this bureau that you saw? And she said, yeah, that's exactly the bureau I saw. It turns out this is a piece of furniture that was just left in the bedroom when they first moved into the property. And the decoration she was describing was much like how it looked back when they moved in before they redecorated. She'd not known the bedroom to be like that because she came along a lot later. And she'd never ever seen the bureau before because it always been covered up in the back of the garage. And she'd have no reason to really go looking, you know. So there's that. And then I've had a few strange experiences myself where I've had like strange feelings and vibes. And sometimes I've had like whispering in my ears. The only one I can really remember where it actually said was it was like a woman's voice really close as though she was whispering right into my ear. And she said, help me. There was the little Victorian girl you photographed. Yeah, yeah. That was in the same property that most of those events with the tall black thing happened. A lot of the houses in the UK, they're sort of like really old Victorian houses that have just stood the test of time and we still use today. I remember I got a brand new phone. So of course, as you do, when you get a new phone, you're excited to test out all these new features. So it's just sort of taking pictures with it to sort of test the quality of the camera. This was like early 2000s. So it was like a really old Sony Xperia camera phone. We have galley kitchens where it's just really long, narrow, straight kitchens. So I decided to take a picture using the flash into the dark kitchen just to see, you know, how well it illuminated all that. After looking at the picture, I noticed that there seemed to be something shadowy next to one of the wall mounted cupboards at the back of the kitchen. On further study, I found that it looked like a little Victorian girl. That's the only way I could describe it. She had like little pigtails. She was wearing like the old style really ruffly dress with like the band around her waist and the really puffy shoulder pieces. It looked like she was stood on the counter because that's like the sort of the positioning of the picture. It just looked like she was stood on the countertop, which was really strange. Funnily enough, I saw I ended up actually seeing her again. I woke up one night. I turned over to grab like a drink of water from the nightstand and she was just stood there in my face. But she didn't look like any other apparition I've seen in the past. She looked like the stereotypical sort of appearance of a ghost, you know, no colour, glowing like a vague blue white sort of thing. Very, very much like it was from a movie or something. That was a really quick sort of turnover. So she was there, went, oh, turn back over, just face the wall for a while, you know, turn around and she was gone. But yeah, there was, there was the man in the mirror I used to see when I used to live with my parents. It was like a guy who had like half of his face torn off. Oh my God. And he used to only appear in the mirrors. I could only see him every time I looked in a mirror. And I remember getting the local newspaper one morning and seeing there was an article that covered on a really bad accident on the roads, not far away from where we live. And it was a motorbike rider that had gone underneath a, um, a lorry and killed, unfortunately. But, uh, the picture they had of the guy that it happened to was in the paper and it was, it was him minus the, uh, chewed up face, but it was the same guy that I was seeing in the mirror. He had the same sort of hairstyle and looks and he was wearing the same clothes that he was wearing in the picture in the newspaper, which was really bizarre. That only happened like for a few days around about the time that he passed that he would have passed away. And then I never saw him again. I don't know, remember where I read this, but there was somebody somewhere in our travels forest. It suggested that, yeah, especially with the suddenly departed person like that, that the spirit is around only for a few days before it moves on, which would track with that experience. Yeah. There's a transition time, but not again, there's no hard, fast rule. As far as we know, uh, where some people kind of linger, uh, obviously, if that's the scenario, that's true that some spirits are killed and often, uh, unexpectedly that they hang around. Well, it could be for eternity, depending on when they're called home or whatever, but some people pass, uh, into the light right away. Some take a while. Some who have died, perhaps in an accident, don't really know what happened to them yet because it was so sudden and unexpected to them that they're just kind of in a daze. And since there's no time on the other side, they're just kind of wandering around forever in the, in the general area. But again, we're just piecing this together from anecdotes we've heard before, but to your story though, with the shadow figure or these, this being, I'm going to have to stop calling it a shadow figure because again, there's no, there's no shadow. It was just the void, maybe the void creature, but this is in two different houses that this happened. Most of these experiences, right? Yeah. Yeah. And there was one experience in our first ever house and then the rest were in the second, uh, these weren't close either. Um, they would have been like three or four miles away. Again, I'm not great with distances, but it was like 15, 20 minute car ride away. So it's not like it was in close proximity. It could have perhaps wandered over from the other one, but it was almost like it's following me. Well, that's what I was about to ask. Do you think it's something with you or your family? Like, what do you think is going on? What's your gut feeling on all this? It did feel strangely targeted. And my ex, the kid's mother, her name's Laura. She always said afterwards that she felt like I was sort of cursed with misfortune for a while. She has told me previously that she comes from a, um, a family of, uh, psychics. I'm not a hundred percent sold on stuff like that myself, but you know, I wasn't inclined to disbelieve her with it, but she said she always sort of got feelings and vibes as though something was out to just bring me misfortune and things like that. Uh, it was very strange. I always wondered if it was attracted to him because he had that power. He could see these things. He could hear these things. He had these senses about multiple different locations, multiple people. So I wondered if it was attracted to that. We hear these ideas on lots of different, uh, you know, stuff we've covered also our friend Jim Harold show and other folks shows about how things like this can be drawn to the light of the living. And especially if they're being bleeds over into that world, they re they recognize that there's, that there's a connection there that most people don't have. But you know, it's interesting that you're like, you know, well, I don't believe if my ex, I don't know if she was psychic or whatever. Meanwhile, you're having all these experiences. Yeah. I mean, I've always said, like, I would have thought that I was going crazy if it weren't for the fact that two other people had some sort of like witness to this with, you know, um, the kids. That's right. That's a great point because you have the eyewitness plus the physical attack on your daughter. Yeah. Um, I forgot to mention after the event where my daughter got scratched, um, I forgot to mention, we actually sort of tried to protect ourselves a little bit. We put like, um, protection symbols on the door. We like drew them onto, um, like pieces of paper and