3 HOURS | Scary Stories Told In The Rain | RAIN VIDEO | (Scary Stories) | (Relaxing Sounds)

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] hey welcome this video was created for you to relax or fall asleep to if you enjoy it please give it a thumbs up for me and subscribe so you can watch more of my videos later on and as always there's only three ads in this entire video after the first three stories after that no more interruptions thank you for being here now let's begin [Applause] so this story takes place in the winter last year i work as a chef in a hotel based in the uk and as the hotel is in

the middle of nowhere they are able to provide staff accommodation we also get a lot of people from abroad come and work here for work experience as most of the staff are quite young who live in accommodation this of course means quite a lot of partying one night me and my friend aj are finishing a long shift and decide to have a few quiet beers and not attend any of the parties we go to my room and start chatting about the day's events and the conversation after a few beers moves on to the paranormal and

what we both have experienced aj is from mexico and he starts telling me about stories from his hometown i find out that he used to be quite the urban explorer visiting abandoned locations and documenting them that's when he tells me about randa nautica for those of you that don't know randonnatica is basically an app that asks for your gps data and sends you a location using randomly generated nearby coordinates little did i know at this point that there had been some true horror stories by people who have used this app i really wouldn't advise it

especially at night as we were a few beers down at this point and aj already had the app downloaded we decided it would be fun to go for a walk and see what was at the location selected by randontica it asked us to think about what our purpose was for example find something scary or something unexpected as it was nearing 2 a.m of course we went with something scary it popped up with three nearby locations as neither of us had a car we decided to take the one that was closest as i said before we

live in a hotel in the middle of nowhere surrounded only by woodland and fields so this meant that we would be walking along back roads in the pitch black with only our phone torches as light as we started walking everything seemed to be amplified the wind whistling through the trees the animals rustling in the hedgerows we walked down a hill near the hotel and towards the bottom we could see traffic lights illuminating the path ahead we were talking and feeling positive maybe a bit merry from the beers we had before nevertheless we were getting closer

to the location and i started to feel a bit on edge we crossed into some fields and this is where things started to get weird our path was blocked off by some gates the gates were padlocked shut but they were small enough to climb over the location was past the gates through the field and off to the left-hand side i looked at aj and suggested we head back but we both came to the mutual agreement that we had come too far to just turn and walk away we both jumped over the gate and started walking

through the muddy field now it was really dark the moon had gone behind some clouds and it seemed to get colder it was nearing 3 a.m we both pointed our torches in the way the app was telling us to go and suddenly we could see what looked like an old storage container just sat there in the middle of the field is that it i asked no said aj it's over in that direction and pointed to his left we both continued to walk towards the storage container though don't ask me why i think it was just

out of curiosity we both stopped at exactly the same time our torchlights lit up the front of the container there someone had spray painted a clown a sinister looking clown i was frozen if we had stumbled across this during the day it would have been scary enough let alone at three o'clock in the morning when we were walking towards the unknown aj broke the silence by letting out a nervous laugh it's just a clown bro i just looked at him yeah mate it's just a clown spray painted on a random storage container in a random

field with no one around for miles after a few seconds he said let's keep walking at this point the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end something really didn't feel right i'm not actually scared of clowns it's just i really didn't expect to see that and something was off it's just over there bro he said pointing at a tree line absolutely not i thought to myself not a chance am i walking up to those trees it was the start of a vast forest that ended at the hotel nearly two miles away

i am not running through the forest and getting lost if there's something out there waiting for us i said in a shaky voice again we both came to an agreement not to turn back we edged closer towards the forest until we could see a little opening it's in there he said i looked and started walking faster towards it i didn't want this to be drawn out any more than it had to be something stopped me in my tracks my blood ran cold we were on the tree line at this point and through the trees i

saw a light someone or something else was there i knew where that light was it was in the pinpointed location i turned for what only could have been a split second to tell aj we were in danger when we heard it twigs and branches breaking whatever it was it was moving closer i looked back even though i knew i shouldn't have and a tall black figure was standing in between two large oaks i didn't get a better look i couldn't my legs just geared up and i ran i ran without looking back me and aj

were sprinting now faster than we ever had before we didn't even know what direction we were heading in we didn't know how far we ran until we saw that illuminating glow of the traffic lights we both slowed down panting and spluttering it felt like my throat was bleeding as the cold night air hit my face while running and through gasping breaths had cut my windpipes like glass we looked around and couldn't see anything i think we're in the clear aj said through staggering breaths we walked quickly up the hill towards the hotel i have never

been so happy to see the lights in my entire life this is a warning never download randontica and if you ever do only use it in the day later it came to my attention that people have gone to locations only to find dead bodies and some people say it's associated with the dark web i don't know what that thing was or who they were i guess i never will what makes this story more scary i don't think it was paranormal i think it was a human lurking in the trees waiting for us [Applause] this happened

to me when i was around 10 or 11 years old back in the early 1990s every summer when i was a child my mother would send me and my younger brother to stay with our cousins in mexico it was always a great time we would spend countless hours playing going to the beach eating delicious food and renting movies we would normally all sleep in the same room but on this particular night an argument ensued between me and my cousins and they kicked me out of the room me also displeased with them was just fine with

that and decided to sleep in the living room while everyone else slept in their respective rooms i went to bed around 10 30 pm or 11 o'clock i managed to fall asleep within minutes during the night i do not know the exact time maybe around two or three a.m i heard someone knocking on the back door which led to a back room which was used for storage that part of the house was under construction and a construction crew was coming every day to work on that room and they were supposed to build a wall and

close that room up which at the moment was open and anyone could have access to it now i heard the knocks followed by pleadings saying in spanish miss please open please open please like i said i was sleeping in the living room which was located in the front area of the house and the knocks were coming from a room that was all the way down the hall on both sides of the hall were different rooms which is where my aunt and uncle slept and my cousins i was concerned about the pleadings and wondered if that

man needed help but i was also perplexed about the fact that no one else seemed to hear what i was hearing i actually mustered the courage to get up and investigate made my way down the hall and actually attempted to open the door i twisted the handle several times and the door would not open all the while this man continued to plead for someone to open the door i even attempted to talk to him and said hello sir do you need help but he did not respond just continued to plead for someone to open the

door as i was unable to open the door and also becoming a little frightened i decided to run back to the sofa bed and get under the covers not long after that i passed out the next morning everyone was up auntie was cooking breakfast and my cousins were no longer mad at me i was ready to tell them about my experience the night before while we all gathered to sit at the table but decided to wait and see if anyone else would mention anything about it and big surprise no one did it seems i was

the only one who heard that man and the knox summer came to an end and i was getting ready to say goodbye to my cousins i was getting ready to have one more ball game with my cousins the construction crew had also finished the construction of the house and they were sitting chit-chatting and drinking beers my cousin kicked the ball a little too hard and it went long one of the construction men saw the ball coming and picked it up and made his way to me as i ran towards him he said here's your ball

i said thank you as i grabbed the ball from him and then he asked why didn't you open the door for me little girl [Applause] i bolted back to my cousins my mother picked me and my brother up shortly after that i continued to go back there a couple more times for the summer but thankfully i never saw that man again [Applause] i grew up in an extremely small rural town in florida on a farm the population of our town was less than one thousand people the closest city gainesville florida was about an hour away

the nights were pitch black dark because there were no street lights or light pollution like in the city except for the light of a million stars my great grandfather passed away when i was about eight years old leaving my granny heartbroken we lived a field away from my great-grandmother who was about 75 at the time unfortunately granny had already started getting early alzheimer's and sometimes didn't act like herself the family besides me decided that it would be best if i moved in with her so that she didn't have to be alone in the evenings and

at night granny lived in an old farmhouse that she had helped build by hand with my granddaddy in the 1930s the house was constructed of wood with a tin roof we did have electricity at this time but no air conditioner or telephone the front door was wood and the top half of the door was a glass window pane with a small decorative curtain across the very top the kind you might see on a kitchen window needless to say anyone could see inside the house as clearly as we could see them the door lock was the

original one made by my granddaddy it wasn't really a lock at all it was a piece of wood nailed to the frame that you turned horizontally when you closed the door meant to keep someone from pushing the door open i slept in the room with my granny our bedroom was at the very front of the house right next to the front door and my bed was pushed directly up to the window that looked out over the front porch and yard i always felt safe because my family and aunts and uncles lived in the adjacent farms

all around us in 1990 that all changed i was 10 years old by now granny was getting more forgetful sometimes wandering around the house at night in the nearby city something awful had occurred a man had broken into apartments of several college students in gainesville murdered them and done horrible things to their bodies there were no suspects the police called him the gainesville ripper rumors spread through the community like wildfire some said the killer was dressing up like a cable man or electric man to get people to let him in their door fear and anxiety

grew daily as the police had no leads my dad decided it was time to teach me how to use our family weapon just in case dad took me out in the woods and i practiced that night i fell asleep with the weapon beside the head of my bed with clear instructions to not open the door for anyone we didn't know as a 10 year old i felt like this was a pretty big responsibility and my anxiety kept me from sleeping much those next few nights they reassured me that i would never have to use the

weapon but better to be safe than sorry until the next night which was the most terrifying night of my life up until this point i was laying in bed looking at the digital clock on granny's dresser 305 am in bright red digits granny had gotten up to wander around the kitchen she did this often and i just let her do what she thought she needed to do i heard a tap on the front door window pane i listened intently and then silence suddenly the porch light flipped on illuminating through my little window what was granny

doing i scurried out of bed to the front door just in time to reach for granny's hand as she was trying to turn the piece of wood keeping the door locked at the same time i looked out the window my eyes meeting the eyes of a strange man standing there the porch light was behind him and i couldn't see his face very well but his hair was long and unkempt i did not know him he jiggled the handle and pushed hard on the door with all his weight i was terrified and i excitedly screamed at

granny asking what she was doing she told me granddaddy was at the door she sometimes thought granddaddy was still alive there was no convincing her it wasn't him with the man pushing furiously against the door i had to drag granny with both hands into the bedroom so i could reach the weapon without giving her a chance to open the door i grabbed the weapon and ran into the living room aiming directly at the front door my finger on the trigger the stranger was gone i had no telephone to call for help we were trapped i

sat in the recliner by the front door staring out into the darkness beyond the porch light with weapon in hand for the rest of the night unable to swallow shaking so hard i could barely aim the weapon i waited for the man to return to try one of the flimsy windows or the back door every moving shadow distant dog bark bump in the night or snap of a twig had my heart racing and blood rushing through my ears the wind would blow and make the screen door creak open and fall shut with a bang it

was torture my arms ached from holding the weapon my nightgown was soaked with sweat and i was on the verge of bursting into soul-wrenching sobs but i had a job to do guarding us from the ripper oblivious granny tottered around the kitchen getting ready to make breakfast because granddaddy would be wanting his coffee soon i didn't argue or care what she did as long as she stayed away from that front door i never saw another glimpse of the stranger but i felt like he was out there watching us after staying wide awake all night terrified

holding vigil i made sure granny was back to sleep slipped out the back door and ran straight across the hayfield's home to mom and dad for help once the sun came up in the morning the police eventually caught the gainesville ripper and it was not the same man i saw at our front door that night my family hired an elderly lady to stay with granny and i moved home permanently to this day i don't know who was at the door on that pitch black night but i still panic looking out of windows at night into

the darkness i would like to start by saying i am not a strong believer in the paranormal that being said the reason i'm here is because i have no explanation for the story i'm about to tell you to set the stage i was a senior in high school during the 2020 2021 school year which means my last year of grade school was complicated even though we were allowed in school there were still a lot of rules and protocols added due to the virus long story short someone in one of my classes got the virus and

i sat close enough to them that i got sent home to quarantine for the next two weeks i know what fun well on top of that my parents didn't want me spreading the virus to the rest of the family so i spent days in my room ate dinner on the other side of the kitchen and most importantly moved all my toiletries out of the bathroom my sister and i shared luckily our house happened to have a small bathroom with a shower on the first floor unluckily this meant that when i went through my nightly routine

of brushing my teeth and washing my face i was left all alone downstairs in the dark like i said i'm somewhat skeptical of the paranormal but i'm still totally creeped out when i'm left alone in a dark house so as i rushed through my routine every night i spent the whole time on edge worrying that some terrible monster was waiting in a dark corner for me to turn out the last light until it pounced and i would never be seen again but in the back of my mind i was certain that it was impossible in

fact despite my fear i was absolutely certain i was the only one downstairs for those brief moments when i was the last one awake until one night when i may have been proven wrong the last thing you need to know is that the bathroom downstairs was one of those that had two doors on either side one led to the kitchen and the other led to my dad's office my dad's office also had two doors one that was always closed and led to the bathroom and one that was always open and faced the base of the

staircase so one night exactly like any other that week i was scrubbing my teeth as fast as i could while keeping an eye on the mirror to make sure there was nothing trying to sneak up behind me i had spit my toothpaste out and was renting the toothbrush off when my ears perked up over the rushing water coming from the faucet i thought i heard my dad call my name from the top of the stairs the sink was so loud and his voice was so quiet that i wasn't entirely certain what i had heard so

i turned the water off and shook my toothbrush dry while i strained my ears against the uncanny vacuum of silence that filled my house i figured that if i had heard my dad he'd call my name again to get my attention so when i didn't hear so much as a breath for the next few seconds i figured i was just hearing things i turned the faucet on again and began washing my face and when i turned it back off i heard my dad call my name again this time it was so clear and unmistakable not

only did i know it was my dad who was calling me but i was also able to tell that he was on the landing of the staircase slightly closer now yeah i called back feeling a little sorry that he probably thought i was ignoring him when i really had heard him call my name after all i waited for a response tilting my head slightly toward the open doorway leading to the kitchen however the response i received was not the one i was expecting instead from the closed door that separated the bathroom from the office came

three distinct single knuckle knocks i was very confused at this point wondering why my dad hadn't responded to me what he needed to tell me that required him coming all the way downstairs to the bathroom and why he decided to go to the locked door from the office instead of the open one from the kitchen now i could have just opened the door he was standing behind but for some reason i found myself taking the unnecessarily long route out of the bathroom through the kitchen through the hallway into the open door to the office this

isn't a decision i remember making i just did it in fact i wasn't thinking about anything including the fact that i never actually heard my dad's footsteps approach the door or even come down the creaky staircase and i certainly had no idea what to think when i turned the corner to look into the office i stood in the open doorway and strained my eyes against the inky darkness looking at the spot where my dad should be standing but he wasn't there needless to say i went straight to my room and turned on every light on

the way it took me a long time to calm myself down and fall asleep that night all i could think of was staring into the darkness of that office and wondering what might have happened if i had just opened the door when i heard the knocking [Applause] i was around 17 when this incident happened i was in junior college and had rented out a tiny apartment in a stand-alone building this building was right behind a construction site meaning that not many people were around this place especially in the night for context i was living with

another girl let's call her nancy who was completing her education too one day i had to go attend a friend's birthday party there were about 12 people that attended the party that evening i didn't expect it to be late by the time i'd get back home so i did not see it as a problem that my friend wouldn't be able to accommodate me in case something were to go wrong however things did not go as i had planned being young and stupid i gave in to my friend's request to stay at the party until late

