S18 Ep48: Ghostly girls, alien abduction and skinny, silver men - Tales from the Road II (Sn. 18 Ep. 48)
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On the Airspace podcast from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, we're bringing you stories from in the museum and beyond. In season 10, we've got the OG space race, measuring the distance between the Earth and the sun. We're learning how we know how old the moon and Mars are. And we're taking you behind the scenes to learn about new scientific research being done with objects in the museum's collection. Plus many more stories from air and space. Yeah, so don't miss out. Listen to Airspace wherever you get your podcasts.

Good evening and welcome to Monsters Among Us. I am your guide, Derek Hayes. And a spooky evening to you all as well. I have one hell of a collection compiled here tonight. And this will mark the second time we've explored this topic on a Tuesday episode. It went so well the first time I thought I would bring it back.

So tonight I present to you Tales from the Road Part 2. Stories from streets, roads, highways, and interstates. And to kick us off, we begin on the East Coast. Please welcome Brittany from the Mitten State. Hi Derek. My name is Brittany and I am from a small town in Michigan. And I'm relatively close to Detroit. The reason I say this is because I had a weird...

experience with kids and I don't know if it's really worth talking about but it freaked me out and it was worth telling my boyfriend so I guess it's worth telling you guys. I have worked my whole life and I usually get off at 3. I started this new job and now I don't get off work until about 7 p.m. and I work in Detroit so getting home is about a 45 minute drive.

On my drive home, there's this road. It's literally right off the expressway ramp and people go fast. You just got off the expressway. So I had been seeing kids with backpacks walking along this road and there was always like a different number of them, but it was never like a large group. The most I would say is probably about seven kids.

My first like three weeks working at this job, I see these kids walking home every day. And it doesn't occur to me that this is weird to begin with because these are little kids walking down this road where there shouldn't be a bus stop at like seven o'clock at night. They all have backpacks. They look like they just got off the school bus. I don't think anything of it until one day I'm coming home and it's just one kid walking

It's this little girl and there's really nothing notable about her. She just looks like a little girl. She had on a normal backpack. I don't think there was any design on it. She was wearing like relatively normal fall clothes for school, but she's walking along this road and the cars drive fast.

So me being a concerned person about this little girl, I was like, okay, it's just her. I have to stop. If something happens, no one's going to know. So to stop for her, I have to pull ahead of her and then get off to the side of the road because there's no sidewalk. There's nowhere to stop. This is not a place for a child to be. I go to pull off the road.

And by the time I pass her and I get in front of her enough to stop, she's not there anymore. There's no road. There's no path. There's one road that leads to a house, but that was in the opposite direction of where she was walking. The way she was headed, there's nothing. It's just a little bit of forest and then...

a broken down restaurant that there's no one there. There's no reason for this kid to have been where she was at. Making it even weirder, once she disappeared from me, I immediately called my boyfriend. I was like, babe, this kid was here. And I told him the whole spiel. And he was like, well, first off, you're not allowed to pick up hitchhikers. I don't care who they are.

But then he was like, you know, we just watched that thing on the Black Eyed Kids. And I was like, oh, man, I wonder what would have happened if I would have actually like been able to stop or if she hadn't disappeared. What was she? Who was she?

So that was my encounter with some weird disappearing kid. The town I live in, and even the town surrounding it, like, nothing ever happens. We...

Claim that we live in a bubble because it's just peaceful. There's never anything that happens here. Like, I don't think that anyone, like, died there or something. But it freaked me out and I wanted to share. Thank you, guys. Bye. Thank you, Brittany, for calling in. Now, what do you think, folks? Did Brittany encounter the Black Eyed Kids? Or were these simply children-sized ghosts?

Perhaps she was a normal child that just ran when she saw the vehicle start to pull over. I know that's what I would have done. But that still doesn't explain why they would be walking along this busy thoroughfare at such a late hour. Now regardless of who the girl was, where she came from or where she went, it made for one hell of a story and a great way to kick things off here this evening.

And I'll be right back with even more ghostly children. But first, these messages. Let them go through this process and... He's come out and admitted it. And he's shocked by it himself. It was said that the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest on the night of All Hallows' Eve.

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Memberships are limited and they close Friday, April 18th. So don't delay. The Jack-o'-lantern tier is already almost sold out. Head over to Cryptocurium.com forward slash OTV for more details and to sign up. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can also find them on Instagram at Order of the Thinned Veil. I highly recommend you checking them out. They really know how to keep the spooky vibes going all year long.