just stuck them all over the doors and things like that. And we always made sure to keep the doors closed every time we went to bed, because there was three doors, one at the very bottom of the stairs, and then one for each bedroom at the top. We always did that after that second event. And the first night that we actually put those up onto the doors, we had another experience again. This time, both of us were actually awake. Uh, we hadn't previously been to sleep yet, but it sounded like we had wooden flooring on the living room. So it sounded like there was someone scuffling their feet on the wooden flooring by the bottom stairs door. And like they were trying to open the door handle, we could hear the door handle rattling as though something was trying to open it, but couldn't get it open. And that lasted for like five, 10 minutes. And we were just sat up in the bedroom, like, Oh God, Jesus, you know, that stopped. And we never had that again, uh, at least while we were conscious. And then, yeah, then, then it went on to the, uh, the other event where I'd moved on and was with a different partner and she witnessed the night terror thing. Was there something in your family history or past that you think may have opened the door to this kind of activity? I could never get anything out of my, um, my grandmother because she didn't really talk about stuff like that. She was a very quiet and reserved sort of person, but I've definitely had a few stories of that kind of nature from my mother where she's had paranormal experiences herself. And then, yeah, I've gone on to have some of these experiences and I've always cursed to my mother for passing it on because I don't want to seal this. It's not very pleasant. No one's sat you down and been like, let me tell you about the thousand year old curse on our family. Well, this is God-spoken fun, but a lot of times we'll hear about people with a family history of these kinds of interactions. And then they'll say, yeah, you know what? We talked about this with our family and there were those aunts that seemed to practice black magic or there was, there's something in the past where like, yeah, granddad, you know, he opened this box that he shouldn't have way back when there's sometimes, uh, there is a, an occurrence where this is sparked in a previous generation or the family, like you said, a family of psychics or a family of some kind of abilities that is, uh, attractive to something on the other side, some of these kinds of forces. And they, they make it a generational thing. Same thing with UFOs or even cryptid sightings. Those often run in families. So there is some kind of connection there. That's a familial one. And since we've been together, there have been more experiences. So his power hasn't ended. Yeah. I must say it's not quite up to scratch these days because, um, I'm disabled. I had a workplace injury a few years ago. I'm pretty much housebound now. So I don't know whether it's because I'm housebound and I've never had an experiences in this property, or it's the very strong medication that I have to take to get through a day that's sort of dull in any kind of senses. I don't really know how it's supposed to work, but I've not had any experiences for the past year or so. Yeah. We had the incident in the, in the nature reserve and you've seen some black cats in this house, but nothing, nothing terrifying. Oh, right. Yeah. It was the shadow cats. I remember I saw the black cats. Yeah. I saw some shadow cats. So you don't have cats? Ironically, we have a black cat, but he didn't see that black cat. Oh, it was a different black cat. Because the black cat that we have, he's got a, he always wears a collar, doesn't he? And he always tries to get it off. So it ends up pretty ragged up. Yeah. But the shadow cats that I saw, it was sort of like very brief, this sort of flip, you know, like a cat just flits through a room. Yes. But it wasn't wearing a collar and it wasn't the black cat that we have, because he was either outside or downstairs or it was not where I saw him basically. Yeah. The experience in the nature reserve was a strange one because we, both me and my partner, Fove, we're practicing Norse pagan. Yeah. Norse pagan kind of thing. So we had like a little gathering with our friend and his then partner. I mean, these, his name's Gareth. He was the one who got me into practicing the paganism sort of route anyway. So we had like a little bit of gathering and we went to the nature reserve that's just over the road for us. It's an old quarry and it's been turned into like a little nature reserve and you can just go and walk through it. And, you know, it's just completely open to the public. But there's always been like a bit of an urban legend that it's haunted. It's always quite funny because they call it the phantom pusher and it's people who go jogging and they feel like they've been pushed by something. But we went up there and we had like a little bit of a, I don't really want to call it a ritual because it really wasn't. It was sort of like we were stood around in a little circle and we said like a bit of a prayer and that kind of thing. Positive thinking, positive enforcement, that kind of thing. You know, we are friends in a place of nature, putting out good energy. It was more of that kind of vibe, if I remember. Yeah, I guess so. But it was nighttime when we did it, so it was like pretty dark. There's no lights up there, so you have to get by with torches and things. But I don't know. I remember after we did it, I sort of just remember stood around sort of just looking around casually waiting until we went to do whatever else it was we were going to do next. And I saw like someone just walk by in front of me because I was sort of looking down at the ground. And I saw someone just walk in the peripheral of my vision from left to right in front of me and they were just all wearing white. And I thought nothing of it because I was like, oh, it's probably just one of the guys. They've just walked past me, you know. And then I was like, hold on a minute. None of us are wearing white. We're all wearing like jeans or shirts or whatever. And I looked up and looked to my right and there was no one there. Nobody was standing to the right of me. Everybody was in a little group talking to themselves to the left. And I just sort of like turned. I was like, did any of you guys just walk by me and then look back around or something like that? And I was like, no, we've just been studying the entire time talking. I was like, oh, good. Fun. So I see a lot of random, strange occurrences every now and again. None of them ever really seem that connected. It was only the void figure that was the big connected one. And it was terrifying. And it still scares me to this day. I'm always terrified it's going to come back. Is there anything that, Fove, that you've experienced that's of your own or connected to Damon? The most connected one would be at the nature reserve. Are you okay with me sharing this? