Aokigahara: The Suicide Forest
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Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath come home, or one that lieth dead in the desert, or a ghost unburied, or a demon, or a ghoul, whatever thou be until thou art removed, thou shalt find here no water to drink. Thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand to our own. Into our house enter thou not. Through our fence break through thou not.

We are protected, though we may be frightened. Our life you may not steal, though we may be scared to death. Welcome to another episode of Scared to Death, Creeps, Peepers, Roberts and Annabelles. I'm Dan. Hello, Dan. I'm Lulu Marie. Still Lulu Marie. I just love it so much. Stick with it. Okay, good, good, good.

We get emails. People are like, I just, I really loved the show until she changed her name. It's too much. Too much. Hope everybody's having a good summer. Hope you're doing all right. And how much? No announcements today. That's it. No announcements. Let's go. We have a lot of story. Welcome to July, friends.

How much fan horror have you pulled from the submissions sent to mystoryatscaredtodeathpodcast.com? Well, I have three tales. Oh, yeah. My first two, it's a UFO alien double feature this week. Nice. And they both really gave me the spoops. Okay. Okay. And then my third and final tale is...

Not anything related to aliens or UFOs, but a confirmation tale from the other side. It's a beautiful story. It's sweet. But I know that you're also going to be giving this warning, but I do have a suicide warning. Yeah. It's just weird that we have an episode with so much suicide this week. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I normally, I mean, don't give triggers. Not because I'm not sensitive, but because...

You know, you can make an argument that a lot of our stories would require this type of trigger. And I don't want to like give one and then forget another week and have people be like, hey, so you don't care about this? That's not it. And that's why we do the disclaimer at the very beginning of the show, just built into the show overall about things. But that's why the show is listed as explicit. Yeah, exactly. But I will give an additional trigger warning today regarding suicide because there's just so much of it in the first story. It's about a place literally called the suicide forest.

It's Aoki Gahara. Yeah, Aoki Gahara. I have to say it a few times every time I go back into it to get it in my brain. I'll share lore and whisperings of hauntings from this infamous Japanese location. Then we'll head to Italy, hear about a monster from Italian folklore, Laborda, that some claim is more than folklore. And just remember, guys, if...

If the suicide warning, if this episode isn't for you, we'll see you next week. Exactly. We love you and we'll be here for you next week. It's okay to take a week off. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, so you put on your spoopy socks. I have these super cute, not all who wander are lost socks from two sweet fans, Cheryl and Justin Fry. Thank you. Thank you so much. They're so cute. I specifically love the colors because green is the only color I really wear outside of black. Yeah.

Yeah, you look good in green. Oh, sure. Okay, so here we go. In this first story, like I said, we're headed to Japan to explore what just might be the most haunted place in the world. And if not the most haunted, definitely one of the most disturbing. The place we're visiting is imposing, vast, and somber. This big woodland that sits under the looming shadow of Mount Fuji. It's a place that has many names.

Aoki, Gahara, the Blue Tree Meadow, the Sea of Trees, Jukai, but you most likely know it as the Suicide Forest. Today we'll uncover the sinister history of this haunted forest in a very different way than I covered it several years ago now on episode 88 of Time Suck. Much less skeptically, much more open to the possibility of the paranormal being behind much of the horror that has occurred there. Before we dive in, let's get to know a bit about the non-paranormal details of this forest and

The first thing to understand about Aokigahara is that it's an anomaly, unlike any other place on Earth. To walk the narrow trails that run through it like veins is to feel like you're entering another realm of existence. That if you step off the beaten path, you might be swallowed whole, never to be seen again. Some say the reason so many people disappear into Aokigahara every year is because it's especially haunted.

Though that might be true, there are some more terrestrial, though no less disturbing factors that make the Japanese woodland such a strange, uncanny, and disorienting place. You see, Aokigahara was literally born from fire and brimstone.

When Mount Fuji erupted in 864 CE, it left 14 square miles of nearby land completely covered in lava. Eventually, that lava hardened into igneous rock, from which a mass of cypress, cedar, and Japanese red pine eventually sprouted. One of the most bizarre consequences of growing out of hardened magma is that Aokigahara, the forest, is eerily silent. Volcanic rock is extremely porous, and that can act as a sound absorber.

The trees themselves also add to the disconcerting stillness of the place. The very dense foliage, so thick in some areas that daylight is nearly entirely unable to pierce the forest canopy, will muffle any noise anyone or anything might dare to make. In other words, if you scream an Aokigahara, the soil might just soak it up. The trees might blot it out before the sound could reach another living soul.

This is a real issue if you ever get lost in the forest, which as thousands and thousands of people can attest to, is frighteningly easy to do. And that's for a couple of reasons. One of the biggest ones being that any one section of the great expanse of woodland looks pretty much exactly the same as almost any other section. There are no distinct landmarks to tell you where you are. No real variation in the terrain to help you orient yourself. And on top of all that, navigational systems are almost useless in Aki Kahara.

GPS and offline map apps, even those that are supposed to work without internet or cell connection, frequently malfunction or fail entirely. Now, you might think that's fine, let's bring a compass, but that also likely will not help you like you would think. The volcanic soil contains atypically large deposits of magnetic iron, which will interfere with the normal functioning of a magnetic compass. In this forest, even the most reliable of compasses have been known to go absolutely haywire.

needles have spun erratically, preventing their owners from knowing north from south, east from west, perhaps in large part to how easy it is to get lost in Aokigahara. And because it's so profoundly isolated from the rest of the world, many people unfortunately have chosen to end their lives there. Or perhaps they have been manipulated by paranormal forces into doing so. For the last 50 years, Aokigahara has been statistically one of the most popular locations, if not the most popular, to die by suicide in Japan.

In the 1960s and 70s, on average, 30 people ended their lives in the forest each year. But in the coming decades, the number of bodies found continued to increase exponentially. In 1988, authorities recovered the remains of 55 suicide victims from the forest. A year later, they found 75. In 2002, they found 78. A year after that, in 2003, they found 105. Throughout the early 2000s, the number of dead bodies recovered averaged around 100 per year. And the real total, probably higher.

The actual number of suicides that have occurred in the forest are likely much greater than the stats have shown because the stats are only accounting for bodies that have been found. Like we already went over, the forest is insanely massive, very dense, very difficult to navigate, much of it inaccessible unless you're on foot. Because of this, it's not uncommon for corpses to go undiscovered for multiple years following their death.

For example, in the 2011 Vice documentary on Aokigahara, while exploring the forest, the crew and their guides stumbled across the skeleton of a suicide victim, the remains of someone who had clearly been dead for many years. And they didn't find the body in some obscure, hidden crevice in the distant heart of Aokigahara. They found it less than a mile away from the parking lot, not far off from the designated trail. Imagine, then, how long a body could go undiscovered in the rest of the sprawling forest.

It is for that very reason that each year a band of police officers, park rangers, local volunteers, and curious journalists conduct a coordinated sweep of the woodland looking for bodies that have yet to be found. And they still presumably miss many bodies every year. Fearing that they were doing more to encourage suicide than to dissuade people from it, in 2011, local officials stopped making the annual number of suicides in Aokigahara public information.

Perhaps recent totals are astronomically higher than they were in years past. And now you might be wondering why. Why do so many people die by suicide in Aokigahara and for so many years? Well, some say the answer lies in an old book called Tower of Waves in English, which was published in 1960 and ends with the heroine going to Aokigahara to die by suicide.

As one source put it, the novel subsequently became a bestseller. And since then, it is widely known in Japan that one cannot escape from Aokigahara after entry. As a result, an increasing number of people have died by suicide in Aokigahara. While that may be true, the forest history with suicide predates the Tower of Waves by more than a few centuries. The first documented case of suicide in Aokigahara occurred nearly 700 years ago, back in 1340.