that night this meant that i would be on my own when i was to go back home since there simply was no space for me in my friend's tiny apartment especially not when she had five more people staying over that night to avoid going back alone i brought two of my companions for a sleepover sandra and kathya our uber dropped us off in front of the construction site since that night the conditions were less than ideal to drive to the building i lived in the workers had just been careless and left piles of concrete in

the way we were left with no choice but to cross the construction site to get home i remember how sandra kept saying that she was a little apprehensive and she should have taken her pepper spray along with her i tried to act brave but honestly was a little scared kathia on the other hand was carefree and we followed her lead we were walking through the construction site when we saw something that took us a back we saw a bizarre flickering blazing light coming from one of underneath the construction buildings it was really odd as there

was no chance that it was a construction worker at 2 30 am in the middle of the night before we had time to register what was going on we heard something that made our hearts stop for a moment it was a shrill frantic cry of a woman coming from the same building judging by the sound of her voice she was in excruciating pain what happened next gives me nightmares to this day we saw someone falling from the building literally meters away from us causing an earth-shattering thud [Applause] sandra almost yelled in terror but kathia was

able to quickly grab her mouth to make the sound fade thinking on her feet she grabbed us both by the arm and pulled us behind a half-constructed wall of another building just to be sure that no one could see us we stayed behind this wall for what seemed like forever suddenly we saw someone wearing a bright yellow jacket exiting the building with a gas cutter in his right hand and an amputated arm in the left we couldn't see his face because the place was not well lit and it was almost pitch black there honestly considering

the absolute horror that we were in that was the last thing that would cross our minds after another eternity of making sure that we were now safe we made it back home still trembling with fear we called 9-1-1 the police came and investigated after a few days we learned that it was a homeless woman who was murdered brutally that night her arm was cut off with a gaslighter and she was pushed out of the fifth story and left to bleed and die however to this day after several failed attempts investigators have no clue as to

who the murderer was [Applause] last summer i went to a house party in the gariowa neighborhood of limerick here in ireland we were right in the middle of lockdown restrictions and i know it was really stupid and selfish of me to go but i was just so in need of a stress release i'm a really social creature and i need to spend time around people like i was actually going mad being stuck inside all on my own i do actually really regret going but breaking the virus restrictions aren't the reason i wish i hadn't gone

because i saw one of the worst most horrifying things i have ever seen in my life at that party and it's something i don't think i'll ever get out of my head so the party is going swimmingly for a few hours and i'm occupied being the little social butterfly that i am but then i walk into the kitchen to get another drink and this big argument is unfolding between this couple that seemed to be based around allegations of infidelity it was super intense and awkward being in there with them so i just quietly grabbed my

bottle of wine from the fridge and then head back to where i was gabbing away with some new friends i didn't really think much of it house parties can be weird like that after all one room people are passed out another one had people dancing around while some rooms host little arguments between couples that usually don't turn into something hideous only this one did the guy in the argument storms out of the party and then for a few hours everything is good vibes again but then at some point later in the night the guy comes

back to the party people know his face by this point so they don't really have any reason not to let him in and i'm guessing he didn't give them any clues as to what he was about to do otherwise they would have never let him back into the house the guy then searches the house to find the girl he had been arguing with i'm not actually sure if they were a couple i just heard them arguing about sleeping around when he finds her he confronts her starts screaming at her then reaches into his jacket takes

out a bottle and then appears to douse her with the contents people thought he was just being a jerk and throwing vodka on her the outrage partly stemming from the wasted alcohol as well as the undo aggression he then legs it from the room while she's screaming from the people i've spoken to about it the ones that were in the room when it happened they first thought her screaming was her being a bit melodramatic about having some drink chucked on her face but then she took her hands away from her face and it's covered in

what looks like burns it wasn't alcohol he had thrown onto her face that night it was acid luckily someone there was a chemistry graduate they realized what was happening almost straight away and then grabbed something from under the kitchen sink that would neutralize the acid i don't know what it was exactly but it was some other chemical that probably didn't do her much good either but it definitely stopped the damage from being any worse than it was i heard the poor girl had to have a skin graft from her leg though like even with the

help she got her injuries were absolutely horrific the guy who did it went on the run for a bit too like the guard die what we call the police in ireland didn't manage to get cuffs on him for like a month and we were all so relieved when they finally did [Applause] i can't imagine what kind of monster does something like that after an argument to use actual acid to try to permanently disfigure someone's face that takes a really special kind of evil don't you think [Applause] [Applause] to all outside observers it appeared that dr

john hamilton and his wife susan had the perfect loving marriage in their 14 years of blissful union john's passionate love for his spouse had led him to lavish her with expensive gifts and luxurious vacations a brand new porsche on their wedding day being just the beginning of a long list of romantically motivated purchases but john wasn't just generous with his money he was apparently generous of heart too and spent a great deal of time reminding susan just how much he loved her in a variety of heartwarming ways when susan professed a yearning for employment for

a purpose outside of being a housewife john gave her a job at his highly esteemed obstetrics and gynecology clinic in oklahoma city he was there for her in every way and by all accounts they were a textbook case of romantic longevity but that's what makes it all the more horrifying that on valentine's day of 2001 dr hamilton's arrival at the family home kicked off a chain of events that would turn their perfect little world into a living nightmare as you can imagine in a marriage as loving as jon and susan's valentine's day was held in

high esteem every single year they were married they exchanged gifts and cards often having planned some kind of romantic rendezvous be it dinner and a movie or a walk around a local park but on valentine's day of 2001 john was needed in the operating room of his clinic fairly early in the morning too any exchange of gifts would have to wait until his lunch break but just as he promised john ducked out of the clinic as soon as he was able and drove home to spend a romantic half hour with his wife after which he

would have to return for another surgery he called her name as he walked through the front door but she didn't answer john suspected that his wife might have some kind of surprise in store for him and he felt a ripple of excitement to run through him as he walked up the stairs towards the master bedroom he called his wife's name again but still there was no answer and it was then that something caught john's eye lying on the floor of the second floor bathroom it was susan she was in a crumpled lifeless heap with blood

pooling underneath her paramedics were called to the scene but susan couldn't be revived those in attendance noted that she appeared to have been strangled with two of her husband's expensive silk neckties but the blood on the bathroom floor was undoubtedly from the series of bloody head wounds she had due to repeated blunt force trauma the wounds being so severe that parts of her brain were exposed while her face was completely unrecognizable to his absolute horror dr john hamilton was the number one suspect in his wife's murder from the very beginning police have since publicly stated

that there were many factors which led them to such a conclusion the first being that there was no sign of forced entry to the home whoever killed susan had keys to the residence it was also a crime in which nothing of value was stolen and one which there were no bloody fingerprints left in a bathroom which had blood almost everywhere this meant that there was a distinct chance that whoever killed susan was either extremely professional incredibly lucky or had the time and privacy to scrub the scene of incriminating evidence before the body was found on

top of that while searching the home police got their hands on a valentine's day card that susan had written to john presumably that year and in the message inside wasn't nearly as loving and cheerful as you might imagine i bought this two weeks ago so i guess maybe it doesn't seem as appropriate but i do love you have a great day susan the content of the card raised a lot of questions concerning the state of hamilton's marriage evidently it suggests that there had been some kind of incident or argument one that had caused a degree

of turmoil and somewhat soured that valentine's feeling as it later turned out this incident involved susan catching john making phone calls to a woman employed as a topless dancer police actually found hundreds of calls to this person on john's cell phone during their investigation and heard from close friends of susan that she had confessed to considering a divorce to the cops the explanation seemed simple jon had murdered his wife to prevent her from running off with half of his money but at his trial much of the local community came out in support of dr hamilton

and refused to believe that the man was capable of such a horrific crime especially given that the victim was his own beloved wife but when the paramedics who attended the 9-1-1 call john made were questioned in court the jury began to notice some disturbing inconsistencies in his story hamilton testified in court that after he contacted emergency services he had gotten to work trying to perform cpr on his wife's bloodied corpse and this appeared to be true as the paramedics confirmed that when they had arrived john had been performing chest compressions but as people who performed

cpr on an almost daily basis the paramedics noticed something peculiar about john's technique it was incredibly ineffective from a regular person with no first aid training that could be understandable but john's was so bad that it almost looked like he wasn't actually trying to revive susan at all which for a medical professional is very suspicious john also claimed that he had tried performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife but the paramedics claimed that jon had no blood on his mouth or face when they arrived there was so much blood around the victim's head that there's no

way john could have performed mouth-to-mouth and not gotten any on him some of susan's blood was also found on the steering wheel of dr hamilton's car and despite his claim in court that he had simply moved to the vehicle to make room for emergency vehicles a prosecutor was able to make use of the overall suspicion to claim that this was evidence that jon had been considering an escape attempt at one point during the trial the prosecution's case against dr hamilton appeared to be floundering hamilton's defense attorney had brought a number of key character witnesses to

testify in court and all had built a picture of john as nothing but a loving husband and he believed that the nail in the prosecution's coffin would be the testimony of a crime scene investigator named tom bevel an expert on blood splatter at crime scenes bevel was essentially brought in to confirm that the blood splatter on dr hamilton's shirt the same one he was wearing during his attempt at cpr was consistent with a man simply trying to revive his murdered wife while in a state of extreme panic and grief at first tom bevel did indeed

testify that much of the blood splatter could have well been from the doctor's attempts at cpr but as it turned out bevel had noticed something that other investigators had overlooked he had made a note of the few small flecks of blood that could be found on the inside of hamilton's right sleeve a pattern he had seen many times before on the clothing of people who have killed someone with a blunt object in the seconds that followed the courtroom was deathly an expert defense witness had testified against the person they were supposed to be defending and

in just a few words tom bevel had condemned dr hamilton to prison when later asked why he made the decision to essentially act as a witness for the prosecution bevel claimed he just had to tell the truth he said he had sworn an oath something that overrode any allegiance he may have had to his client after that it only took two hours for a jury of his peers to find john hamilton guilty on the charge of first degree murder where after a judge sentenced him to life in prison those that followed the case were highly

disturbed by the sudden turn of events john had and still does maintain his innocence even to this day but more and more evidence points to the idea that he killed his wife in cold blood his defense team even floated the idea that he must have been innocent because the guilty timeline would mean that jon went to work and performed flawless surgeries right after murdering the love of his life this might well be true but in light of the guilty verdict it's all the more damning because it suggests that dr john hamilton was able to beat

his wife skolin on valentine's day then remain calm and collected enough to go and perform complicated medical surgeries and if it's true then maybe a more fitting name for dr hamilton is dr death [Applause] hi my name is lindsay i'm a 19 year old female living in pennsylvania with my parents and two of my sisters we live in a pretty rural area and there isn't much that goes on out here i listen to your stories every morning at work and always wished i had a scary story of my own to share well tonight i got

my scary story to preface this story a bit me and my older sister have only been hiking one time before this experience so we are by no means pros we do however always bring some items for safety such as pocket knives flashlights and a medical kit for this story i will not use my sister's names for the sake of their anonymity my older sister will be called m and my younger sister will be referred to as f so today is f's birthday and she has never been hiking before and we figured we would bring her

on a little hiking trip to take advantage of the beautiful weather the area we hiked at prior is actually part of the state game lands hikers are permitted on the mountain trails during the off season of hunting however not many folks know about this spot because there are no signs or anything until you walk the mile or so into the woods by then you reach a small parking lot of sorts which is always empty there are two main trails that are marked with the occasional blue dot on a nearby tree if not for these spray

paint dots to mark the path you might not even know it is a trail because of how little use these paths see probably not the best first hiking spot for a couple of newbies like us i know but it's super close to us and makes for a quiet hike with lots of scenery so we decided to once again hike that trail because we were somewhat familiar with it we were decently excited and ready to have a nice relaxing hike through the mountain and hopefully get some cool pictures we started walking from our house all the

way to the bottom of the mountain where we would begin our hike on our way there we were telling f about the trail and how beautiful it was m then expresses concern that there could be animals of all sorts nearby because the area isn't normally frequented by many humans i figured there would be animals of course it is the woods after all but i never imagined anything like what i am about to describe in this story after walking for about 15 minutes we reached the parking lot m led the way with me in the middle

and f following closely behind the first couple of steps onto the trail require you to walk up a small but steep hill m crested the hill before eff and i and as she did we heard a pretty loud rustling noise off to our left i naturally chalked the noise up to some birds or maybe a squirrel messing around in a tree but then m suddenly stopped in her tracks causing ethan i to also pause briefly just as i was about to ask what the problem was m calmly said turn around guys me and f just

looked at her confused not understanding what she meant i just started asking why and she said probably the scariest thing i have ever heard there is someone over there run now that sentence was a lot more scary to me and f because we know m very well and she doesn't scare easily so to hear the clear panic in her voice as she ordered us to run away from something that neither f or i saw was terrifying m and f immediately started sprinting back down the small hill as i was still standing in my place i

quickly looked behind me but i saw nothing i did hear something though i was still very confused because i hadn't actually seen anything and m never saw what she saw i ran over to m and f who were waiting for me just before the entrance to the parking lot i think part of the reason i hesitated running right away was because i thought m might be exaggerating a little i should have known by the look on her face that she was not messing around i had a miniature hatchet multi-tool and a pocket knife on my

belt and you better believe i had them at the ready i had no idea what i was expecting but i knew that whatever might run out of those woods behind us was gonna get a full face of stainless steel when i reached my sister's i asked em what exactly we were running from she just told us to keep moving as she constantly looked back at the trail we had just come from she even told us to jog just in case it was following us we did after maybe jogging a quarter mile or so m finally

told us what we were running from she said she looked in the direction of the noise we had all heard and what she saw was a gray figure hunched over about ten feet off the trail she described it as being at least the height of f who was around five six she said it looked to be bipedal but she didn't stick around long enough to take in every detail about the figure however she did note that it looked as if it was shuffling towards us i believe that's what made her get us out of there

so fast she must have feared that we were being chased now i never have believed in monsters of cryptids or anything but em said she honestly has no idea what the thing was we don't have any type of animal in pennsylvania that matches that description at least as far as i know i know that black bears stand on their hind legs sometimes but they are not gray and it didn't sound big enough to be a bear the only other thing it might have been is a human but why would someone hear us obviously distressed and

not call out to let us know they were there and were not a threat unless the person was not there as a friendly hiker possibly a person living on the mountain maybe someone doing drugs and were afraid they would get busted i don't know that seems to be the only logical explanation but i am not fully convinced it was a person i don't believe in bigfoot or anything else like that but who knows by the time we were almost home em told us that she used to go to the bus stop with two of the

neighbor kids years ago she said they would always talk about a mystery animal that they would see walking around in the woods near their house which is very close to the state game lands at first she didn't believe them because she had never seen such a thing but one time when the neighbor kid's grandmother was with them at the bus stop em asked about this mystery animal the grandmother is and has always been a religious person and didn't seem to be the type of person to believe in something like her grandkids had explained but to

m's surprise the grandmother said she also witnessed the mystery animal lurking around what's more is our house is just across the lawn from where our neighbors claimed to spot this unknown creature i am not sure if these two experiences are related besides that was years ago but could the figure m encountered in the woods tonight be the mystery animal maybe it was a human maybe it was an animal who knows for sure but what i do know is i don't think we'll be hiking on that state game lens again anytime soon [Applause] twenty-year-old kelly berg