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were meditating as a group and I was just listening to the wind. I wasn't quite sure what we were supposed to get out of this experience. And then suddenly I was being taken down deep, dark roots underground and I was like throwing down all these tunnels and roots. And I got really claustrophobic and I broke the circle. And I think it was a couple of hours afterwards I confided in Dave and he was like, oh, yeah, that was my vision. I was like, oh, you didn't have to bring me into it. I was just listening to the wind. Other than that, I grew up in a haunted house during my teenage years and for the most disruptive years of my family. There was a divorce and it was a very nasty time. We had a poltergeist that threw stuff around my house a lot. And that was about five years of that. It would pace outside my bedroom, run up and down the stairs. It would constantly rearrange the kitchen. It did not like how we had the kitchen. It would rearrange the spice rack. It would move the bread around. It would turn the kettle on. And one night it just, it sounded like it was having a fit in my room. Like it was just throwing everything around my room, like papers and bags and books. And I was like, oh God, I have a lot of that in my room. I have a whole cupboard full of books. So I was like, just lying there too terrified to move under the cover, just listening to this cacophony. And it eventually turned on the lights and nothing had moved. Everything was exactly the same. It was like an audio thing pure. And I was like, right, I'm insane. I didn't really tell anyone about this because I thought I was hallucinating until my mom saw stuff get thrown around the house as well. It's like, oh, great. You see that too. Now it has to be real. That's worse. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think I'd rather have just gone to therapy and it got away. But then you have to deal with the reality of you saw that too. And in recent years, telling my brother about this, he has premonition dreams that he never told me about. So we both grew up with these experiences we never told each other about. But yeah, he has premonition dreams that apparently my nan has. And it skipped me and mom and went to him and no one told him because previously it always been down the female line of the family. So no one thought to tell my poor brother about this. So you can see why I love you guys and why I believed, you know, Damon without question. Well, there's a lot to these stories that are just beyond the anecdotes themselves because, you know, if we had just read a lot of these emails, you know, they're just usually a handful of short encounters. But I think like yourselves, without Scott and I having really experienced anything significant or major, we are looking for answers. We are looking for connections and commonalities and looking for, has somebody else experienced something like this? And what was their experience? What are their details? Was there anything odd that stands out? And so that's kind of what grabs us when we read these emails of like, okay, here's something we've not really heard a lot before or at all. And it's significant. And then you start to kind of put these patterns together, but they're not always the same. It's not all, I think that's also human nature is like there's just one type of ghost or there's one type of Bigfoot or cryptid or there's one type of alien. And it's just gray and with a big head. And anybody that studied this, you know, that there's just every manner of description and some kind of overlap and are the same. Or have recurring themes. But a lot of them are just, they're very individual to the person and themselves. But again, you know, so that's what we're trying to look for in with your story of just, yeah, the long pointy fingers that taper off. The thing that's sucking in light rather than emitting it or just covering it up in a shadow. So we try to put these patterns together and see if there's any commonalities. And this one's a little bit unique, but it sounds like at least it got your attention specifically. And it hopefully is done with you. It's moved on. I hope so. Yeah. I do not want to see it again. I'm still terrified to this day. I don't think I'll ever forget the scream that it made or just how it looked, how it felt. It was not very pleasant. Yeah. Please let us know if there's any other kind of activity. The other thing is following up with folks. We like to hear from them after they've told their story or sent an email or we've tried to give them, point to them some people that could help if they're looking for help. And oftentimes you'll hear about something horrible that a family is going through and they say, well, here's some people that know a little bit more about this. You can read these books. And then we never hear from them. And we can just only hope that whatever it was, it was cleared up or that they've have not given up and decided like, well, this is just life now. We're just going to have to put up with this terrifying experience. So we hope they're okay out there. But certainly, yeah, let us know if anything is happening again or connected. We'll have you back on for some kind of show. I just want to, on behalf of both me and Forrest, we just want to thank you guys so much for emailing us and for coming on the show to tell your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having us. It's been great fun. It was nice to get the story out there because I know when I was trying to look into what it could have possibly have been, it was very disheartening to not really be able to find much information about it. So being able to put the information I have out there for someone else who may or may not be experiencing similar, hopefully they can find it and be like, ah. Well, that's one of the things we like about the show is being able to get people's messages out there. And we look forward to maybe talking to you again in the future if anything else comes up. But hopefully nothing does. Hopefully there's no reason to come back. Hopefully. It's been nice. Well, thank you. Yes, thank you very much. Raise your hand if you want your nails to look perfect all the time. Me too. I'm Sarah Gibson Tuttle from Olive and June, and this is exactly why we created the Manny System. 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Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. I'm Madi. Thank you for listening to Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. Well, now we'd like to welcome our next guest, Allison, who has a, I would say, in some ways, a traditional haunted house story that she wanted to share with us. But then there's an update, which we always love, that was fairly recent. But in this case, this story stood out to us because there is a twist on it, shall we say, some kind of resolution that you don't often get. But like some of these stories, they start off at a particular time in a person's life, usually when they're younger. In this case, this would be 1996. Is that correct, Allison? Yes, that is. Just start off wherever you'd like, but make sure to include that small detail about a sighting when you're around five years old. Hi, my name is Allison. I'm from New Jersey. And the story that I'm going to tell happened in 1996, but it does go back a little bit further than that. When I was a child in the house that I grew up in, so my parents still live in this house, too. And we moved into this house in 1976 when I was about three years old and my brother wasn't. I have one younger brother. He wasn't even born yet. But I always felt a little uneasy as a kid in that house. I don't know why for the most part, but I was just always a little bit afraid. One time, though, when I was young, I was walking down the stairs in the house. I had woken up and gotten out of bed, and I was walking down the stairs, and there was a man standing at the bottom of the stairs. And this wasn't anybody that I knew. He was looking up, and he was looking up at me. He was a heavyset man with white hair. And as a kid, I was just thinking, who is that? You know, I thought somebody was just in the house, and it was somebody that my parents had invited in the house, even though it was early in the morning, and that didn't make any sense. But as I walked down the stairs, he faded away and disappeared. Did you, as a kid, get any idea of who this was? Or, you know, when