As a form of religious purification, a Buddhist monk named Shokai starved himself to death one winter in one of the forest ice caves. Because Mount Fuji has such profound spiritual importance, ascetic monks used both Aokigahara and another nearby forest surrounding the volcano to practice self-denial, which sometimes led to death.

Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, Aokigahara was also allegedly used for ubasute, the practice of abandoning the sick and elderly in a remote spot for them to die. Whether or not ubasute was widely practiced in Japan is highly contested, though there is evidence that during times of famine and economic hardship, sacrificing those the community could no longer care for was definitely a reality.

Additionally, during World War II, an undocumented number of Japanese people attempted suicide in Aokigahara to escape the horrors of the war. All that being said, there really is no real, all-encompassing, universally agreed-upon answer to the question of why so many people die by suicide in Aokigahara. It's impossible to comprehend fully what induces a single person to die by suicide, let alone a few thousand people.

What we can definitively say, though, is that in Japanese folklore, the violent pain that compels someone to leave this earth is believed to be the very thing that changed their soul to it. Time now for the tale of what lives in the forest of the dead. In 2011, Rob Gahooley entered the forest alone, his camera being his sole companion. He was a professional photojournalist, and having only recently relocated from the UK to Japan, he was anxious to get to work.

He'd come to Aokigahara with the goal of capturing some of its awe-inspiring beauty on camera, as well as to satisfy his morbid curiosity. He wanted to find out if what they said was true. Are there really more nooses than leaves hanging from the tree branches of Jukai? Rob didn't get too far in the forest before discovering the answer to that question was clearly no. That was absurd. There were not, as the old adage implied, thousands upon thousands of nooses dangling from the forest canopy, frayed at the ends from where the police had cut bodies down.

But there was something else in the forest, something Rob was not as he perhaps should have been prepared to experience, and something he can't explain. He recounted his chilling experience at Aokigahara in an article for the Japan Times, which I will now read an excerpt from. I am walking through Aokigahara Jukai Forest, the light rapidly fading on a midwinter afternoon, when I am stopped dead in my tracks by a blood-curdling scream.

The natural reaction would be to run, but the forest floor is a maze of roots and slippery rocks, and truth be told, I'm lost in this vast woodland whose name in part translates as sea of trees. Inexplicably, I find myself moving toward the sound, searching for signs of life. Instead, I find death. The source of that scream remains a mystery, as, across a clearing, I see what looks like a pile of clothes. But as I approach, it becomes apparent it's more than just clothes I've spotted.

In a small hollow just below a tree, and curled up like a baby on a thick bed of dead leaves, lies a man, his thinning gray hair matted across his balding cranium. His pasty upper torso is shirtless, while his legs are covered only by black long johns, with blue striped boxers sticking out above the waistband, and a pair of woolly socks. Under his bent legs are a pair of slacks, a white t-shirt, and a jacket, have been spread out as a cushion at his final resting place.

"'Scattered around are innumerable documents, "'a briefcase and other remnants of a former life. "'Nearer to him are items more closely related to his demise. "'Empty packets of prescription pills, "'beer cans and bottles of liquor. "'Seemingly this man, who looks to be in his mid-fifties, "'had drawn his last breath long before I heard "'the unsourced chilling cry. "'That I came across a body in this forest was a shock, "'but not a surprise.'

For half a century, thousands of life-weary Japanese have made one-way trips to the forest. It's a dark place of stark beauty, long associated with demons in Japanese mythology, and one that has earned itself the unfortunate appellation of suicide forest. I find evidence of such pilgrimages is strewn amid the dense undergrowth. Four pairs of moss-covered shoes lined up on the gnarled roots of a tree, two adult-sized pairs, and two children's pairs.

Further on, there's an envelope of photos, one showing a young man, another two small children dressed in colorful kimonos and elementary school uniforms. There was no sign of human remains. Local police suggest wild animals often get to corpses before they do, so clouding the issue of exactly how many achieved their goal and ended all here. In addition to a lingering sense of mourning for the departed, what Rob Gahouli's story leaves us with is the same unanswered question that he faced in Al-Khigahara, who screamed...

Well, based on the facts of his experience, it could have very well been a yurei. You've encountered this entity a few times here on this show, but in case you forgot, in Japanese folklore and modern Japanese spiritualism, yurei are souls of the dead who are shackled to the physical world. It is believed that if proper funeral rites are not performed for a person, or if they have died in a particularly violent or abrupt manner, or if in death they remain under the influence of their fiercest earthly emotions like jealousy, sorrow, hatred, or regret...

then their spirit is barred from entering the afterlife. Some Yurei are able to set right whatever wrong is holding them back, and as soon as they do, they are freed to join their ancestors in the great beyond. But if they do not set right the wrong, then they must remain on earth. And the longer they remain, the more whatever good was once within them will rot away, until eventually they become just as vile and ghastly and nightmarish as the very existence they've been damned to.

Given Aki Kahara's centuries-old association with suicide, it's no wonder it has also had a long history of being haunted by yurei. Dating all the way back to at least the early 1200s, locals avoided the forest at all costs, not only because of the wildlife and other natural dangers, but because of the demonic, cannibalistic yurei believed to dwell within it. Almost a full millennium later, and the local population still steers clear of the forest for the same reason.

Many of the area's monks, however, do regularly enter this forest. While some Buddhist monks use the forest to perform acts of self-purification, others have only went in order to maintain sacred altars, which they've erected inside Aokigahara in order to ward off all of its evil spirits and protect the locals from their malign influence.

To this day, there are still Buddhist monks regularly setting up protective altars in the sea of trees, now specifically with the intention of combating the evil yurei who are believed to call out to the heartbroken and the desolate, luring them to the forest and ultimately to their deaths. The spirits are calling people here to kill themselves, the spirits of the people who have died by suicide before. Buddhist monk Kiyomyo Fukai was quoted as saying in the New Zealand Herald.

In October of 2000, alongside 50 other monks from his temple, Fukai came to Aokigahara to construct a temporary protective altar in the parking lot. The altar was meant to both combat the influence of the evil spirits and also to help them find peace. For three days straight, the group of monks prayed for the release and the repose of the troubled souls of Aokigahara so that they may finally move on and free the living from their torment.

If the innumerable claims of recent paranormal activity are to be believed, sadly, it seems the monks' altars have done little to hinder the yurei of Aokigahara. Visitors, locals, monastics, and patrolmen alike have all claimed to continue to witness white wraiths drifting in and out amongst the trees. Some of these specters appear completely ignorant to the presence of anyone or anything around them, while others terrifyingly do not.

These apparitions seem intensely hyper-focused on the living, stalking them as they trek to the forest. Even when you can't see them, you can feel them, their malice radiating from some invisible place, their infernal loathing directed entirely at you and your soul.

For centuries, people have also reported seeing warped, demonic faces floating amongst the branches, and occasionally, the silhouette of a person waving slowly at them from the prohibited area of the forest, beckoning them to join them, only to strangely dissipate into thin air as soon as their invitation is accepted. Sightings of these apparitions are often accompanied by the sensation of someone whispering incomprehensibly to you from nowhere in particular, and an oppressive, muggy weight bearing down upon your chest.

One person online swears, on his father's life no less, that while hiking through the forest in the early 2000s, he saw one of these apparitions, not standing behind a tree trunk, but dangling from a noose. The man had been taking a leak about 10 or 15 feet away from the hiking trail when he says he saw it. He described it as looking deadly pale and thin, and it also had the look of being surrounded by swirls of mist. And yet, it was still distinctly human-looking, and distinctly dead.