dove lived with her four-year-old daughter in bridgewater virginia she was a popular young woman not a single soul in all of bridgewater seemed to have a bad word to say about her least of all her loving husband who she'd been romantically involved with since they were both high school sophomores she also made a point of keeping in touch with her mother and sisters almost every single day all in all kelly was about as wholesome a person as you're ever likely to find and even found the time to work night shifts at a local gas station

to help support her family they weren't exactly strapped for cash but kelly valued the idea of making a contribution that would allow them a taste of the finer things in life as well as squirreling a little of her paycheck away each month for her daughter's college fund but sometimes terrible things happened to the most wonderful of people and on the night of june 18th 1982 something was about to happen in the sleepy town of bridgewater that would send shockwaves through the close-knit community on the night in question kelly was working her usual night shift at

harrisonburg's imperial gas station on south main street route 11. kelly had gotten the job because her three sisters had either worked there in the past or were still currently employed by imperial the employer thought it would make the girls more accountable for their work and he was right whenever one was sick or couldn't come into work another would always take her place and on this night in particular kelly was covering for one of her sisters for a little extra college money for her young daughter kelly's mom rachel was also a very loving and attentive person

and would often call the gas station whenever one of her daughters was working to check if they needed any food or hot coffee brought over to help them through their shift when rachel spoke to kelly that night nothing seemed to be amiss to her it was just another average night at a mostly quiet gas station in rural virginia but little did she know this would be the last time she would ever talk to her daughter as the evening's events were about to take a rather dark and terrifying turn at around 2 30 in the morning

long after kelly's mom had retired to bed kelly apparently called the harrisonburg police the call was to inform them that she had been aggressively harassed by a guy she had described as improperly dressed it seems kelly was far too polite to describe what this male customer actually did in any kind of detail but it's safe to assume that the implied meaning was that he had exposed himself to her just a few minutes after this first call kelly called again this time pleading with the dispatcher for a patrol unit to be sent to the gas station

the same man that had apparently exposed himself was calling the station to make obscene threats and it seems that kelly was growing anxious as she believed he was willing to follow through with them the dispatcher promised to get a unit out to her as soon as possible and that she should hang tight however just moments after the second call ended kelly called 9-1-1 yet again only this time she was in a complete panic with a voice that was dripping with fear she demanded to know how far away the responding police officers were as the same

deranged customer had apparently returned and was sitting in a silver or gray ford that was parked in the gas station's forecourt the last thing the 911 dispatcher heard was kelly screaming that the man had just gotten out of the vehicle and was heading towards the gas station's main building she then slammed the phone down apparently preparing to defend herself the cops rushed over to the imperial gas station expecting to arrive to a violent assault in progress but to their bemusement when they arrived at the gas station the place was as quiet as the grave they

searched the entire site but kelly was nowhere to be found all that remained was her purse there were no signs of any kind of violent struggle no indications the store had been robbed but there were also no clues as to where kelly was it was as if she simply vanished into thin air what's clear is that if the suspect was armed he could have forced kelly into his vehicle in just a matter of seconds kelly's family believed this to be the case as they insist that any attempt by an unarmed man to grab her and

shove her into their vehicle would have resulted in kelly fighting back vigorously the police investigation that followed led officers to a nearby convenience store where a clerk informed them that he had been visited by a man driving a grey vehicle about a half an hour before kelly's disappearance the clerk told them that the man was aged between 20 to 25 years old and had blonde shoulder-length hair this might seem like an obvious lead but the cops were unable to track down this man so no connection between him and kelly's apparent abduction could ever be made

the police then interviewed kelly's three sisters who were also employed by the gas station they were shocked to hear that the obscene kind of phone calls that kelly had received that night were commonplace but that no one had ever acted on them believing them to be from some harmless old pervert whose bark was louder than his bite they also didn't entirely believe that the man that had harassed kelly that night was the same person making the phone calls as there didn't seem to be anything overly threatening about the lewd calls while the driver of the

silver or grey forward was obviously aggressive enough to show up to the gas station in person yet after news hit that one of the gas station girls had apparently been abducted the phone calls seemed to stop entirely for a while only resuming around six weeks later when this apparently harmless old perv called and made lewd comments to one of the gas station's new hires this could well be because whoever was making the calls simply wasn't involved in the abduction and didn't want to implicate themselves as a suspect in such a violent and disturbing crime but

it could also be because the same person who made the calls was satisfied with abducting kelly and didn't feel the need to make another call not until the same hunger resurfaced in them around a month and a half after the fact when local media outlets contacted kelly's parents regarding their daughter's disappearance they gave a rather shocking answer to some very probing questions when asked if they had any idea who might have kidnapped or harmed their daughter and if this person might be a member of the local community kelly's parents unequivocally answered in the affirmative although

the police had asked them not to publicly speak the man's name they believed her abductor had been someone kelly had gone to high school with someone who had a long history of indecent exposure and making obscene telephone calls and according to kelly's sister also drove a silvery grey forward but surely if kelly had known the man personally even just by association she would have named him in one of the three 911 up to her abduction but it's also very possible that this person had either obscured their face somehow or kelly had simply not recognized him

given that they had both graduated some time ago there's also the possibility that kelly was so terrified that she just failed to mention the man by name during one of those calls either way the police obviously found the possibility of this man being the culprit so plausible that they asked kelly's parents not to use his name publicly yet despite this he was never charged with any crime as there was simply not enough evidence to attempt any kind of conviction there were several other suspects in the case and authorities were sure to question all of them

but at a time when cctv cameras and dna evidence were still just technological pipe dreams actually placing a suspect at the scene that night was all but impossible for all intents and purposes the person who showed up at the imperial gas station that night is a ghost someone who showed up bundled kelly bergdove into a vehicle and then seemingly vanished themselves barely a trace of either of them was left behind merely a purse and a vehicle description far too little for the cops to go on to secure a suspect kelly or her body almost 40

years later what happened that night remains almost a total mystery with kelly being declared legally deceased by local authorities despite her family pouring money into private investigators to try and find out exactly what happened they are no closer to getting any solid answers as they were almost four decades ago the only truth we have of that night is the terrifying reality that kelly went to work that night not suspecting a thing and ended up encountering someone that caused her to vanish from the face of the earth and that horrifyingly enough is something that could happen

to each and every one of us [Applause] back in the late 70s i was a little girl around seven or eight years old i loved spending time out on my uncle's farm as i found it to be a source of stability in my life my mom couldn't sit still as my grandma would say we moved all the time 12 times just in one year alone my uncle worked a full-time job and had to run his farm so when drifters would come by he would offer a place to stay and good home cooking courtesy of my

aunt in exchange for an extra helping hand around the farm one saturday after a long day of work my uncle took one of these farm hands out for dinner to the local restaurant which was also the bar gas station and market he lived in a tiny village with the only other establishment being a church at that time my uncle returned home without his farm hand we'll call him tom moving forward stating that he had stayed behind at the bar to hang out with the other patrons later that night my cousin rick came home and had

decided to sleep on the couch in the living room instead of risking waking my aunt and uncle as he tried to sneak to his bedroom you see rick was only about 15 or 16 if i remember correctly and had gotten home way past his curfew he had only been laying down for about 30 minutes or so when the front door opened it was tom and he was covered in blood now my cousin knew that tom was a farm hand and could possibly have been butchering an animal but he couldn't understand why he'd be doing that

at this time all he knew is that something told him to keep his eyes closed and pretend to be sleeping so he did tom stood there for an unusually long amount of time just staring at him before he finally walked away rick could then hear what sounded like the washing machine start up then the shower turning on he recalls thinking the entire situation was odd but did eventually manage to fall asleep the next day started out like any other until my aunt returned home from church she had to deliver the terrible news to my uncle

that his lifelong friends that owned the local restaurant bar market etc had been brutally hacked to death the night before with an axe they were a husband and wife that had their home attached to their business upon hearing the news my cousin rick thought back to tom coming in that night covered in blood he took my aunt aside to tell her what he had witnessed and to see if maybe tom would have been working that late but of course the answer was no she called the sheriff's office who came out right away luckily some blood

was left on the washing machine and even though dna evidence was nothing back then like it is today they were still able to trace the blood to one of the victims the thing that scares me the most about this is that it came out in court that tom had stated to the sheriff that when he returned to my uncle's home that night if anyone had been awake he was going to kill them all and now wishes that he had you see i was sleeping on the couch opposite of my cousin that night [Applause] my mom

never let me spend the night again [Applause] okay so a little bit of backstory for this my great-grandmother's second husband was apparently a total sadist who systematically abused her grandchildren for many many years in pretty much every way you can imagine these grandchildren happened to be my dad and his sisters and it had a horrendous effect on them as you can probably imagine it was also totally unknown to anyone but them until quite a while after he died which coincidentally was around the same time i was born so as i said the abuse had a

really harsh effect on my family's collective psyche and it made them vigilant to the point of paranoia when it came to protecting me from a similar fate as a result i was basically never allowed to play outside without strict supervision and i most certainly was never allowed to go to sleepovers at my friend's houses when i was a kid anyway this story takes place back in the early 90s when i was about 7 or 8 years old my family was living down in florida just when the holidays were about to roll around we were a

very close family for reasons i already stated so my nana lived with us right up until the day she passed she helped out around the house and with a lot of child care stuff so whenever i was home due to school holidays or whatever she would always look after me whenever my mom and dad had to work i adored her with all my hearts she was just about the best nana that anyone could ever wish for and she was tough as an old boot too so this particular year i was lucky enough to have gotten

the one thing i really really wanted santa to bring me a brand new pair of roller skates i was obsessed with them and from the moment i got them i was itching to practice so i could get good enough to start going really fast or nail some tricks on them one afternoon i'm zooming up and down the sidewalk outside our house getting better and better with each passing hour while nana is sitting on the porch and keeping a close eye on me in between bouts of reading a magazine or a book or something then at

one point the phone rings and nana basically has no choice but to duck inside to answer it since it might have been my mom or dad saying they needed to stay late at work or something i don't know something important anyway i'm guessing she did their dawn calling me inside knowing i would kick up a fuss if i had to stop skating even for a minute so she must have figured that she could probably duck inside and answer the phone without it being too much of a risk but as she did she kept the main

door open so she could still see me through the screen door it took a minute or two for her to get back from the call but nothing went down during that time so i figured that gave her a little peace of mind that she didn't have to worry about me all the time when she gets back she goes back to reading her thing while i was hard at work learning to spin on the spot or whatever trick i had my heart set on learning then after maybe another 45 minutes or so she calls to me

that it was time for a lemonade break and that we had to go inside i remember begging her with everything i had to just please please please let me skate for just a little while longer i managed to bargain with her somehow telling her i'd skate just a few more minutes but also swearing that i would come inside as soon as she made the lemonade no ifs or butts she kinda scowls at me for a second probably silently cursing the fact that she couldn't quite say no to me whenever i begged her like that but

she eventually agreed before going inside to get the lemonade ready but when she did she tells me to sing as loud as i can so she can hear me from the kitchen and know that i was still there so i did as i was told and warbled all the boys to man lyrics i knew while i continued to skate up and down then maybe only a few minutes goes by and i look up to see this big old van turn onto our street it starts cruising along all slow almost looking like they were lost or

looking for something but i mean i didn't pay it any mind i was a kid naive and besides i was too busy being happy with my skates to really consider any danger it might pose and on top of that i was with my tough old nana and nothing could ever hurt me so long as she was around or at least that's what i thought so as it rolls up alongside me and slows to a stop i just carry on trying my very best to twirl on the spot with my skates in fact knowing me i

probably tried to show off a little given i had an impromptu audience the next thing i know the passenger side of the van opens and a very very tall man steps out i know everyone is tall when you have yet to hit 10 years old but this guy probably towered over all the other grown-ups he was around too he was skinny to boot he looked like a scarecrow and a skeleton's love child or something just all gangly limbs with a shock of salt and pepper hair messily strong across his scalp he approaches me and asks

me which way the highway is and i just pointed back down the street i am not even sure that was the right direction but i sure as heck wanted to be helpful to a stranger i remember he smiled and thanked me and it was only then that i started to get nervous it was his teeth they were all discolored and crooked i think most kids associate monsters with their teeth maybe most adults do too i know i certainly do and seeing that guy's teeth put the fear of god into me but i tried to stay

polite when he asked me how my christmas went showing him my new skates when he asked me what santa had brought me that year it was then that he told me that santa had been extra generous to him and his family that year and had brought his daughter so many presents that she didn't even want all of them now my family has always been close-knit loving and generous with their money they just never had a lot of it so holidays for us were always pretty sparse affairs which is why when the scarecrow man told me

his daughter got so much that she didn't even want some of her presents i couldn't quite believe my ears and when he actually offered me a barbie themed dollhouse one i actually really did want i almost forgot about how nervous i was of him it wasn't enough to completely shake the fear out of me though so when he told me he had it in the back of the van asking me if i'd like to come take a look i just started skating away from him shaking my head silently but instead of just shrugging it off

and getting back into his van he starts to follow me back towards my parents place asking if it was where i lived if my parents were home that kind of stuff we hadn't had any stranger danger lessons in school so it was only out of pure instinct that i unlatched the gate to my parents place and began to wail for my nana no sooner had i let out the second cry then my nana appears with this big old cast iron pan in her hand and comes tearing up the path towards me and what i know

now to be my potential abductor and she's screaming bloody murder as she does so i didn't see this at the time but from what my mom told me years later at my nana's funeral this guy takes one look at nana fills his britches and just bugs the heck out of there as she chases his van up the street i do remember seeing her swinging that pan around and telling him to come back so she could beat him black and blue and as much as her display of furiousness freaked me out i was just grateful she

could be twice as scary as scarecrow man had been the way my mom tells it nana had tried to get the van's tag number only to find it didn't have one the guy was a predator through and through and had obviously been prepping and gearing up to kidnap someone for whatever reason that may be next thing i know the cops are at our house my dad has come home early from work and i am having to tell people over and over again what the guy looked like while they write things down and ask me a

zillion questions about the color of the van the guy's clothes like every little detail you could possibly think of needless to say i didn't get to go out on my skates again for the rest of the holidays so like i mentioned this whole story came up at my nana's funeral when we were telling tales about her and the one really freaky thing about the whole incident and something i didn't know until years and years after was that when me and nana described the scarecrow man to the cops they both shot each other a look like

holy crap before telling nana and my dad that we had pretty much just described another one of their perps to them to a t we had described a guy that had made several other attempts at kidnapping kids in broad daylight over the holiday period a guy they were desperate to get their hands on because they knew it was just a matter of time before his luck turned and he managed to trick a kid into getting into the van knowing i could well have been dead before my tenth birthday having endured unimaginable torment before i was

finally put out of my misery it's something that makes my skin crawl even to this day [Applause] [Applause] near central california there's an old mining community that you've probably heard of called the mother lode it's an area of california that was a large part of the gold rush that is where this story takes place on the way out of town down a long road almost like a stretch of highway you suddenly veer off to the right and go down a rough older road less than a quarter mile down the road dead ends into a circle

parking area with a gate at the end which is kept locked by the city if you were to go past the gate you would end up at a popular lake in my area when you park at the end you are basically surrounded on one side by steep hills dotted with poison oak and tall pine and oak trees the other side is a steep downhill slope to the lake so basically you are in a bowl we were told that if we were to go up to the left up the steep hill that there would be an