you're a young child, especially that old, like, strange things happen all the time. The world is still kind of fascinating and wondrous. But did you have any questions for adults? Did you follow up with this? Did you ask anybody anything about this? Or what did you think at that age? You know, I never did. And that's the funny thing. And even with the story I'm going to tell, I never told anybody. It was just something that I saw it. I guess I always felt like no one would believe me, maybe. And it is odd, because you would think I would have come down the stairs and just said, hey, what happened? There was somebody standing here, and now he's gone. But I just walked down the stairs, and that was it. I didn't say anything to anybody. And I never told anybody any of these things that happened. Did you ever see this apparition again? That was the only time. And as we progress through your anecdotes here, did this apparition, this person, whatever it was, tie into anything else? Was it significant in any other way in some kind of connection? I never felt like it did connect with anything. I just felt like somehow that apparition was there at that time, and I saw it, and then that was it. It never really came back. It never bothered me again. But like I said, I always just had an uneasy feeling at night. I was always scared at night. Did you see a full person or just partial person, and how much detail was there? I saw a full person. I mean, he was standing there like a full person, just looking up. Like if you're descending the stairs and somebody's at the bottom of the stairs, he was just standing there looking up at me. And that's why I thought it was real, because he did look like a real person. What age did he appear? What did he look like? He was old. He was balding. His hair was white, and it was disheveled. And he just looked like an old man. Did you sense any feelings from it? No, I really didn't. It just was an uneasy feeling, because it wasn't like he looked friendly. He did look a little bit scary, but he wasn't there long enough for me to like even back up or not go down the stairs. Like as I was walking down the stairs, maybe the first two or three steps, then he just disappeared. But he didn't look friendly. That I have to say. He didn't. In the terms of disappearing, was it like an instantaneous gone or like a fade out or like how? It's like he just faded away. Like he was just there, and then it was like air changing. Like he just faded away. From that age to about 1996, did anything else happen, or was it just a lot of odd, random things? You often mentioned that you would go and fall asleep to the sounds of doors slamming. Yeah. So you thought this apparition was just another kind of weird thing that was in your head, or when you were younger, you would just hear all kinds of noises. Did anything else significant happen until those college years? Not really. What happened was when I was falling asleep is when a lot of these things happened. And I think because of that, I would feel like it had to be all in my head. It couldn't be something that was real. Like it was, I was making a mistake. I was in, you know, half asleep, and these things were happening to me. When I was in high school, though, before I left for college, when I was falling asleep, I used to just hear the sound of doors slamming for whatever reason. And I still don't know why that is. I mean, it's just, you know, it's like we all experience that, I think. It's like when you're starting to fall asleep, and you're in this, you know, kind of a fuzzy area before you drop off. But that's what I used to hear, and it was just an odd occurrence. But there really didn't, like nothing else, like seeing people or the story I'm going to tell you what happened after college happened to me at that time. Was that only for you ever in that house? Have you ever had where you've heard loud sounds like that when you're starting to fall asleep in other places? No, just in that house. That's never happened to me. And that only happened to me when I was young like that, too, when I was in high school. That never happened to me as an adult, and it never happened anywhere else. Okay. To me, that could rule out the possibility of it being exploding head syndrome, because for me, it doesn't matter where I am. It's happened to me at home. It's happened to me in different places. But thank God it doesn't happen that often, because it's really jarring. It's not always scary. It's scary in terms of like it wakes you up in the same way that what they used to call a nap jerk, which is when you fall asleep and you jerk your body jerks real quick. Which I've heard that means that our ancestors, they thought that it was because we're about to fall out of the tree branch we were sleeping on. Yet also connected to night terrors. To the prey below. Yeah. So as we get into the stories about this college era, 1996, do you think anything was happening with your life specifically that triggered this, or was it just, this is just when it happened? You know, I came back from college. I was sad to be home, really. I didn't have a job, so that wasn't the best thing in the world. It's not the best thing when you come home, when your parents know you have no job, no prospects, after they just paid that bill for college. So I came home, I had a, you know, I had a boyfriend I had at that time in college, and because he didn't live close with, you know, he was in a different state, it was just kind of tough. You know, I felt just very lost at that time. I was trying to find work. I couldn't find work right away. In the house, we had a few things going on in the house. My parents were having just some problems. You know, they weren't really getting along. So the house itself just wasn't a happy place at that time. And it wasn't like that my entire life. Like, I grew up very happy. I was very lucky. Very, yeah, we had a lot of great times. But just that particular time just seemed like everybody in the house was off for the most part. So that sets the stage that you're coming home from college. There's a little bit of off energy, as you said, but nothing too traumatic. Everybody experiences these kinds of things in these stages of life. So this is around 1996, and you just graduated. And now you're back home, and you're starting to look for work. As you say, the strange occurrences started at night around this time, 1996. So what were the activities that would happen? When I was falling asleep, I'd feel the bed shake slightly. So nothing like you see in the movies where it was very distinct. I would just feel the bed shaking a little. And I would, again, just say to myself, this can't really be happening. This has got to be something that I – is it something I'm doing? Is there something wrong with the bed? I mean, I just tried to explain it away the best that I could. But it happened night after night, and I was starting to get just a very uneasy feeling. What is really happening here? I mean, this is not me. I was even being absurd and thinking, am I breathing weird that it's making the bed shake? But it wasn't. It was just slightly shaking, which was uneasy. One night what happened, as I was falling asleep, the bed was not shaking that night. But I felt something poke me in the back. And I was, again, falling asleep. And I started to get up because I didn't know what it was. And it didn't feel like somebody's hand poking you in the back or, like, fingers. It felt like a force hitting me right in the middle of my back. And as I got up and started to turn around, something wrapped around me that I couldn't see. And I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. And I started to try to get up off the bed and