Its neck was bent horribly, its face contorted with rigor mortis. Its eyes were closed and its mouth was slacked open, the jawbone dangling to the side. The man was too paralyzed with fear to move or to speak. And then suddenly, he reported that the corpse's eyes flung open and an ear-splitting scream of anguish burst forth from its gaping mouth. The man said he then stumbled backwards, shocked and cried out for help. A moment or two later, his friends appeared asking him what was wrong. Breathless and terrified, he pointed to the corpse, but the corpse was gone.

There was just the frayed ends of a noose and the empty air. It's also worth noting that monks aren't the only ones to construct spiritual altars in the forest. Though it is not excessively common, it's also not that unusual for people to curse the world they're leaving behind before ending their lives in Aokigahara. In that 2011 Vice documentary, the crew came across a life-sized doll nailed upside down like an inverted crucifix into a tree. The doll's plush face and stomach had been ripped out.

A few feet away, they found a handwritten note that had been nailed to a tree. The note read, "'I came here because nothing good ever happened to me. Do not go looking for me.'" The crew's guide, who in the 20 years he'd been doing suicide patrol for the forest, had found over a hundred corpses, explained the display saying, "'We accidentally found this, but it's not a prank. They nailed this character upside down as a symbol of contempt for society. It's more like a curse.'"

Pointing to the rusty nails in the doll's hands, the guide added, "...the curse is nailed in." In addition to man-made curses, another disturbing thing you might come across in Al-Kikahara are long strands of severed tape. Though cut tape might seem pretty harmless, it's said that if you come across some in this forest, it means a demonic spirit is nearby.

When visitors plan on venturing off the designated trail into the forbidden parts of the forest, they often bring colored tape to mark their path, since compasses, GPS, and even paper maps are useless in Algecigahara, as I mentioned. It is very strongly believed that to prevent the living from ever escaping the sea of trees, the vengeful Yurei will slice their tape and scatter it in the wind, leaving the hikers disoriented and confused, with no one around but the dead to hear their screams.

But even if you do escape the forest, you still might not escape what lives inside. Many people have reported feeling the sinister effects of the woodland long after they've left it far behind. They just can't shake that feeling that someone is watching them, whispering to them, calling out to them, inviting them to please return immediately to the sea of trees. Disturbing.

And there are more disturbing stories than that. According to a psychological study completed in 1982, three people were rescued by police on the same day while trying to kill themselves in Aokigahara. That in and of itself, sadly, is not unusual. In that year alone, 116 people who had attempted suicide in the forest were rescued before concluding the act. What is strange is that when these three people were rescued, they all had amnesia, as if they'd suffered head injuries, though none of them had.

Making it stranger still, the three cases referred to in the study as Mr. A, Miss B, and Mr. C had no connections to one another whatsoever. However, they all expressed the same sentiment to the police upon being saved. They could remember nothing about their lives or who they were. All they could recall was a vague foreign feeling that they had come to the forest to die. According to the study, during their separate recoveries at separate hospitals, none of the patients were suicidal any longer.

However, a year after their attempts, the first two cases, Mr. A and Miss B, both died by suicide. It is not known what happened to the third case, Mr. C, as he completely disappeared after his release from the hospital. Where did he go? Did Aki Gahara call them back? Did they listen? And did the forest follow the other two, never letting them fully escape from the world's deadliest forest? Do people just like go there like tourists? Yes. Okay. Do people regularly go in and come out?

Yes. People do. They stick to the designated trails. Okay, that was another question. Are there designated trails? Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. Yeah, it seems that venturing off the designated trails is pretty dangerous. Okay, yeah. That's where it seems like you run into GPS map issues, getting lost, disoriented. Okay. Okay. I wasn't sure if the entire forest was that way or, again, if there were designated paths where it would be...

safe to stay on the paths, go in, see the forest, and then leave. But it does have like the darkest reputation of any forest I'm aware of in the world. Would you ever go? I don't know, actually. Maybe not. Yeah. I don't think so. I'm not morbidly curious in that way. Like, yeah, paranormal stuff for sure. But I definitely would not want to find someone's body. Like no part of me wants to have that experience in life. But what if you just went and stayed on the designated trails?

No, I don't want to go to this place, actually. Okay. Yeah, I would go to like Mount—but yeah, but this specific forest, I think I'm out. Okay. What about you? It actually like just makes me misty-eyed thinking about it, you know? A place full of a lot of sadness, for sure. Yeah. But I think maybe also, too, maybe it's a place full of a lot of like relief. You know, if you're—if you've had a very hard life or, you know, through your own making or just the life that you were served—

There could be a huge release there for them, for people who died by suicide there. Yeah, for some of them. Yeah. So there could be a certain kind of beauty to it. I don't know. Not that we're, of course, advocating, which we're not. Oh, my God. No, no, no. I'm just talking about this location and how it may feel there. Yeah.

I think the only way I could possibly know... First of all, it wouldn't be something like, I'm so excited. We're going to the Suicide Force. Like, no, it's not that. It's very somber. It's like if we found ourselves in Japan, which I hope to someday. Yes. And it was, you know, part of an itinerary or it was like, oh, it's right there. I feel like I would get there and I wouldn't know until I was there if I could do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, in theory, all the way over here in Idaho, I'm like...

I think I could have a very spiritual moving experience in this forest. Yeah. Like a certain kind of, I don't know, just otherworldly experience. Yeah. But also, if I'm just not in that headspace, I might have to just say like, I can't because I also...

For all of the people left behind from those who've died by suicide, I don't know. It feels voyeuristic almost. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know if I think it's respectful or not. Yeah. I feel very conflicted. I think I'd have to do a lot of research. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would only want to go if I had personally lost someone specifically in that forest.

And then I might want to go and just try to find some answers. Yeah. And try to like, what does it feel like? Was something calling to them? Yeah. Yeah. In that case. Just some closure. Just, you know. To help with some closure. But otherwise, I think I'm out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have some pictures. Okay. Nothing too gnarly. Picture of the forest from yamanashikanku.jp.

uh, just a photographer really revealing just how thick it is. Yeah, it really is. There's like, uh, you can find all these pictures, uh, on our Instagram channel, scared to death podcast, same thing for Facebook, uh, scared to death podcast there as well. Uh,

If you're not looking at the photos or unfamiliar with the forest, not only are the trees tall and thick, but also when you're looking at the ground, there's a lot of root popping up all over the place. There's a lot of moss. It actually looks quite dangerous. Like, you know, moss is so slippy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like you could very easily, yeah, I can see you can get very easily lost or hurt.

This next one, even thicker, this just comes from the New York Times, just another picture of the forest. And yeah, it's quite dense. The roots look like rivers. It's just, they're just so, they look like they're moving. And lots of fallen trees rotting there. Yeah.

This one, yeah, so it's had just several sets of abandoned shoes. Those ones that were mentioned by photographer Rob Gahouly. Makes my stomach hurt. Yeah, via the Japan Times. And then this is just an example of some tape. Okay. Left behind by hikers in the forest via Offbeat Japan. And then this is a traditional Japanese depiction of a yurei. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Just from Wikipedia. And also from Wikipedia, just another depiction of a yurei. This one comes from 1707. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Just sad, angry spirits. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. And after all that suicide talk, if you're feeling suicidal on any level, please talk to someone in the U.S. You can call or text 988 to access the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also just go to 988lifeline.org. And most nations around the world, if not all, have some similar type of program. So don't wait. Don't ignore it. You're worth more, a lot more than what you're feeling right now. Yeah.