old mine long abandoned by the miners that the county didn't close about 250 feet up the steep hill we found the old mine almost hidden in a slight divot in the hillside that you wouldn't see unless you walked right up on it to get into the mine you had to climb down a slight slope into the ground and go over some medium-sized rocks on the ground leftovers from when they blasted into the mountain the mine itself was about seven feet tall and six feet wide which formed a tunnel that was about 250 feet into the

mountain the mine had rough rock walls with a colorful vein running along the left wall this vein is said to indicate the presence of gold by its ribbons of colors the tunnel followed along that vein taking at least two turns with a couple of short dead-ended offshoots as you got deeper into the mine you had to step carefully to avoid mud which is what the old ore cart tracks were handy for ore carts hauled blasted rocks out of the mine on like many railroad tracks once you were inside the mine it was completely and utterly

dark and silent except for the sounds of the wind howling and dripping water we took our time walking into the dark tunnel until we eventually reached the tunnel's end a wall of solid rock disappointed we started on the way back to the entrance my buddy decided to stop near the entrance to chip some sample rock from the vein in the wall he promised to be quick so i just stood and waited for him i maybe stood there for a couple of minutes before i heard the first strange sound it sounded like a small pile of

rocks toppling over echoing up the shaft towards us i tried to tell my buddy what i just heard but he didn't hear me so i just let it go not even two minutes later i heard it again this time closer this time i got his attention to tell him what i just heard but he just thought i was being paranoid he said you're just hearing an echo from me i tried to take his word for it but again not even two minutes later there it was again that time the sound came with a feeling of

panic and fear that was when i literally just said you only have to be faster than your slowest friend then i just took off running over the rocks and out of the mine when he came out a few minutes later he said he walked back to the end and didn't see any fallen rocks i didn't go back there until a few years later with another buddy of mine same as before up the steep hill we went the mine looked exactly as it did before front to back with no signs of a cave-in just as my

other buddy had done before my buddy just had to stop on the way out to chip away at that vein winding along the left wall as i was standing there waiting i heard another strange scary sound but that time it sounded like a rattle and we both heard it the only way we could describe it was it sounded just like a baby rattle we both froze and looked at each other puzzled and anxious illuminated in each other's headlamps not even a couple minutes later we both heard it again the sound of a baby rattle we

both grew up here so we knew it wasn't a rattlesnake or anything which are common here when we heard it the third time the creepy feeling came right back to me and i just ran out of there as fast as i could practically tripping on the rocks on the way out i haven't gone back since i can't describe it something about that old mine just came with a bad scary feeling and both people that went there with me felt it as well an acquaintance of mine who happened to have been a cop once told me

this little tale he experienced several years ago back then he was a deputy and still new to the patrol scene since he was new to it he got called often to more simple tasks tasks that made the more experienced deputies jobs easier one night the deputy got a request over his radio to sit on a suicide scene the victim was still inside the home and they needed the deputy to sit and guard the main entry to the home until the coroner got there to take the body they didn't want any relatives or anyone else to

enter the scene and mess up evidence basically that was a standard procedure so the deputy got to the home of the suicide victim and confirmed with the cops already on the scene that he was there to wait for the coroner it was the middle of the night so the deputy grabbed his flip phone out of the patrol car and settled on the front porch to play some snake all was totally quiet around him after everyone else left all the deputy could hear were the occasional sounds of distant barking dogs and the faint sounds of the

sparse highway traffic [Applause] the silence did indeed make him a little nervous especially considering what lie only a few feet away and invisible to him only because of a wall so it was only natural that his instincts had his ears on high alert so he was startled when he suddenly thought he heard a rustling sound seemingly coming from inside the house behind him all he could do was sit there and wait and listen intently a few minutes went by though and he didn't hear anything else so he just figured he probably heard the house settling

or something over half an hour went by and the deputy was starting to get a little drowsy staring at snake on his small flip phone so he flipped it shut and sat back for a few minutes to relax but then suddenly there was that sound again which seemed louder this time a strange rustling sound like maybe rustling papers he thought to himself puzzled as he sat there and listened hard he heard it again and that time he was sure it was coming from inside the house behind him where the victim was at that point the

deputy admits he was pretty scared he didn't want to call for backup until he was sure there was someone inside the house but he also didn't want to go inside the dark creepy death scene by himself to investigate either so he stood up and waited once again for any noise while resting his hand on the weapon in his belt then the deputy drew his weapon as a loud sound from behind him caused him to spin around and face a large window by the front door covered by vertical hanging blinds as he turned around to face

the window an explosion of movement disturbed the vertical blinds the deputy did admit to me in telling of this story that he did in fact definitely jump and scream as most anyone would the deputy's vision quickly cleared and he stared at the face on the other side of the window definitely not expecting to see that particular face staring back at him the deputy screamed and went wide-eyed the face staring back at him made his startled sound and went wide-eyed as well then for a quiet moment man and feline eyed each other before both turning away

feeling stupid i guess the victim had a pet cat which ended up most likely going to a relative of the victims the deputy admitted to me after telling me this story that he felt it was one of the scariest instances he had ever had in his entire career [Applause] i wasn't as scared as i should have been but my fear gene is broken and i have been drinking so we have a lake less than an hour from home and my daughter's friend had never been camping so we decided to do a quick overnight there we

mom and daughter 18 then camp a lot and like the solitude so we often try to find the most remote places no campsite or anything just drive up and find a space so we found this nice little peninsula big enough for about three campsites and it being sunday we were hoping the other two groups would leave they did eventually and we had the place very much to ourselves as the night goes on we have a nice fire sing laugh i'm drinking wine we're making s'mores everything is perfect until we go to sleep about an hour

in the girls are bugging me to wake up because it's raining and we need to put the cover on the tent it was a huge tent so all hands were needed by now the wind is blowing and we're struggling but we finally get it covered and it's back to sleep we go until a motorcycle more specifically a dirt bike at about 2 am just riding circles around the peninsula mind you this is literally a small enough area that only three large tents plus three cars would fit and there's nothing else nearby but bushes and the

lake there would be no reason to be there as it was obvious we were alone up down around and stop never cutting the engine i just want to sleep so i go to the front of the tent and unzip it i look outside and see him just staring so i climb out of the tent and stare back it's dark and i can't tell if this creep can even see me so i go back in the tent frustrated the girls ask what he's doing and when i tell them they get really frightened i tell them i'm

gonna go give him a piece of my mind they are terrified demand that i don't leave the tent so i settle back in and wait up around circle engine rev idle over and over this guy goes on for at least another hour i've had it down up around with all that annoying blatting motorcross sound blasting by our tent back and forth and stop i look out he's staring again i'm about to go stomping over to go tell him off when i get the tingles all down my spine he was facing directly towards our tent saying

nothing just still and staring i realize i have no weapons no way to protect the girls and he's between us and the car i wait i'm outside the tent but i haven't made a move forward because now instinct and logic have the better of me and i realize that an aggressive approach is probably the wrong move i stay stuck still just like the rider for what felt like an eternity both of us staring must have been 20 minutes i stood there and then just like that he took off drove off the peninsula and out of

earshot and never came back to this day i'll never know what that was about or if i did the right thing i can only say i'm glad i never confronted him my gut just told me no as for my daughter and i i think i need to buy a weapon if we're going to camp alone like this again [Applause] i was 22 and lived in my parents house while they had left south africa to work abroad my grandmother moved in with me to help out as i was a single mother while still studying in university

in the end we helped each other because she was also on oxygen due to chronic lung disease growing up in south africa we are taught from a very young age that it's important to make sure all doors are locked and windows are closed at night being a very private person i would always have my curtains closed people can be extremely nosy here well one night after a long day of studies and simply being a mom we locked all the doors and shut the windows pulling all the curtains closed to settle in for the night now

my son was not a great sleeper and would often wake up throughout the night after dozing off later that evening he woke me up asking for his bottle and i decided to check the time slightly blinded by the tv's light i sat up rubbing my eyes 10 pm something wasn't right i felt like we weren't alone as i peered through the doorway into the passage i could have sworn i saw a dark shadow almost crawling across the tiled floor i'm imagining things i must be shrugging it off i pass my son his bottle still i

swear i'm hearing sounds like someone coming up the stairs this time but that's in the opposite direction the railing creaks and i'm about to get out of my bed to check when a face peeks around the corner of my bedroom door gran is that you expecting her to be needing help with something so i reached for my phone to create light as i had already switched the tv off again a man storms into my room and grabs my phone before i can hide it i'm in so much shock yet i know exactly what is going

on at that moment take whatever you want please just don't hurt us i say calmly he puts his index finger to his lips he's just standing there as though he is waiting and watching guard then suddenly three other men rush in and asked question after question where's the safe where's the weapons where's this and that they were all armed and i had no idea what they had planned for us i just couldn't keep up trying to answer all their questions why would i a single mother in a house with her child and grandmother have a

weapon in all honesty i've never even owned one they took everything and then insisted on taking my car keys i tried telling them i couldn't remember where i'd put them but they stuck a weapon in my two-year-old son's face and asked again where are the keys so i told them where i thought i'd left them after going through all my things taking what they wanted and were then ready to leave i'm presuming they were throwing everything into my car for the getaway the one guy chose to stick around in my room a little longer give

me a kiss he whispered oh no i was shouting in my mind still trying to stay composed he put out his hand and took mine then the others called for him and as he pulled away i dug my nails into his hand and scratched if i was going to do anything i was going to get dna off one of them if no one could see what was going on in my home i would find a way to get justice don't scream they said and ran down the stairs i ran down after them and screamed as

loud as i could for help from the neighbors as they sped off in my car standing outside in the pitch black calling for anyone to help us and yet no one heard it felt like hours had passed no phones no laptops no means of contact they took everything and i couldn't even call my parents to this day these men have never been caught and i wonder if i had my curtains open perhaps someone might have seen people were still awake i am now 35 and since that night i refused to go to sleep without my

curtains open and at least one light on [Applause] this happened in 2004 i was a new college graduate starting my career in healthcare at a hospital two hours away from where i grew up the hospital i worked at was huge a level one trauma center i work in a highly specialized area there were only two other people at the hospital with my licensure that's important because we spent a lot of time working alone in our department and had to stagger our shifts for coverage i had the early shift i arrived at 5 45 in the

morning staff parking was several city blocks away from the hospital and they sent a shuttle to pick employees up the lot was surrounded by an urban forest the city tried to leave as much green space and trees as possible there was nothing else near the parking lot at the time since i arrived so early the shuttle service had to be called when i arrived the call button was located at the shuttle stop meaning you had to leave your car to communicate with the dispatch i was always creeped out because even though there were parked cars

there were never any employees in the lot at the time i came in the overnight shift didn't change until 7am a few weeks after i started working there i had settled into the shuttle routine and gotten more comfortable at this time cell phone service was spotty at best and i didn't own a smartphone so it wasn't very reliable one afternoon when i returned to my car i found a note left on my windshield it read hot and sweet you are i glanced around and didn't see anyone i was perplexed but not really frightened another week

passed i forgot about the note until one afternoon i returned to my car and found a flower in the windshield wiper and another note this one read i really love your dimples i could make you smile what the heck i had just moved to this town and didn't have any friends beyond the other two people in my department i didn't know anyone else i did feel creeped out this time and began feeling like i was being watched or something early in the mornings i would park as close to the shuttle stop as possible buzz the

dispatch and then wait in my car with the doors locked i often imagined i heard shuffling noises like shoes scraping through the gravel and i couldn't see all the way to the dark corners of the lot when i returned to my car in the afternoons i carried my pepper spray just in case i told my co-workers about the notes and they told me i should tell security i felt a little silly but i made a report security said they would keep an eye out whatever that meant i stopped parking in that lot opting instead to

find parking on the street nearer to the hospital where there were other people around things went fine for the next few weeks until one day i got another note this time it was on my car one morning outside my apartment building in the same scribbly handwriting it simply read don't be shy i was so confused what did this person want obviously they were following me and now they knew where i lived and probably knew i lived alone i contacted the police there wasn't much they could do but they did make some safety recommendations and said

they would patrol the neighborhood more often i took a self-defense class and was hyper aware of my surroundings it was worse not knowing who i was dealing with a few weeks later a woman was found assaulted and murdered in the trees behind the employee parking lots [Applause] they caught the guy a couple days later i recognized him he was a contract painter who had been working in my area the hospital had been remodeling our department and this painter would come in early around 6 30 a.m i made coffee every morning in the break room and

he would come in to get a cup we made small talk a few times but never any red flags then it came back to me sometimes he would call me dimples i shivered good morning dimples i was shocked that he had literally been right under my nose for weeks i had been totally alone with him on many occasions and i never suspected anything i don't know for certain that he was the one leaving the notes but they stopped after he was arrested anyway stay safe out there guys and gals on the morning after thanksgiving of

2003 the snow-covered winter wonderland that was the horn creek conference center in west cliff colorado made for a peaceful and serene setting but that piece was to be shattered when the naked corpse of a young woman was found lying frozen in the snow just outside one of the guest cabins the young woman's name was natalie drissell natalie was 20 years old when she was found dead having grown in her native missouri then moving to the state of florida to attend college during the summer of 2003 natalie had taken a job working at the horn creek

conference center during a christian summer camp event that was being held there it was here that she met her boyfriend who had a full-time job there and it was during the thanksgiving break of 2003 that she decided to make the journey back up to colorado to visit him with the couple opting to stay in separate guest cabins for the duration of their trip given the pious nature of their location the couple spent thanksgiving together taking romantic walks around the snow-covered campgrounds hand in hand afterwards natalie's boyfriend dropped her off back at the cabin shortly after

midnight of friday november 28th so that she could get some rest but the next morning the boyfriend went back to the very same cabin to check up on her yet found she wasn't there he looked around a little and was disturbed to find footprints in the snow leading away from the cabin ones that had obviously been made by someone's bare feet given the shape and size this must have sent him into a panic wondering what could have frightened his girlfriend so much that she fled into the freezing night in nothing but her bare feet he

followed the tracks for a short while into a wooded area around 200 yards from the camps conference building before finding her body lying in the snow at around 8 50 a.m but natalie wasn't just barefoot she was completely naked her exposed arms and legs were all scratched up and bruised and by the time her boyfriend found her body rigor mortis had set in she was completely stiff like a wax model and it must have been extremely traumatizing for him to see someone he loved so dearly in such a terrible state custer county sheriff fred jobe

said there was only a single set of prints that had led them to natalie's body meaning she had not been pursued by anyone in the moments before her death he also said that the pattern of her footprints appeared to be erratic as she had been wandering through the area in a days before she had collapsed it was also judged that given the state of rigor mortis she was in that she had actually died very soon after being dropped off back at the cabin maybe only 15 to 20 minutes after the boyfriend had departed an autopsy

was performed over at the el paso county coroner's office on november 30th with the conclusion being that natalie appeared to have been in a completely healthy state before she had died given that there were pine needles in her hair with dirt and abrasions on her face and shoulder and coupled with a chaotic patterning among her footprints it appeared that natalie had actually run into one or two trees as she fled her cabin evidence of such injuries included among other things linear scratches on her forehead cheeks neck chest abdomen and legs small contusions just above the

