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Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath come, 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 the 300th Tuesday night episode of Scared to Death, Creeps, Peepers, Roberts, and Annabelle's. Oh my gosh. 300 straight weeks now. Well, 300. Actually, I think we did our first two episodes was like a double, like boom, boom. Yeah. Week one. Uh-huh. That's a strategic choice. Uh-huh. So maybe it's like 299 straight weeks. Oh boy. It's a lot. Whatever it is, it's

300, give or take, weeks of never, ever, ever missing one single episode. And thanks to all of you who have been along for this ride or who've joined us at any time. It's so fun to still be going. Yeah, thank you for the constant ratings, reviews, the fan stories, buying merch, coming to summer camp, buying tickets to the annual live Halloween show. Just every little thing that you do matters to us.

so much in this grand scheme. So please know that we are endlessly grateful for sharing these moments with you, building community with you, and building out this podcast with you. Yeah, absolutely. And we've got a lot of horror for you today. I'm very excited. I have four tales. How many do you have? Well, hot damn, I just have two. I didn't know we were going hard. Oh, yeah. Okay. 300. 300. Well, that's okay.

Yeah? Yeah. Okay. All right. Oh, sorry. I thought you were going to keep talking, so I was waiting for you to say the next thing is why I got quiet there. That's okay. That's also okay. All right. So you have your two stories. Do you want to preview them or no? Yeah, I would love to. My first tale takes us to an adventure that we can all relate to, a couple of kids exploring something out in the woods, right? We've all probably done that as teenagers. That's super fun. And then my second tale is truly, truly one of my favorite ever.

Though I hate the topic, fans submitted possible alien stories. It is so strange and unsettling. All right. Yeah, I have like, as I said, and of course, sorry, I paused. It's the weirdest thing recording. We've talked about this before, but it's like my voice has felt 100% all day long. We're recording this about like 5.30 p.m.,

And right before I push the button to start record, weird tickle in my throat. It's like your brain knows. And for some reason, it's like, oh, you're gonna be talking a lot. Oh, okay. Let me mess with you for no reason whatsoever. I equate it to the same feeling of like when you have to go to the bathroom, but you're like three miles from home and your stomach's totally fine. And then you round the last corner and it's like, you cannot get in the house. Yeah.

get your pants off and get to the toilet fast enough. It is that similar kind of feeling. It's so strange. Weird mind-body connection. Yeah, well, cosmic. Okay, so I have four tales, light on historical details. I have been seeing the feedback and taking that into account. Mostly I thank you. Mostly it's me. Okay, these are heavy on chills. The first story revolves around a real-world tragedy in Virginia intersecting with the supernatural.

Oh, fun. So a very nice supernatural smorgasbord covering all kinds of the tales that we've covered here over the years. And yeah, excited to share these. Yay.

So once you put on your spoopy socks for nearly the 300th time, what are they? These are my new favorite socks that we got when we were in New Orleans at the Britannia Theater when we saw Sinners. It was actually so cute. I was holding seats and Dan went to get in line for snacks and, uh,

He sent me a picture of the candies that were available, and I saw in the case that there were socks. And I was like, I'll have socks, please. And he said, I already got them for you. Yep. They're so cute. They're yellow with little sodas and candies and popcorns. I love them. Perfect. Plus, I just love everything New Orleans. There's that. Okay, so here we go. If you were to drive down Route 360 in Mechanicsville, Virginia, just outside of Richmond,

You'd pass a stretch of trees and fields that look at first glance unremarkable, peaceful even. But this land is anything but peaceful. It's soaked in blood. And some believe the dead still walk its soil, both the dead who died screaming and in terror more than a century and a half ago, and the dead whose tragic demise occurred much more recently. Time now for the tale of the Elliott House and the Haunting at Cold Harbor. We began not in a house, but in a mass grave.

In the summer of 1864, the fields of Cold Harbor bore witness to one of the Civil War's most gruesome and unnecessary slaughters, the Battle of Cold Harbor, a clash between General Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee's Confederate forces that left more than 18,000 men dead, dying, missing, or maimed. In just one hour, on June 3rd, over 7,000 Union soldiers fell in a futile charge against deeply entrenched and fortified Confederate lines. It was a suicide run.

The men died in agony, bleeding in the dirt, some calling for their mothers, some praying, some silently just staring. General Grant would later write in his memoir, I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. And just two years prior, that same ground had borne witness to the Battle of Gaines Mill, when another 15,000 men had either died, been maimed, or gone missing. Two massive displays of carnage, separated by just two years worth of time.

After the war, the area was slowly swallowed up by time. Much of the original 7,500-acre battlefield is gone, claimed by neighborhoods, parking lots, and shopping centers. But the energy, the anguish, has it fully left, not according to a multitude of paranormal claims. Visitors to what remains of the battlefield have reported hearing disembodied screams, phantom drumbeats echoing through the woods, and a thick fog that can roll in suddenly on a clear day.

Sometimes obscuring vision completely and bringing with it the feeling that you are not alone in the dense mist. Some have said they've heard gunfire, others have smelled smoke, and still others in the area have claimed to feel and or encounter the effects of a much more recent tragedy. Over a century later, not far from the old battlefield, a disturbing tragedy would unfold. A nightmare one family would never wake up from.

In early October of 1979, on a quiet residential stretch in Mechanicsville, John and Treva Elliott left their modest brick home to go to work. Inside the house, they left behind their two children, Randy, 17, and his half-sister Melissa, just 12 years old. Melissa Carol Elliott, born January 16, 1967, was preparing for another day of school. She attended Battlefield Park Elementary less than a half-mile walk away down the street from her house.

but she would never make it. Sometime around 7:30 AM, her older brother Randy entered her room, raped her, then shot her twice in the chest to prevent her from ever sharing the details of what he'd done. He then tried to somehow erase the evil act he had committed by dragging her lifeless body into a field behind their house, a field that once echoed with the cries of dying soldiers where he hid her remains inside a refrigerator box. Some say those remains were then found by men collecting straw,

Others say it was construction workers. It doesn't matter. What's agreed on is this. It was a discovery no one connected to would ever forget. Randy fled Mechanicsville but was caught days later in North Carolina. He was charged with capital murder, rape, grand larceny, and more. And now he didn't deny what he had done. He confessed, claiming he had snorted cocaine that morning, that he had then blacked out and had some sort of psychotic break...

that when he came to, he was standing in the doorway with a gun in his hand, blood on his clothes, and Melissa dead across the room. He pled guilty and, despite his age, was sentenced to life in prison. But he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and he would eventually get that parole. In 2018, Randy Lynn Elliott was quietly released at the age of 56 after serving 39 years behind bars. And today he lives in North Carolina as a registered sex offender.

and the house where he took the life of his younger sister, after ensuring that her final moments were filled with pain, confusion, and violation, it still stands, and perhaps the land beneath it still whispers. After the murder, the Elliott house was briefly converted into an office, but the tenants, they never seemed to last. They always left before their lease ended, sometimes leaving behind an untouched closet full of office supplies with no explanation.

Locals began to think something was truly wrong with the house, not just haunted, but cursed. The building's basement was said to reek of rot, even directly after it was freshly cleaned. Some reported feeling dizzy and overwhelmed with dread inside the home. Visitors to Melissa's old bedroom would find themselves sobbing, completely overcome with intense feelings of sadness. Others said they heard things, things like scratching coming from behind the walls and whispering.

or the sound of someone breathing both quietly and rapidly, as if they were scared and hiding. Many say the house was haunted before what happened to Melissa, that Randy was influenced to do the unthinkable by something malevolent that was already there. The neighboring building, now known as the cabin on 360, has also become a paranormal hotspot. Both buildings are now owned by the same people who rent the space out for paranormal investigators, and both buildings and the land around them are reportedly incredibly haunted.

Caretaker Dennis Eslock reported once seeing a man in 1930s clothes standing at the foot of his bed who vanished the moment he reached for his weapon. Other guests have heard their names whispered by unseen mouths. Some say they've actually felt hands grab them in the dark. Civil war apparitions have reportedly been seen in the woods, men in blue and gray standing in silence before disappearing into the mist. But that's not the most terrifying part of this tale. In the summer of 2022, a group of friends decided to go on a ghost hunt.

So as many others had done before them and they booked an overnight at the cabin on 360 which included access to the Elliott house next door And one of them a woman named Andrea agreed to stay in the Elliott house by herself for a full two hours She set up night vision cameras EVP recorders in a spirit box. The other stayed in the cabin monitoring her feed at first It was quiet dust moats floated lazily in the green glow of the camera, but then movement

In Melissa's room, the toy closet door slowly creaked open by itself. Andrea thought it might be the old hinges until the door slowly closed again. She called out, Is anyone here? And on the spirit box, a child's voice replied. Andrea froze. The voice came again slower. He's coming. And now she began to hear footsteps upstairs, heavy, deliberate circling. But where was this person walking? There was no second floor. She turned to leave and that's when she heard a second voice. Not the child's.

Andrea couldn't make out what it said, no one could, but after she heard it, the power cut out. All the cameras went black, and Andrea said her mind was filled with images of the worst things imaginable, and urges to do the worst things imaginable. The team in the cabin rushed over to find Andrea collapsed in the hallway, sobbing uncontrollably. She wouldn't speak for hours. When she finally did, she described seeing a black shape with glowing eyes hunched in the corner of Melissa's room and watching her. It was a thing that had spoken to her, and she shook with fear when she described it.

One of the other team members took Andrea home. The rest stayed, but not in the Elliott house, in the cabin on 360. The following morning, three team members went home with scratches on their backs they couldn't explain. One developed night terrors that went on for weeks. Another two weeks later supposedly wrecked his car after swerving to avoid a dark figure standing in the middle of the road that vanished on impact. Andrea? She supposedly quit ghost hunting, deleted her social media, moved out of state, and hasn't contacted any of the people that were with her that night.

The footage? It supposedly captured nothing of what they had claimed they'd witnessed. As if the spirits manipulated not just what the ghost hunters were seeing and hearing and feeling in real life, but also manipulating the footage in the opposite direction, erasing the terror they experienced and replacing it with the mundane to make them feel like they'd made it all up, to keep anyone from believing them.