Ready to move on? Yeah, it's heavy. Before we move on to more scares, we need to take a quick in-between story sponsor break. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a Robert or Annabelle on Patreon. Get the episodes ad free, additional bonus episodes and more. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Did you know that work-related stress is one of the top causes of declining mental health? 61% of the global workforce experience high stress at work.

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Sunshine, long days, cool nights under the stars, there are a lot of things I love about summer. One of my favorite things about the warmer weather is that you, Lula Marie, wear a lot less clothes. Ooh la la! Ha! This is true! I hate the feeling of clothing sticking to my body. And even worse than my sundress clinging to my skin is my underwear getting all hot and steamy. I mean, I want to get all hot and steamy with you, but my underwear... I get it!

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Thanks for listening to our sponsor deals, Creeps and Peepers. And now we head to Italy. Most monsters live in stories. They hide in the shadows of fairy tales, warnings to keep children in their beds and grownups out of the woods. But do some of them ever slip through? Do they cling to the edges of memory? The way mist clings to the reeds of a forgotten swamp.

In the fog-choked marshes of northern Italy, locals still whisper about one such monster, a figure cloaked in damp rags, dragging rope behind her, blindfolded but never lost. Time now for the tale of Laborda. Laborda is a folkloric creature said to haunt the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. Her origin, like many folk terrors, is murky. Some say she's the ghost of a drowned woman.

Others claim she was a witch who made a pact with some devil of the swamp. But the most enduring vision, or version, excuse me, is both simpler and darker. She's a blindfolded hag, the ghost of the once living, the spectral echo of a woman who prowls bogs, riverbanks, and canals. Why? To snatch wayward children, particularly those who have wandered too far from home or have gotten too close to the water's edge.

But she doesn't limit herself only to the young. Drunkards, stragglers, and lone travelers have all been said to disappear without a sound, their only mistake being that they walk through the fog too far into the swamp and alone. If Laborda is to take you, it'll happen suddenly, and you might not have heard her coming. She moves silently, her footsteps making no noise, her presence is felt rather than heard. First is the change in the air, thick humidity, a sudden drop in temperature, the scent of rot and mildew.

Then come the ropes, ropes wound from reeds and nettles, coarse and damp, slipping around ankles, wrapping around your neck like they have minds of their own. And if you see her face, you might as well already be dead. Her mouth, they say, is sewn shut. And while her blindfold is continuously soaked in dirty, swampy water, she somehow never misses her mark. In some villages, mothers used to scare their children with lullabies that would mention her name. Perhaps they still do. Sleep well, stay near to me.

If you wander, the border will come for thee. This is no idle nursery rhyme. While the true nature of the threats might always remain a mystery, are they paranormal or are they of this earth? There are definite threats out in the swamps where La Borda is rumored to haunt. In places like the Po Valley and the marshes near Ravenna, the fog rolls in thick and fast. And still today, stories are whispered about figures seen standing in the middle of roads or just beneath the canal bridge, unmoving.

A few years ago in 2017, a Reddit user shared a brief cryptic entry about Laborda in the two-sentence horror subreddit. As I raced home to the foggy streets, the rope tightened around my neck. She doesn't need to see, she always finds you. The post was quickly buried by other entries, but a few users replied saying they'd heard similar warnings from grandparents in Emilia-Romagna.

One even said their uncle went missing in the late 1980s after a night drinking in a canal-side village. And when searchers combed the area, they found his shoe hung on a low branch by a fraying rope. And now for a more detailed tale of a possible recent encounter. Ella Jamison, a 31-year-old from Nottingham, England, an academic who visited a village east of Modena, near the edge of the wetlands, claims that the following events took place one recent October, just as the fog began to settle in for the winter.

I was in Italy researching for my graduate thesis on rural folktales and superstition, how they've preserved orally, how they're preserved orally in isolated communities. I'd spent most of October bouncing between libraries and village museums in Emilia-Romagna. That's how I found myself in the town of San Castaldo, a speck on the map east of Modena, just where the land begins to sag into the marsh. The locals called it Una Terra Dementica, excuse me, Una Terra Dementicata, a forgotten place.

The locals were also kind. I was given a spare room above a small archive office to stay in for two nights while I cataloged some dusty parish records and field notes left behind by an ethnographer in the 1970s. It was damp. Always damp. There was a canal just outside and mist rolled in every evening like clockwork. The old man who ran the archive, Vincenzo, gave me two warnings. First he said, don't walk along the canal after dark.

And second, if you hear the sound of dripping rope, go back inside. I laughed, thinking he was making some joke I didn't fully understand. He was not. The second night was when it happened. I had just finished photographing some handwritten notes about Laborda. Nothing I hadn't seen before. Warnings, songs, some crude sketches of a hunched, shrouded figure drawn by schoolchildren in the 1950s. One of them showed Laborda standing in a foggy alley, holding a rope like a leash. I remember checking the time. It was 11.38 p.m.

I should have stayed upstairs. But I'd been drinking espresso all day and needed to walk it off before bed. So I threw on a sweater, grabbed my phone, and stepped out onto the canal path. The fog was thick. My shoes made no sound on the damp ground. At first it was peaceful, but then I noticed something. No wind. No frogs. No insects. Just silence and my own heartbeat. That's when I smelled it. Rot, wet earth and mildew. It hit me like a wave.

And then, a sound. Not footsteps. Not breathing. Dragging. Like rope. Wet, thick rope being pulled slowly through puddles. A sound one normally would not hear. It would be drowned out by the sounds of the world around you. It was unnaturally amplified somehow. Feeling on edge now, I turned around, hoping to see someone out walking their dog. But there was no one. Well, no one I noticed at first. But then I looked to my left, and there she was, standing at the edge of the water. Not moving, not facing me, just there.

Her back was hunched, her clothes dripping. A gray blindfold was wrapped across her eyes, but her head was turned just enough to make me think. She sees me. I didn't move. I couldn't move. Then she raised her hand, and the rope in it began to uncoil. Thankfully, now I could move. And I ran. I ran back towards my lodging at a full sprint, never looking back. I tripped once on the slick stones and swore I felt something brush up against my ankle like reeds or fingers or rope.

When I reached the archive, I slammed the door and locked it. And I kept the door locked, barely sleeping until the following morning. I was so scared I never once even looked out the window. And I kept the curtains closed. The next morning when I left, Vincenzo didn't ask me what happened. But as I turned in my room key, he said quietly, She doesn't come for you the first time. Just learns where you are. And then he handed me a small charm. Some red thread with two knots tying a tiny silver bell to it. He told me to hang it by the window in whatever room I slept in.

I did, for the rest of my time in Italy. And when I got back to England, I kept hanging it in the window. I still do today. I guess I'm superstitious now. Better safe than sorry. So what happened there? Was Ella just sleep-deprived, spooked by old stories, her mind playing tricks on her? Or did something both ancient and patient really reach out to her from that fog? For our next encounter, we hear from someone identifying themselves as a 39-year-old man named Marco from Bologna.

My grandmother passed away in the fall of 2022. She lived her entire life in a crumbling yellow farmhouse just outside Ferrara, right near the edge of the Comecchio wetlands. After the funeral, it fell to me to help clean out the place before we listed it for sale. I hadn't been back since I was a kid. The house smelled exactly the same, like boiled tomatoes and cold stone. And the fog. God, I'd forgotten how thick it could get out there. At night, it was like being swallowed whole.

The house was full of junk. Newspapers from the 1950s, jars of unidentifiable preserves, rosaries hanging from what seemed like every doorknob, and the attic, a place that always bothered me. I remember being terrified of it as a kid because my grandmother would lock it from the outside every night. She used to say, it's for Laborda. Don't give her the rope. It made no sense to me back then. I assumed it was one of her many Catholic old lady superstitions.