trachea on her right cheek and to the right of her chin and purple contusions on her left forearm hand and wrist other than evidence of injuries which the coroner believed were consistent with running through trees and brush she had no visible external injuries it is also interesting to note that the autopsy showed that there were no internal injuries to her brain so we can safely rule out there being some kind of hemorrhage or tumor being to blame for natalie's strange behavior while the autopsy did not determine the cause of death sheriff job said they have

ruled out anything criminal it's just really really weird but we're still hoping to find out something more conclusive lee royable officer in charge of the colorado bureau of investigation also commented on the unusual nature of natalie's death saying it's the strangest thing you've ever seen although there could be no definitive answers as to why or how natalie had died the coroner was forced to conclude that she had ultimately died from a phenomenon known as excited delirium she had absolutely no traces of narcotics or alcohol in her system when she died and despite not being able

to give a concrete conclusion that she had died of excited delirium listed six main factors that had caused him to reach such a decision the first and main point being that she had been found completely naked having not been obviously pursued by anyone there were also no internal injuries at all so no obvious way of telling how she had died there was also the complete lack of narcotics in her system so there was no way a drug could be to blame for the erratic state she was in that evening there was also the possibility that

given she was a recent arrival to a relatively high altitude from sea level florida that a lack of oxygen in her brain could be the blame for the delirium on top of all this there was an elevated amount of glucose in her urine as has been stated there could be no concrete conclusions as to how natalie had died but there was much rumor and speculation in the days that followed for example there was a great deal of attention paid to her boyfriend given that he was a natural suspect having been the past person to see

natalie alive as well as the person who found her corpse first yet natalie's family did not and still do not believe that her boyfriend had anything to do with her untimely death there was also a great amount of conjecture regarding a supposed eating disorder that natalie had been dealing with and that the cardiac arrest she suffered was a direct result of malnutrition given the mysterious circumstances and a plethora of different theories put forward to explain natalie's death it is almost impossible to decide on a definitive explanation as to how or why she passed away what's

clear is that she had absolutely no history of mental illness had no history of drug use and was in perfect health right up until that thanksgiving weekend yet suddenly she appears to have had some kind of psychotic break for no obvious reason at all one moment her boyfriend was dropping her back at the guest cabin and she was perfectly normal the next she was stripped naked and she was sprinting through the snow-covered woods in the dark at such a speed that she collided with tree trunks as she ran with the whole episode ending and her

dropping dead just a few hundred yards away from where she was staying we have to admit the situation is truly and terrifyingly bizarre with the information at hand raising many more questions than answers although the coroner gave the explanation of excited delirium it has proved to be a controversial diagnosis the condition known as excited delirium is not recognized by the world health organization the american psychiatric association or the american medical association and therefore not listed a medical condition in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders the uk independent advisory panel on deaths in custody

suggests that the syndrome should be termed sudden death and restraint syndrome in order to enhance clarity examples of deaths due to the condition are found primarily in restraint or attempted restraint situations while medical preconditions and symptoms attributed to the syndrome are far more varied in which case can we even place any credence in such an explanation and if we dismiss it entirely we are left with a gaping hole in natalie's story and trying to explain just how she lost her life but still is it possible that natalie encountered someone or something in or around that

cabin that gave her such a fright that it could have triggered a highly panicked state that could have been confused with so-called excited delirium and if so just what was it that she encountered could it have been some kind of twilight creeper who posed such a terrifying threat that natalie abandoned all reason and logic deciding it was better to run naked into the snow in order to escape such a threat or perhaps it was something far worse a large wild aggressive animal perhaps that wasn't about to display the same kind of subtlety and was about

to smash its way into the cabin to devour her it's unclear what caused such a state of fear that night but one thing is clear in abundance that we will never know exactly what happened to natalie drissell and that we'll have to accept that here we are walking the earth knowing that at any moment we too could simply fall down dead from some mysterious ailment that leaves our loved ones as baffled as they are heartbroken [Applause] i live in belgium and i'm currently 21 years old these events took place when i was around 8 to

12 years old my grandparents used to live in an older home in the countryside not too far from the city at first glance this house was amazing it had a yard surrounding the entirety of the property and me and my cousins used to play there a lot it had a fishing pond with koi fish in the back a huge walnut tree on the side and lots of space to play around in lots of our family parties took place in this house and we visited with my parents every wednesday for lunch to eat my grandmother's amazing

pancakes it was an older home and we used to sleep over there quite frequently i don't remember much of my nights there but there were some things that always creeped me out about this house to paint a picture the house had two entrances one in the front which i never witnessed anyone using and the door in the back that came into the kitchen in the kitchen you had an open doorway going into the living room right in front of the back door entrance and on the right a long hallway all the way at the end

of the hallway was the playroom a room full of toys and games where we used to spend most of the time during family parties when we weren't playing in the yard my grandparents bedrooms were on the ground floor right next to the wooden stairs the first floor had two guest rooms one right to the left of the stairs with one regular bed and a bunk bed and one all the way to the right of the stairs with a king-sized bed you also had a bathroom diagonally of the stairs and in the guest room to the

left you had a door that led into a small room to start off this story we'll talk about the small room in the back of the guest room this door was always locked my grandfather used to tell us this room should not under any circumstance be entered without his permission and i've only seen the inside once when he went to grab some old things from my father when i was still a child me and my sister used to sleep in this guest room whenever we would sleep over and most nights were uneventful though for a

reason i can't seem to explain this house always gave me the creeps at first i thought it was because it's such an old home and i've always been a person with a vivid imagination however after a while it became apparent my intuition wasn't as far off as i thought it was many things took place in this house and i will try to keep it as chronological as possible the first thing i remember being relatively freaked out by was when my grandparents cat tom died after a long relaxing life i was laying on the couch with

him and petting him as i used to do so many times during my stays he was a cuddly and fat cat truly a beauty but at this point he was as old if not older than i was as i was petting him i put my hand on his stomach while watching tv and subconsciously matched my breathing to his this is when i noticed i was getting light-headed trying to keep up with his breathing it was as if he was hyperventilating concerned i told my grandmother something was wrong with tom i explained what i noticed and

she assured me she would take him to the vet i slept over that night and woke up early in the morning when i came downstairs i walked through the long hallway going into the kitchen for breakfast as my grandparents always made sure we had something to eat when we woke up as i was walking i saw both my grandparents to the bathroom to my left right before the door to the kitchen they were squatting down and i went in to see what was happening to my surprise they looked at me concerned and i glanced over

at what they were doing it was tom he was in a basket not moving my first thought would have been that he was sleeping like he always did but judging by the look on my grandparents faces i figured out quickly what had happened tom had died during the night of course i realized this could be a freaky coincidence but looking back i don't know if it was the reason i say this is because this is when the scary thing started to happen not long after i started to see a woman in a white dress in

the corner of my eyes walking into the bathroom tom died in when i would be passing the hallway i was a scared child so i never had the guts to walk in after her to see if i just imagined it i would just run to someone as fast as i could in order to feel safe and i knew no one would believe me i never mentioned it to anyone not even my sister who used to sleep over with me and is only two years older i didn't want to seem paranoid or like i had been

crying for attention or something i started running down this hallway as fast as i could whenever no one was around to see me as i was scared of it by now i slept over less because i no longer felt comfortable in this house and made sure to always have someone around when i was there however there would be times when we'd have no choice but to sleep over or when i would forget for a split second how scared i was and agreed to sleep over my grandparents are amazing people and i love them with all

my heart if they asked me to sleep over saying no would be close to impossible for me my sister and i slept in the guest room with a locked door we would often sleep in the bunk beds together i didn't feel very scared with her i have always felt like she was protecting me as a child and even now as a young adult on a few occasions as my sister would be fast asleep i would hear sounds coming from the room behind the locked door i remember once i thought someone tried opening it from the

other side and it scared the bejesus out of me i just went under the covers as i always did in order to feel safe i think everyone has at some point often i would fall asleep afterward with no more sounds or scares some time had passed between my nightly stays at my grandparents and for the first time in a few weeks i decided to sleep over again my sister wasn't with me this time i was going to be spending the night alone which in hindsight creeped me out reminding myself of what had happened in the

past i thought i would sleep in the other guest room that night my grandparents though surprised happily readied the big bed for me to sleep in night came around and i was relaxed in bed trying to fall asleep as i was drifting to sleep i suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as i heard tapping on the window behind the closed blinds this room was on the side of the big tree in the yard so i shook it off thinking it was a branch hitting the window and closed my eyes

again however the tapping continued one tap two three silence a few seconds passed one tap two three silence i started to get skeptical why would a branch hit the window at a set pattern it didn't make sense if it was the wind that caused the branch to move wouldn't it be random i stood up pushed aside the curtain to look outside and saw nothing at first for a second i felt relieved nothing was on the other side but then i realized the tree it's a few meters or a few feet from the window there is

no branch that would be able to hit it even with a good amount of wind i couldn't make sense of it so i looked around for anything that would cause this noise nothing would be able to hit this window so high up not to mention the intervals of the taps it was too regular it had to be done on purpose i got scared i ran back to my bed and hid under the covers again but not even a minute later the tapping started again at this point i was crying the more taps i heard the

louder i became until i started yelling stop as loud as i could my grandparents ran upstairs and came into the room super concerned the tapping had stopped they saw how upset i was hugging me and asking me what happened i said something was outside my window but to no one's surprise there was nothing there my grandfather decided it would be better if i slept with him tonight and my grandmother decided to sleep in this room after calming down i slept peacefully in the morning they tried asking me again what had happened i told them something

scared me by tapping on the window and as i initially figured they said it must have been the tree outside too ashamed of myself i just agreed with them ready to forget it ever happened fast forward a few months i hadn't slept over at the house for quite a while and it was time for me and my sister to spend another night there at this point i kind of forgot how scary it could be and to no surprise that seemed to be my downfall as a side note i have always been an insomniac spending hours

falling asleep sometimes never once in my stays have i heard my grandparents bedroom door at the bottom of the stairs open after they went to bed in the middle of the night it must have been around 1am i woke up to the sound of footsteps coming up the wooden creaking stairs that stopped at the top the open door to the bedroom was immediately to the left of these stairs so whoever was walking up had to take one more step towards the doorway to be visible from where i was laying my sister snoring in the top

bunk didn't seem to be bothered by this but i was scared out of my mind my grandparents would at least show themselves to us to look in to check in on us but there was no one in the doorway no more sounds we always kept the light on in the hallway so anyone that would even try to peek in would be obvious but there was no such thing it felt like an eternity but after a few minutes i started to calm down blaming my vivid imagination and decided to go back to sleep a few hours

afterward i woke up again this time with a full bladder being half asleep i forgot what transpired earlier and gladly stood up to go to the bathroom i did my thing washed my hands and walked out of the bathroom as i was walking towards the room i noticed from the corner of my eyes my sister in the mirror above this sink looking back at me from the reflection i remember thinking i just hadn't seen her past me as i was washing my hands or something and went back to my room to my horror i saw

my sister on the top bunk sleeping like a baby then it hit me what had transpired earlier my heart sank i threw the door shut and locked the door terrified like a deer that had just seen a tiger in the distance i just stood there not knowing whether i should wake someone scream whatever i had to do to get rid of this pit i had in my stomach i couldn't fathom what had happened on this night i just sat at the door for what felt like hours trying to make sense of it once the sun

started coming up i felt less scared i was so tired i just decided to lay in my bed i couldn't sleep though and in the early morning i heard my grandparents door open and decided to go downstairs i needed company conscious company at least i didn't tell anyone again not until a few years later i never slept there again i didn't feel safe there anymore and to me sleeping there was like having a nightmare i found excuse after excuse not to stay until my grandparents finally moved out the house was getting too expensive for them

and it was too much to keep it clean and in a good state so they moved to a small house not too far from my uncle to be able to spend more time with their children and grandchildren they are happy there and live quite comfortably i slept over there once luckily without any problems but deep down i am always on edge being alone in the home of my grandparents and never feel truly comfortable there i loved that old house our family made a lot of memories there and it was super fun to play in and

around the home with my cousins but never in my life would i want to spend another night in that godforsaken place [Applause] on december 14 2014 a teenage boy is exploring the woods around the back roads of beaver county pennsylvania around 30 feet from the nearest path it is a quiet rarely traveled area where the nearest tarmacked road is just under a mile away one that cuts through a residential area that hosts only around a dozen or so homes with minimal traffic little more than a locally known shortcut to and from route 989 the young

lad is in a world of his own enjoying the peace and tranquility of nature completely unaware of what he is about to stumble across he only spots what he is about to discover because it looks extremely out of place even among the death and decay of the pennsylvania winter the thing has a distinct air of morbidity about it when he recognizes what it is he turns on his heels and runs screaming from the woods tears in his eyes his heart racing in his chest because what he had discovered that gray december day was a severed

head only this wasn't the disembodied head of a newly murdered person this particular head had been embalmed preserved when the police finally arrived hours later they discovered that the eyes of the severed head were shut but the mouth was wide open they intensively searched the surrounding area for any signs of the body it had once been attached to but found nothing the head was so well preserved that its face was still definitively recognizable but a subsequent facial reconstruction yielded no clues to the owner's identity forensic examiners estimated that it had been there for between one

week and a month just lying there among the fallen leaves waiting to be discovered if the gray hairs that covered her scalp were anything to go by it was thought that the owner of the severed head was anything from 50 to 80 years of age an anatomy professor turned forensic artist by the name of michelle vitale examined the head in excruciating detail by request of the local police department after hours upon hours of study she came to a shocking conclusion that whoever had severed the head had done so with the skill of an expert pathologist

that they must have had some kind of anatomical training to have completed the task with such precision a conclusion shockingly reminiscent of the world famous 19th century serial killer jack the ripper when we lifted the skin flap at the nape of the neck we could see that the whole purpose of that was to access the key joint that would preserve both the head and the vertebral column she told local news reporters during a horrifying interview this is not anybody going with a kitchen knife or anything remotely like that it was well done and it was

placed perfectly she was dismembered professionally another piece of evidence that supported the theory that whoever had severed the head had done so with professional skill was the use of what are known as eye caps a common mortician's tool these are devices that reassemble contact lenses and are worn in a chillingly similar way they slip between the eyeball and the eyelid of the deceased person and are complete with small ridges or spikes that main the natural curvature of the eye whilst holding the eyelids shut the pathologists who examined the embalmed head removed these eye caps and

found that the person's eyeballs had been removed but also made a disturbing discovery the eyeballs had been replaced with small red rubber bouncy balls the kind a child might play with whoever had done such a thing obviously had a sick sense of humor and was undoubtedly a very dangerously disturbed individual after the initial forensic analysis the embalmed head was sent over to salt lake city based iso forensics who undertook isotope testing on it for those unfamiliar with the technique isotopes are particles that can be found in the human body that come from drinking water that

can be traced back to a particular geographical location when the results of the isotope testing came back investigators were able to conclude that the woman had spent the previous several months being something of a nomad having lived or at least stayed in areas including west virginia western maryland southern pennsylvania and even as far as eastern ohio and new york state yet despite there being evidence to the owner of the severed head having lived in so many places there was little to show that she had ever lived in beaver county during time leading up to her

death or discovered however the use of embalming fluid meant that determining the exact time of death was almost impossible it also made dna matching next to impossible as the fluid destroyed nucleotide bonds that enabled such analysis to be undertaken the small amount that was obtained was so damaged that it could not be matched to any other samples in the national database but much to the relief of those involved with the analysis it was discovered that there was no criminal element to her death that the cardiac arrest was the most likely explanation for her demise this