Now if you would, join me in the Aloha State. Travis, welcome to the program. Hey, how's it Derek? This is Travis from Hawaii. The way that it goes, this is probably around 2003 or 2004.

Myself and a couple of friends were going to go do a road trip to the other side of the island. My friend had just bought a new-to-him car, and he wanted to drive his new car over there. So I was driving my car ahead of him, and he was in the car behind me. We were going across the old Saddle Road, which is now gone. The new Saddle Road is a nice big highway. You can do 60 miles an hour on it, no problem.

The old saddle road was an old military road that went right between the two mountains in the center of the island. It was pretty gnarly. It was supposed to be two lanes, but really only had enough pavement right down the middle to drive. You know, there was kind of a drop-off right off the side of the lanes. It dropped off about eight inches straight into lava field. That was very rough. This is cooled lava, obviously.

So yeah, anyway, we're driving down Saddle Road, cruising along, and I'm kind of looking at his car in my rearview mirror, and I see him swerve off to the right side of the road a little bit, and then all of a sudden he cuts really hard to the left side. His car slides sideways, he goes head-on into an embankment, and I see his car flip up into the air, high.

at least eight feet in the air. And the last point I saw him in my rearview mirror, his car was pointed straight down at the ground, the front bumper being the lowest part of the car, about eight feet high. Eventually his car landed 90 feet off the road without ever touching the ground. It landed flat on the roof. Yeah, I thought I watched my friend die. So I stopped, I started running back to his car thinking I'm going to go find my friend's body in his car.

just really trying to mentally prepare myself for this. And I couldn't see his car. All I could see was the front wheel sticking up above a little lava rock hill. And as I'm running toward the car, I see his head pop up in the middle of the wheel. He looked like a prairie dog or something, poking his head up out of the ground and looking around and just shocked that there he was. So I ran over to him and he's fine. He's got

glass on his face, but it's not cuts. He's not hurt. He's shocked, obviously, that he just had this crazy car accident. But the odd part is that he's not hurt. His car landed on the roof in sort of a cup in the lava field. The roof of the car on the driver's side was crushed all the way down to the top of the door. It had crushed the driver's seat.

The passenger side had landed in this cup and didn't have a scratch on the roof. Kind of looking at this going like, how did you get out of this? And he goes, I don't know what happened. He said, but when I was on the road, I saw a rock in the road and I went to dodge the rock. And that's when he went off the side of the road. And then he overcorrected and that's when his car slid. And that's when he went into the embankment. And he said, as soon as he hit the embankment,

He saw a bright white flash in his face and he closed his eyes, which was the airbag going off. He went through the crash and after the crash he opened his eyes and he was hanging upside down in the car, buckled into the passenger seat. He was alone in the car. The airbag in front of the passenger seat was dark gray. The driver's side airbag was bright white.

So we couldn't figure out how he got into the passenger seat. He didn't remember getting out of the driver's seat. When he hit the embankment, the white flash would have been the white airbag, as far as we could tell. And we know he was in the passenger seat, buckled in, because, like I say, the driver's side roof was crushed down to the top of the door. If he had been in the driver's side, he most likely would have been either seriously hurt or killed. The passenger side, like I say, the roof didn't have a scratch on it.

He was unhurt. So we called the police. Police officer showed up about 45 minutes later. We told him he wasn't hurt. Not an emergency. We're just kind of waiting to get a tow truck towed off the road. That's where we get the measurement of 90 feet off the road. To this day, I can't figure out how that happened, how he ended up in the passenger seat, buckled in in this accident. I watched it happen. I saw him in the driver's seat as he swerved off the road.

Well, switching seeds mid-crash isn't normal, Travis. So I guess we have to call it paranormal. And thank you for the phone call, by the way. How incredible.

You know, it certainly seems like someone was looking out for him that day. Thanks again, Travis, for sharing the story. Now, folks, if you have a story you would like to share here on the program, a true story, call our 24-7 hotline at 888-608-NIGHT. That's 888-608-N-I-G-H-T. Or you can send me a voice file over email to MonstersAmongUsPodcast at gmail.com.

Next up, we head to my state of California, Sylvia. Welcome to tonight's Tales from the Road episode. Okay, so Sylvia and I live in Central Valley, California. And when I was a child, I want to say I was like nine years old. I saw something really strange.