But after she passed, I had to go up there. I had to clean it out. And I wish I hadn't. The door was stuck at first. When I finally got it to open, the attic felt wrong. The air was heavy, like it hadn't been touched in decades. Cobwebs, dust, old dolls, and a chest. But right in the center of the room was this strange pile of rope. Old rope, thick and moldy. But it was laid out carefully, like it had been braided into a specific shape. A loop at one end, like a noose, and coils spreading outward.

There were also nail marks in the wood around it, like someone had tried to pin it in place, but the rope had shifted over time. And then I saw six words carved into the wall near it. She doesn't need to see you. I froze. And then I shuddered. I remembered those exact words. My grandmother used to say them to me if I cried too loud at night. She'd tell me to stay quiet or Laborda would climb up from the well with her rope. She'd come for me.

She never specifically said exactly what she would do to me with that rope, but I remember distinctly believing that she would trap me and kill me somehow. I was so scared now that I left the attic, locked the door, and tried to sleep. But I woke up around 3 a.m. to a sound I still don't fully understand. Scraping. Coming from above me in the attic. Not footsteps, not rats, more like something dragging something heavy across the floor. Then, tap, tap, tap.

And now for one more. A supposed encounter shared by someone identifying themselves simply as Lena from Hamburg, Germany.

I was backpacking through northern Italy last summer, doing the low-budget, off-the-grid route. I love weird stuff. Abandoned places, folk legends, forgotten shrines. And I've been reading about lesser-known superstitions from the Emilia-Romagna region. That's how I came across Laborda. I found this blog post. It looks super old, from the early days of the internet. Talking about a village that doesn't appear on modern maps anymore.

It was supposedly near the Lidi Fereisi, one of the reclaimed marshland zones near the Adriatic Sea. The blog mentioned disappearances and a local ban on rope being left outside, and something about whispering drain pipes. I was intrigued, so of course I went looking for the village. I never found it, but I did find a wooden sign, mostly rotted through with the letters C-A still visible.

Behind it, what looked like an abandoned house. Half buried in overgrowth and fog. No tracks, no path, just reeds and mud. And here's where I think I screwed up. I left something behind. I didn't go inside, I didn't dare, but I took a picture. And I left a length of red climbing rope outside as a kind of symbolic offering. I'd like to say I was trying to honor La Borda, to pay respect, but that's not true. I think I was trying to prove to myself I wasn't afraid by taunting it and daring it to reveal itself. Big mistake.

That night at my hostel in Komakyo, I woke up around 3:30 AM. The room was freezing. The fog was so thick outside the window I couldn't see the courtyard. But I could hear something. The sound of something dragging. When I looked out, there was a shape in the mist. A woman, facing the building with her head tilted back. And then I heard a sound I will never ever forget. The sound of a rope tightening. Like someone was pulling a knot until it creaked. Such a distinct sound.

I ran from the room, spent the rest of the night in the kitchen with the light on. The next morning, I went back up to get my bag, and there it was. A slipknot on my pillow, made from red rope. The same kind I'd left behind. I've never been more afraid. So what is Laborda? A story invented by someone's imagination to keep kids from wandering off into the swamp and nothing more, a fairy tale, or something else? Is it possible that in parts of the world, there are monsters, things that never die but just wait?

If you ever find yourself walking through fog in northern Italy and you hear the sound of some rope tightening, should you run? Should you hide? Can you hide from this thing? Because Laborda doesn't need to see you to know exactly where you are.

That's so creepy. She doesn't need to see you to know where you are. Because she always has this blindfold on. No, I know. Yeah, I know. It is creepy. It's so upsetting. I feel like I just want to put on like a bracelet with tiny little bells on it and just keep it on my ankle from now until forever. Little charms and stuff to ward it off. Yes. Yeah, there's obviously there's no pictures, photos, but I did find an illustration of Laborda by an Italian artist named Vasco Brie.

Brighi. Yeah, Vasco Brighi, just on Tumblr. That's their interpreter, like a little swamp beast. She looks like a swamp troll. I know. More trollish in this one. And then I found a photo from the Facebook account at Immersis, Immersis Emergo, of a woman who describes herself as a witch living in Italy dressed up as Laborda. Okay. She mostly just looks like she's into weird sex. Yeah, I know. It does kind of have BDSM vibes. Which is fine. Uh-huh. No shame.

Yeah. But those are the two distinct features of Laborda, the blindfold and the rope. If you dressed up as her for Halloween, no one would know. No one would know. People would just think, like, what are you doing with a noose? Yeah. You'd have to dress up as her in that region that, what is it? It's like Emilio Romano. Sure. Yeah. I can never think exactly how to say it. Emilia. And it's Emilia Romano. Yeah.

Emilio Estevez. Got it. Emilio Estevez, region of Italy. You get it. You get it. Well, those were fun.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that Laborda tale. Yeah. I really enjoyed all the supposed encounters or possible near encounters, the missing uncle. Yeah, there were some really cool features in there. Thank you. Yeah. You know what I just realized? What? Because we're recording back-to-back episodes. Huh? Do you know what? I didn't ask you about Layla in the last show. Yeah, read Layla last episode. Dang. Yellow Layla today. Yeah, I got them both over here.

Got ketchup and mustard over there. And I didn't ask. That was weird. Okay. Well, you know, all human. Sometimes these things happen. Are you ready to dive into our UFO alien double feature? Yes, I am. Okay. Let's take a, let's, let's leave Italy and go to the skies. I like it. All right, here we go.

Hey, Dan and Lindsay. Long time fan. Love you guys. Blah, blah, blah. We all know the drill. Thank you. I haven't told anyone this story. Well, not the full version. Not the real version. It's been 15 years and I still can't sleep when the fog rolls in.

I was 32, living alone in a rented farmhouse outside of Manchester, Vermont. The place was cheap. An old, drafty, two-story house with sloped floors and a wood-burning stove that smoked no matter how I arranged the flu. But it had privacy, and I needed that.

I was recovering from a rough divorce, a layoff, and a half-hearted suicide attempt that ended with me vomiting up pills into a cold toilet bowl. My life felt like wet cardboard falling apart in my hands. So I ran. The farmhouse was surrounded by dense woods with a gravel drive that would...

That wound off into nothing. No neighbors, no streetlights, just mist and deer and the sound of the wind knocking over branches in the dark. I thought isolation would heal me. I thought quiet was peace. I was wrong.

The encounter happened in late September. The leaves had just started to die. Blood orange, red, ochre, copper. And the air carried that earthy rot you only smell in New England autumns. I remember waking up at 2.30 a.m. Not from a nightmare. Not from any noise. I just woke up suddenly alert.

The room was glowing faintly, like moonlight filtered through gauze. I sat up in bed and saw the fog outside, dense, unnaturally bright.

My bedroom faced the backyard, which ran about 40 feet before hitting treeline. And just beyond those trees, there was light. It wasn't the moon. It was too bright. Too white. And it flickered, like lightning behind clouds pulsing in slow, deliberate bursts. I should have been scared, but I wasn't. Well, not at first.

I got up, put on a flannel shirt, and went downstairs. The house was freezing. I remembered that clearly, how cold it was. The kind of cold that doesn't feel right, like something's coming from the inside out. I opened the back door and stepped onto the porch. The fog was thick, like milk. I couldn't see more than, I don't know, 10 feet? But the light was still there, brighter now, closer. I took a few steps into the yard and stopped.

The sound hit me next. It was like a humming, not from a machine or engine, but almost like a tuning fork. Vibrational. And I could feel it in my teeth. And there was another sound beneath it, like whispering, right on the edge of hearing. Too soft to make out, but impossible to ignore. And that's when I got scared. I turned back inside, and then I saw the figures.