was due to toxicology tests that had shown that there were trace amounts of lidocaine and atropine in her system which are both varieties of medication that are used to treat irregular heart issues most likely a cardiac arrest but not completely confirmed one homicide detective was said to have been extremely skeptical that the owner of the embalmed head had died of natural causes having seen far too many cases in which the possessiveness of the killer was displayed in their willingness to tamper and toy with the body of their quarry when interviewed by journalists beaver county coroner

terry tatalovich rossi said could it have been someone with a great deal of anatomical knowledge yes could it have been someone who is just peculiar or bizarre the answer to that question is also yes we just don't know at this point michael o'brien the borough police chief claimed the embalmed head was found so far off the road that it was entirely possible that it could have been simply thrown from a passing car it was also determined that the scent and flavor of the embalming fluid would have made the flesh very unappealing to scavenger animals so

there was little chance it had been dropped by some hungry fox the placement was deliberate someone had wanted it to be found sooner or later a number of funeral homes that associated with the pennsylvania funeral directors association were contacted with pleas for information and details of the bizarre case were even shared at a national funeral directors association conference but unsurprisingly no one could shed any light of the gruesome situation every theory with the exception of grave robbery had been dismissed with many agreeing that the most likely explanation is that the owner of the embalmed head

had been a victim of the black market trade that deals in the illegal acquisition of human remains either for professional or recreational purposes there's a black market on body parts and that market is pretty extensive beaver county district attorney anthony was reported to have said detectives have repeatedly stated that they believed the head may have been removed from the corpse of a natural-caused death by what's known as a body broker an individual or firm who purchases and sells cadavers or remains one solid reason that this line of investigation is thought to be the most plausible

is because the black market cadaver industry had been linked to similar abuses in the past due to the plethora of firms where you can purchase human remains any attempt to discover where the severed head came from is according to professor michelle vitale extremely hard to track if the owner of the severed head is to ever be identified it would almost certainly require the assistance of a dentist the forensic investigation discovered that the owner of the severed head had work done on every single tooth one of them as many as seven times on one of the

three teeth that had been pulled forensic dentists discovered a filling compound that wasn't available to dentists before 2004 indicating that the woman must have died after that particular year so far analysis of the woman's dental work had produced no leads but with a forensic facial reconstruction investigators still hope that someone someday will be able to identify the woman and give her name back almost six years later we are still no closer to discovering the identity of whoever owned the embalmed head or that of the sick individual who had severed or stolen it by replacing the

eyeballs with red rubber balls it might well remain a total mystery who exactly placed the head in the woods out in pennsylvania but perhaps the real question is do we really want to know the whole story behind it or are we most likely able to sleep easier remaining in blissful ignorance [Applause] in 2004 in the sleepy chicago suburb of aurora illinois amy pitzen would give birth to her first born son after some deliberation she and her husband james would name the boy timothy the first six years of the boy's life were happy and uneventful and

we have every reason to believe that he was loved and well looked after by his two young parents he had an extensive collection of relatives that he visited regularly who cared for the boy just as much as his own parents did but timothy and his family were headed towards a tragedy that would confound and puzzle all that became familiar with it a mystery that would remain unsolved even to this day on the morning of may 11 2011 james pitzen woke up made breakfast for himself and his son and then drove the boy to his kindergarten

class over at greenman elementary school on west galena boulevard before he headed to work but for some reason a short while later just after 8 am amy pitzen arrived at the school telling a member of the teaching staff that there was a family emergency and that she needed to take timothy out of school for the day timothy's kindergarten teacher naturally obliged his mother letting the young boy out of class to accompany her wherever she was headed after wishing her the best with whatever emergency she was dealing with however instead of dealing with this apparent family

emergency amy pittson's whereabouts are unknown until around 10 am that same morning when she arrived at a vehicle repair shop in aurora a friendly employee of the shop then drove pitzen and her son over to the nearby brookfield zoo where the pair then spent the remainder of the morning and the early afternoon relaxing and exploring the various animal exhibits that were on display there at around 3 p.m amy and her son arrived back at the vehicle repair shop collecting her car before driving over to the key lime cove resort in the small town of gurney

over in lake county which is known for its large water park as well as being a subsidiary of six flags after taking timothy around the water park amy and her son spent the night at the resort leaving early the next morning before driving over state lines to wisconsin here they checked into kalahari resort in the wisconsin dells at around 10 a.m both being recorded on cctv cameras but since then neither hide nor hair of timothy pitzen has been seen anywhere for all intents and purposes the young man had vanished into thin air around lunchtime the

following day on may 13th amy pitzen made a series of phone calls to some of her relatives including her brother-in-law and her mother she assured them that they were not to worry how she and timothy were both safe and well and that neither of them were in any danger these relatives would later confirm that timothy was indeed present with his mother at the time of these calls since he could be heard in the background complaining that he was hungry in the investigation that followed cell phone records showed that the calls were made from an area

close to sterling in vernon county wisconsin and that the pair were apparently on the move again via route 40. yet contrary to what one might expect amy pitzen did not contact her husband the one person you might assume she would call to inform of her and her son's whereabouts james had been frantic with worry ever since the evening of may 11th when he had returned home to find the house empty and had subsequently heard the news that his wife had taken timothy out of school on the evening of may 13th amy pitzen was recorded on

the security cameras of a winnebago family dollar store she was alone when she purchased a notebook some stationery and some envelopes she was still all on her own when she was sighted at a branch of sullivan's food also in winnebago wisconsin where she apparently visited the pharmacy counter before swiftly leaving she was not spotted again until just past 11 that night when she had apparently returned to illinois checking into a room at the rockford inn in the city of rockford the following day in the early afternoon of may 14th a member of the housekeeping staff

at the inn visited the room that amy pitzen was staying in with the intention of cleaning the room there was no do not disturb sign present on the door handle and when the housekeeper knocked there was no reply from inside the room so against her better judgment she unlocked the room and walked inside there to her absolute horror she found amy pitzen lying face up on the sheets that were soaked with blood pitzen had taken an overdose of powerful antihistamines before slashing her own wrists she had also apparently left a note on a nearby dresser

stating that she was well and truly sorry for the mess she had caused but that timothy would never be found however the note was quick to reassure those that read it that timothy was in fact safe with people who would care for him but that it would be pointless to look for him since his new guardians had hidden him away and would never give him up after being called police quickly arrived on the scene to shut off the hotel room for forensic examination they located the knife that amy pitzen used and a close inspection of

her car found traces of what appeared to be an alarming amount of her son's blood yet upon analysis only amy's blood was to be found on the knife at the scene to the relief of investigators close relatives of the pittons revealed that in the run-up to timothy's disappearance he had suffered a rather large nosebleed in the car and this was why so many trace particles could be found inside the vehicle amy pitzen's cell phone was nowhere to be found at the scene of her death but it was later found in a grassy verge on the

edge of route 78 evidently tossed out of the window of her moving vehicle as she returned to illinois but analysis of her cell phone records shed no further light on what she had done nor why she had done it and there were no clues regarding her son's whereabouts to be found furthermore the analysis of amy's vehicle revealed that at some point she had been parked in a grassy area there were traces of clay embedded in the vehicle's tires which investigators surmised had come from a place with a stream or a river nearby thus it was

highly possible that amy had driven into a rural area possibly off the road in order to hand timothy over to his new keepers pitton has since made it abundantly clear that he believes that his son is still very much alive and in august of 2018 the since cancelled law enforcement tv show live pd showed their viewers some digitally generated age progression images showing what timothy might look like at age 13. the guest on that episode of the show was angeline hartman of the national center for missing and exploited children who urged members of the public

to come forward with any and all information that might help police locate timothy but none of the calls that were made as a result came to anything at all however less than a year later calls were made to police in northern kentucky that brought a phenomenal amount of hope to those who wished for timothy's return but also revealed an unfathomable mystery and an unimaginable evil on the 3rd of april 2019 citizens in the city of newport called local police to inform them that a teenage boy was wandering in nearby streets apparently in a daze after

having run across a bridge on the ohio river police soon located the young man who was shaken distraught and exhausted and who required a great deal of consoling before he could even bring himself to speak police asked the teenager for his name and his reply shook them to their core timothy he stammered to timothy pitzen the boy was rushed to louisville kentucky's largest city where he was interviewed by detectives regarding his apparent disappearance eight years previously he said he couldn't remember a thing that the most he could recall was escaping a house in neighboring ohio

before running across the river bridge but dna tests would reveal something that was devastatingly disappointing to james pitzen who was indescribably overjoyed at the sudden breakthrough in the case the boy was not timothy pitzen the entire story was an intricate lie fabricated by then 23 year old brian michael rini rini has been released from belmont correctional institution in ohio just shy of a month prior to his terrible claims he had served just 14 months on charges of burglary and vandalism resulting from acts committed in medina county sergeant bill rowley spokesman for aurora police later released

a statement saying although we are disappointed that this turned out to be a hoax we remain diligent in our search for timothy as our missing person's case remains unsolved one cannot possibly imagine what would have possessed brian michael rini to tell such a heinous and evil lie it is possible that he had seen an episode of live pd or somehow heard of timothy's disappearance whilst incarcerated and wished to hit back at a world that he viewed with what must be a remarkable degree of contempt but either way timothy pittson remains missing to this day and

there have been no sightings of the boy since the day he suddenly disappeared at the hands of his mother however no bodies have been found not even a drop of blood that wasn't easily explainable so it is entirely possible that he is still out there somewhere in the united states just waiting to be found [Applause] i'm only 23 and i'm a very social person so i've seen a lot of things and i've encountered many strange people but this experience may have been one of the most frightening and unsettling encounters of my life this happened in

the late summer dark of 2021 it was mid-september so the school year had just started i was a senior in college and my group of friends and i decided we wanted to go camping not overnight camping we just wanted to go out in the warm night and sit around a fire in the woods make s'mores chill and maybe have some drinks one of my friends who was a girl landry i'd come up with the idea to do this after classes were over that friday landry brought some of her friends gracie and lily i asked my

two roommates wyatt and marshall if they wanted to come they both agreed so there were six of us in total three girls and three boys we were all just college friends having a good old time we had all been out there for maybe 30 minutes when i heard footsteps in the woods as soon as i heard the footsteps everyone else must have heard them too all of the talking around the campfire turned to silence i think the reason it startled everyone was because of two reasons one because the footsteps were heavy and it was unmistakably

something much larger than a small game animal like a squirrel or a rabbit and two because it was clearly not a deer or another four-legged animal because of the frequency of the footsteps the footsteps were hitting the leaves one at a time if it was a deer there would be simultaneous thuds on the ground indicating a creature with four legs given the way the leaves were crunching one step at a time it couldn't be anything but something large that was traveling on two legs suddenly there was a thud on the ground about 30 yards away

from us as if whatever was moving through the woods had fallen the footsteps had now stopped we knew whatever it was had to still be in the woods near us just stagnant needless to say we all had our guard up now the strong unsettling feeling of being watched soon got the best of us so we all agreed to just take our things and quickly leave as soon as we all started to get up we heard a voice from the woods in that same direction yell in a creepy friendly tone it was a man's voice and

he said something along the lines of hey where are you guys going the girls immediately started running back to the truck without getting their stuff which was maybe 100 yards away i wasn't really scared but i definitely knew something wasn't right wyatt was obviously flustered but he was trying to hide it he grabbed his stuff and started to walk back without saying a word meanwhile marshall called back to whoever was in the woods he said something along the lines of what do you mean or something stupid like that we were the only two people still

with an earshot of the man in the woods now marshall was toying with danger and we both knew it the man replied with something along the lines of i'm stuck in the woods and i need help marshall was kind of being a jerk and said something like how could you be stuck in the woods did you get caught in a bear trap after there was no answer marshall said that he had got him marshall and i grabbed the girl's stuff and started toward the truck i remember walking back thinking that marshall is an idiot for

doing that as marshall and i were approaching the truck i looked at my phone and had some missed calls from landry i found out why as soon as we got back in the truck when wyatt and the girls simultaneously started trying to tell me and marshall about how they saw multiple tall silhouettes walking near the tree line in the moonlight they explained how the shadow outlines were walking in the direction of where we had set up camp we obviously didn't think they were lying after the exchange marshall just had with the guy in the woods

immediately following we promptly booked it out of that place in retrospect it could have been some guys just playing games out in the woods but more realistically it was probably some sort of gang or cult or something like that i'm just glad we were so lucky to get out of there when we did or who knows what could have happened [Applause] [Applause] when i was a young boy i always had a lot of trouble falling asleep at night i would lie awake my mind racing with anxiety it would get so bad that i would carry

my pillow and blanket around the house and see if i could maybe sleep better in the living room or sometimes even on my parents bedroom floor looking back this is pretty embarrassing but there's a reason i mention it every so often i would stay at my nana's house with my younger brother it was a three-story duplex in one of those gated seniors communities that spring up in residential areas surrounding hospitals when i was eight my grandfather passed away from cancer at the hospital right around the corner since then my nana has always lived alone even

still i remember enjoying spending time there eating lots of food playing video games watching lots of vhs taped shows about alien encounters and ghostly hauntings that's where i got my thrills that being said i've always considered myself skeptical to the paranormal however something happened one of those nights at my nana's house that to this day over a decade later i still cannot explain on this particular night it was only me staying over at nana's house the upstairs floor of her three-story duplex consisted of two bedrooms a large master bedroom and right across the hallway was

another smaller bedroom most nights when i stayed over with my younger brother we would both sleep in the smaller bedroom but there was always something a little creepy about that bedroom and on the night i decided i won't be sleeping alone in that room instead i'll just take a pillow and blanket and sleep on the floor in my nana's master bedroom my family was used to my strange sleeping habits so it was no problem i made my bed on the floor in between the door and the queen-sized bed that furnished the master bedroom and swiftly

fell asleep i woke up tossing and turning in the middle of the night it must have been in the very early am hours the room was very dark to my right is the large bed where my nana lay sleeping to my left is the bedroom door left a jar only slightly i can hear my nana sleeping in her bed the soft inhale and exhale of someone in a deep sleep and then a troubling realization takes hold of me i notice that hers isn't the only pattern of breathing that i can hear to my left in

the direction of the hallway and the room directly across the hall i can hear a completely separate inhale and exhale it sounded as though someone was standing right outside the bedroom door breathing loudly i can remember thinking to myself am i just imagining this or am i hearing myself i remember holding my breath and listening and then guaranteed myself that i was hearing two different people breathing it was easy to tell because the breathing sounds were on opposite sides of me it continued for at least a full minute and the more i paid attention to

it the more terrified i became in the moment i pulled my blanket over my head and convinced myself that maybe for some reason one of my other relatives had shown up and needed to crash in her guest bedroom somehow i eventually fell back asleep the next morning sitting down at a stack of pancakes i asked my nana if anyone had been over last night she told me no and asked me why i asked but i couldn't bring myself to tell her what i had experienced the night before being in a gated community she would have

had to buzz through any visitors that arrived that's the one and only time i've ever experienced something that i just cannot explain [Applause] when i was in college i worked the night shift one summer vacation i was 19 years old and an average looking female i wasn't enthused about having to work a job over the summer but it was the only way i was going to be able to afford tuition working night shift was probably the weirdest experience of my life it was at the mcdonald's drive-thru i still remember my first night on the job