They say the Elliott house feeds on pain, that the murder awakens something ancient buried beneath, something tied to the blood of the old battles, to the blood-soaked soil of Cold Harbor. And if that thing sees you, you'll never be the same again. We gotta talk about this. Mm-hmm. This is very upsetting on so many levels. Mm-hmm. Okay. Randy. Mm-hmm. Okay. Let's just discuss it right away. Let's just get rid of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

First of all, I'm going to bet my freaking life that this was not the first time that Randy raped Melissa. Ooh. I just, my gut instinct is that, and I don't wish this for her. Sure. You know, this is not, my gut instinct is that he was lusting after her, fantasizing about this, and taking small steps. I'm not saying that he, that it was always an engagement of intercourse, but I'm

Sexual assault occurs in many different formats. Sure, sure. And I'm going to guess that she was... That he was grooming her or something. Yes, and based on the encounter that Andrea had in the house of Hyde, I would bet, I would bet, bet, bet that...

Poor Melissa was scared every time her parents left for work early and her brother was meant to get her off to school. Yeah. I'm just thinking about being a parent and if you don't have other familial help, just thinking about the whole situation. You don't have help. You've got to get to work on time. Maybe you're a one-car household or maybe you guys go in opposite directions in your two different household vehicles. Yeah.

It's Randy as the older brother or older sibling, whatever, his job to get her and him out the door. Right. There's this like 30 minute window. All parents know about these windows of time of like, fuck, I have to be here and the kids have to be there. And me as a kid who walked to school every day, and maybe I'm just projecting here, but I had to walk to school every day, kindergarten through eighth grade. And it was my brother's job. Yeah. And it was like a neighborhood thing. So I'm just imagining this poor girl. And again, compacted with.

I'm sorry, Andrea's encounter there. Like, why would Melissa be hiding? Why would a ghost of Melissa say, he's coming? Because if she had a great relationship with Randy, I don't think she would feel that in her day-to-day life. Second thing.

Cocaine blackout, huh? Yeah, that's, yeah, exactly. That's what I was, I thought you were going to say the first thing was, yeah, that's just such a nonsensical. That's just, uh, I hate it when people, that reminds me of like when people do something terrible and they blame it on like, oh, I was listening to heavy metal, like, you know, back in the eighties. Yeah. And now the equivalent would be like, oh, I, it's because I played all these violent video games. Just as this nonsensical, these nonsensical excuses thought up by defense attorneys to try to like manipulate a jury. It's like, no, you did it because you wanted to do it. Yeah. Or, or there's something incredibly wrong with

you. There's a mental health issue. Like, who knows what's going on with Randy? But it wasn't the cocaine. It wasn't the cocaine. Yeah. A lot of people do cocaine. The cocaine might have like put you over the edge in the sense of like you'd been dreaming about this, fantasizing about this, and it gives you this like invincibility kind of feeling for anybody who's done cocaine. It's like, you know, you're like, haha, I can do anything right now. Yeah. And your understanding sometimes of right and wrong definitely gets...

Yeah, yeah. Blurry, you know? Exactly. Yep. But it didn't cause it. No. I can't believe he got out. I mean, he was in for a long time, but I always hate it when like when you do something that horrific. To me, it's like you've voided your life.

Correct. Yeah, you should. I mean, I just don't think you can be rehabilitated. No. And now, absolutely not. Like, you're a monster with that. Like, you've you've you've gone in. And just like, what a crazy thing to do. Like the poor family where if you have two kids. Oh, my God. You lost both of them. Well, and also and so this was his stepsister. So now I'm half sister. Oh, half sister. I misheard that. And the news articles were not clear on like if the biological parent was mom or dad.

And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I can only imagine, though, what that did to that marriage. Oh, it's done. I would imagine. I would imagine. Because, okay, let's just put ourselves in those shoes. Let's say I came to the table with Kyler. You came to the table with Monroe. Uh-huh. Well, we had Monroe together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, this child wasn't your child. Right. And now my child killed our child. Uh-huh. I...

How anybody who can get through that without blaming the biological parent that's in that relationship. God bless you because I don't think that I could. I know. Even though I know it's not your fault. Right, right. It's just like, you know, logically speaking, but it's so emotionally tight. It'd be a reminder of it. Yeah. I have a few pictures.

uh of this one this this first one is uh i just found this on what is it google street view i had to look it up so that's it's a very nondescript house but on a lot of land and it makes sense now i'm like wait a minute he took the body just behind the house it's like oh yeah he just like went into the woods behind the house sure it's a big open area when you look on like the um the map from like above like an aerial view uh-huh exactly and then you can kind of see in the background on the left our left that other little house that's the thing called the house on 360 or cabin on 360 oh okay

I couldn't get like a story behind it. It had a website. Like you can rent out both these places. Don't know why it's a cabin. Don't know how old it is. It's not a great website. Okay. But you can, yeah, you can rent it out. They have food and everything. You can stay the night there. And it's 5, 4, 1, 6 Mechanicsville Turnpike. Mechanicsville, Virginia is where that is. This next one, I was able to, thank you, newspaper archives. This is a newspaper clipping relating to the murder of Melissa Elliott talking about her brother being apprehended.

And then this is a picture of her from her memorial. Yeah, just a little kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Woof. I know. If tragedies are associated with hauntings, it's like, well, of course that place is haunted. Of course it is. Okay, now onto the haunting piece of it. Could you do what Andrea did? Could you spend two hours alone in that house? And I want to propose two different scenarios. One, you have the scenario that she has where you know that your friends are close by. Yeah. So risk...

reward you know seem kind of even you know it's like well there's gonna be a good reward my friends are here if it gets risky someone's gonna come in versus two hours by yourself with no one close by could you do either

I mean, okay, this is one of those things where it's like compared to, let's say, swimming in a shark cage, something that I have like a more phobic fear of. That, I don't know that my body would cooperate to allow me to do it. Maybe it would, but I feel like I would have like some kind of panic attack in the water and not be able to breathe. Uh-huh.

I could do this. I wouldn't like it. But you could. But I could get through it. In both scenarios. In both scenarios. Completely by yourself, two hours or two hours with someone close by. I could get through it. I wouldn't enjoy it. Wouldn't like sign up for it like happily, but I could do it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I could not do it alone. I thought about it. And if it was like a life or death matter and I had to do it with people close by, I could. But I think what happened to Andrea would be me. It would be like, I would...

erase myself like no one would be able to find me and I would move away and I wouldn't be able to remain friends with those people and I would be in such deep therapy I would be in so much experience like that yeah yeah I mean I would need EMDR therapy to just rid my mind of this memory but damn yep okay you ready to I like to say there's a lot of variety with these ones now you want to go on to an entirely different kind of story I do that one was heartbreaking I know

Time now for the tale of Tamam Shud, The Final Whisper. In the early hours of Wednesday, December 1st, 1948, the sun cast its first light over Somerton Beach, a serene stretch of sand near Adelaide, South Australia. It was going to be an exceptionally hot midsummer's day, one of the hottest of the year. In a few hours' time, the sun would be out in full force, and by the middle of the afternoon, the temperature will have soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

School wasn't out for the summer quite yet, but if it had been, kids would have already been filling up the beach along with any family members who didn't have to work for the day. But since school was still in session, since it was a Wednesday morning and not on the weekend, the beach was quiet, serene, tranquil. The waves lapped gently against the shore in the early morning light, and the world felt still.

But as the morning unfolded, a discovery would quickly shatter the tranquility of the beautiful morning and ignite one of the most perplexing Australian mysteries of the 20th century. A couple strolling along the beach for their morning walk stumbled upon a man slumped up against the seawall. He looked very overdressed for a nice day at the beach. He was impeccably outfitted in a suit and tie, his legs outstretched before him, his feet crossed. A half-smoked cigarette rested on his collar, as if placed there with deliberate care.

The man appeared to be sleeping. Maybe he'd finally crashed after a late night out celebrating. But as the couple approached, they realized the unsettling truth. He was not resting, not in any sense he would later wake up from. He was dead. The authorities were summoned and an extremely puzzling investigation began. The man had no identification on him. Even the labels of his clothing had been meticulously removed.

In his pockets, investigators found several mundane items. A bus ticket, an unused train ticket, a comb, a pack of chewing gum, and a box of matches. But it was the discovery of a tiny rolled-up scrap of paper in a hidden fob pocket that would really deepen the enigma. The paper bore but two words. Tamam Shad. A Persian phrase meaning, it is finished.

The phrase was traced to the final page of a rare edition of the Rubaiyat, attributed to Omar Khayyam, a 12th century author dubbed the astronomer poet of Persia. His strange words translated into English in the 19th century by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald. The book is a mysterious and mystic collection of quatrains that explore profound themes of existence, fate, and the search for meaning amid life's transience.

The copy of the book that the scrap of paper had been ripped from was soon found in an unlocked car, a car not belonging to the mysterious man, near the beach. And inside that book, detectives discovered a series of strange codes and a phone number, leading them to a woman, a young nurse named Jessica Thompson. Jessica denied knowing the man, but her reaction upon seeing a plaster cast of his face they had taken strongly suggested otherwise.

Her daughter Kate would later claim that Jessica admitted to knowing the man's identity in her final years, but still chose to keep it a secret, even from her. Why? Jessica did cryptically tell her daughter Kate that the identity of the so-called Somerton man was, quote, known to a level higher than the police force. What does that mean?

She suggested that her mother and the Somerton man may have both been Russian spies, noting that her mother taught English to migrants, was very interested in communism, and could speak Russian fluently, although she would not disclose to Kate where she had learned that nor why.

Jessica Thompson would tell the police that while she was working at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney during World War II, she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat, and that in 1945 at the Clifton Gardens Hotel in Sydney, she had given it to an Australian Army lieutenant named Alfred Boxall. Investigators now wondered if Alfred was the dead man, but he was found to be alive and well in Sydney. He still had Thompson's copy of the Rubaiyat with the final page still intact, and he claimed no knowledge of the Somerton Man.

But, like with Jessica, his reaction upon first hearing about what happened said otherwise. What were they hiding? Not only did no one seem to know who this man was, no one could figure out how he had died either. Autopsy reports indicated no visible injuries, and toxicology tests failed to detect any known poisons.

Some experts theorized that he had been administered a rare, fast-acting toxin that left no trace, a method associated with espionage activities during the Cold War era, again pointing to the man possibly being a spy. Theories as to who the man was and why he had mysteriously turned up dead abounded. Was he a spy eliminated for knowing too much? Or was he a jilted lover, ending his life in dramatic and intentionally mysterious fashion? Or perhaps was something stranger and maybe even sinister going on?