There were three of them, standing at the edge of the fog, humanoid, but tall. Too tall. Thin in a way that seemed impossible, like they had bones, but no muscles. Their arms hung too low. They didn't move. They just stood there, silent and still, watching me.

I didn't move either. My legs wouldn't work. The whispering got louder, and now I could feel it inside of my own head. Not as words, but as thoughts. Emotions. Images. You see us. You remember. I don't know how long I stood there. Maybe seconds? Maybe minutes? Then one of them took a step forward.

I ran. I don't remember getting inside. One second I was in the yard, the next I was upstairs, crouched in the closet with the door shut, clutching a baseball bat like a crucifix. And I didn't sleep. I didn't blink. I just waited for the morning. When the sun rose, the fog was gone. And so were the figures. I told myself it was a nightmare. Maybe even sleep paralysis. I'd been stressed and drinking too much and isolated.

But that day, I found something. Out by the edge of the woods where they had stood, the grass was scorched in perfect circles. Three of them. Each one about six feet across, blackened to ash. The trees nearby were stripped of bark and vertical lines like something had clawed them. I took pictures, but of course they didn't develop. Just gray smudges and overexposed blotches, like the film had been damaged.

And still I stayed. I told myself I was imagining things. There was no one out there. That it had to have a rational explanation. Until it happened again. About three weeks later, just after midnight, the power went out. I was reading in bed, using a headlamp, when the batteries died. Completely dead. I went downstairs to find fresh ones, but my phone had no signal, and then the flashlights wouldn't work. And then that was when I heard the knocking.

Soft at first, rhythmic. Knock, knock, knock. Then silence. Then knock, knock, knock. It wasn't at the door. It was coming from the roof. I ran outside. No shoes, no coat. I just wanted to see. I just wanted proof.

The fog was back, thicker this time, wetting my clothes in seconds. And above the house, floating maybe, I don't know, 30 feet up, was a shape. Oval. Silent. It didn't make a sound, not even a humming. But it pulsed with that same pale white light, almost organic, like something breathing.

I blacked out. I woke up in the living room. It was 4.07 a.m. My clothes were dry. My feet were clean. The fire in the stove was crackling like it had never gone out. But the house smelled like strange, like ozone and burnt metal. My body felt heavy, like I'd done way too many drugs. That morning, I found something under my skin. A lump just below my left ear. Small, hard, smooth.

It didn't hurt, but it felt wrong, like a pebble underneath leather. I went to a clinic in Battleboro, told them I thought it was a cyst. They took an x-ray. Then they told me the machine was malfunctioning and asked me if I could come back later.

But I never did. I moved out of the house a week later, broke the lease, left half my things behind. I didn't care. I drove back to Boston and stayed with a cousin for a while, sleeping with the lights on and the TV blaring. Over the next year, I started having dreams. In them, I was on a table. Not metal, but something smooth and warm. The air smelled like vinegar and snow. There were lights above me, too bright to see through, and voices, clearer this time.

You were chosen. You belong to us now, they said. I'd wake up sweating, shaking, sometimes bleeding from the nose or the ears. I saw doctors, psychologists. I was diagnosed with PTSD, sleep disorders, possible delusional psychosis. But I know what I saw. And I'm not alone.

A few years after I left Vermont, I found an online forum for people who'd seen things. Lights in the sky, figures in the fog, dreams they couldn't explain. I posted my story under an alias. Got dozens of messages. One from a man in New Hampshire who swore he saw the same white pulsing light. Another woman in Idaho who described the exact same whispering thoughts that weren't hers.

We began comparing notes. We all had the dreams. We all had the lump.

One of them dug his out, said it was like a tiny metal rod, half an inch long, with no identifiable alloy. When he mailed it to a lab for testing, the package disappeared in transit. After that, he stopped posting. I still feel them sometimes, not every night. But when the fog comes, especially in the fall, I get that humming in my teeth again. The cold behind the eyes, and I know they're out there, watching.

waiting. I think they let me remember on purpose. I think it's part of whatever they're doing, like part of a test. I don't know, maybe I passed, maybe I failed. I don't know. But I am marked now, and I belong to them. So I stay awake, I keep the lights on, I don't go outside after dark, and I live in the city now, somewhere the fog can't easily find me. But it always does. Eventually. And when it does,

I'll be ready. I just don't know what for. James. Thanks, James. Yeah, that's like a, that was a really intense story of UFO abduction. Yeah. Just like being marked and just, just all of it. Just the little three circular burn marks in the yard after thinking it might've been sleep paralysis. Just all those things. If that, if that had happened to me, if,

Again, I say this not in any offense to James, but as you know, it's like, I'm going to be skeptical of all these stories. Of course. The stories that I find, the stories that everyone sends in. But if that story is true, it's like, oh yeah, you are for sure marked by an alien. 100%. I was thinking about how in last week's episode, 303, that...

Oh, the house in Canada. Oh, the... I was going to say balloon, but that's not right. Baldoon. Baldoon. Yeah. You know, and at the end, I was like, bullshit. Sure, it's weird with the goose. But then you were like, okay, yes, but like, what are the rules? Where do we draw this line? It's all weird. It's all weird. And so like this story too, when I read it, I was like, I don't know. I was with it until the thing behind the ear and that felt too far. But then... But again, what if it really happened? Yeah. And it's like...

Just imagine if that happened to you or I. Yeah. Right? And I can feel this thing behind your ear now. It's like, you know, where do we draw the line? Who do we believe? Who do we not believe? Do we only believe what we can see? That is the whole premise of this show is like, what's out there? And what if something messed with you and just, it was such an intense experience that when you tell the truth now, you know what a curse that would be. You know that everyone's like, get out of here. Like there's too much, but it's like,

But what if that's actually how it happened? Yeah. What if like you definitely saw them? Your film definitely like didn't like, you know, show like, oh my God. Oh, develop. Develop. Thank you. I was like, it's been so long since I've thought of film. Sure. Everything's just digital for so many years. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, your film doesn't develop. Or what if you took digital pictures and they just were messed up for whatever reason? Yeah. What if you really did go in and have like this thing tested and a doctor took it out and like, yeah, we'll send it to the lab. And then it did disappear. I know. It's like, it's like. You would feel insane.

Insane as well. Yeah, it would be terrible. And it's like, oftentimes, it's like, okay, yep, that's, oh, that's just old Mr. Potter. You know, he's a little bit different. He's been talking about UFOs for a long time. It's like, yeah, because it happened to him. Right. Can you imagine how that would feel? Oh, my God. I actually tried to write, it was like my Moby Dick of stand-up bits for so many years.

Like in like year two or three of standup, I got this, this weird story to work like once or twice and I became obsessed with it. And then it just bombed for like a month in a row. And so finally I'm like, whatever. And then I would try and bring it back every few years, never could get it to work. Right. But the premise was basically what we just talked about. Yeah. Where, what if you had the most intense paranormal experience of all time? I mean, for comedic effect, I made it,

way crazier. Sure. Where you're out in the woods, you're hunting, all of a sudden you see Sasquatch riding a unicorn. Oh, yes, yes, I remember this. Right, and there's a leprechaun on top of that and then aliens beam them all up. Like, it's just so over the top. And I talked about how that would suck because it would ruin your life.

Like the more intense, more outlandish the real experience would be, the more inclined you would be to try and talk about it and the less apt people would be to believe you. And that could absolutely just wreck you. You know what I'm thinking of? I'm thinking about that green room story that somebody told us. Oh my God. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah. It's such a preposterous story. Yeah, somebody told us in a comedy green room a while back.