shake it off. Like, I almost screamed, really. And then it let me go. It let me go right away. And it was gone after that. And I got up, I put the light on, and I slept with the light on for I don't even know how long after that. Because I was so freaked out that it actually hit me. That thing, whatever it was, hit me. And that was the start of it getting a little bit worse. When you felt the force in your back, were you laying on your stomach at that time? I was laying on my side. Yeah. Wow. So it was something, do you think, located or localized in your bedroom? Was it throughout the house? Obviously, you saw something at the bottom of the stairs. But were there different places in the house where things would happen? It did. So most of it happened in my bedroom. And that's where the worst of it was. But there was one weekend where my parents weren't home. So if they weren't home, I didn't want to stay up in that bedroom by myself. So I used to sleep on the couch. I'd go downstairs, sleep on the couch, fall asleep with the TV on, all the lights on. And one morning, I was waking up. So again, I'm on like the cusp of sleep, right? I'm coming out of sleep. I was waking up. And I heard a voice. And the voice said to me, it said, wake up, Allie. And it used my last name, too. And it was imitating my mother. But it wasn't my mother's voice. And it was like doing a bad imitation of my mother. And that scared me so much. I couldn't even open my eyes. Because I didn't know what I was going to see. I absolutely just laid there. I couldn't, I almost couldn't even breathe. And I just kept my eyes closed. And I said to myself, just don't open your eyes. You know, like, just stay like this for as long as you possibly can. And I don't even know how long I stayed like that. But after a while, I finally opened my eyes. And nothing was there. But that voice, it was a horrible voice. It was like mocking my mother. But it was almost more mocking me. Like, it's like trying to trick you, you know, like trying to trick you with a bad imitation. Like, you're a fool. Like, that's what it sounded like. You know, it was just doing that. It was, and it was had that, like, bright way that my mom speaks. But it wasn't that. It was an ugly, it was ugly, ugly doing her voice. It was like your nickname plus your last name, which was also something that you characterized as not something that your mom ever would have done in referring to you. No, my mother never would have said that to me. She never would have called me by my nickname and my last name. She just never referred to me like that. So it was just like, it was not only something that was imitating her voice, but doing a bad imitation of the voice itself, but also something she never would have said anyway. So it was just like, everything was just false about it. And you were alone in the house. I was alone in the house, yeah. And did you mention this to your folks when they finally came home or not at all? Yeah. No, I still didn't tell it. Because you know something, as weird as this is, and it's just like when you watch every horror movie and the protagonist is trying to explain it all the way and you say like, you're an idiot. Of course it's happening. That's like, you're an idiot. Of course it's happening to you. But that's what was happening. I was saying to myself, even though I had read every Stephen King book, everything else, I kept on saying, this can't be happening. It's got to be something in my mind. It's got to be either because I'm waking up or falling asleep. It's just, I've got to be wrong. This can't, and even though that happened and it was daylight too, because when that happened to me, it was in the morning, but it wasn't like it was dark and early in the morning. It was daylight at the time. My grandmother lived with us too at that time. And my grandmother always said, she lived to be almost 97. And she was like, I never saw a ghost, never all these years. She never believed it. She's like, I never saw one all these years that I was alive. I never saw a ghost. So I never said anything to anybody. Wow. So not too long after this, something else happened that's pretty significant. And this is again, at night, you were falling asleep. You started a dream. And then how do you know, or when did you know that something was different about this? It didn't feel like a regular dream. Like I know that most of the time we dream and it seems to come very far, you know, a long time after you fall asleep, right? I mean, it's in the REM sleep. It's, you know, every time I wake up out of a dream now, it's always in the middle. This was, I fell asleep, but I didn't feel like I was dreaming. I felt like almost I fell into a different time. That's probably the best way I can describe it is that I fell into a different time. It was almost like I went into a different dimension because it wasn't that quality of a dream where you're waking up and it's a little fuzzy. You can remember some things you can't remember others. It's almost like I was seeing everything perfectly the way I'm seeing things right now. And I was in a room and it was a dark room and it was almost like a library. Like, it's funny now that I didn't work in an office back then, but that's what it was. It was like going into an office at night with cubicles, but it wasn't cubicles. It was almost like library carols or something along those lines. But I was walking through this and I turned and I saw a guy standing there and what he looked like, his face was turned down, but his eyes were looking up at me. All right. So it's like he was looking up and his hair was all disheveled and he was just staring at me. And I was in that time. I was trying to say, who are you? What do you want? And he wouldn't answer. He just looked at me. And it was totally frightening because it wasn't, again, not a friendly face, somebody that had a menacing look in his eyes. And then I woke up after that and again, had the light on. That was it. But it wasn't the same as coming up out of a dream. It's almost like when you see people being hypnotized and the hypnotist snaps their fingers and the person's back and they're back in like the normal world. That's what it felt like to me was that I wasn't coming up out of a dream. I was opening my eyes and I was like back where I was. So that was one of the most, just an odd experience with that person that was there who was frightening. But it just wasn't a dream state. And there was no familiarity about this person. No crossover between him and the man at the bottom of the stairs. No. No. This was a different person. Totally. Nothing to communicate other than just staring at you. Just staring. Like an ominous stare. Yeah. And he was young. He was like a young guy. Like that guy that I saw at the bottom of the stairs was old. This guy was young. He didn't have white hair. He had brown hair that it was. But again, like disheveled. Disheveled brown hair. But he was just looking and just looking at me. And then I woke up and I, or I woke up or just came out of it. And I was back in my bedroom. When you say young, you mean like 20s or something or 20s, 30s, somewhere in there? Yeah, probably 20s, 30s. 20s, 30s. Okay. Okay. So at this point though, you're out of college, but your boyfriend at the time was still in college and came home to visit you for a few days? Yes, he did. And we were up in my bedroom and I had that light off and the light turned on by itself. And it was one of those, if anybody was around in the 90s, they remember those halogen lights from the 90s that, yeah, we all know they don't have them anymore. Yeah. They don't have them anymore because they probably caused a lot of fires. They definitely did. But that's what it