Fast forward all the way to 2022. It had now been almost 75 years since the mysterious well-dressed man was found on the beach. 75 years of not knowing who this man was or how he had died. And now advances in DNA analysis finally had led researchers to positively identify the Somerton man as Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne. The mystery had been solved, kind of. This revelation raised more questions than answers.

When Webb's life was thoroughly investigated, no one could come up with anything that would tie him to espionage. He seemed like the last person who would work as a spy. And his reasons for being in Adelaide remained a mystery. There was also still the question of how he had died. What if the answer transcended the physical realm? Some locals whispered of a curse associated with the Rubaiyat.

They spoke of a man who delved too deeply into forbidden knowledge, into mysticism, someone asking too many questions and looking in places he shouldn't have been looking to find answers, invoking forces beyond his comprehension. The cryptic codes found in his book, could they have been incantations connected to summoning or communing with entities from some other dimension? The phrase, Tamam Shud, might not signify an ending, but rather a transformation, a passage from one existence to another.

Did Charles Webb not die the morning he sat down on the beach, but rather leave his earthly body behind as his soul departed to some other realm his studies had uncovered? Witnesses reported seeing a man matching Webb's description carrying another figure along the beach the night before Webb's body was found. Where did that other body go? Out to sea? Why didn't it wash up on shore? Could Webb have been carrying out some kind of ritual, a sacrifice to appease otherworldly beings?

The absence of a clear cause of death and the meticulous removal of identifying features suggests a deliberate attempt to erase his earthly ties. Jessica Thompson's involvement adds another layer to the mystery. Her knowledge of Russian, her cryptic responses, her connection to the book hint at deeper involvement. Perhaps she was knowledgeable of ancient secrets Secrets Webb was also familiar with.

Perhaps he was dabbling in something he didn't fully understand, or something he did, but she didn't. Something dangerous Jessica didn't want to acknowledge, and then be pressed to answer questions she didn't want to or was afraid to discuss. Whatever her exact reasons for not getting involved, she took her secrets to the grave. Today, some visitors to Somerton Beach report feelings of unease, as if being watched by unseen eyes. Some claim to hear whispers in unknown languages, carried by the wind.

The area where Webb's body was found has become a focal point for paranormal investigators, many of whom report equipment malfunctions and other unexplained phenomena. The Somerton Man's story is a tapestry woven with threads of mystery, intrigue, and the supernatural. While science may have provided a name, the true nature of his death, and how and why he ended up on that beach dressed as he was, remain shrouded in darkness. Perhaps some questions are not meant to be answered, and some doors best left unopened.

To ma'am Shudd, it is finished. But is it? Okay. Just a weird one. I've never even heard of that book, but now I'm very intrigued. Do you think it's safe for me to read it? I don't know. Probably. The Rubaiyat? Yeah. How do you spell that? R-U-B-I-A-T? It is spelled... Let me back up because it is a language I am unfamiliar with. The Rubaiyat. R-U-B-A-I-Y-A-T. Oh. Okay. Okay.

Fascinating. And they don't actually know conclusively who the original author was. I love mysteries like that. They speculate. I mean, it was found so long ago. They speculate it was that Omar Khayyam, this 12th century Persian, the astronomer poet of Persia. Omar what? It's K-H-A-Y-Y-A-M. I don't know how to spell it. I just didn't hear you. Khayyam. Khayyam.

Yeah, but they don't actually know for sure. The author is like they think based on, I guess, like some other things he'd written that sounds like it's something maybe he wrote, but it's very like mysterious. I like it. Yeah. I'm going to read it. Yeah, and it's interesting about the meaning of life and very existential, it sounds like. Uh-huh. Okay, I have some pictures. Do you have questions first? No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay, this first one, this is Charles Webb as he was found dead.

The Somerton Man. Okay, listen. Face on, because for those of you who are not looking at the photos right now or haven't seen the photos over on our Instagram or Facebook pages, excuse me, at Scared to Death Podcast, there's a face forward and then a profile photo. He kind of looks like Tom Hardy.

In the movie version of this story. Yeah, Tom Hardy would play him. Tom Hardy plays him. Okay. I'm relieved to see this photo because I have an ex-boyfriend named Jim Webb and he is from New Zealand. Oh, yeah. And I was like, that's it. This is his family's history. This doesn't look like his family. This next one is a photo of Somerton Beach. Take me there right now. I know it looks so nice. It has not been a great start to summer in Coeur d'Alene. So that looks awesome.

And then this one, a photo map of where the body was found, just showing there's a kid for a home for children above it, 25 steps down to the beach. And then he was like laying right next to the staircase. So bizarre. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. It's fun. Do you have any more questions? Oh, this is so silly, but.

I love that they removed the tags. Like, this is how my brain works. I was like, actually, if you're going to commit a perfect crime, that's a detail you need to think about. Because they will... You forget about things, but it's like, of course, they will trace...

That item, back to where it was purchased, who purchased it, who do they know? Like, it just opens up a different web. And back then, I think that would have been more important. Yes. Because people aren't ordering things online, obviously, back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they would have been able to figure out what local departments, like in Australia, what store he had gotten his suit from. Absolutely. And like, you know, who bought a suit of this size? People actually kept records of things like that more back then. Yeah. And he probably, I mean, since he's wearing a suit, it's probably custom made to some degree, tailored. So now they're going to talk to the tailor. I mean, it would be...

fairly in-depth. Also impressive that researchers stuck with this mystery for 75 years to finally solve it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the, okay, the Russian spy angle is so fascinating. This really would be a great movie. This would be a great spy movie. Yeah, because there's something going on here that people like took the secrets to their grave. They weren't talking about something happened that connected at least, what is it, Linda, the Thompson. I think I kept adding a P in her name. It's actually

T-H-O-M-S-O-N. So Thompson, but Jessica Thompson, like she's connected to this guy. I mean, the fact that her number was written in that book, there was some connection there that she didn't share, not even with her daughter fully, but she did tell her daughter. Oh yeah, there's a connection. I knew him and weird that even on her deathbed, she wouldn't explain why she knew him. Yeah. Yeah. Something's going on there. Something is amiss.

It's okay that you kept adding a P to Thompson. It just sounds like that. I know. Thompson. Thompson. Or Thompson. Because you don't say the P when you say Thompson. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's just kind of there. It's just that hard like, mm. Uh-huh. Yeah. You ready to leave now? Oh, am I? Okay. We're going to move away from Australia and head to some terror in Nigeria.

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Thanks for listening to our sponsor deals, Creeps and Peeper. Jumping right into this one. Time now for the tale of Lady Koi Koi. In the hushed corridors of Nigerian boarding schools, a name has been whispered with fear for many, many years now. No one seems to know for exactly how long. It's like she's always been around, hiding in the shadows, and preying on students and any other members of the living walking the halls of these schools late at night. Lady Koi Koi.

Her strange moniker derives from the eerie koi-koi sound her red high heels are said to make as she roams the halls at night. This spectral figure is said to be the restless spirit of a former teacher, known for both her beauty and her cruel, strict discipline. After a tragic incident, accounts vary between her being dismissed after harming a student or being killed by vengeful pupils tired of her abuse. She vowed revenge.

And now her ghost is believed to haunt not just one, but many schools across Nigeria, especially at night, targeting students and anyone else who wander the halls after the lights have gone out for the evening. Students across Nigeria have reported hearing the distinctive koi-koi footsteps approaching, doors creaking open, and even experiencing physical attacks like slaps.

Most tales seem to describe her as a beautiful woman in red, while others depict a more grotesque apparition, sometimes missing a shoe, often missing a shoe, dragging a bare foot and emitting a chilling, coy, sk sound. Beautiful or hideous in most depictions, again, she seems to be wearing just one of her heels. And I'll share three tales of supposed encounters with this one-shoe-wearing apparition for you now.

A student, a teacher's, and then a custodian's. All at the same school. Starting now with that student's claim. By the end of her first term at Queen Adana Girls Boarding School in Lagos, 16-year-old Chika Madu was already standing out. Not for grades, though they were excellent, but for being one of the only students who did not believe in the legend of Lady Koi Koi. She, of course, had heard the stories. Every girl had.

The sound of a single high-heeled shoe echoing through the dormitory halls after midnight. Doors creaking open with no one behind them. Girls waking up with scratches on their faces or bruises in the shape of fingers around their arms. A name whispered just behind their ears, never shouted, only murmured, But Chica thought it was all nonsense. Superstition for scared girls, she called it, proudly telling her bunkmates during nightly devotionals. There's no such thing as ghosts in high heels, no less.

That conviction would change in mid-October, during her final week before the midterm break. It started with a voice. Around 1.30 a.m., while studying late in the common area, Chika dozed off. When she next opened her eyes, the room was pitch black. She fumbled for her flashlight, noticed something chilling. Her books were neatly stacked in front of her, even though she remembered leaving them open and scattered. Then she heard it. The sound that gave Lady Koi Koi her name. The sound of a woman walking with just one high-heeled shoe remaining.

Chica froze. The sound echoed softly down the corridor, deliberate and slow, one step at a time. She swallowed hard and peered out to the frosted glass of the common room door. The hallway was empty. But then the light in the common room flickered, and Chica saw a shadow across the window. She didn't wait to see more.

She fled to her dorm, heart pounding, whispering a prayer under her breath. She told herself that she had not seen a ghost, but some very much alive of this earth woman walking past her school window late at night. That the flickering light was mere coincidence. But that night she dreamt of a red shoe tapping against a marble floor and the woman wearing it had no eyes. She could told no one what had happened that first night. The next night she was woken again, not by footsteps, but by laughter.

A high-pitched giggle, muffled, almost childlike, drifting in from the hallway. She wasn't up late studying this night, she'd been sleeping. As she sat up in her bed, she felt something brush her leg. She screamed, only to discover the bedsheet had been pulled back neatly and folded at her feet. Her roommate, Boulanle, was awakened by her cry, groggily now asking what was wrong. Chica lied, saying she had woke from a bad dream.