It was a really bright, crisp day. It was really pretty outside. This was about 30 years ago. And I'm walking on the sidewalk. I'm walking to my school and all of a sudden I see a shadow on the street. And it was a perfect circle and it was moving really slow.

It caught my attention. I'm thinking, why is there a shadow on the road when there's nothing above it? There was absolutely nothing. It's floating on the street and it just slowly floating. It just kept going and I never could figure out what was above it, what was under it. I mean, there was nothing, absolutely nothing. So anyway, through all my life, I've seen, you know, a couple of more times

the shadow with nothing, you know, making a shadow, but it's never been a perfect circle anymore. It's been just shadows where when I'm driving and I'll see like a shadow go over, you know, my car or other cars, but there's nothing above it. There's no plane. There's nothing. Sometimes it's a huge, huge shadow. Sometimes it's a small, small shadow.

I don't know. It's just weird. I don't know if anybody else has seen shadows when there's nothing making a shadow. I have tried to Google it. I didn't really see anything. I did see like one or two videos on TikTok where some girls saw something like that on a mountain in Nevada or something like that. But I still don't know what could it be and what could have made that perfect circle shadow. I know it's something unexplainable. I know it has to be like a ghost or something or something.

some kind of spirit. I honestly think it was like an evil spirit somehow, but I don't know. Anyways, that's what happened. Thank you for this opportunity to share and I hope somebody else has seen something similar. Bye. Thank you, Sylvia. Well, if you want to know my guess, what if there was a cloaked vehicle floating above you? Perhaps a classified hovering military craft or maybe even something from a far off universe.

And it's a safe assumption that both of those things have the ability to camouflage themselves. If not, cloak completely. But I don't know what they do about the shadow. How do you get rid of that? And you know, if something was up there, slowly, silently floating along, it would leave a shadow that behaved almost exactly like what Sylvia described. But hey, your guess is as good as mine here.

But whatever it was, it sounded like a pretty neat encounter. So thank you again, Sylvia, for telling us all about it.

On the Airspace podcast from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, we're bringing you stories from in the museum and beyond. In season 10, we've got the OG space race measuring the distance between the Earth and the sun. We're learning how we know how old the moon and Mars are. And we're taking you behind the scenes to learn about new scientific research being done with objects in the museum's collection. Plus many more stories from air and space. Yeah, so don't miss out. Listen to Airspace wherever you get your podcasts.

How to control credit card debt. Those who qualify and enroll through this relief program will only have to pay back a... Now a little bit ago I teased about more ghostly girls along the side of the road stories. And I aim to deliver. So to help me fill that quota, please welcome Roy from Parts Unknown. Hey, how's it going? My name is Roy. I live in Louisiana. I don't want to go into too many details because...

Other people got involved with this and other people had found out about it. I had been dogged for a long time about it. I've had a really hard time with this just because of the way it affected me and at what age I was. Just under the circumstances, it really messed me up. So I had just gotten my driving permit. I was 16 years old. You know, my parents didn't give me a vehicle or anything like that. I had to buy it, you know, get it myself.

I had a friend that ended up selling a 1984 Ford F-150 truck. It was old. It was steel. It was a tank. It had a straight six motor in it. I loved it. I still love it to this day. So I got it, rebuilt the engine, got it running, started driving. And on a Sunday morning at 637, I was on my way to church by myself. And I drive this highway all the time.

Even to this day, I drive this highway. So I'm on my way. I take my left onto the highway, going down the road, and it comes into like a triple S turn. When it comes out, it starts to go to the left, and then it goes to the right, and to the left, and then to the right again. Just a really windy part of the highway. So I made it through, you know, the three turns, and I'm coming up to the last one, to where it goes into a straightaway.

And, you know, cell phones weren't really that big of a deal. A radio was already on whatever station it was on. And so I had just glanced away for a moment. And when I looked back up, there was this little girl dead center my lane in the highway. And she wasn't but 30, 40 feet in front of the truck. I hit my brakes so hard, locked up the tires, but it wasn't nowhere near when I should have done it.

She had just disappeared under the hood when I hit my brake pedal. And it wasn't just like an apparition that dematerialized into the air. I felt this. I heard it. When she hit the front of my truck, she bounced underneath the truck. I felt it in my feet. I felt it in my hands. When I hit her, it was like hitting a deer. I felt and heard the impact.