this lady came in and was talking to someone while she was waiting for us to take her order she sounded extremely upset and she was screaming at the top of her lungs it sounded like it was directed at someone in the back seat i immediately assumed that she was abusing her children i'm a psychology major so i naturally pick up on stuff like that she ordered three big macs and three large cokes my intuition has been wrong when she pulled up to pay for her meal she was completely alone i was honestly a little startled

why would this lady be here ordering this much food and screaming in her car if she was alone i couldn't wrap my head around the situation she was otherwise polite she was nice as she spoke to me and paid for her food and left she even told me to have a good night she had been the only customer we had in a probably 45 minute window and after she left i saw some of my co-workers laughing at me i asked what's so funny and he told me that it was my first encounter with schizo susan

they told me that she regularly did stuff like this and always showed up at all hours of the night to order seemingly too much food she was always yelling at people in her car but there was never anyone actually in her car they didn't actually know her name so they just started calling her schizo susan they told me that there were occasional nights when she was the only customer to come through the drive through at all i found it extremely unnerving i immediately started wondering what was wrong with this woman about a week went by

she came in every night just like they said and in between speaking to me to order her food and picking up her food she was always yelling at someone i couldn't take it anymore i had to know what was up so i formulated a plan i was just going to ask her who she was speaking to you know play it off like i thought she was talking to me it was the best i could come up with without seeming abrasive i remember it being a friday night when i decided i was going to do it

i had chickened out a couple of times but i figured that since i don't work the weekends may as well try something new to end my last shift for the week well the night that i did it i listened into her screaming for a few more seconds than i normally did you see i can listen to what people are saying through the mcdonald speaker without them necessarily knowing that i'm listening if i don't say anything they would never know i normally never did this because it's kind of frowned upon i'm pretty sure there's some kind

of rule against it but i listened for maybe 20 or 30 seconds i listened for long enough to know that she was yelling at someone named darian when she was in the middle of saying something i interrupted her and said i'm sorry ma'am were you speaking to me she just replied no crap i thought to myself i knew that i had to try something else i asked her if darion would be ordering with her then she went silent it wasn't an entire minute but she didn't say anything after the second time of asking her if

she was still there she let out a banshee scream it was the loudest thing i have ever heard in my life it really hurt my ears the mcdonald's microphone system is already pretty loud but when someone screams into it trust me when i say that it is the most unbearable thing you have ever experienced i was also surprised at how long she screamed she had one deep loud guttural scream going for like 30 entire seconds in the moment though i was scared for my life i also got really worried that i was going to lose

my job i felt really guilty for asking like it was my fault for setting her off in retrospect i don't think i really did anything horrible to her literally just asked her if the person whose name she was screaming just a minute ago was also going to be ordering food she didn't actually say anything when she screamed it was just kind of a violent and guttural screaming i was really taken aback there for a minute how the heck do you even respond to that i asked her if she wanted to continue placing her order and

that's when she just drove away she really floored it and drove way faster than she should have and as she drove by i saw her face looking at me through the window it must have been only a split second that i could see her but i got that one really good look at her she looked extremely distressed and as if things couldn't get any weirder the microphone system stopped working correctly the rest of the night i think she screamed loud enough to break something in it that was hands down the weirdest thing to ever happen

to me throughout any jobs i've ever worked and this weird lady just disappeared after that she stopped coming to mcdonald's all together i asked some of my other co-workers how long she had been stopping by for her nightly visits and they all said that it was for as long as they can remember which probably meant at least a year i felt somewhat guilty for pissing this lady off so bad but i think it is safe to say she probably needs some serious mental help i haven't worked at mcdonald's in a long time and i don't

ever plan on working fast food again i just hope that wherever that lady ended up she got the help that she so desperately and obviously needed [Applause] the other day i remember this one little story that happened to one of my friend's old neighbors his old neighbor lived in a really small rv park anyway he liked to go back there to visit her a lot since they were pretty close i was his ride at the time so i would usually end up hanging out there with them the small rv park was located right off a

main road and a highway that led directly into one of our small historic townships the park was shaded by mostly tall oak trees so it was often nice and breezy in the hot summers since it was such a small neighborhood in the rv park everyone had no choice but to know everyone while we were hanging out there one day my friend's former neighbor and her other neighbor started commenting on the fact that there were tons of ants that was unusual to them since they lived there for years and never had that problem before eventually after

dealing with the ants being absolutely everywhere for a couple days my friend's old neighbor decided to go outside and try to track the ant trails to see where they may be coming from she ended up tracking them to an rv that was one space away from hers there she found several trails of them both going into and coming from this man's rv everyone in the little neighborhood knew that the man who lived in that rv was somewhat of a hoarder and he was not clean at all so she knocked on his door a few times

but he didn't seem to be there so she decided to tape a note to his door for when he got home in the note she asked that he please have his son maybe pick up some ant traps and also to have him maybe clean up a little the man who lived there was quite weak and ill with mrsa i believe mrsa is a disease that can be passed through bodily fluids and such and i also believe it is eventually fatal thankfully though he had his son around to do his errands and some other things to

help care for him a couple days after she had left the note on his door she got a knock on her door and it was the man's son what he had to say was the grossest and most horrifying thing i have heard what had happened was that when the man's son came by to take his dad to an appointment he knocked but didn't get an answer as he was waiting for his dad to answer the door he realized he hadn't heard from him in almost a week i guess his dad usually called him at least

every other day or so since his dad wasn't answering him his son went to go grab the spare key that his dad had given to him previously when he let himself into his dad's rv he made a morbid and terrifying discovery he found his dad's decomposing body still in his bed totally covered in ants he ran out of there and it didn't take long for a neighbor to find him sobbing next to his vehicle within minutes the whole small community had heard the gruesome news as it just so happened i had taken my friend over

there for us to all hang out again on the day his old neighbor had heard the terrible news we didn't even get a chance to sit down before she was already telling us about it as she was telling us about all the ants on his body i just couldn't help but to think about how ants come into your house crawl all over your sinks counters and dishes and even in your food so for whatever reason the ants were truly the most horrific part to me after all mrsa can be passed through bodily fluids we didn't

go back there for a while after hearing that when we did though they were still in the process of trying to move the rv out of there and that was after a man in a full hazmat suit spent days cleaning it out the whole thing just kind of freaked us all out though especially the ants [Applause] during the mid-19th century the united states saw a sharp rise in the number of people who chose to leave their homes in the east to resettle in the california or the newly acquired oregon territories for many a new life

in california meant freedom from financial servitude or freedom to practice their own particular brand of christianity without judgment from their peers back east others were attracted to the west's new and exciting economic opportunities or inspired by the idea of manifest destiny but for one group of migrants their pursuit of the american dream would quickly turn into a nightmare one characterized by isolated mountain passes freezing cold and stomach twisting hunger in the spring of 1842 a wagon train that was almost 500 strong headed out from independence missouri seeking to follow an established trail that would lead

them to the promised land of california taking their place at the rear of the wagon train was a group of nine wagons containing 32 members of the reed and donner families the family patriarch george donner had spent time in a number of eastern states before finally making the decision to move his family west at first heavy traffic on the trails leading eastward as well as the large number of other travelers meant that the journey is relatively easy traveling in the summer months could be hot and tiresome but it paled in comparison with how difficult navigation

during the winter would be it was essential that the wagon train make as much ground as possible while it was still possible for winter was coming and it would not be merciful by the end of september 1842 an attempt at a shortcut had gone terribly wrong for the donner reed families seeking to overtake the sierra nevada mountains before the winter arrived they had successfully traversed the great salt lake desert but complications meant that they had in fact slowed themselves down by about a month lack of water in the harsh dry desert had driven the party

to near madness and caused casualties among its essential accompaniment of oxen and other cattle tensions among the party members were reaching breaking points in the following month of october many of wagons that made up the original party had gone their separate ways either pushing on towards california or making their way back eastward in the group that remained two wagons became entangled and a man by the name of john snyder attempted to remedy the situation he lacked patience and soon began mercilessly whipping one of the oxen soon james reed the oldest and most senior member of

the reed family attempted to intervene to stop the beating but snyder reacted furiously to the intervention and turned the whip in his hand towards reed a physical altercation ensued one that was only ended when james reed took out a long steel buoy knife and plunged it into snyder's chest [Applause] despite reed's explanation of self-defense the party members convened to decide his punishment united states laws were not applicable west of the continental divide in what was then mexican territory and wagon trains often dispensed their own justice some suggested that reed should hang for his crimes but

it was eventually decided that he should merely be banished from the wagon train but on pain of death should he attempt to return what was once a happy adventure into the west had become a vicious fight for survival grass was becoming scarce and the animals were steadily weakening to relieve the animal's load everyone was expected to walk the trials that the donner party had so far endured resulted in splintered groups each looking out for themselves and distrustful of the others in one incident of abject cruelty an elderly man was ejected from the wagon he was

reliant on for transport being told that he had to walk or die a few days later the elderly man sat next to a stream his feet so swollen they had split open some members of the party begged the others to wait for him to show mercy to the party's weakest members but the others refused thinking only of themselves the old man was not seen again in the following weeks attacks from the local paiute indian tribe were responsible for the party losing almost 40 of their cattle this is extremely shocking for a number of reasons firstly

the paiute tribe had first appeared friendly to the migrants sharing supplies with them and even directing them onto trails that would take them westward but at some point the relationship had soured and the people known for their respect and reverence of the natural world appeared to have no problem slaughtering the wagon trains animal accompaniment in an attempt to slow down or even stop the party dead in their tracks with nearly all the cattle gone one particular party member stopped to bury his wagon for safekeeping two of his numbers stayed with him to help but they

returned without him reporting they had been attacked by paiutes murdered and scalped by the end of october the party was forced to make camp around truckee lake in the eastern sierra nevada mountains three widely separated cabins of pine logs served as their homes with dirt floors and poorly constructed flat roofs that leaked when it rained of the 60 at truckee lake 19 were men over 18 years old 12 were women and 29 were children six of whom were toddlers or younger very little food remained in their supplies and the oxen began to die their carcasses

were frozen and stacked truckee lake was not yet iced over but the pioneers were unfamiliar with catching lake trout the most experienced hunter among them killed a bear but had little luck after that margaret reed promised to pay double when they got to california for the use of three oxen from other families she was charged 25 normally the cost of two healthy oxen for the carcass of a single ox that had starved to death the mood in the camp was beyond tense people were only looking out for themselves by this point but an incoming blizzard

would be the straw that broke the mule's back during the height of the snowstorm a man named patrick dolan began to rant deliriously stripped off his clothes and ran into the woods he returned shortly afterwards and died a few hours later not long after some of the group began to eat flesh from dolan's body the next morning the group stripped the muscle and organs from dolan's body then dried them to store for the days ahead taking care to ensure nobody would have to eat his or her relatives as the days went by more and more

of the parties succumbed to their desperate hunger and made the decision to consume human flesh some were determined to continue hunting and fishing only turning to cannibalism when there was no other option but it appeared some preferred the taste of human flesh and eschewed the long and tiring hunting trips in favor of consuming those who died of disease and malnutrition at one point a scouting party looking for the most efficient way ahead came across two milwaukee indians named luis and salvador they had once been party members but had attempted to move on when the supplies

had run low at the time they were discovered they had not eaten anything for nine whole days and were dangerously undernourished and weakened as a result however instead of attempting to rescue and save the lives of their indian friends one of the scouting parties simply shot them there and then before carving off chunks of their flesh with a hunting knife on january 12th the group stumbled into a milwaukee camp looking so deteriorated that the camp's inhabitants initially fled fearing them to be the spirits of undead souls who wandered the snow-capped mountain range once it was

clear that they were in fact the survivors of a disastrous expedition the milwaukees gave them what they had to eat acorns grass and pine nuts completely unaware that the group had murdered and eaten two starving members of their tribe they were shaken starving and had arguably sold their souls to stay alive but they were safe now relatively safe anyway reporting on the event across the u.s was heavily influenced by the national enthusiasm for westward migration in some papers news of the tragedy was buried in small paragraphs despite the contemporary tendency to sensationalize stories several newspapers

including those in california wrote about the cannibalism in graphic exaggerated detail in some print accounts the members of the donner party were depicted as heroes and california a paradise worthy of significant sacrifices but it seems that sacrificing one's family and friends as well as losing one's humanity through consuming human flesh might not be worth any prize no matter how great [Applause] as a young child i had a very active imagination as an adult i am very skeptical about ghosts and the paranormal but as a seven-year-old child in the early 90s i remember seeing and witnessing

stuff which a rational mind would conclude to be impossible regardless i remember such events in some instances i was with other individuals who too shared my experiences of these paranormal sightings who also have profound memories of them to this day in the 90s my family owned a small village pub called the crown inn the establishment is situated in the english countryside like many public houses in england the crown inn was very old and at the center of many tragic stories including murder i would spend many hours exploring the victorian building whilst my brother played with

his friends in the village and when my parents worked i would often spend a lot of time by myself in the upstairs flat and during these times i recall witnessing objects flying across the room furniture hovering feet off the ground and other such occurrences i would convince myself that these were just simply hallucinations or my excitable imagination however the family dog would also react to these unexplained events on one occasion jake my black labrador bolted out of the bedroom with his tail between his legs when a table lifted off the ground he ran to the

bottom of the stairs and urinated all over the carpet during this time i was sure that we were not alone in the pub i will detail one particular night that sits vividly in my mind which i catch myself pondering about to this day it was late at night the pub was closed down and everybody in the building was in bed asleep at this time i shared a bedroom with my brother and also shared a double bed i remember waking up in the dark and silent room only a slight bit of light spilled through the window

from the street very faintly illuminating items around me i first focused on my brother who was sound asleep just a few feet to my left still laying on my back i turned my head the other way and as i was about to close my eyes something caught my attention on the wall to my right hand side adjacent to the bed and slightly raised towards the ceiling was something i couldn't at all comprehend there were no pictures paintings or any items hanging from this particular wall and apart from the window the wall was completely bare except

of course this strange thing being intrigued of this item fully aroused my attention and i must have gazed at this object for what felt to be a few minutes the item was almost egg-shaped no larger than an american football then i felt my heart starting to beat faster and a cold sensation ran down the length of my spine as i started to slowly understand what i was looking at the light reflected off the object to make out what appeared to be a cheekbone as soon as i recognized this i could make out a masculine jawline

an ear a nose and a mouth i was completely frozen when it was evident i was staring at somebody's face no other part of the body was visible apart from the facial features peering what seemed to be through the wall the face was slightly turned away from me as if its attention was drawn to something at the foot of the bed through my fear i did my best to remain completely motionless still staring at this face studying this insane image in front of me i recall its eyes were casually looking away from me as if

in deep thought almost sorrowful the bed made a slight noise as i unintentionally shifted my weight on the mattress instantly the face in a jolting reflex motion turned straight towards me as if it had been rudely disturbed its wide open eyes staring directly into mine in every sense of the word i was utterly petrified it sounds peculiar to describe but the face was contorted with such an intense expression a concoction of extreme delight and anger at the same time it was horrifying to behold to say the least i couldn't breathe i couldn't move i couldn't