But when morning came, she found some dirt in the shape of what could be the footprint of someone wearing a high-heeled shoe on the tile beside her bed, as if they had walked through some mud and the mud had dried. There was no dirt anywhere else, just one circle of it, and a few inches away another, much smaller circle. Later, during a break for lunch between classes, one of the younger students, a girl named Daisy, approached Chica and whispered, "'Auntie says you saw her.' "'Who?' "'Lady Koi-Koi,' Daisy replied. "'She's angry, you don't believe.'

Chica demanded to know what she meant by auntie, but a daisy only smiled and said, She watches us from under the stairs. Didn't you hear her knock? The young girl's words gave Chica the chills. She worried that her encounters with Lady Koi Koi were not over, and she was right to worry. Determined to prove she was being pranked by some other students, Chica stayed up late as she returned to the common room to again study. She brought her phone this time, recording audio as she sat with her back against the common room wall. At 2.16 a.m., she heard it again.

This time she recorded it, or thought she did. After failing to see anything that night, she returned to her room, climbed into bed, and fell asleep without further incident. When she played the recording the next day, all she heard was static, but then faintly a voice. Chica, come with me. That afternoon, she told her dorm mother about what had happened, but the woman only crossed herself and muttered, You shouldn't say her name out loud. That night, all hell broke loose. Chica was yanked from sleep by the sound of furniture scraping across the tile.

Her desk in her dorm room had moved by itself. As she watched in paralyzed horror, her dorm locker began to rattle. The door creaked open and a single red heel, cracked at the toe, covered in dust, dropped to the floor with a clack. Then footsteps approached from the hallway. The door creaked open, but no one was there. No one she could see anyway. Suddenly all the lights in her room flared bright white, then exploded. Her roommate finally woke up and she was screaming.

Chica turned towards her bunkmate, Boulanle, who had now stopped screaming. She was staring at the ceiling, eyes wide, lips moving silently. Her nose was bleeding. A teacher soon was in the room with them and the girls were told it was a fuse issue. Nothing more. No more talk of Lady Koi Koi. No more talk of ghosts. Boulanle, due to her still bleeding nose, was taken to the infirmary. When Chica visited her the next day, Boulanle looked through her and whispered, She lives in the mirror. Don't look too long.

and blood still dripped from her nose. The doctor had yet to determine exactly what was causing it. It was now the day before break, and Chica was determined to leave the school early. She packed her bags and went to the chapel to pray. She was worried about her roommate. She was more worried for herself. Inside the chapel, it was cold, far colder than it should have been, and the air smelled of old perfume. Chica sat at the front pew, her head bowed. Then she heard it again, not approaching this time, but circling her.

round and round the altar. When she opened her eyes, all the candles were lit, and in the large mirror behind the pulpit, a woman was staring back at her. She wore a tattered red gown, her skin was gray and flaking, her eyes sunk in pits, her mouth a twisted smile. Then the woman lifted a hand, and so did Chica's own reflection, but she hadn't moved. Chica screamed and bolted out of the chapel. She said she would finish her schooling elsewhere, refusing to speak of what had happened for three years.

But just last month, she posted anonymously in a Nigerian horror forum, I don't go to churches with mirrors anymore. I can still hear her heels on certain nights. I never found that red shoe again, but sometimes when I wake up, I find my bed neatly made, even when I haven't touched it. And last week, I caught a glimpse of a red heel vanishing under my bed. No word on whether or not her roommate, Boulanle, ever recovered. And now for another encounter, from a teacher this time. It wasn't only the students of Queen Adana's Girls Boarding School who whispered about Lady Koi-Koi.

Some of the teachers believed in her too, though few would admit it. One of them was a woman named Miss Olambadi Bako, a stern but fair English teacher who had been teaching at Queen Adana for seven years, a woman who did not tolerate superstition in her classroom. When students whispered about ghosts or omens, she'd roll her eyes and say something like, you're here to study Wole Soyinka, not chase shadows. But then came the 2019 blackout term, a strange three-week period where the school's backup generators frequently failed.

where lights flickered unpredictably, where more girls than ever before were sent to the infirmary for night terrors. And one senior girl reportedly scratched the words koi-koi into her own forearm. Ms. Bako dismissed it all as stress, social contagion, until it came for her. It was 9.15 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Ms. Bako was grading papers in the staff room, alone, because the other teachers had left early for a wedding rehearsal. She preferred the silence anyway.

But this evening, the campus was unusually quiet. Even the typical background noise of girls sneaking between dorms or whispering down the halls had faded. Ms. Baco sipped her tea and continued marking, and then she heard it. She looked up. Nothing. Then louder, coming from the hallway directly outside the staff room. She stood, walked to the door, and flung it open. Nobody. The corridor lights buzzed, the air felt heavy. She returned to her seat. But when she looked down, she shrieked. Her red pen was gone.

In its place, a dusty red high heel. Worn, cracked, the leather curled in strange places like it had once been soaked. She backed away from her desk, heart pounding, and then the lights died. In the darkness, she heard breathing. And just below the desk, something clicked against the tile. Not footsteps now, just like someone rocking a shoe heel back and forth. The temperature dropped. Her breath misted in front of her. Then she heard something more, a voice. Low, hollow, feminine.

but stretched like something trying to remember how to sound human. You see me now. She turned and ran, leaving everything behind. When she reached the gate, she turned back and swore, swore that in the third floor window of the staff quarters, she saw a woman in red watching her. Miss Baco took a leave of absence the following week. She refused to return for the end of term ceremony. She told a fellow teacher privately that when she packed her things the next day, she found that old red heel she'd left in her classroom sitting inside her handbag.

A warning? An invitation? For what? Tell the students to stop mocking her, she told her colleague. The stories aren't just stories. She wants to be believed. And now for one final encounter claim, from a custodian at the same school. Baba Ikenna worked as the night janitor at Queen Adana Girls' School. A former electrician with failing knees and cataracts in both eyes, Baba Ikenna had worked the night shift quietly for many, many years.

He was well-loved, always offering the girls butterscotch candy or fixing their broken fans when days were long and hot and the rooms were sweltering. No one suspected the smiling gentleman had tragedy in his past, a son who had died in a car crash, a wife who'd passed away in her sleep when she was not yet 50. Some say people who have survived such brushes with death are more sensitive to visitations from the land beyond the living. The school was nearly empty for break when it happened. Only a few staff remained.

Baba Ikenna was sweeping the third floor science wing, humming an old hymn to himself. On Christ the solid rock I stand. He moved room to room as he always did. But when he reached room 3C, he stopped and tilted his head in confusion. The classroom was already clean. Not just tidy, pristine. Desks wiped, windows spotless, the floor shining, as if someone had just mopped it moments ago. And in the center of the floor, standing upright like it had been placed with care,

A single red high-heeled woman's shoe, cracked with dried mud around the toe. He blinked. Then he saw the footprints. Wet. Bare. Leading across the room into the broom closet. He approached that closet slowly, his heart pounding. The door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open, and his breath caught in his throat. Inside, the walls were smeared with... something. Mud? Blood? It was hard to tell. But scratched into the back wall, scrawled over and over again in jagged letters were words...

Then from behind him, the unmistakable sound. When he turned, she was there. Not in the hallway, not far away, but now right in front of him. Close enough to smell her perfume, something ancient and powdery and rotting. Her face was wrong in more ways than one. Too long, her eyes too wide, her mouth too full of teeth. She lifted her hand and gently touched his face, and he blacked out.

When he awoke, he was in the infirmary, raving about a woman in red in a closet that bled words. He was sedated and sent home with paid medical leave. The school tried to write it off as if he had had a stroke, a blood sugar drop. But the custodian who filled in for Baba Ikenna quit after just one night, said he found mop water spilled into the shape of a shoe print, and heard humming from the girls' lavatory after midnight, even though the lavatory had been locked all week due to a plumbing problem. Baba Ikenna never returned to the school he loved.

He had been of retirement age for many years already and had thought about finally retiring before his frightening night. But still, he would have returned if he had been able to stop thinking of Lady Koi Koi, if he had been able to stop feeling his heartbeat rise up into his throat and his chest tighten every time he thought about her. He was afraid if he saw her again, she might scare him to death. Weeks after his terrible night, he left a voicemail for the headmistress, saying he needed to speak with the chaplain, urgently. He claimed that Lady Koi Koi had spoken to him again in a dream,

He said that the students, for their safety, needed to stop talking about her, to stop thinking about her. His message ended with six quiet words. She walks where she's remembered. It was a very sudden end. Uh-huh. That's so creepy. Mm-hmm. I love that story. Yeah, me too. I was deep in it. Oh, good, good. Yeah. Interesting detail with the shoe appearing all over. All over the place. Mm-hmm. I was thinking about a friend of ours who was a custodian. Oh, yeah, uh-huh. And I was like, oh, God.

I want him to listen to this and tell me, like, how scared would you be if you walked into a classroom just doing, like, I mean, anybody who works alone or somewhat alone at night or in the early hours of the morning, witnessing things by yourself, it's just different than, like, coming back from lunch into your office where there's going to be 30 other people also coming back where you can be like, look at this, you know? It's just...

Ugh, unnerving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find it so interesting how different language is from place to place. And so koi koi is not a sound that I know. Right, right, right. So I was like, oh, like, it took me a second to kind of wrap my head around like,

Yeah, exactly. Like in like another language, it might be, you know, produced differently than I was. And I kind of felt strange saying it. But then like when I was going over the first in my head before the recording. Yeah. But then I was like, you know, once you just kind of accept it. Yeah, exactly. It's just like a...

a creepy recurring sound in that story. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. But it does affect, you know, how we hear stories. Like, it made me think if I was conversing with somebody

You know, from Nigeria. Yeah. Saying like, oh my God. And then I heard this like crazy sound and they were like, well, explain the sound. Yeah. How quickly things can get lost between two different people from two different places. I don't know. So a gentle reminder. Yeah. To go slow when we're talking to people who don't speak the same language as us. And that could be like your actual native tongue or just...

different sets of beliefs or values where it's like, okay, let's take a second to try and understand where each other is coming from. Yeah. Yeah. I was excited to, uh, to find another story, uh, from Africa. We haven't been there in a while and there's so many good stories there. And I was like, I like, I like the rhythm of that one. Um, no photos of this story, but, but I did find just a cool lady Koi Koi thumbnail, uh, some art from a video titled the legend of Madam Koi Koi from the YouTube channel, the heart of African tales, uh,

Uh, if you want to go over there and, you know, listen to more about her. Oh, okay. They made her a little more monstrous with the red eyes. Okay. Okay. Mm hmm. Yeah.