I heard the metal bend. I heard the glass break. So I locked my brakes up and I don't know how long I sat in the truck. I really don't. But I eventually started to move again and I opened up my door. I'm freaking out. I'm crying. I'm hyperventilating. I mean, that's like one of my worst fears is hitting someone's child.

I'm gonna have to live with that for the rest of my life. So I get out, I get out of the truck, start to walk to the front of the truck. I don't think I ever shut my driver door. I walked around it and slowly crept to the front of the truck. And when I finally got parallel with the front of the truck and peeked around to look, there was nothing there. There was nothing. It was perfectly fine. Now,

In my head, I'd never hit a deer or anything like that before. When I looked in the front of the truck, you know, there was no damages or anything. And so in my head, I'm thinking that, well, I heard it bounce up underneath the undercarriage. I heard those noises all the way until I got through underneath the truck. So maybe the front wasn't hurt. You know, maybe the front of the truck wasn't damaged. Maybe she just laid over. And I turned around, and it's an empty highway.

and all I can see are my tire marks. So I start to walk to the back of the truck. I get back there. I thought it was weird because when I looked back, there was nothing in the road. So I go all the way to the back of the truck. I look and nothing's there. And so I get on my hands and knees and I look under the truck. And that was so terrifying to me because if she wasn't in the front, if she wasn't in the back, she was still underneath the truck.

the images that were going through my head of what i was about to see petrified me but eventually i looked and there wasn't anything there either so i get up and i kind of lean over my truck trying freaking out trying to grasp reality at the moment and i hear a car and it's this old man and his wife coming up the highway in my lane and so they get up behind me and they stop the old man he gets out almost right away to ask me if everything's okay

And when I lifted my head up, I don't know what I looked like. But judging by the look on his face, I probably looked pretty rough. And so he had asked me, you know, what was wrong? What's going on? And I couldn't really vocalize all that well. Maybe two or three minutes, he was asking me what was wrong. He had his hand on my shoulder and I told him, I said, I hit a little girl. And I mean, as soon as I said that, he recoiled. It was like he found out I had some horrible disease or something.

And his first question was, "Well, why did you do that?" I said, "I don't know. She wasn't there." You know, I looked up and there she was. We're in the middle of nowhere. It's nothing but woods. What is a little girl in a sundress doing out standing in the highway? I told him that the front of the truck was okay. There was nothing under the truck. She wasn't behind the truck. So he said that she probably bounced into a ditch. And so here come the fear again, because

If she wasn't in the front, behind, or underneath, she's in a ditch. We looked at those ditches. I guess at some point he had gone back to his car and told his wife to call the police. And so this was in a small town, and small town cops, you know, if something happens, everyone's going to know about it. The cop showed up. The old guy had told him what had happened, and so on and so forth.

The cop took me aside and he was telling me about manslaughter charges and everything else and asking what kind of drugs I was on or if I had been drinking. It's 6.37 in the morning. I'm 15 and a half, 16 years old. And my world is falling apart. Well, it turns out that they couldn't find anything. They had a few more units show up. They had an ambulance come out there. And they couldn't find anything. My head was swirling.

Thank you, Roy. That story was quite the emotional rollercoaster. And I suppose as creepy as the ending is.

It's a whole lot better than the other version of those events. And it sucks that people make fun of you for this experience, Roy. Awfully narrow-minded of them, if you ask me. Because it sounds like something strange occurred out there that morning, Roy. And whatever it was, I hope it was a one-off occurrence. Thanks again, Roy, for sharing that unsettling story. And folks, speaking of deaths on the road...

Let's look at a couple of numbers. There are over 4 million miles of roadway in this country, the largest system on the globe. There are over 291 million cars on the road at any given time. Folks spend a lot of time in their vehicles, 60 minutes a day on average, and traveling an average of 30 miles per day. And there are roughly 16,000 wrecks every 24 hours.

and nearly 43,000 die in a vehicle each and every year. So it's no wonder that roadway stories are abundant. Not only are there plenty of potential witnesses passing through, but the recipe is perfect for some sort of haunting. And perhaps it was a haunting that Sho's friend experienced in this next entry. She's calling in from Texas.

Hey, Derek. This is a first-time caller. I go by Sho, and I live in deep East Texas. Where I live is a pretty wooded area. I live on a really big farm, and I wanted to call in and tell you about not personally my encounter, but a friend of mine. So,

I had a friend over and it got to be late at night and they were like, hey, well, I need to go. And I was like, okay, yeah. So they got in their car and they started to drive off and I didn't think of anything and I kind of like started getting ready for bed.

