When I was growing up, one of my best friends was a guy we called
Ricky. His real name was David.
Ricky won our respect pretty quickly, too, and not just
because he could handle a little playful abuse.
He was obsessed with the counterculture of the 1960s.
He loved the music, the rebellious attitudes, and he was
fascinated by the whole concept of psychedelia.
So it should be no surprise to anyone that Ricky was the first
of us to seek out something a little stronger than the cans of
Molson that we used to steal from our dads.
We were big into partying, so we wanted to try stuff like weed or
LSD, but only Ricky had enough balls or street smarts really to
go off looking for it, and things stayed like that for
years. We'd be happy to just sit in
someone's bedroom passing around A1 hitter and watching Conan
O'Brien. But Ricky wanted to keep raising
the stakes and pushing the envelope.
He wanted to learn how to brew up his own super powerful LSD
and then go out into the woods and trip for days.
And like most things with Ricky, if he said he was going to do
something, you could bet your butt that he was going to go
ahead and do it. He was wild.
He loved to party, but he never let his lifestyle get the better
of him. He did OK in high school,
graduated from college, and then landed himself a well paying job
at some financial company near the waterfront, all while making
home brewed batches of high potency LSD in his apartment's
spare bedroom. He was like Jim Pattison on
Monday and then Jim Morrison on a Friday, which is an awesome
joke if you're Canadian, I swear.
Anyway, so Ricky carries on like that for years and years, slowly
ramping up his psychedelic adventures until he was doing
things like going to Mexico to do peyote with indigenous tribal
people, or to Peru to take part in some ayahuasca ceremony
hosted by his very own personal shaman.
And we never worried about him. Ricky always seemed to be in
control, and I guess that remained true right up until the
day he seemed to just lose it. It started when his sister
started calling around his social circles, which obviously
included me and a bunch of mutual friends who all went to
the same high school. Ricky's sister said neither she
nor their family had heard from him all week, and we tried
calling Ricky on his cell phone and he wouldn't pick up any of
our calls either. By the end of the next day, his
family had called the cops to file a missing persons report
and as you can imagine, we were all pretty worried about him.
But then, a few weeks later, Ricky reappeared, only to not
check in with his folks or let us know that he was OK.
All he did was clear out his apartment and leave a letter in
his parents mailbox, one that basically said sell or burn
anything I left behind. I'm not coming back.
Everyone was as freaked out as you can imagine.
We went from mildly concerned to extremely worried about him, and
the not knowing was the worst part.
Like, I personally had this irrational fear that he'd been
kidnapped or murdered or something, and that someone else
had written the letter to confuse people or throw the cops
off their trail. But when the cops spoke to
Ricky's landlady, she confirmed that he'd been in town that day
and that although he seemed rushed, she didn't think that he
was in fear for his life or anything like that.
He hadn't given her any kind of forwarding address.
He just packed up what he could and then left.
On paper. That was contact right there,
and knowing Ricky was alive might have been enough for some
other folks to call off the search.
But then, because his folks still didn't know what was
happening, they told the cops that they still wanted him found
so they could confirm that he was safe.
And by that time, we'd given up trying to call his cell phone,
and it was a weight off our shoulders knowing that he was
still alive and that he hadn't fallen victim to a murder or
kidnapper or really anything. But we knew that there must have
been something that made him run off like that, and I worried
over that almost as much as I wondered where he'd gotten to.
About two or three months went by with me and Ricky's other
friends keeping in constant touch with his family.
And then one day we heard that the cops had gotten a tip from
someone up way over near Ottawa, and that's how they traced him
to some cabin out in Algonquin Provincial Park.
A few cops went out to talk to him, and he only told them who
he was. After they promised to leave him
alone. The cops left, but immediately
told Ricky's family where he was.
Ricky's brother then went up to try and talk to him, but he was
gone, moved on again to who knows where.
Ricky's family tried to get the cops to carry on looking for
him, but that's not how those missing person things work.
If the person doesn't want to be found, the cops can't very well
go stalking them from place to place, even at the behest of the
person's family. If they wanted to track Ricky
down, they'd have to do it themselves.
And looking back on it, it seems like the obvious thing to do
would be for everyone to keep looking and not give up.
We've been handing out Flyers, putting up posters, and this was
in the early days of Myspace too.
So I remember Ricky's sister making a little page for him and
adding a bunch of people to try to raise awareness.
But that was before the cops went to talk to him out at that
cabin, before word got around that he basically decided that
he hated everyone and that he didn't want to see or talk to us
anymore. People didn't take that well.