How do you spell that? Koi, koi. Like koi pond? Yeah, I believe so. K-O-I. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious. Yeah. Making little notes over here. I was like, koi, koi. Like, what is... In some African language, I don't know for sure. In Nigeria, like, there's many different languages spoken in each African country. There are in some, like, more like clicks and different, like, sounds that we don't have equivalents of over in English. Oh.

And so there could be with that, you know, like with the proper pronunciation, it could have more of a clicking kind of sound that would be more reminiscent of like a heel hitting like a tile floor. Yep. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for that clarification. That makes sense. Mm hmm. Okay. So one more. Your favorite type of story. An alien abduction. I love that we're both ending our portions of the shows on strange alien tales. Yeah.

It is August 20th, 1976. Deep in the wilderness of northern Maine, four college-aged men, Jim Weiner, Jack Weiner, yes, you heard that right, Charlie Foltz and Chuck Rack. It's not Weiner?

It's W-E-I-N-E-R. Sometimes Jewish people will, because it's a typically Jewish last name, they'll say Weiner, even though it's spelled Wiener. Yeah, and I guess Wiener is W-I-E. You know what? Let's hope it's Weiner. Because otherwise, and they're twins too. Otherwise, they're literally the Wiener twins. Let's say it is Wiener. It's more fun to have them be the... It's more entertaining. Sorry if we got it wrong. To be the Wiener twins.

And also Jimmy Weiner. Oh, God. And Jack. Dick Dick. Well, just Jack, like jacking off. Well, no, I know. But like oftentimes Jack somehow becomes Dick. Does it? Yes. No, Richard becomes Dick. Yeah, but so can Jack. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. We had an uncle in our family, like extended family. Okay. So artists. Okay. So these guys, the Wieners, the Chuck, Charlie, they're on a week long camping and fishing trip.

artists students and friends the four had planned to escape the summer heat and their studies at the massachusetts college of art by spending time in the remote forest rap solitude of the allagash waterway what they found was not solitude it was something else entirely something that watched that waited and then one night that took time now for the tale of the allagash abduction

The four men had spent the first few days canoeing down the Allagash River, eventually making their way to Eagle Lake, a beautiful, pristine body of water ringed by dense pine forest. On the night of August 20th, they set camp up at the water's edge. Wanting to do some night fishing, they built a large bonfire on the shore to use as a beacon, smart, the only source of man-made light for miles in any direction. And with the fire roaring behind them, they paddled their canoe out into the center of the dark, glassy lake.

That's when they saw it. A bright object hovering in the sky above them. It was obvious to all four men that it was not a plane. It was not a star. It wasn't quite stationary. It glowed in a strange, pulsing white-blue hue, and it began moving towards them, slowly at first, then faster. One of the men, Charlie, grabbed a flashlight and began signaling SOS towards the light, joking nervously. It was a moment meant to break the tension, but that was when the object stopped midair.

as if it had just now noticed them, and then it descended. Soon it was hovering not far above the treetops, and then suddenly it emitted a beam of light, like a spotlight blinding in its intensity, and now the men began to panic. They turned the canoe around, paddling frantically back towards the shore, back towards their fire, but they felt strangely incapable of making it out of the water, like the water had thickened somehow, and they were trying to paddle through syrup, or the time had changed and slowed down.

They would later describe hearing a strange humming in their ears and feeling an odd electrical tingling in their limbs. And then, blackness. No sound, no memory, nothing. The next thing they would remember, they were standing on shore. The bonfire, which had been huge when they left, was now nothing but barely burning embers. How? They hadn't been out on the lake that long, had they?

They all looked at each other. Something was very wrong. Their canoe had been pulled up onto the beach, even though none of them recalled doing that. They were cold, confused, exhausted, and deeply unsettled. They didn't talk about it much that night or the next day. They chalked it up to simply something weird, and they finished their trip and tried to put it behind them. But it didn't end there. Their experience wasn't over.

Weeks after the trip, all four men began having nightmares, each of them, and it was the same dream. A dream of being paralyzed, of being stripped naked and laid on a cold metallic table under blinding white lights, of tall, thin alien figures with large almond-shaped cold black eyes leaning above them.

They dreamt of strange instruments, of being poked and prodded, of searing pain in their heads and groins, of voices inside their minds. Voices that didn't speak words but communicated all the same with emotion, and sometimes with threats. Jim began having seizures. Jack now suffered from insomnia. Charlie lost weight. Chuck lost interest in art and stopped painting altogether. Eventually, they all agreed to undergo hypnosis.

And that's when the story got much more interesting and harder to dismiss. Under the guidance of UFO researcher and psychologist Ray Fowler, each man was placed under regressive hypnosis separately. But all four of their stories would match. They described being taken aboard a ship, metallic and windowless. Inside, they were laid out in separate rooms and examined. They felt emotions from the beings. Not anger, not joy, but something cold, clinical. Like a farmer inspecting livestock.

Each man recalled a strange test involving a device placed over their heads. They felt as though their minds were being downloaded. One man described a long needle being inserted into his genitals. Another recalled a being placing its hand on his chest, pushing something through him like electricity. They remembered being shown images of Earth from above, and then of disaster, war, plague, societal collapse. Afterwards, the beings wiped their memories, or tried to, but something got left behind, a residue, a connection.

All four men believed that since the abduction, they were being watched. And they weren't the only ones. Years later, in the late 1980s, they claimed that strange men began showing up in their lives. One man described being followed by a black car. Another said he received anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night. No one speaking on the other end. Jack claimed that someone tried to break into his apartment, but nothing was taken. Things were just rearranged.

One day, Jim said he found a note taped to his door. Written on it were words that felt like a threat. Some stories shouldn't be told. There were no fingerprints. The local police dismissed it. Skeptics have dismissed what's been called the Allagash abductions as a hoax. They point out a lack of radar evidence. They argue that shared hallucinations or sleep paralysis could explain their accounts. But all the men, all of them, passed polygraph tests.

They never gained financially from their story. And decades later, their accounts remained consistent, even as they aged, moved, and retired. Jack once said, I didn't believe in any of this. I still don't want to, but I can't explain what happened to us. It's like something reached inside my life and rewired it. Chuck was more blunt. He said, they didn't just take our memories. They left something behind, a scar you can't see, but it's there. We all feel it. And then in 2015, almost 40 years after the incident, Charlie Foltz was hospitalized for a mild heart attack.

During routine observation, a nurse noticed something odd in his vitals. Fluctuations in brain activity during sleep that didn't match any known pattern. A neurologist was called in. When Charlie woke up, he asked for paper. He drew a series of symbols. Cocentric circles, triangles, what looked like an elongated star chart. And then later, he'll claim no memory of having done this. Or of saying once he had finished his strange sketches, they were waiting. The symbols were eerily similar to diagrams sketched by other abductees around the world.

People who had never met never heard the Allagash story. So what happened that night on Eagle Lake in 1976? Was it a hoax? Grown large in memory and fear? Or did four men really come into contact with something not of this earth? And if they were taken, why were they returned? And what, if anything, came back with them? My God! That's awful! It's awful!

The like weird co-dreaming essentially that happens afterwards. That's like where it all starts to get a little uncomfortable for me. But also in the year 2025, I'm like, all right, listen, today I feel like if aliens would just come down and just like tell us what's going on, that'd be great. What's the plan? How do we go forward from here? Explain this to us. Maybe there is no plan.

So maybe it's just all a big experiment. And I think like, okay, if we're going to go with, which I do believe that aliens exist statistically, I think they're probably out there. Yeah, they're out there. It's terrifying. But then I also think, well, I highly doubt there's just one group of them. There could be so, so, so many groups. Sure. So even if one group reasoned with us, what about all the other groups that could be visiting us? There could be dozens of groups that have visited us. Aye, aye, aye. Yeah. I haven't considered that and I don't care for that at all. No, I just think like,

The angle of aliens are up there pulling the strings or monitoring us or watching us. I'm like, just tell us what the end game is. Just tell us the fucking point. I've had enough. I'm fed up today. I have some photos. Okay. This first one is a photo of Eagle Lake in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Just very pretty. Oh, wow. Is that beautiful? Mm-hmm.

This next one, a photo of the men who were abducted, plus one. I love this. From left to right and back, Charlie Foltz, Chuck Rack, the Wiener twins. Apparently the seated man shown here came out of the woods, stayed for a while, hopped into this pick, and then just left. Never even gave his name. What? Yep, the guys don't even, they have no idea who this guy is. Also,

Jack doesn't become Dick. Jack becomes John. I don't know. It got all smashed up in my brain. Oh, okay. That makes more sense because I was like, I've never heard that. Yeah, it's always been Richard. It's because I had an uncle, an Uncle Jack, but really his name was John. And when I learned his name was John, my mind was blown because I don't understand why would you go from Jack to John, like, or John to Jack? Yeah, I am glad. It just seems so silly. I am glad you cleared that up just because I know that a lot of our listeners are like, wait, what?

People just go around and start calling people named Jack Dick. It's a common, common nickname. But Jack and John are so similar. I just couldn't understand. I still don't understand. This next one's a sketch one of the men made of the four guys in a canoe being approached by a UFO. Takes a second to kind of see it, but you're like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I see it. Mm-hmm.

And then this one is... It's actually a really cool sketch. Yeah, it is cool. This one is a sketch that Chuck Rack made of one of his captors. Okay.

That's that little alien. Why do aliens all look like that? I know, a lot of them do. They all kind of look like the greys or they all have this like... Big old noggin. Oval shaped head with big black eyes. Well, they got so much tech that they don't really need their bodies to be like strong or anything anymore the same way. Or who knows? Maybe an insectoid. My feeling is like, why do we all see that when we see alien? And is it because...

We've learned that. That's what the argument from skeptics would be is that the first people made it up. Yeah. And then ever since, people are just copying the first made up thing. Because I can't tell you of a single alien story that I've heard where there's a photo of said aliens attached that they don't somewhat look like this. I can think of some, but it's rare. Yeah. There's some that'll be like an outlier, like a totally different body configuration. I would say 80, 90% are like a version of this guy. Mm-hmm.