Well, a little while later, I get a text and they're like, hey, I made it home, which I was like, okay, that's cool. But then they were like, also, like, that was a good prank. And I was really confused because I had not left the inside of my house. It was real dark outside. I didn't have a reason to go outside. So I was really confused. So, um,

A little while later, when we went back up, I had asked them about it, and they had said that they had gotten a little lost because it was their first time really coming over to my house. And so they got back to my house to pull up.

the directions because we have wi-fi and in our area you don't get great signal and as they were sitting there pulling up the directions to get back to town like back to their house they feel this huge just they said it was a very powerful like push on the back of their car so they got out

and they looked around, and they couldn't find anything. So they were unsure as to what was going on. They thought maybe it was one of my dogs, but my dogs were inside in their crates. So they had just assumed that I had, like, snuck outside, and I had ran to their car, pushed on it, and then ran back inside the house. But I reminded them that

Well, I only have a front door, my back sliding door. You can't get in and out of it.

So, I mean, they were parked right in front of my house. So I would have had to open the door, run down the stairs, run to the back of their car, push down on it. And in the few seconds it took for them to open their door and look at the back of the car, I would have had to ran back up the stairs and close the door. And I didn't even know that they had came back to the house.

because I essentially got ready for bed and I went to bed and I didn't hear anything until like the next day. And I was like, what? That's crazy. And we got to looking at the back of their car and it had like scratch marks on the back of the bumper that wasn't there before. And it was really kind of weird.

I mean, weird stuff happens all the time. I kind of follow the Appalachian rules at my house of if you see something, know you don't and don't go looking in the trees or in the fields. So, but yeah, that's like one of the interesting things that's happened. Love your show. I'm fairly new to it. I've only been listening to it for about a year, but I enjoy every new episode. So yeah, keep doing what you're doing and thanks. And I'll probably call back in with a few more other spooky stories. Thanks, Derek.

Thank you, Chell, for calling in. Now, you know, I do have to play devil's advocate here. A strong gust of wind can also give a car a good shake like that, especially if it hits at the right angle. But I will admit that you do often hear the wind as it blows by, unless, of course, you have your radio turned up to 11. Now, outside of that, it sounds very similar to legends told around the country.

Places where you can stop on a bridge or a set of tracks, put the car in neutral and shut it off. And then unseen hands will slowly push you away from danger. Sometimes even leaving handprints on the back of the vehicle. So this is a newer spin on an older legend. And we thank you, show, for sharing it here with us.

The inevitable has happened once again. When I say the inevitable, I mean... Actually happier with it? That sounds like something to look into. Alright folks, the road trip continues. Next stop, the bluegrass state of Kentucky. Jess, welcome to tonight's installment. Hey, this is Jess from Kentucky. I wanted to call in.

about an experience that I had between my junior and senior year of high school. This would have been around 2005, 2006. I've always been into spooky stuff, but I've never really had any experiences. I wouldn't say I'm a skeptic. I just think that there's a bunch of wild stuff out there. This experience happened during the summer. It was July. I was with three friends.

Two of those friends were brothers and their dad was driving. So there was four of us, high schoolers, and then a dad. And these two brothers, their dad used to take us to these concerts. We used to be into heavy metal music and hardcore music, the whole scene. And we would just travel around across the state of Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio. We'd go to these shows.

and there were small shows at little venues, churches and break centers and places like that. And we ended up in a place outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. We're somewhere on the eastern or western side of Cincinnati near the Kentucky border still, I remember, because it didn't take us long to get there once we crossed over the river. So we go to the show, we leave, we get there easily. Directions easily get there. This is before we had smartphones.

We just had, you know, regular old cell phones. We leave, and on our way out, our friend's dad, he has trouble coming out and retracing his path or getting back to the interstate, just leaving. So we get lost into some cornfields, you know, in the Ohio farmland. We come up on this little area, really strange, that is houses that look like they're from, like,

I want to say the 50s, but they just look like they're from maybe a couple decades earlier. But the weird thing was they had Christmas lights. It was like Christmas in July. There were Christmas lights everywhere. You know, initially you look and just think that everybody's got lights up, but there were like trees and snowmen in the yard. You know, it's 80 degrees out in the middle of the night. It's probably about 1 a.m. in the morning now. Middle of the night, a little Christmas town. Everybody's got lights, got Christmas trees, there's wreaths, Merry Christmas signs.