It's too much to get into. It's like an hour long story, but it's just like. It was just weird where somebody I'd known for a long time and the story they told was so preposterous. But what if it's true? I know, but what if it's true? Yeah, if it's true, they are a real life Jason Bourne. They are the toughest person who has ever lived by leaps and bounds. Or it's just like, please stop telling that story. Everyone's going to think you're nuts. Okay, but now apply that to this. I know, I know, exactly. Right? I know. Wow. Okay, well, let's do it again. Yeah. Yeah.

Hello, Lindsay and Dan. Hello. My longtime bestie recently turned me on to Scared to Death and Time Suck, and let me tell you, I am hooked. Thanks. I have listened to about 130 episodes of Scared to Death in the past eight months, and I can't get enough. I plan to devote more of my listening hours to Time Suck soon, but for now, I'm solidly in my spooky era. Be sure to buy that shirt from our merch store. And just can't get enough of the scares.

A little bit about me. I'm a total skeptic creep who is constantly chasing that one experience that will make me a true believer. Although I've never had any true haunting or paranormal encounters, I have had one experience that I was not looking for, which left me and a good friend of mine with one simple question. Did we just see a UFO?

My story takes place in 2011 when I was a junior in college. I attended a very small university in a town with a population of 6,000 people in western Minnesota. Anyone who has lived in a small town knows the type. There's not much to do other than hit up one of the many bars or hang out at the home of a friend.

On this particular night, a few friends and I had decided to have a fire in my backyard. It's important to know that during this time, I was on a little dry out period due to the aforementioned lack of things to do and a myriad of bars to visit. So I didn't partake in any recreational substances. We had a chill night listening to music, talking until everyone got tired and started heading out one by one.

Finally, around 2 a.m., it was just me and a very close friend, Mabel. One thing the two of us always loved to do was lie on the ground and look up at the stars. Because the town was so small and far from any larger cities, the light pollution was nearly non-existent, and the night sky was the most breathtaking explosion of stars you can imagine.

However, on this particular night, the sky was covered by one thick cloud that blocked any visibility to the stars and hung so low, the streetlights, as few as they were, reflected back down, giving a ghostly glow that made it seem as if the sun was just waiting to burst over the horizon and bring the morning.

In stargazing fashion, Mabel and I were lying down in opposite directions so that our heads met in the middle and our feet stretched away from one another. Her feet pointed east and mine pointed west. While we were chatting about random topics, I had my head positioned with my chin up and my head tilted back so I could see as far east as possible. That was when I saw it. I saw something that immediately made me stop listening and start tapping her on the shoulder repeatedly.

She got the hint, followed my gaze, and instantly became as quiet and stunned as I was.

Right there, below the clouded sky, moving from east to west, were four little balls of yellowish light gliding across the sky in a perfect square formation. Normally, I wouldn't think much of it, but the giant cloud that spanned the sky was so close to the ground, and whatever these little light orbs were, they were floating seamlessly below it.

Then, just when we were about to start commenting on what the heck it could be, they suddenly and effortlessly began to weave in and out of each other in a tight pattern that was far smoother than any aircraft I've ever seen. The way they moved in and out of each other was so rhythmic, it was mesmerizing. Needless to say, Mabel and I could do nothing other than watch in complete silence."

By this time, they were flying directly above us. I was able to whisper one single phrase to Mabel. What the? Then almost as if on command, they stopped weaving in and out of each other and gently moved back into their perfect square formation. The transition from square to weaving and back to square again was anything but chaotic.

The movements, though fast, were very smooth and gentle. Mabel and I sat completely in silence and motionless for another 30 seconds or so until they glided out of sight. When we finally regained our composure, we started asking each other, what was that? Did you see that? Holy shit, what did we just witness? We just kept asking and reassuring each other that we had, in fact, both seen the same impossible thing.

While going back and forth about the entire experience, we realized one thing that gave us goosebumps. There wasn't a single sound the entire time the lights flew over us. No frogs, no crickets, no cars driving on the road nearby, though it was a busy road that normally has light semi-traffic at night. No wind, no rustling of the trees, no crackling from our neglected and dying fire. Just nothing.

Even eerier to us was that thing, whatever it was, didn't make a single sound as it sailed through the sky below the clouds. To this day, we still tell everyone we can about that story, and no one ever believes us. It really leaves us wondering, though, did we see a UFO, or did we somehow have some kind of shared sober hallucination?

Anyway, I hope you find this story as interesting and strange as we do. It may not have been very scary, but holy shit, do I go out of my mind thinking about it even 13 years later.

I'd like to give a special shout out to Lindsay Scott for turning me on to the Scared to Death podcast. You're an amazing friend, and I can't wait to have you stand by me as my best lady in August. You've been such a supportive and positive force in my life, and I'm so grateful to have you as my best friend. Lindsay and Dan, thank you both for the great podcast. Keep up the solid work and stay spoopy, my king creep and queen peeper.

P.S. I let Mabel read my story before I submitted it, and she remembered it the same as I do after all these years. She is ecstatic that I am writing this to submit it to a podcast and was thrilled that my recollection of the event still matches every chilling memory she has from that night. If the story happens to make it onto your show, which it has, you both have permission to use our names. All the best, Travis. Thank you, Travis.

Yeah, just another, like, you know, good possible UFO. I mean, this one, not an abduction tale, but just, yeah, what else would explain that? My mind did go, I mean, this was a while back. What was it, like 11 years ago, I think they said, Travis said? 13. Oh, 13 years ago, even further. So I did have the thought just for a second. I mean, there were, like, drones and stuff around there, but, like, the no sound. But it did just make me... Yeah, because drones... Yeah, you'd hear it.

But it did make me think, God, if you were really good at engineering and you could make a drone unlike any other drone with lights and stuff, it wouldn't match up to any existing drone on the market. So it would have to be a custom piece. I was just picturing where we live, where there's this other little lake near us and then a steep mountain on the top where if you –

flew the drone, I'm picturing this trail we can go that takes us to the top of that ridge. And if you flew it up there from where we would be sitting in our backyard. Oh my God. We would just see little flying objects coming over the ridge and it would be hard to tell if

if they were way above the ridge or right above it. So it'd be hard to figure out their size. And if you had like weird lights and powerful lights, it could go and like, like a couple of them that could weave around. I'd be like, you could freak so many people out. Yes. And actually it'd be a prank that you could kind of feel good about where you're like, you're giving people a cool experience.

You're making them into believers. You're giving them a really fun conversation piece. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Now I'm thinking about tech with like actually just – I know this is so random, but they had – I never saw it. I don't even remember if I saw the videos. But I remember hearing about it at Coachella so long ago. There was some hologram. I was there for that. Oh, that's right. You saw it. Tupac. Tupac. So you saw the hologram. Yeah.

With that kind of technology, you could also eventually people are going to be able to like make ghosts. Oh, my God. Yeah. If you had some. Absolutely. Custom hologram thing. Oh, my God. You could blow people's minds. So fun. Haunted houses just got way scarier. Yes. Because if it could just. Oh, my God. Right. If it could just materialize. Yeah. That'd be sick. Especially before that people were jaded towards that technology like at first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Fun. Okay. Are you ready for one more story, Dan? I am. And thank you, Travis, for that last one. Okay. Here we go. Hello, bad magic badasses. Do I have a story to tell you? First, I have to say my husband, Jim, turned me on to scared to death at the first episode. He had heard and watched it on YouTube and was so excited to share it with me. We finally started Time Suck in May, 2023. You guys make my work hours joyful. Thank you for all you do. And now on to my story.

Jim and I have known each other since three and four years old. Oh, my God. Our moms were best friends, and our families vacationed around the country together, whatever state our families lived in.