Uh, which makes you think. Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. There's arguments on both sides. Yeah. Yeah. And then this is just the guys, uh, date unknown in this, just this, the four dudes. I love these guys. Uh, years later. Now, which two are the wiener twins? The two on the left or the two in the middle? I believe the middle is the wiener twins. Cause you, you can see like, you know, the facial resemblance. Oh yeah. Yeah. And like, they kind of have the same smirk. Uh huh. I love these guys so much. Yeah.

Yeah. Or actually, the wiener twins could be the two on the end. Oh, I think it's the left and then striped shirt because hair. Look at the hair. Oh, you're right. And then look at those noses. You're right. Those are the wieners. Those are the wieners. Two wieners. Two twin wieners. Two wieners. One a little bit bigger than the other. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Also, okay, the one guy that went to the hospital and then the drawings and then how he doesn't remember doing that and it matches other abductees' drawings. That's very fascinating. Yeah, I like that story. And I had not heard of it before. You'd not heard of the Wieners before? Not heard of the Wieners before. Yeah.

I thought you were for one second going to bust into a Christopher Walken wiener story. I got very excited. The wieners are great guys. They're not a couple of dicks. No pun intended. Why is it so silly? Why does it make me so happy?

Okay. You know how like an episode or two ago, I asked the question of like, can you use a likeness of someone's voice in a commercial? We were talking about Christopher Walken. Somebody in the comments on the Patreon said that at their local airport, the announcements are made in a

cheap man's Morgan Freeman. But it's like, it's like, it's like definitely like an attempt to sound like Morgan Freeman. I bet on that level. And that reminds me of many years ago, I had the same manager in comedy as Larry, the cable guy. Yeah. And when he was like huge, people were putting some variation of get her done on everything. And so they were constantly having to do cease and desist. Oh, I bet. But it would be this thing where it's like, there'd be, she remembered her telling me like, was it worth it in some cases? Like there would be like,

I think there was like a tackle, a bait and tackle shop in some random small town that was like get her done lures or whatever. Some variation of that. And they're like, is it really worth going after this guy to change his store name? Yes, it is. And I'll tell you why. Yeah. Brand protection. Because all it takes is for that tackle shop to...

to, well, one, start selling something that goes gangbusters. Because that can happen. And then number two, and more concerning, is reputation. So now people will assume that that is associated with Larry the Cable Guy. That is his company. That is his whatever. And if that owner does something, let's just say he loses it. He goes out and he goes on a murder spree. Then somehow, like... Then guess whose reputation is just...

automatically linked and tarnished. So it sucks, but yes, it matters. I bet with the airport knockoff Morgan Freeman, it just hasn't gotten back to Morgan Freeman's reps. Right. Or because the voice isn't saying like, hello, I'm Morgan Freeman. Is that what Morgan Freeman sounds like? Andy Dufresne. Because he narrated Shawshank Redemption. That was when a lot of comics would do the Andy Dufresne.

I can't remember how to do this voice. That's good. But like... It's good that you don't remember because you're not doing it correctly. I know. I'm doing a terrible job. But as long as they don't say that, it's probably grayer since it's a voice. But I promise you, if there was a commercial, like a national ad campaign that strongly was like, that's Morgan Freeman, there would at least be some legal talks behind the scenes. I do wonder though, because I will hear commercials and I'm like, was that so-and-so?

But, okay, just very quickly, I was listening to an economics podcast recently, and there are a lot of celebrities doing commercials right now, like voiceover commercials. Oh, yeah. Easy money. They said it's an indication of a pending or upcoming recession because it's easy money for them because they don't... It was fascinating. They were talking about how, basically...

They don't feel like they can count on like the money of like movies and television, specifically movies, because people aren't going to be spending in that way. So box office numbers will do. It was this whole incredible thing. And I was like, wow, that's fascinating. So I'm going to, well, not cool for recession, but cool for them that they're making a lot of money doing their commercials. All right. All right. Where's your Layla? I have a traditional here. Trad Layla. Let's not push forward trad. I don't care for that.

Let's go. Hey, Dan. Hey, Lindsay. Hello. My name is Brett, and I have been a longtime listener of The Suck and then caught scared to death at the beginning of its inception. Thank you. Keep up the great work. I grew up in a semi-rural area in Virginia, Spotsylvania County, to be exact.

It sits directly between Washington, D.C. and the city of Richmond. And that's where this story takes place. Your first story taking place. I know. All of a sudden it's just hitting me. I was like, wait, this is so weird. I was actually stumbling on my words a bit. So I was like, wait, am I having deja vu? I sure am. It's probably best known for the Civil War battle that took place here. There's tons of Civil War battlefields and a lot of American history in general in the area. That does not equate to a lot to do as a bored teenager.

A friend of mine, Ken, and myself were into exploring any sort of old, abandoned house or building we could access. We'd drive around during the day scouting places we could come back to at night to explore. It was never about ghost hunting or anything to do with the paranormal. It was just fun to explore places that humans hadn't been in some time. The older, the better.

One day we spotted a rather large house off of a road we'd never been down before. It was very, very old and probably had not been lived in in 30 plus years. It was hidden by a copse of trees in the middle of a field and no other houses were in sight. We decided that we would return later that night. Before heading to the house, Ken and I stopped to pick up his girlfriend Hannah. She liked to explore creepy places with us from time to time.

Then, we headed to our local Walmart to buy new flashlights because we had conveniently left ours in my car, which we were not in. Clearly, we were a very organized bunch. Next, we started to the house, which was about a 30 or 40 minute drive deep into the country. We arrived without incident and parked on an old access dirt road about 200 yards from the house. We unpackaged our flashlights, put new batteries in, and stepped out of the car.

There was a field to cross with an old, decrepit, rotting fence along the access road. Our flashlights on, we stepped over the fence, and immediately our brand new flashlights stopped working. Both of them. They had just worked literally five seconds earlier. This should have been our first sign that something wasn't right. Instead, we chalked it up to them being cheap and we powered on in the dark. The moon was bright and there was no light pollution. After

After our eyes adjusted, we could see somewhat clearly into the night. We trekked onwards towards the house. We arrived at the house and good fucking god this place was creepy up close. The house was easily over 100 years old. At one time, it was probably extremely nice. It was two stories with a dirt basement, none of the glass windows were still intact, and the massive front porch had completely collapsed.

The basement held openings where windows once were, so we decided that that was our best bet for getting in. I went in first, followed by Ken. Ken was assisting Hannah. You had to put one leg in and then slowly lower the rest of yourself in. Hannah was assisting Hannah.

Hannah was squatting outside the window, and the second her foot entered the opening into the basement, the most blood-curdling female scream I had ever heard in my life came from one of the floors above us. I'm not exaggerating. This scream would have made a slasher movie queen proud. We stood there, absolutely frozen in fear.

What do we do? Well, we hauled ass the fuck out of there, straight back to the car, full sprint. We made it back to the car, jumped in, and locked the doors. As we sat there, out of breath and full of adrenaline, I picked up the flashlight on the seat next to me, and guess what? It worked perfectly fine. So did the second one. Hannah, extremely upset and understandably so, demanded we hightail it out of there and head back to her house.

After arriving at her house, we sat in the driveway trying to wrap our heads around what had just happened. I don't know exactly how it came up, but Ken said something along the lines of, I want to go back. Do not ask me why, but I did too. It was strange. Ken and I both felt like we had to go back.

Hannah stated how stupid we were, told us there was no way she was going back, and exited the car after telling us what a horrible choice we were making. But Ken and I were on the road again like Willie Nelson.

We parked in the same spot, got out with the flashlights, and it's the same story. As soon as we crossed the fence line, they stopped working. We even handed them back and forth from one side of the fence to the other, and it was truly baffling to watch them work perfectly on one side and then not at all in the space of a few inches.

We crossed the fence in the dark and headed back to the house. We arrived at the basement entrance, barely speaking to one another. Ken went in first. Nothing. No screams. I dropped myself in. Still nothing. Total silence. There was a staircase to the main floor across the room, so we slowly headed upstairs.

We made it to the main floor and began looking around. It felt as if we were searching for something and that we knew exactly where to go, kind of like we were on autopilot. The house was in super rough shape. Parts of the house floors and walls were missing. The main floor had a long hallway, which led to two rooms on either side of the hallway at the back of the house. A main sitting room and what I presumed was once a kitchen were near the front.

We explored each room, which were surprisingly illuminated by the moonlight streaming in. We saw and heard nothing. The steps to the next floor up were sketchy at best, but we cautiously made it up. The second floor was a finished attic, just one big space.

Ken walked over to a wall, dropped down to his knees, and started lifting up rotten floorboards. I've never seen him do this in the dozens of places we had been to before. This whole time, we were totally silent. Ken seemed like he was in a trance.

The very first floorboard he pulled all the way up revealed a stack of very old papers. And I grew tense all of a sudden. The sound of glass breaking like a massive chandelier falling from a great height filled the air. It was coming from somewhere below us. Ken snapped out of it and we decided to immediately get the fuck out of there. We quickly headed down the stairs. On the main floor, we saw a comically large old school birdcage in the hallway.

This was most definitely not there just moments ago, but it also would not have made the noise we had heard, even if it had somehow fallen from somewhere. Freaked out, we rushed past it. We were almost to the basement when the sound of birds chirping filled our ears. It was as if a flock of birds were in our heads. As soon as we were out of the basement, we were treated with silence. Dead silence.

We ran to the car and peeled out of that place. I hadn't noticed in our frantic exit that Ken still had a stack of papers in his hands, and I was pissed. We had a rule that we never took anything from the places we explored. Not ever. We made it to Hannah's safely that night. Ken showed Hannah the stack of papers. She was not too thrilled about him bringing back anything from that place.

Nothing we can do about it now. So we started to read them. They were all dated from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. There were some land deeds, some receipts. Much of them weren't legible. But then we found a series of letters. The letters were not nice in nature. They were addressed to a man named Absalom, and they were quite threatening. For

From what we gathered, Absalom owed a man a large sum of money for a quantity of alcohol, and there was something about a land purchase in there. The letter started off stern, though somewhat friendly, and then eventually the man threatened Absalom and his family's lives. What the fuck? I'd had enough. Ken dropped me off at my car, and I went home.

We didn't speak much of this night after it happened. However, Hannah still has these letters over 10 years later. None of us ever returned to that place. It does make you wonder what happened all those years ago. Brett. Thank you, Brett.