By the way, there were no cars. All the lights were off except for Christmas lights. You could see Christmas candles, you know what I'm talking about, in the windows. You could see into some of the windows, but there were lights off except for Christmas trees. And this was several homes. So we get out and we pull over kind of like at a three-way stop. Cornfield's around us. Wind's blowing. Nice night. And we pull a map out trying to figure out what's going on. The whole time, by the way, once we get lost,

This is a very crucial point to make. We could only get one radio station, and the only song on this radio station, and it was on repeat, was Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. I can have my other three friends call and their dad. They can confirm this. They will give you the same details that I give you about that night. It still wears us all out. Now, you'd think that that would be the weirdest thing, but no. The next thing that we notice is that we see above us aircrafts.

Now, they are triangular-shaped lights at each point. I kind of always said it looked like, you know, we racked pool balls. And it had three lights, and we would watch it. It had made no sound. Then we would see several other ones come from the distance. There was only one that was near us, but you could see that there were other aircraft that were shaped similar. These aircraft would move in the sky without changing the direction that they were facing.

It just slid around like you would move a rack of balls on a pool table. No sound. They were high enough that maybe a helicopter or a small prop plane or something like that would fly. We finally just decided to get out of there. I don't know how our friend's dad got us back. Everybody was starting to get really quiet and kind of weirded out about the things that we were seeing. And we somehow made it back to I-75.

and were able to make it down back home into southeast Kentucky. So I wanted to call in because I was just listening to episode 19, season 16. Like I said, I'm not a skeptic.

but I do try to find reasonable explanations for things. And I know in that episode, there was a lady from the Cincinnati area who mentioned that there are a couple of aviation bases or GE plants or whatever they were in the area and people who have reported seeing all kinds of strange stuff. First thing I think when I see weird aircraft is that it's probably some sort of military project or whatever.

But we still couldn't explain the only picking up one radio station, Starway to Heaven on repeat. And we all know that that song always had a tie to some supernatural things in the Christmas town. That's probably the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. So I just wanted to call and say thanks for what you do. Your show is awesome. Keep up what you're doing. Appreciate it. Good night. Thank you, Jess. Now I was real tempted to hold this one over until the next holiday episode.

but I trust there will be plenty of calls for me to use by then. Don't let me down, folks. But this call was too relevant and too interesting not to include here tonight. Now it is worth mentioning that they were somewhere outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, which we know is not all that far from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It's only about an hour up I-75, so perhaps there's some sort of connection there.

Who else has a fleet of black triangle aircraft at their disposal in that area? Otherwise, I'm at a loss here. If anyone listening has any info, we're happy to hear it. Give us a call. 888-608-NIGHT Until then, thank you again, Jess, for sharing that unusual experience. And speaking of unusual experiences, that perfectly describes this next one as well.

Sam, from Maryland, the microphone is yours. Hey Derek, this is Sam. I live in a small town in central Maryland called Sykesville. It's probably about 30 minutes west of Baltimore City. I've had a few paranormal sightings happen to me. Your podcast has caused a lot of memories to be jogged. I'll start with my craziest story.

In about 2017 or 2018, I was working at a print shop in Columbia, Maryland and I had to work late. I was on my way home probably about 10 or 11 o'clock and I was taking the highway home, Route 70. I'm driving down the highway. It's not a very busy time of night because it's during the week and

I see something out of the corner of my eye over the trees on the side of the highway. I start getting closer and over the trees comes this giant boomerang shaped UFO with these lights that are just round on the bottom of the craft and it's just slowly hovering around

It starts going over the highway and I'm driving. I have no intention of stopping because I'm just like, what am I looking at? I have no idea what I'm looking at. I don't want to stop because I'm terrified. I just floor it. I go down the road. I don't want to know what's in there. I don't want to know what's piloting it.

I wanted to get out and go home. I get past it. I look in my rearview mirror and I see absolutely nothing. I remember just thinking for the rest of my 20 minute drive home, what did I see? Because I have no idea what I was looking at. It wasn't making any sound. It wasn't an airplane. It wasn't a drone. It was just this giant metal craft in a boomerang shape.

with these big bright lights under it. It wasn't like those giant triangular crafts that people see. It was a boomerang. It wasn't blacking out the sky. It was a physical thing that I could see. So I get home, I go to bed, and I don't remember this for years. Years and years. And I don't know why. It just never...

ever came back to my memory until I started listening to this show. I don't know if there's missing time involved, I don't know what, because it was just gone. And this show jogged that memory. I still remember that fear, it was just like something took over and I did not want to see what was going on up in that sky. It was just like, I need to get home, and I need to get home now. So that's what I did.