was. And that light, so it was one of those tall halogen lamps. And that light turned on by itself while we were in that room. That light never turned on by itself before that, never turned on by itself after that. Never. It was just that one time. And he said to me, like a little bit later on, he goes, that light turned on. How did that light turn on? Isn't that weird? And I said, yeah, I guess it is weird. I'm like, you know how those lights are, but I didn't say it to him either. You know, I didn't even say it to him because I just said to myself, what am I going to say? Like, look, there's something, oh, well, thanks for coming to visit me. And let's just let me tell you. My house is haunted. I might be possessed. You're now going to say, yeah, all these things that are going on in the house that you're now going to stay at for a while. You know, yet again, I didn't say anything because, again, I kept on saying, like, and I knew that light just didn't turn on by itself. And I knew, but I still didn't say anything. I just kept it to myself. And I think I was really afraid, too, of just what everybody would say about it. And many people are probably saying this to themselves right now that, well, okay, it's just turned on. But to describe to the folks that may not know, I think they used to be called a torsier lamp or that was one of the names for them. And so they were a long stand light fixture that had a very hot, bright halogen bulb, a long rectangular bulb on the top. Usually it was like a ring of glass around. It looked like an Olympic torch type situation. Yeah. A lot of them did have that design. And the idea, though, was, and I actually liked the quality of the light that they put out, but that the bright light was, it was so bright that you would be reflecting off like a white ceiling or wall and that it would give a pleasing reflective light quality to it. So they were actually kind of nice, but this lamp, and let me ask you if that's part of the feature in this lamp, most of them had a rheostat in them, meaning that you could adjust the amount of light. And so you could click them on and then there was a knob and you could adjust the intensity, the brightness of the light to your liking. And so it went from very low and kind of a nice, very dim quality, or you could have it very bright and light up the whole room if you turned it all the way up. Was that this type of lamp? It had that kind of a rotating adjustment? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly, that's exactly what it was. Yeah. Because they were all made the same way. They got cloned all over the place. You could, it was like you walk in, if you were going to go into a Walmart at that time, probably be a whole aisle of them because everybody in the world was buying them. But that's an important point. And of course, I'm glad you brought it up because I was thinking the same thing. Like now everybody's lamps are, you touch, it's a touch, turn on thing, whatever. It's like this, that was not the case back then. This is a actual mechanical switch with a rheostat in it that controls the light, but also at the bottom, it clicks. So it takes a little bit of human force. And from what I remember with most of them, rotating the knob, there was a fair amount of resistance on it too. It's not like it would just spin open. It clicks on and a very pleasing click. And then you could just rotate it clockwise to get full brightness. So my point being is that it didn't just click on, something clicked this on and it turned it all the way up or it spun that knob all the way to the right clockwise. So it was on full intensity. So, and then what Allie was referring to is that you don't see many of these lamps anymore because they had an open top. And what would happen is if they were close to a window and the wind was blowing in, there was curtains. A lot of times the curtains would fall on top of the bulb and it was so hot and bright that it would light the curtains on fire. And so it started a lot of fires, these lamps, even though I found to be the light quality to be very pleasing against. But again, that was odd that it just turned on and all the way up. And this time you had a witness who just said, hey, that was weird, wasn't it? And then it was dropped? Yep. Just dropped after that. Okay. I didn't say anything else because it was, and it was really, things seemed to be getting worse because aside from things happening to me personally, that was an object in the house that was touched and changed. That to me was almost worse because it was just me, you know, it was just me before. But again, you're right. There was somebody else there to witness that too. And it did, it turned all the way up from an off position and it just went all the way up to the, to the brightest. And then one of the last things to happen was just a few weeks after that, right? Yes. So the last thing that happened was when I was getting into this place of falling asleep and it happened to me the second time, just like it did the first time where I didn't feel like I was falling into a dream state, but I felt like I fell into another place, another, I don't know how you really want to say it. It's like another place, another dimension, but I was in a different place and I was looking around and someone was behind me and I turned around and it was the guy that I had seen the first time. The only thing with here, and I knew it was him because it was the same hair. It was the same disheveled, like brown hair that he had had before, except this time he was wearing mirrored sunglasses, like those ones that were just mirrors. And I could see myself in them. And what he said to me was, he goes, Hey, remember me? And now he's talking to me. And I said, yes, I do. But as soon as I said that, I woke right up. And what I saw in front of me was I saw a picture of two winged figures and they were going away from me. They look like two angels because they were tall with white, long white wings. And between them, they were dragging that person away from me. And that picture, as I opened my eyes up and I still can see, I was laying on my side. I was looking toward where my front, my, my door is the door of my bedroom. I saw the two figures and they were dragging him. It's like they had their arms hooked each one. And it's almost like if you see two cops taking somebody away from something and they're dragged because that guy wasn't walking. They were literally dragging him away. And the picture was a large picture in front of my face, but it was almost like when you shut a television off, like the old time TVs and the picture would just shrink into the middle of the screen. That's exactly what it looked like. So that picture of these two winged figure, these two angels taking that guy out. And it's like, they dragged him out of my room, out of my life and out of that dimension. Cause nothing ever happened after that. That was the last thing that ever happened. All three of them are facing away from you and they're taking him away. Yep. And the way he was is that he wasn't standing. They were dragging him. Like his legs were dragging on the ground. Yeah. They were, they were dragging his feet and they both had him on either side and they were, they took him out. They took him out of the room and it just, but it wasn't like the way. I was saying before about the way that that ghost faded. This was a clear picture, but it shrunk and was gone. That's what it looked like. And to be clear, you're fully awake at this point. Fully awake at this point. And you stayed awake. Yes. I stayed awake for a long time. I stayed awake for a long time after that, but I woke up and I said, I saw that. And I said, he's gone. Like he's been