I would love to find those old letters. Stuff like a mystery like that. Isn't that cool? Mm-hmm. And when I was thinking, I didn't know what else they were going to find before I knew that they were going to grab some stuff. Mm-hmm. When I thought, like, when they lifted up the floorboard, Ken had, and then they heard the sound, the crashing, and it sounds like they were just going to bolt out of the house. Yeah. I remember thinking, like, ooh, I would want to go back the next day during the daylight. Ooh. Just to get whatever was under that floorboard. Okay, okay. It's like buried treasure kind of vibes. Okay, yeah, yeah. Also, a sign of just getting older. Yeah.

When I hear stories like that about exploring like an old, rotten, decrepit house, I'm worried less about ghosts and more about just getting hurt.

And I was like, you guys are going to fall through the board. Someone's going to break a neck. Yeah, exactly. Get a rusty nail. You're going to have to get a tennis shot. It's so funny. Yes. The bird cage was so bizarre. Yeah, the bird noises. And then both of them, what Brett doesn't explain, but I imagine to be true, is that they probably both got out and they were like, did you hear that? Because how else would they have known that they were both hearing this very strange bird sound? Yeah.

Birds kind of freak me out sometimes. Yeah, birds freak me out. It's funny. I was just talking about birds on Time Suck because a recent episode was talking about the staircase murders, the Michael Peterson and all the shows written about that and everything. But there was this theory that you and I watched it about the owl, about the barn owl, that was pretty nonsensical, but it was like,

Somehow, oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. It was back-to-back bird things. I did a recent Bone Wars episode about how birds are descended from dinosaurs. Yes. But old birds, like dinosaur birds, would have teeth, and that made me think about birds with teeth, and I'm like, that is the fucking creepiest image. Like a little pigeon's out in your yard, or a robin, and it opens up its beak, and there's a bunch of little fangs or teeth there. And I was like, birds don't have teeth, thank God. Yes, they do. Geese.

They don't actually have teeth. Well, I mean, some birds do. They don't. But they have what looks like teeth. They have like... Technically, they're not teeth, but like geese and I think certain other waterfowl, they have these little cartilage things along their tongues. That look like teeth? That look like little fangs. And you can find images of...

Just like, right, you know, search goose with teeth. Yeah. It is so creepy. I think, okay, this explains so much. I think somebody sent in an email. I'm going to put in goose teeth right into my Google search. Oh, I saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's terrifying.

Oh my God, but they're not really teeth, huh? They're not really teeth. When you look into it, they're not technically because they're not. But they look like teeth. Implanted in the jaw, but they might as well be. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No thanks. An email came in about your bone wars. Yeah. I was laughing so hard I was crying. Somebody did way too many shrooms and thought they were a dinosaur. Oh, I haven't read that one yet. Oh God. I was like in tears laughing. It was so funny. That'd be fun to be a dinosaur.

I also love the connection between spirits and electricity. Yes. You know, like, which is...

It's so many stories, you know, flickering lights, flashlights not working. And in this one, it was just a clear thing where they put the batteries in, new flashlights, they step onto the property, flashlights go out. Leave the property, flashlights go back on. Yes. Can you imagine handing the flashlight back and forth over the fence and watching it work and not work? That'd be wild. I mean, that's what they said happened. It's so intense. And with batteries, I feel differently than I do about something that gets plugged in because at least like, okay, if you're plugging in a lamp,

You can say it's the light bulb. You can say a breaker. You can say it's faulty wiring. There's more possibilities. Yeah. But a battery, I mean, I guess I don't know a ton about batteries. And sure, you could say that the flashlight itself has malfunctioning wiring. But to buy a two-pack of flashlights and then both of them to not work with fresh batteries, it's like...

Damn. I just want to know why, someday hopefully we'll know, why is there a connection between the spirit world and specifically electricity, which also still to this day is a bit of a mysterious substance. Yeah. We still don't,

As far as I know, we still don't fully understand exactly what electricity is and how it works. Yeah, it's still a little like. Yeah, like electrical engineers and stuff obviously know how to like its properties and know how to like use it. But there's still some semblance of mystery there. Like what is this energy exactly? I feel like engineers would say there's no mystery behind it. I think there is though. I don't feel like they're the kinds to say that it would. Yeah, maybe not. That there would be.

Okay. Are you ready for my alien story? I am ready for your alien story. I am pumped to share this tale with you. Okay. Okay. Hello, Dan and Lindsay. Hello. I am, in a weird way, messaging you from the past. Okay.

As a completionist, if I start listening to a podcast, I have to listen to them all from the start. So despite me emailing you now in 2025, I am on episode 79 of Scared to Death and loving every second of it. I will eventually get to Time Suck, but that could be 2028 at this rate.

The following story has taken over 25 years to get written down into something legible. And listening to other people's experiences through this podcast has really helped me to collage this. So without further ado, here is my account of making contact with something alien.

It was a gray, overcast day on Sunday, November 16th, 1997. I was just eight years old. It was the kind of day where the sky feels oppressively low, clouds stretching endlessly in a dull, featureless expanse of a quiet town just outside of the cost walls in Oxfordshire, a stone's throw from the UK's biggest Royal Air Force base, RAF Brisnorton.

It had been chilly earlier, but not bitter, and the air was heavy with the smell of damp earth, a scent that seemed to seep into everything that touched it. By the time evening came, I was at my best friend and next-door neighbor's house, Andrew, as I so often was on the weekends. His home had become a second home to me, a place of warmth and familiarity, where we could lose ourselves in our games and childhood chatter.

The hour slipped by, and for most of the afternoon and early evening, there was nothing out of the ordinary. We were in his bedroom, the glow of the TV casting flickering shadows on the walls as we played one of many great PS1 titles of the time. Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, or Spyro the Dragon were our go-to games back then.

Then the phone rang. Andrew's mom answered, her voice friendly as ever. After a brief exchange, she turned to me. It's your mom. She says it's time to head back for dinner. It was about 1815 or 1845 at this point, so a very normal time to start making my way back home on a Sunday evening. My parents knew where I was, and there was a very trusting relationship between our family and Andrew's.

I said my goodbyes to Andrew and got ready to head back through the house to our adjoining gardens to my house. But as I prepared to make my way through the house, as I would usually exit through his back door and through his garage, something shifted. Andrew's mom's voice, usually warm, suddenly echoed from the kitchen, but it was monotone, unnatural. Andrew, come here now, please, she called. Her voice felt hollow, as though it wasn't entirely hers.

Andrew, without hesitation, got up and left the room and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to just kind of leave on my own. "'Uh, see you tomorrow, Andy,' I said to no reply. The atmosphere changed instantly."

The air seemed to grow heavier. The colors of the room dulled as if someone had turned the saturation of my world to gray. I shrugged it off, thinking perhaps it was just my imagination, and made my way down the long corridor to the door that entered their garage and outside to the back garden. The oppressive clouds that had hung overhead all day were gone. The sky had cleared entirely, revealing a moon so bright it bathed everything in silver light.

The stars glimmered like scattered jewels against the blackness, a sight so vivid it took me aback. The transformation was startling. It should have been cold, I thought. But it wasn't. It was tepid, the air neither warm nor cold, but eerily neutral, matching the temperature of my skin. The world around me was utterly still. No distant cars, no rustling leaves, no barking dogs. Just silence.

A heavy, unnatural silence that seemed to amplify the sound of my footsteps on the path that bordered the house toward a clearing in the bushes adjoining our properties. I began to take that path, and as I did so, the security light warmed the space as it flickered on to illuminate the back garden. Moths fluttered into its beam, vanishing again into the dark edges of the yard. That's when I saw it. A small, glowing orb about the size of a moth, but distinctly different.

It hovered about nine feet above the ground, moving slowly, almost lazily, away from the light. My breath caught in my throat. This wasn't normal. The light moved past the barrier of darkness where the moths disappeared, but unlike them, it stayed visible, illuminating the shadows around it. Drawn by a strange curiosity I couldn't help explain, I followed it.

The orb drifted lower, eventually floating at my eye level. It moved in a dead straight line toward the middle of Andrew's garden. Despite my usual cautious nature, I felt compelled to keep pace like an invisible thread pulled me closer.

I found myself veering off the usual path, heading towards the pond that lay in the middle of the garden. I didn't want to go there. At least, I didn't think I did. But my legs seemed to move of their own accord, carrying me closer with each step. My heartbeat quickened, thundering in my chest, yet my hands remained steady, my body calm. It was as if I was being guided, my own will overridden by something I couldn't comprehend.

When I reached the pond, I stopped dead in my tracks, like my own will finally snapped back into play and stopped me from falling in. The glow of the orb could be seen reflecting in the mirror-like surface of the pond water. The reflection was so flawless, it gave the impression of two orbs suspended in a void. It continued to move slowly at around-my-eyes level before coming to a controlled stop on the other side of the pond.

The orb was unlike anything I'd ever seen, perfectly spherical and glowing with a soft, pastel white luminescence. It seemed to pulse gently, as if it were alive. The light it emitted was self-contained, spilling softly onto the ground around it but going no further, as though the darkness beyond was an impenetrable wall.

I should have turned and run. Every fiber of my being screamed at me to leave, to get as far away as possible, yet I couldn't. My body refused to obey. It felt frozen, not with fear, but with an overwhelming sense of curiosity. A compelling force was guiding me. As I stepped closer, the air around me seemed to change. The damp, earthy smell vanished, replaced by something sterile and metallic.

The silence deepened, pressing against my eardrums until I thought I might go mad from it. My breaths came shallow and fast, but my movements were still calm, deliberate. The orb pulsed once, brighter, almost beckoning. Without thinking, I reached out.

The moment my fingers made contact with the orb, everything changed. It was cold, so cold it burned like pressing your hands against dry ice. It vibrated softly under my touch, a hum I could feel in my bones. I lifted it, grasping it in one hand and brought it closer to my face towards my ear, and then...

Then the screams. It wasn't a sound in the air, it was a sound inside of me, a high-pitched, vibrating wail that filled every corner of my being. It wasn't pain, exactly, but it was unbearable, a sound so overwhelming it seemed to shatter every thought, every sense of self. It felt like my eardrums were being stretched and squeezed through a black hole.