I really don't want to know if there's like missing memory or missing time. I'd rather just not know. Obviously, it could have been some sort of government craft, but I see airplanes and other government things like helicopters in this area all the time. Just because Baltimore and D.C. are so close, I've seen military helicopters, planes,

Just regular commercial aircraft. And it was nothing like that at all. I want to thank you very much for letting people share their stories. Thanks, Derek. You know, Sam, I don't know if I would want to know what took place during this missing time either. That is not information you can just forget after learning it. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Thank you again, Sam, for sharing that unnerving entry.

Now I saved some of my favorites for last. And any long time listener of this program knows that I'm a big fan of creatures and monsters. And these next two stories introduce a creature I didn't even know existed. Chris from Indiana. Go ahead and kick it off.

Hi Derek, my name is Chris from Dyer, Indiana. I wanted to share a story. This happened to me, it was either August, September of 2023, about 11 o'clock one night. I live in Dyer, pretty typical suburban neighborhood full of townhomes.

I was taking my dog out at 11 o'clock, as I usually do, to go to the bathroom and walked from the drive to the sidewalk. And I was looking down the street and about two, maybe three blocks down, usually there's nobody out there this time of night, they saw this figure. It was about five, maybe five and a half feet tall, and it was sort of metallic.

I don't know what it was wearing, what it was made out of. It was definitely metallic. I could see the streetlights sort of reflecting off of it. The other weird thing about it was how it moved. It moved very, very slowly. The closest thing that I could compare it to is an elderly person who has severe arthritis. Very, very slow, very, very stiff, sort of shuffling along.

And I just got a really bad feeling when I saw this thing. Like, you know, this is not normal. This is not what we see in just this quiet little suburban neighborhood. And, you know, the dog, she has her spot where she likes to go. So I kept walking along with her, and finally she went to the bathroom. What was also interesting is, you know, she's a very friendly dog. She likes people. She likes other dogs. But when she saw this thing from a couple blocks down,

she started growling at it, which was very, very unlike her. But anyway, you know, she went to the bathroom and was like, okay, I want to get back in the house. So turn around and start going. And maybe walked 20 steps or so. I was like, all right, I'm just going to take one look back at this thing. And it was just gone. Just completely gone. And even if it had, you know, gone a few feet off the sidewalk into a shadowy area, I mean, you know, maybe I turned my back 10 seconds.

That's what I'm talking about, Chris. What the hell was that thing? A robot? An alien? A puppet of some kind? Or could it be something mimicking a human?

Have you ever seen the movie Mimic? And why was it walking down the road? Where was it coming from? Where was it going? Well, those exact same questions can be asked of this next story. A similar and equally as terrifying entry from Lonnie in Colorado. Hey Derek, this is Lonnie. There's a story that I had to tell you guys. Only about three other people know about it.

just because it's a little bit of a weird story and I know what I saw so not like I can unsee it or anything like that. It happened in the winter of 2017. This happened in Pagosa Springs, Colorado which is like a small mountain town but very very secluded. There's a lot of open area out there but very very close to New Mexico where there's a lot of empty basin and green. But anyways

I was getting off work at night and it was probably about 11 and I was driving down this windy road because the town it's built off of the interstate so you know there's not too many roads and they're all pretty windy because we're in the mountains

So it gets pretty dark outside. There's not many street lamps or anything like that, so you really rely on your headlights when you're driving at night. And I was just driving down this windy road on my way home, and out of nowhere, I see this tall thing. It had shoulders. I could see that from afar. And it was kind of like a shiny silver thing.

like a silver off blue color, very, very fluorescent. I saw it on the side of the road in a ditch from the corner of my eye, but I just kind of kept driving. I didn't really want to know at that point what it was or, you know, maybe it was just my eyes because I was, you know, driving out of speed and trying to pay attention to the road. So I just kept driving and out of nowhere, it literally jumps in the middle of the road

And I had my high beams on, so I saw everything. And it jumped in the middle of the road on the yellow line. This thing had to have been like at least seven or eight feet. It had shoulders and two legs. It stood upright like we do as humans. It had hands and arms. The fingers were kind of like really, really long, almost like old school vampire hands, but even longer.