scream as this horrifying thing gazed deep into my eyes no more than a couple feet away from me desperately wishing for this crazy event to stop we both faced each other in the dark for a few moments it then did something which makes the hair stick up on the back of my neck even to this day the face almost composed itself for a second until slowly revealing a psychopathic grin a horrible distorted smile before slowly descending down the wall i helplessly watched as the face moved down towards the ground never breaking eye contact until it

was completely out of my sight i thought my heart was going to explode inside my chest as i laid there witnessing the face disappear it's under the bed it's under the bed the thought screaming in my mind i tried to move my arms and legs but i couldn't almost as if i was paralyzed i tried and tried again desperately trying to get myself out of the room in one last final attempt my arms broke free followed by my legs i stood up in the bed and darted across the mattress over my brother and out of

the room never once looking behind me i ran directly into my parents room screaming all the way there waking up the whole pub including jake the family dog my mom consoled me for a while and for the rest of the night i stayed in my parents bed it took a few nights before i built up the courage to go back into that room again with an adult's mind it would be a fair conclusion that i likely suffered from sleep paralysis which is something i do suffer with time to time as an adult with those who

are unfamiliar with this condition it is where you become temporarily paralyzed just before falling asleep or waking up on rare occasions individuals also claim to have hallucinations during these episodes expressing seeing ghosts or demons i'm slightly skeptical of this because i hadn't knowingly suffered from sleep paralysis until i was in my teens and although it's happened to me a handful of times i have never hallucinated episodes in bed like this never happened to me again and with everything else that i experienced in that building for the 10 years we lived there i simply can't rule

out that something else was awake with me in the room that night [Applause] back when i was much younger my friends and i were into urban exploring before it was even really a thing we grew up in a pretty rough area with a lot of old apartment buildings that had to be abandoned and eventually demolished due to asbestos that stuff made them basically fire proof but where fire and smoke will kill you quick asbestos will kill you slow but try explaining that to a bunch of teenagers actively looking for somewhere to hide from grown-ups so

they could do some distinctively grown up things where other people saw a decrepit dusty craphole we saw our own little corner of paradise a home away from home or maybe home is too strong a word but you get the idea anyway there was one particular estate that was almost completely bereft of inhabitants having been gradually relocated by the city council until there must have been no more than two or three families left over it was like an actual ghost town even the local corner shop had its shutters permanently down with a for sale sign quickly

following its indefinite closure but like i said that kind of place was our bread and butter so when they moved out we moved in there was this one set of high-rise flats that means apartments to you north americans that we used to visit on the regular the heating and other utilities had been switched off for a while and this was in the middle of winter so we used to stash cans of cider in the old cupboards and they'd basically act like walk-in fridges it got to the point that we ended up occupying one of the

flats bringing over an old nylon string guitar and other amenities so the place felt a bit more homey so this one night just after christmas about five of us pile into the old place to get drunk and have a sing-song i remember that we were halfway through bowie's man who sold the world when the off-key twang of a string breaking had us all groaning with disappointment what's more it was the g string anyone who knows anything about playing a guitar will tell you break a top or bottom string and it's not the end of the

world but break your g string and nothing quite sounds the same so there we were basically condemned to a silent disco for the night but it didn't dampen our spirits entirely so we committed to staying for a few hours to at least make the most of the evening we are all just sitting around chatting bollocks and bumming smokes off each other when one of us loudly hushes the rest of us before holding a single finger in the air as if to say listen there's a brief silence and i do mean silence no one heard a

thing so the lad who had shushed everyone just put it down to him hearing things the mood softens again quickly and we're back to drinking and hanging out only a little while later the same lad does the same hushing thing he's not alone this time though another one of us swore that he too had heard something a scratching or shuffling noise coming from the dark corridor outside the flat if you have one lad with an attack of paranoia it's easy to forget if you have two lads hear the same bloody thing you start to take

things a bit more serious one of us pokes their head out of the flat shining the light off of his phone's screen into the darkness before turning back to tell us there was nothing there these flats were half falling down it was perfectly reasonable to expect them to creak and croak a fair bit but the two guys who had heard the noises remained anxious shooting each other nervous looks in between scanning the flat's open doorway for movement cut to a few hours later and it's coming up to midnight energy levels are dipping severely and so

are the noise levels this meant the atmospherics were perfectly attuned for us to perfectly hear the creaking of a floorboard just above our heads this wasn't just the rundown condition of the building either it was painfully obvious that the slow and deliberate creek came from a footfall on the floor above us don't ask me how we knew that sometimes your gut just tells you everything you need to know about a certain sound or a shape in the darkness that's how the human race has survived for so long and so successfully there really is such a

thing as a sixth sense as soon as we hear that creak we all freeze i mean proper statue still barely even breathing with all eyes glued to the ceiling we start asking each other what that was but we all knew someone or something was up there and it had been the entire time i should add at this point we had managed to compile a little collective of wooden sticks iron bars and other such debris that we told ourselves were our weapon stash it was all just a bit of a joke to be honest they were

purely totemic value but in the moments that followed that horrible bloody creek i think that what was holy that we had had the foresight to collect them each of us grabbed something to defend ourselves with before falling silent again listening out for any other creaking sounds above us we weren't left waiting long another creek then another each one getting closer and closer to where the front entrance to the upstairs flat would be we couldn't help but sit there terrified listening as whatever was up there got closer and closer to us when the footsteps stopped one

of us plucked up the courage to creep towards the open front door to the flat and stick their head out the next thing i know we're just pouring down the stairs of the apartment block with the lad who scouted the stairs out shouting how there's someone up there we were scared maybe a little over paranoid but over the next few days we started to question if we'd even seen what we thought we had i remember seeing the shape of something on the stairs above us but i wasn't 100 sure it was a man and neither

was anyone else if we were honest with ourselves in the end i had convinced myself that we had imagined the whole thing and decided to run a little experiment i left a loaf of bread in the lobby of the apartment block intending to prove that there was no one living there when the loaf was still there growing mold a few days later but when i went back it was gone years later we watched the council demolish those flats as wrecking balls smashed into the brickwork and plastic window frames we mourned our old hideaway yes but

mostly we wondered if whoever was in there would be buried in the rubble [Applause] this time of year nothing pairs better with too much food and alcohol than grim macabre tales of murder and mayhem this particularly ghastly tale takes place on christmas day 1929 on a farm outside germanton north carolina charlie lawson's big christmas surprise for his adoring family of nine began with a trip into town sparing no expense charlie lawson agreed to buy each and every member of his family an outfit for their choice before taking them over to a local photographer and having

a family portrait taken quite a costly affair for a modest tobacco farmer just over a week later it would be christmas day 1929 one might get the impression that charlie was a good father who tried to bring his family the best christmas possible even on his meager income but you would be wrong on the day itself seventeen-year-old marie lawson had been busy in the kitchen preparing a fruitcake for after dinner that evening while the younger sisters twelve-year-old carrie and the seven-year-old mabel wandered over to their aunt and uncle's house to celebrate the holidays and relieve

some of the pressure on charlie and his wife fanny lawson charlie's spouse of 17 years had been tending to her and charlie's younger children while charlie and his oldest son 16 year old arthur nicknamed buck had planned a very special christmas day hunting trip something of a year tradition for the pair as charlie and arthur prepared to set out on their holiday hunting trip they soon realized that they needed more shotgun shells if they were to have a successful hunt charlie sent arthur up to the store to pick up some more ammo while he waited

patiently in the tobacco barn but when charlie saw carrie and mabel walking down the path on their way back from their aunt and uncle's home he shouldered his shotgun aimed in the direction of his young children and pulled the trigger there is simply no telling of the absolute terror and confusion experienced by those poor girls charlie then set off towards the family home his trusty weapon firmly in his grip fanny who had been out on the front porch to investigate the gunfire attempted to flee but it was no good there was no outrunning the blast

hearing the gunshots from outside the teenage marie screamed bloody murder trapped in a state of abject panic as her father racked the weapon and gunned her down in the kitchen the youngest children heard the commotion and fearing for their own lives attempted to hide charlie quickly found them and brutally bludgeoned them to death with the butt of his weapon then for some unknown reason he then placed rocks under the heads of his dead wife and children and wandered off into the woods as if in a daze concerned neighbors of the lawsons initially walked over to

wish them a merry christmas heard the gunshots and hurried to check on them instead of the festive merriments they had come to expect they stumbled onto a grisly tableau of blood buck shot and shattered bone before they could set out to find charlie they had heard a single gunshot out in the woods charlie had taken his own life by the time arthur made it back from his trip into town his entire family had been murdered folks at the town's general store had gotten word that something awful had happened and someone in the town offered to

give arthur a ride back to the family farm when he reached his home the police had already arrived and a crowd began to gather in the woods police found footprints indicating that charlie had been pacing around a tree for some time before taking his life next to his body were letters to both his parents some accounts reported that charlie had placed stones over the eyes of his dead family members as well as cushioning their heads with them to this very day no one is certain what exactly drove charlie lawson to slaughter his entire family with

the exception of young arthur before taking his life some speculate that lawson had been abusing marie and that she may well have been pregnant with an inbred child at the time of her death others have insisted that charlie could not have had the capacity to commit the heinous acts that occurred on the family farm that christmas day and that the entire thing had been staged to frame charlie a more credible explanation is that charlie had developed a medical condition that affected his actions and caused him to experience a psychotic break perhaps he had knocked his

screw loose after suffering a head injury while digging a ditch on the farm or as some reported he had some kind of painful growth on his chest that had him in constant agony and he had decided to end it all and take his family with him the killing attracted so much attention that an estimated 5 000 curiosity seekers attended the lawson family funeral they were all buried in a single large plot in the private browder family cemetery just outside of germanton the house became a macabre tourist attraction after the incident and charlie's brother decided to

open the house to the public charging admission for tours of the property still on the counter sat the cake that marie had been making even after the house had been closed the cake made its rounds in traveling dime museums protective plastic had to be used to cover the cake after several onlookers swiped some raisins the cake toured for at least a decade before surviving family members buried the cake along with the awful memories that came with it though the home was later demolished the area still has enough spooky history to have inspired ghost sightings of

the doomed lawson children and the murderess charlie lawson unbelievably the tragedy of the lawson family didn't end in 1929 in 1945 james arthur lawson the only child to survive the christmas day bloodshed died at the age of 31 in a truck accident in walnut cove north carolina quite near germanton he was buried in the same cemetery as the rest of his family leaving behind four children of his own when news of arthur's death reached the local community rumors of a family curse abounded they insisted that charlie had reached out to claim his son from beyond

the grave the murders also inspired the famed bluegrass duo the stanley brothers to pen a suitably morbid tune recounting the lawson family fate the song includes the following lyrics they say he killed his wife at first while the little ones did cry please papa won't you spare our lives it is so hard to die most people don't even believe me when i tell them but i have a job where i work from home people in my area mostly work with cars or in the medical industry there aren't many jobs where i live thankfully i was

able to land a decent paying job that let me work from my home office it definitely comes with its struggles but it is hands down the best job opportunity available to me right now it isn't always perfect it definitely comes with its pitfalls sometimes you have to sit at your computer even when there isn't any work to be done it's also very easy to get distracted but i think my biggest problem has to do with the house itself it's kind of creepy the house itself is an old victorian like really old we're talking mid-1800s a

family friend owned the house and sold it to me for a very fair price basically gave it to me i was super excited because it meant i got a nice big house to live in by myself along with my girlfriend i'm a natural loner and don't really care for social interaction so i had a nice big house all to myself and girlfriend and a job where i worked from home with very minimal social interaction with other people that was basically my ideal life but the house's age meant that it was going to be scary at

times and i don't mean with ghosts or anything like that but sometimes i hear the house settling or making noises that i can't explain i've actually had quite a few instances where i'll be sitting down and doing some work and then out of nowhere i hear a noise that i just can't rationalize i go exploring throughout the house only to find that nothing has changed it's as ominous as it is frustrating i did what just about anyone else in the world would do i started to use background noise to drown out the disturbances first i

tried those quiet instrumentals on youtube you know the ones that last five hours and they're supposed to put you at ease or something it didn't really work for me because i couldn't get my computer to be loud enough to drown out all the noises it was also not very good at keeping my attention there was one week where my work was really slow and there wasn't a whole lot to do i still had to sit at my computer though there was an understanding that i was allowed to basically do anything i wanted as long as

i was available to my co-workers if something came through that needed to be done i didn't quite know what to do with this time and just started watching documentaries on youtube it actually was pretty fun i learned a lot so that next week when things started picking up again i just instinctively turned on a documentary i wouldn't be able to have all my focus on it but it was a lot better than having some ambient noise it actually helped distract me from the sounds of the house i guess i just didn't have enough mental focus

energy to notice any of the other sounds going on around me if that makes any sense well it had been about two weeks of me watching documentaries while i worked everything seemed to be good until one friday morning i start work at eight and this must have happened around ten i was sitting at my office chair working while i listened to a documentary about a 911 conspiracy theory when all of a sudden i heard an abrupt banging noise coming from upstairs like i had said i hadn't been distracted by any noises for a while by

this point so the fact that i noticed this noise meant that it was probably serious my fight or flight kicked in you might laugh at me but when i work i keep a knife next to me i ran upstairs with the knife and looked around for any suspicious noises the banging had stopped and i didn't know where it had come from i knew what section of the house that i heard it from but there didn't seem to be anything out of place i stood there for a few moments and then i heard it again it

happened right on the other side of my door i immediately braced myself for there to be some kind of animal or something trying to get in i didn't really know what to expect i opened my door to see that the screen door had not been properly closed my girlfriend didn't close it all the way when she left for work that morning it was also pretty windy that day so it was just going back and forth causing a banging noise when the wind got bad this was kind of a breaking point for me i didn't want

to live my life in constant paranoia and fear of some kind of attacker coming into my home we live in a safe area there's never been a serious threat and i have run around my house with a knife way too many times now i honestly felt kind of stupid so i made a decision i was no longer going to assume that someone was breaking in if and when i ever heard a sound i put the knife in my dresser in my bedroom and decided that i was just going to be into work while i was

working except for my documentary of course so there i was the next week it happened on a wednesday i was sitting in my office doing exactly what i had set out to do i was working ignoring the noises and listening to a documentary i remember the exact part of the documentary i was on when i heard it the sound was the loudest sound i had heard in the house up to that point at first i reassured myself that it was nothing and that i need to fight against this paranoia the sound continued and i couldn't

take my mind off it after about five minutes of listening to what sounded like rummaging and walking i went upstairs to check bear in mind i didn't have any weapon on me and i was expecting some kind of reasonable explanation when i got to my kitchen i saw that the front door was wide open the cabinets were all open and there was a strange man rummaging through them i didn't notice until after the fact but he had been eating something i remember screaming at him i don't remember what i said but it was something to

the effect of what are you doing in my house then he just ran off didn't say a word he took a loaf of bread with him but i don't think he took anything else other than what he had eaten before i came upstairs i reasoned with myself that he must have been a homeless man or something i don't know why else you would steal a loaf of bread from a very ordinary looking house this was the worst thing that could have happened on some instinctive level it had proved all my worst fears right there was

some kind of danger in my house and of course it was the one time when i didn't have my knife on me i lucked out that he didn't try to hurt me or anything but it was still horrifying to see nonetheless i just work at a local coffee shop now it's the only way to stay sane [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]

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