The light of the orb collapsed inward, plunging me into complete darkness. The scream grew louder, louder, louder, until it stopped. And so did everything else.

When I opened my eyes, I was in bed. My room was exactly as I'd left it, the familiar glow of my nightlight casting faint shadows on the walls. I looked at my clock. 7 a.m. it read. The disorientation hit me like a wave. How had I gotten here? The last thing I remembered was the orb, the scream, the nothingness.

I stumbled out of bed and made my way downstairs, finding my mom in the kitchen. My dad was in the utility room, getting his work boots on and filling the dog bowl with food. My mom greeted me warmly, asking if I had enjoyed dinner, as I didn't say much when I got back in, and if the day with Andrew had been nice. I nodded, unable to bring myself to ask her how I'd gotten home or what time I'd even arrived. Something about it felt wrong, like a question I wasn't meant to ask.

Over the next few hours, the memory of the orb faded, slipping into the back of my mind like a half-forgotten dream. Two days later, a knock at the door jolted me from my thoughts. From my bedroom window, I watched as a black car idled in the driveway. It was about 1530, and I'd not long been back from school. The darkness was just starting to fall on the day. It was cloudy. It was gray.

A tall man stood at the door, dressed in dark, unremarkable clothes. His posture was stiff, his movements almost mechanical, yet nervous. When my mom answered, I listened as best I could from the first floor. My bedroom was right above our front door. He asked for me by name, and if he could sit with my mom and I to answer just a few questions.

She refused, rightly so. Her voice was firm as she told him I wasn't available. He didn't argue, didn't even seem to blink, but thanked her for her time and turned to leave. He glanced up at my window, his eyes locking onto mine with a calmness that sent a shiver down my spine. He walked back to his car, his steps slow and deliberate.

yet silent, which was super odd as we had a gravel driveway. The car pulled away without a sound or any signs of acceleration, like it was stationary one moment and moving instantly, disappearing out of view and out of mind since that day.

I didn't talk about the orb again for years. It wasn't until much later, as fragments of the memory began to resurface, that I started piecing together what had happened. Even now, I don't have all the answers. But sometimes, still to this day, I feel it. The weight of unseen eyes. The faint hum of something watching. It's not watching me, but rather seeing what I'm seeing. It's watching you.

The screen phone I'm typing on. The moments I live. They see what I see, what I watch. Sometimes a private moment feels shared. It's not intrusive, not malevolent, just curious. I can sometimes feel like I am mapping or gathering information. These are incredibly rare moments, but it's like my life is bleeding into somewhere else.

Years have passed since, and I tell myself it's nothing, just a trick of memory. But deep down, I know better. The world moved on after that night, but I never truly did. The pond is still there, to my knowledge, but often forgotten about, like so many childhood places. Yet sometimes, when I dream, I'm there again, staring at my reflection in water as smooth as glass. And in the reflection, just over my shoulder,

The light waits, still pulsing, still watching, waiting for me to grab it, wanting to scream. Whatever drew me in that night wasn't finished, and I think it's waiting for the right moment to come again. After all, what's a lifetime to something that doesn't live by our rules? Thank you so very much for reading, and thank you for giving me an outlet to send my story. All the best, Tom. Thank you, Tom. I love this story. It's so creepy. Uh-huh.

Yeah, I like the term completionist. Uh-huh. And also, yeah, that is a very different kind of story where it...

Usually little orbs show up in elements of ghost stories where it's like they think it's like some people think it's a soul, the spirit, you know, floating around. And then all of a sudden it might turn into an apparition. It might go away. And then this one associated with like a loss of time, which is strongly associated with, you know, extraterrestrial abductions. And then the strange men in black element. And then the mother having the robotic voice but doesn't see the mother. Yeah.

you know, like, that weird, like, mimicking kind of robotic voice will show up in kind of extraterrestrial stories sometimes. But the most curious detail to me was the tiny, like, moth-sized little orb. Uh-huh. That was really different. And then what I really, really liked about this, it got my imagination going, was, God, what if when they take us into their examination rooms, if that's what this happened here, what if they could plant some kind of surveillance device? Or not even, that's not even the right term, surveillance, really. But, like, like,

Like put something in your brain that allows them to see what we see, to feel what we feel, to experience what being human and like, like to track somebody like, like I just picture some alien on a planet halfway across the galaxy on some version of a computer monitoring Tom. Like they're assigned to Tom and they get to like tap in and see what he's having for breakfast and stuff without having to be there. Like some level of tech like that is really fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah, what I interpreted when he said, like, you know, this tiny floating orb, what my brain conjured up was basically a tiny, tiny little UFO. Yeah, yeah. Because he says he reached out and he touched it and it was so cold it hurt. And so I thought, I also went to that space of, like, is it within him now? When he touched it, did it somehow...

I envisioned like he touched it and it sort of just completely dissipates, but he thinks it's disappeared, but it's sunk into his skin. It's become one with him. And what you're saying about somebody sitting at a computer, what I imagine is that it has the ability to not only watch, but also tap in and be him. Like almost in our moments of deja vu or moments when you feel dizzy or vertigo or these things that it's like, oh, you don't feel that way because of

Crystals being knocked off in your ear and your equilibrium being off, you are feeling the alien essentially like take over your body for a moment to feel what you feel. As a study of human nature, it is actually taking over your being physically.

temporarily. Yeah. Just to really like feel your emotions, feel your pain, see life truly, not just through a computer screen as monitoring you, but truly as you for a brief instant and that they're so advanced and they're so smart that they only need a split second to gather all of the data from us. And that's why deja vu is so fleeting. That's why vertigo is so fleeting because it's very temporary. They don't need much to gather what they need. Yeah. It's crazy to think about all these possibilities. It's very black mirror. Uh-huh.

I loved it. Yeah, I do like that sense of like the alien could

could be tiny themselves. I think like a whole little ship could be like the size of a moth. Uh-huh. Because there is that theory... Like nanotechnology, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah, exactly. Nanotechnology. And I was just thinking of that theory of like infinite smallness. Basically, like there's that theory like the universe... Okay, the universe is infinite. They think it's essentially infinite. It just goes on forever. It's continually expanding. But then there's also this theory that you could just keep going smaller and smaller and smaller. Like once we have the tech to examine it properly...

That there's, you know, elements within an atom that are like, could be like a whole nother like world inside the atom. Like you just keep getting tinier and tinier and tinier and tinier, which is hard for me to wrap my head around, but essentially infinitely or close to it where you could have a very intelligent being that is the size of like a pen tip. Like a speck of dust. Yeah, it's a speck of dust, which is, you know, weird for weird. Because usually like on this planet, we think about like a creature with the bigger the brain, the more intelligent they are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like there's mammals and stuff that have like, you know, brains I think bigger than human brains. But essentially, you know, like the joke about like bird brain, we at least think that like tiny brain, not smart. Right. Not always true, but it's what we think. And it's just weird to think that something could be so tiny but more advanced than us. I think we all need to watch Honey, I Shrunk the Kids again. Yeah, totally. Because that's what you're saying, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that was a really fun episode. Yeah, I thought so too. And thanks again, everybody, for sticking with us 300 episodes in. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a fun ride. It really has. We are incredibly grateful, and I know we say it, but yeah, it is hard to put into words that would make sense, like just the depth of our gratitude and how fun it is to do week after week, how important it's become to us. It's...

more than just like a job or a career. It's a deeper connection to the, to humanity. And that feels strange to say, like through a podcast, but it is so true. Your stories of, you know, your paranormal encounters obviously matter very much, but it's all the little things in between about, you know, you email us when your kid graduates from college. And I wish I would have saved all the wedding invitations and all the college announcements that we've gotten over the years because we could wallpaper everything.

a 4,000 square foot house easily. And it's those things actually matter so much. Totally. Yep. Agreed. Do you want to do some spoopy shout out? Yeah, I'll thank the Annabelles. You do the spoopy shout outs. I'll thank the Annabelles. Oh, I meant Annabelle shout outs. I would like to thank Miss Coco Annabelle for supporting us. Maribel Ortega, Amanda Stevens, Ethan Young, Zachary Cash,

Dojo Blowing 420. All right. I like it. Jen Allen, Bethany Urbe, Javier Martinez, and Squeaky Pig. Squeaky Pig? Squeaky Pig. Do you think Squeaky Pig is related to Piggy Poop Coach? Maybe. Dirty Little Piggy? Yeah. There's a lot of weird pig poop jokes going on at our house right now. I would like to thank the following animals for their continued support 300 episodes in. Trevor Phelps, Holly Lott, Stacy Tucker, Em,

Nathan Stark, Dalton Taylor, Empathetic Messenger. Oh, do I get that? Angie McGowan. Yeah, sorry about that, Angie. And Ryan Gillan. Yeah. And then I have a few spoopy shout-outs.

To Kate Apotamus from Danny Miel. Love it. Happy birthday to the most amazing sister, wife, and mother I know. You're a blessing to everyone lucky enough to know you. I hope your day is as amazing as you are.

To Priscilla from John, happy 25th anniversary. I love Priscilla and John. We met them at the Austin show several years ago. They've come to summer camp multiple years now. They brought the Florida water. They are a very fucking cool couple. Yep, they are. Yep, I remember them from Austin as well. To Leah, Marissa, and Michael from your mom, Rebecca, happy 25th anniversary.

Mm-hmm.

And lastly, to Amber from Captain, even though we are total weirdos, we are somehow the only normal ones in our family. Happy birthday, spooky sister. I'm looking forward to many more ghost stories in our future. And that is our show.

Thank you for continuing to send in your personal tales of terror week after week to mystoryatscaredtodeathpodcast.com. You can again email us for everything else at info at scaredtodeathpodcast.com. Thank you to Logan Keith scoring today's show. Thanks to Heather Rylander organizing the My Story emails, book editor Drew Atana polishing and preparing listener stories for book number six. Thank you to Olivia Lee for finding the first story I shared this week. I was able to find the following three.

We are on Facebook and Instagram where we post pics that accompany episodes and more at Scared to Death Podcasts. We also have a private Facebook group, Creeps and Peepers, full of fellow horror lovers. Big thanks to the All Seen Eyes, the Creeps and Peepers moderators. Thanks for making our online community such a fun and welcoming place for so many. Enjoy your nightmares, Creeps and Peepers. Thanks for being on this ride for so long. Hope you were scared to death. Bye. Bye.

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