Sadly, that came to an end when Jim's mom died in a bad accident. We lost contact for about five or six years and went on with our lives. Marriages, graduations, college. Jim joined the military, and then one day he needed a place to stay while transitioning out of the army. His sister and my mom reconnected. Jim came to Florida to stay with my mom.

The day we saw each other, it was fireworks. Like the type where you are just so drunk on this person that you literally are divorced and together within three months. The next 20 years, we raised three beautiful girls and we always had each other. And he always called us sugar. Jim also struggled as a veteran with severe PTSD and a TBI. He was my biggest handful, but we made it work and we just couldn't quit each other.

Despite doctors and VA inpatient stays for mental health and meds and volunteer work, Jim couldn't get himself together and started self-medicating. I fought for him to get clean and get himself into a program. Then our best friend died of cancer and he just couldn't fight anymore. On July 6th, Jim left our house and just disappeared.

Ten days straight, we posted social media posts, posted flyers, had police involved, and his friends from his volunteer work helped in a search and rescue to search around the desert where we lived. In that 10th day, we got a notification from our social media campaign that someone had spotted a truck just like ours on the side of the freeway outside of town. There, our worst nightmare came to fruition. Jim was found dead less than a mile from our truck.

He had passed within hours of leaving our home at 1.21 p.m. By 4.45 p.m., his iPhone tracked his last movement. The police determined he had possibly succumbed to the elements, but no one knows for sure. There wasn't much left after 10 days in 120-degree weather, so it remains a mystery.

Flash forward six months after the military honor service and the fuss had calmed down, I learned of an app called Vox, V-O-X. It's basically the instrument they use in psychic investigations that scans through radio frequencies to hear voices from the other side. I tried it a couple different days, but only found static and single sounds, nothing big.

On an especially tough day, I turned it on and cried, why would you leave us like that? I was shocked when on the Vox, I heard clear as day, I'm sorry, sugar.

I turned the dang box off and left it alone. You can't fake that, though. I distinctly heard Jim's voice. He shows up everywhere in his birthday numbers, 9-16. And I can't believe how much I see this number everywhere. I know he's always coming to visit us. It doesn't get easier to miss him, but it helps to know he's always with me.

I have thoughts, I've had thoughts of sending this for almost a year now, but when I heard you encouraging confirmation stories, I knew I had to add mine in. Just because someone isn't here in physical form doesn't mean they aren't still there. Jim and I's favorite movie was What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams. And I feel like we have that soulmate energy, not only in life, but forever. Tanya.

Thank you, Tanya. Yeah. I love stories like that. I know. And I think there's a thread of that. I don't know. I read something a while back. It was a theory about like, why do people like horror and like paranormal horror and just that horror. But it was, you know, one of the biggest stories

sources of anxiety and depression that all of us carry around, maybe not even consciously all the time is this existential, you know, knowledge of like our upcoming death. Sure. Of the, this is all transient. This is all like temporary, uh,

And, you know, it's just, it's heavy when you really like, you know, think about it. Of course. And that horror stories are kind of, it's like they wrote about how it was like practicing, like you're preparing for death. You're trying to get used to it. You're trying to like get jaded and get comfortable with like,

knowing that you're going to die and you also want to know what's on the other side. Of course. Sure. And I think that like, you know, the main reason people are interested in the paranormal is not for the terror. It's for we want to know that we live on in some way and we want to know as much about that as possible. How do we live on? What are the rules of, you know, death? Yeah. And everything. And stories like that, like this,

Even if some people are like, hey, you know, I come here for the scary stories, which I get, you know, I don't come here for that. I think a part of you does. Yeah. I think a part of you does want these confirmation tales that like there is something out there waiting for us, you know? And possibly to build on that, not only that, but that when our time comes and we go, whatever, however that arrives on our timeline, that there is a way.

We can reach back to our people and let them know we're okay. Because isn't, it's like, okay, my grandma Tilly, my dad's mom, the person, like that was the hardest death for me in my childhood. If there was a way in that time that she could have just like reached back and been like, hey, I'm okay. I think I would have felt better.

I think I would have felt like, okay. Yeah. You know, because instead it's just like, well, was it awful for her? Was it painful? Is she mad that I didn't come see her that last time? Which is, you know, of course, we take on roles of guilt often in death. You know, I didn't do enough of this. I didn't do enough of that. But, you know, I was just a child. So, you know, you kind of start justifying these things. But anyways, it's like, how cool would it be to know with certainty that like, okay, once I go –

And I don't know what the rules are, but what if you get a limited amount of comebacks? Right, right. Okay, in each death, we each get five visits. And then you just pop over and tap your person on the shoulder or fill a room with your perfume or just something, some way to say, I'm okay. And off you go. I wish everybody who had lost somebody had one death.

confirmation tale that they could share. Because I think it would give us all hope. Totally. And I like that last story that the concept of soulmate. Yeah. You know, that some people are just bonded so strongly that like they are going to be connected after death. Forever and ever and ever. I will find you. Yeah. Yeah. That cool thing. Like I love when people who are really into

Different ways of thinking will say like, you know, I feel like I have been with my partner in other lives. Yes. You know, when you like have these weird moments of like, it's like a deja vu feeling, but not quite of like, we've been here before together, but differently. Yeah. Yeah. Cool stuff. It is. Oh.

Want to thank some Annabelles? I do. I would like to thank the following Annabelles for being a part of our family and supporting all of the good that we get to do here through our scholarships and monthly donations. We'll have July's donation amount and charity recipient later this month. Courtney Thurston, Katie Morris, Wendy Westman-Harding,

Alex Hooper, Jordan Story, and Hannah Yeager. Yeah, thank you, Annabelle. It's not like to thank your ex-girlfriend. What? That was one of the... JK. Annabelle's your ex-girlfriend. Also, John Foster, Lady R. Looney, Nicole Inc., Shannon Nicole,

And Jizz Farmer. Nice. Okay, well, takes all kinds. Yeah. And this week we don't have any spoopy shout outs. So that is our show. That's it. Yeah. And that was a roller coaster ride of a show. I know. There was a lot of, you know, we say this all the time, but when Dan and I are prepping the shows, we're not consulting with the other person about what's going on. And because of the book. Mm-hmm.

These stories for episode 304 were picked probably back in February. So absolutely no way of lining them up. Yeah. Sometimes I think it's cosmic. You know, it's like, I don't know, maybe somebody needed to hear these stories. I was thinking too as we were telling it. I'm like, this episode feels unique. Yeah. Like special, like it's intended for, there's some fan out there that needs to hear this. Yeah. Stick around. Yes.

That's our show. Thank you for continuing to send. Why are we both crying? I don't know. You started. I started to. Thanks for this heavy, heavy episode. Thanks for continuing to send in your personal tales of terror to my story at scared to death podcast dot com. You can email us for everything else. Info at scared to death podcast dot com. Thank you, Logan. Keith scoring today's show. Thanks to Heather Rylander organizing the my story emails to book editor drew a ton of polishing, preparing listener stories for book number six.

Thank you to Molly Jean Box finding the first story I shared this week and I was able to find the second. We are on Facebook and Instagram where we post pics that accompany episodes and more at scared to death podcast. Also have a private Facebook group called creeps and peepers run by the fantastic creeps and peepers moderators. The all seeing eyes. Enjoy your nightmares, creeps and peepers. Take care of each other and hope you were scared to death. Bye.

If spirits threaten me in this place, fight water by water and fire by fire. Banish their souls into nothingness and remove their powers until the last trace. Let these evil beings bleed through time and space. Evil may pass through but have no home here within. Scared to death. Please stop telling that story. Everyone's going to think you're nuts.

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