taken away. And that's what it was. I felt like in my mind, I saw him. He spoke to me. And again, I woke up right away and saw that being taken away and nothing ever happened after, after that. So are you a religious person? I've gotten to be more religious as I got older. You know, I think I went through a time like, and I'm sure we all know these stories, right? Like, you know, you're younger, you say, forget it, you know, you don't, you turn away from it. Don't really pay a lot of attention. As I'd gotten older, I feel like my faith has grown more. And that was an incident that happened where I know I was being protected. I was being protected. They protected me. I was saved from that thing. Whatever that was, I was saved from that thing. And I think that it was a point in my life too, because, you know, like I said before, I was a little bit, I was down in the dumps. I was trying to find a job. I was just in a very, just not a great place. I don't think I could even have defended myself the way I was at that time. And so something was protecting me. And I think it took it out of that house. And it's not like everything in the house all of a sudden, like magically went better for everybody right away or anything like that. But there was no more bed shaking. There was no more lights turning. There was no, none of that stuff happened. It was done and over with at that point. So that's my next question then was, was that something you had prayed for? Had you prayed for help or you were just, you were just a pawn at that point in whatever was going on? I was asking for help. I was saying, if something's here, like somebody, please just take it away. But I also think I was still in denial of it. I mean, that's how ridiculous it was. You know, I just felt like I was still just saying like, this is really happening to me. You know, like there's no way this is happening to me. But I knew something was bad that was attacking the house. It wasn't just those incidences. I just felt it with everybody. Like everybody seemed to be under some sort of malaise, if you will, you know, if that makes any sense. Everybody seemed to be under like a little bit of a malaise, just not good. And I do think that something was, something was attacking the house and it was, and it was focused on me. You know, it was definitely focused on me. You mentioned to us offline from this conversation so far anyway, that your parents were having some issues at that time, but that that seemed to have gotten resolved after this, frankly. Yeah. After this, I mean, they're still married. Everybody's happy now. Right. But it was just a rocky period, you know, like, and it's not something that people don't go through. We all, everybody does. Everybody goes rocky periods. It just happened that it seemed that everything was coming to a head in a way, I guess you could say with these incidences around it. What happens when, whenever your father goes out of town for whatever reason, what happens with your mom? She comes and stays by my house. She does not stay home alone. No, she doesn't stay home alone. She's never liked staying home in that house alone ever. She never did. But just like I didn't like it either back then, but she still doesn't like staying home in that house. I've stayed alone in that house since then in the last few years. I don't love staying alone there, but I don't feel like anything's really there anymore. You know, I, I, I really, I really don't. I think that that incident definitely cleared that house of anything that was really bad. But, but there is just something there that I know my mom won't, she won't stay there by herself. Well, how does she describe the reason that she doesn't want to be there alone? She gets afraid and she doesn't want to sleep upstairs just like I did. She stays on the couch. Everybody stays on that, that couch. Everybody stays on that. Yeah. She stays on the couch. She just, there's something else. When you say everybody, who else? Like, well, just me too. When I was staying there too, like if I ever sleep over there, I end up going on the couch too. But. Even now or. Yeah. Even now, even now, like if I had to stay there, I had to, when they were away at one point and I stayed there to watch the cat and I slept downstairs, I didn't even sleep up in my old room or anything. And again, I don't, I don't think anything's really there. I just don't like it. Nobody likes it. Do you think something was escalating? Something was building or, or gathering momentum. And at that point it got dragged away before things got more extreme. Yes. A hundred percent. I really do. I think it was getting worse. Definitely getting worse. I mean, just the fact that I saw at one point, it didn't speak to me. Now it's speaking to me when I see it, you know, now it's moving something in the house, you know? So I do really think that it was gaining momentum. And I think by the grace of God, something came and took it away and protected us, protected my family, protected me and protected my family. Have you told your mom the story? No, I still haven't. I still haven't told. You're, you're telling our audience, which by the way, it's a lot of people word might get out. I know. But if the word doesn't get out. So inside your own family, still, nobody knows even this last part, this really dramatic part that you're sharing. No. Yeah. No, you know, I, all these years, I never told anybody. I mean, these are like the last few years I finally said it to somebody. I told one of my good friends. I just never wanted to talk about it. I never thought people would believe me. I thought that was number one. Even people like me that were into, you know, we're like these stories and we're into it. I didn't think that most people would believe me. I think they would say it was in my head. I mean, look, I thought it was in my own head the whole time, you know, just being in a state of either falling asleep or waking up. So no, I never said it to anybody. And I think because it's frightening to think that those things are real, but there's another part to it where it's wonderful that the good things out there are real too. That's something that it's almost personal though. You know, it is. It's like a, and I know that sounds insane. And yeah, I know there's a big audience listening to this now, but it was, it was like a personal thing, you know, because when that, that bad entity, whatever it was, it was like a mocking thing. Like I said, when it was imitating my mother, but it was like mocking me and it was just an ugly thing, a very ugly thing. But then I saw something beautiful defend me and save me because who knows what would have happened if that didn't happen? It was like you said, it was gaining momentum. Things were getting worse, really, you know, little by little, you know, not terrible things right away, but who knows what was in store at that point. But something happened that stopped it all. And that's a very positive story, right? I mean, that's a very uplifting thing that, that whatever is bad, that's floating around out there, that it's opposite. It's out there too. Right. I always say we tend to focus on the evil and ugly and horrific, terrifying things out there, but it's also being policed literally in some cases by the forces of good. And so there's a spiritual warfare kind of scenario. People are battling, forces are battling each other for this balance of good versus evil. And that seemed to end it. So the, the angelic cops drag away the perp, the bad guy, things seem to stop. However, something recent happened, didn't it? Well, something recent happened because at that time I worked in radio and I worked, when I was in college, I worked in radio too. And I had tapes