It didn't have any hair. It was pretty bleak. It had beady eyes, like the eyes were not so much bigger than ours. Kind of like it was more so human features. I didn't see a nose, but it had ears and it had a neck. It was just very, very scary. I saw it in the middle of the road and it was there probably for about three seconds.

and then it jumped on the other half of the road and jumped in the ditch. I stopped and I sat in my car for a minute because I was like shaking. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't believe I just saw that. Something compelled me to get out of my car. So I got out of my car and I flashed my phone light on the ditch where I saw it jump and I didn't see anything. It was gone. But my hairs were standing up on the back of my neck

My heart was beating really fast. I was shaking. Out of nowhere, something just told me to run back to my car and get in my car and drive off. And I did. And as I'm driving down this windy road, trying to process what I had just seen, I see like these two helicopters that were coming from opposite ends of the town, kind of like almost colliding. And they were over this area because on both sides of this road, it's very, very foresty.

there's pretty much nothing but trees. They were just over both sides of the area, kind of like circling. I don't know what kind of helicopter it was because it was all blacked out. I don't know if it was for the city or if it was a military helicopter. I don't know. I just remember it having a big blinking red light on the wings. It was a blacked out helicopter. But yeah, I went home and I told my family and they kind of just looked at me like I was

the most craziest person that they had ever seen. But I know what I saw. Like I said, it was very, very dark that night and I had my high beams on and it jumped in the middle of the road and I saw it completely. It's a very, very scary thing because I never saw anything like that again. I've looked up stories about cryptids and I have found one that's similar to what I saw.

But I just wanted to say I appreciate your show. I'm really, really glad that all of us that do call in have a safe place to share our stories and our experiences that we don't feel comfortable saying to anyone else. Keep doing what you're doing, and I will be an avid listener the entire time. Thanks, Derek. Now tell me that doesn't sound almost exactly like what Chris encountered over in Indiana, albeit a bit taller, perhaps.

But the big question here is what is this thing? Well, Delaney and I scoured our resources looking for similar stories. And to my surprise, there are a few additional encounters that seemed very similar to both Chris and Lonnie's. There was an encounter from Washington State in which a youngster finds a similar creature standing in his grandparents' living room. Another encounter occurred up in British Columbia, Canada.

when a bus driver witnessed one of these things disappear after seeing it pace outside of a crashed or landed craft. And then there's this story, one I remember reading about when it first started swirling around. The following is from a post on Phantoms and Monsters, and it pretty much sums up the events as I remember them.

In April 1996, the East Lansing Journal, along with WILX and WLNS television stations, both in Lansing, initially reported that residents of Mason, Michigan, uncovered a strange humanoid body on their property. As they raked leaves in the spring months of 1996, the body was slender with long arms and legs, a small head and large eyes.

The body was reported to be about 3.5 to 4 feet in length, with silver skin that was deteriorating, presumably over the winter. The new sources reported that the remains had been taken to Michigan State University in East Lansing for examination. There was never again any mention of this unusual find in the media.

Now, the author went on to suggest that the absence of the story indicates that the media was instructed to drop the story altogether. And maybe so, because although I remember reading about this years ago, I cannot find a single mention of it outside of the one quoted above. Mission accomplished, I suppose. At least until I opened my mouth. If I suddenly disappear, you know why.

Now, of course, you can find a link to all of those stories over in the show notes. So you can compare all those similarities yourself. And a big thanks not only to Chris and Lonnie, but to all of tonight's callers. And give yourself a little applause as well for joining me here this evening. Mighty brave of you. All right, folks, that's going to end it for tonight. But before we duck out of here...

Monsters Among Us podcast is written and produced by me, Derek Hayes. Copyright Red Crow Media. Additional support is provided by Sarah Carter Hayes, Delaney Bowers, and Connor Ryan. All media used in this production is done so under the protection of fair use. Give us a like and follow on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and wherever you're poking around these days. And leave us a rate and review if you wouldn't mind as well.

Don't forget that you can catch the show on digital radio every Saturday evening at 11 p.m. Eastern. Just visit the OnX Digital Network. That's onxnetwork.com. And finally, tonight's score was provided by Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse, Code at EG Music, and Carl Casey at White Pad Audio. Thank you again, folks, for tuning in. Now I'll catch you back here on Thursday with a brand new installment. Until then, keep it spooky.

Have a good night.