that I had gotten from my basement that I had been dragging around for 30 something years and wanted to listen to them. So I figured, and there, a lot of them were me on the radio. Somebody had given me, because I don't even have a tape player anymore. Somebody had given me a boom, like an old boom box, one of those old nineties, yellow, really not attracted. Right. The Sony sportsman or Walkman. It's the, yeah. Exactly. It's water resistant. It's slightly water resistant. Water resistant. Slightly water resistant. Yep. And my friend gave it to me and she's just said, she's like, look, I don't know if it's going to work, but you could try it. So I said, all right. So I put the tapes and was listening to some of my tapes. And then I said this, that all generation X knows this sound of the tape getting eaten by the radio. And you've got 10 seconds to save the tape that's in there. So that's what ended up happening. But I did eject it, take the tape out, do the tape doctoring that I haven't done in 20 something years to save my tapes. And then I figured, okay, listen, I'm not going to listen to them anymore. I'm not going to use this boom box because it obviously doesn't work. What happened was though, I was sleeping again. This is in my house. Now I'm sleeping on the couch because I have insomnia. I get up in the middle of the night all the time. I go downstairs and watch some TV and then I fall back asleep. I was downstairs and the radio was next to me and there wasn't a tape in the radio. Cause again, I took the tape out and obviously didn't put another one back in there. The tape though, when I was waking up, I heard from the radio voices like mumbling voices. And there wasn't a tape in there at all, but the fast forward button was pressed and that's what it was. It was running, but I heard something coming from that. And these tapes were the tapes that I had with me. They were from that time of my life. And that's why it's significant because they all were from that same year. They were from 1996. And when I recorded them, it was right before this incident happened. I was playing them and something was coming out of that radio. Anyone who's familiar with tapes like that, that if the tape is warped, that's what it's saying. Yeah. Like war, war bold voices that are a little too messed up to fully understand, but you can tell that they're voices. Yeah. That I can tell their voices. It sounded like two people talking and I was waking up. I said, did I leave a tape in there? Did I, is the tape playing? And I knew I didn't leave a tape in there. And when I went and I reached over and I hit the stop button and it stopped and then I hit the eject button and nothing was in there. And I got rid of that radio the next day. How long ago was this? This was in March. Just a few months ago. And were those tapes stored at your parents' house, your family house growing up? For a while they were. I mean, I've had them ever since I moved out, I've had them with me. So I've been dragging them around from house to house, you know, from that time. But no, they were there. But they were there in 1996, that real pivotal year? Absolutely. So that leads to my next question. Do you believe perhaps that there is some kind of, let's say, spiritual residue, a not stone tape theory, but a tape theory, a literal tape theory going on in that maybe they had imprinted something, some kind of energy onto the tape, and that got released when you played them again? I think it's possible, too, because some of those tapes were also warped, too. You know, like some of them were perfectly clear on one side and the other side they weren't. And I know I didn't record them that way either because I recorded them on real radio equipment. All of them were recorded on better radio equipment. Could that be the passage of time with them? You know, it sure could. But it could have been something different, too. But it was just a very odd thing that that happened. Right. That there's, it's playing sounds. The radio itself, the radio function on the boombox isn't on. It's just mumbled voices are coming from the speakers of this off device. Yes. And do you think that there's any message with that? Or like I said, was it just some literal throwback, some reverb from that time period? Or was this something new starting up? You know, if it was reverb from that time period, I think that's fine. But honestly, if it's something new, I don't want to know. I really don't. I don't want to know. And that's why people had said to me, they're like, hey, yeah, I told one of my friends and she said, why don't you just put a tape in, hit play and record, go to bed? I was like, nope. I don't want to. Now I don't want to know. And I think like going back to your question before about being more religious now, I think that's why I can also tell the story now too, because as I focus more on the positive things that are in this world, it's not as frightening as it was all these years that I kept it to myself. And I did, I kept it to myself for almost, you know, 30 years for the most part. But now that I understand more of the good forces that are out there, it's not as frightening. But I also don't want to court any of that again either, you know, because I think that sometimes if you are focusing on it, you know, something is out there that you might not want to find. And that's how I felt with that radio. And that's why the next day I took it out, got rid of it. And that's, that's it with that. This is a very authentic and wonderful story, Scary. I'm glad you went from telling your one friend to telling a hundred thousand people listening to the show. Maybe your mom will find out now, but I doubt she's a podcast. I doubt it. That's why I can say it. You're safe. You're safe here from, from moms. My own mom does not listen to this show. So, but really, seriously, thank you for coming on and sharing it. It's, it's a really interesting story and thank you for sending it in to us. And if anything else happens, you have to let us know. Absolutely. Thank you guys. You know, I love your show so much. It's always been a fantastic show and I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much for saying that. That's fine. And I'll send you 50 bucks after we finish. And stay awake, Allie. That's going to wrap up episode 295 of Astonishing Legends. A very warm thank you to Kamal, Holly, Zach, Joseph, Damon, Fove, and Allison for candidly sharing their personal stories. We'll be back in two weeks with a new show. Find and subscribe to the other shows from the Astonishing Legends Network, The Midnight Library, Scared All the Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. We have links to all of them in our show notes. Our show is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound and co-produced by Tess Feifel, who is also head of research and the social media manager. Our technical producer is Ed Vakola, or as we call him, The Mechanic. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin. Hi, I'm Anna Teja. I'm Kat Peter. Hi, I'm Craig from Scotland. Hi, I'm Mari. Galaxy wide in perpetuity. Galaxy wide in perpetuity. A-N-A-K-A-T-T-E-E-R-R-R-P-C-A-N-O. That's my name. Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com, or interact with us and other listeners on Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of the show and additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Drawer. If you're new to Patreon, you can save money by signing up on the web through a browser, or using an Android device rather than Apple's App Store, where Apple is now charging a 30% markup on signups through iOS. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. 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