They took it personally. They didn't see it for what it
was. And I say all that from
experience. We basically grew up together.
We were best friends, and I was ready to drive out there myself
to go see him because just hearing that he didn't want to
see us wasn't nearly enough to make us want to quit.
It was the leaving the cabin that did it.
Leaving the cabin said This isn't some cry for help.
Stop looking for me. Leaving the cabin said I don't
owe you an explanation, which was honestly all we really
needed. We didn't want to control him.
We just wanted closure, and I feel like we were entitled to it
at the very minimum. That was in early 2004, and
there was a time when I thought that we'd still be looking by
the time it was 2005, but in reality we'd all stopped looking
by then, even his family. We figured that if he wanted to
reach out, he'd do so, and it was all just a matter of time
until that day came. Now cut to 2011, a full seven
years later when I got a call from a mutual friend of ours
named Abdi. He got a missed call while he
was at work, and when he listened to his voicemail, he
heard a familiar voice on the other end telling him to call a
number they left in the message at the exact time.
The caller never said who it was, but when my buddy Abdi
called me, he said that he was 99% certain that it was Ricky
and then asked if I wanted to come over so I could be there
when he called the number he'd given me.
I drove over to his place almost immediately and we talked about
the call and how sudden it seemed right up until the time
to call the number, at which point we sat down at his table
with a pen and paper in hand and then gave it a call.
We didn't actually talk for all that long, but the long and
short of it was this. It was Ricky that had left the
message on ABS voicemail, and although he didn't say where he
was, he told us that he needed our help.
He thought it was a big ask, considering that we hadn't
talked in seven years, but that he didn't know who else to call.
Even though he'd spent the last few days trying to track down a
working cell phone number for one of us, he'd understand if we
told him to go F himself. Needless to say, we didn't tell
him to do that. And although he had a ton of
questions, Ricky said that he'd answer them all if we agreed to
meet him at this place called Whitney, which turned out to be
a small town about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa.
We were nervous on the drive up there and Miss timed our arrival
by around 15 minutes, so we had to sit there biting our nails
and wondering if Ricky was actually going to show up or
not. But lo and behold, right on the
stroke of six we spotted someone walking into the parking lot of
the Little Burger place that served as our meeting spot,
Someone who looked a lot like Ricky.
If he'd spent seven years living on the streets, or more
accurately, living out in the middle of nowhere in the woods.
It was an emotional reunion. No tears were shed, but it felt
very positive, though intense, mainly because Ricky started out
by telling us how sorry he was. He said cutting off contact was
a mistake and one he'd never forgive himself for, and that it
hurt to think about all the time that we had lost.
Hearing all that pretty much knocked us off our feet.
I mean, he covered a lot of stuff that we wanted to talk
about in his opening little speech, and after that there
really wasn't much else to ask him.
We wanted to know where and how he'd been living, but he wanted
to know all that same stuff from us too.
And since we had him right where we wanted him, we figured that
we could get him up to speed while we went inside and got a
burger. We got to talking about all
kinds of things, but eventually me and Abdi were able to ask
Ricky two things, #1 where had he been living?
And #2 what did he need our help with?
Both questions could be answered by finishing our burgers,
getting back into our car, and letting him direct us towards
the place that he was living, which was way out near this
place called Little Hay Lake. As it turns out, Ricky had been
living almost completely off the grid for almost six years in a
trailer that he'd managed to haul down a dirt road and then
far enough into the trees so that you couldn't see it anymore
from the track. He walked into Whitney every so
often to pick up whatever he couldn't shoot or forage for and
then hitched a ride further afield whenever he needed to
make a few bucks. And the way he was earning those
few buckaroos was by making LSD ultra potent, medical strength
LSD. And then because he was making
it, he was having to test it out too very frequently.
But as far as we could tell, that suited him just fine.
I guess Ricky just sort of found his calling and the way he
talked about it, he was happy, at least for a while.
He had everything he needed out in that trailer.
The place was relatively clean. He had a little generator that
he'd used to power a laptop and he had no Internet.
But Ricky didn't mind. He had his DVDs and that was all
he needed. But then came the problem that
he needed our help with. And at first I was actually kind
of scared that he'd killed somebody or something and that
he wanted our help disposing of a body.
As it turned out, that wasn't the case and there was nothing
Ricky needed help disposing of. But by the end of the next
morning, there would be a body, and it wouldn't be one we needed
any help disposing of at all. We did a little more catching up
back at the trailer, but then after a little looking around, I
asked Ricky half jokingly, if he was about to enlist our help in
digging A shallow grave. Ricky actually seemed kind of
offended at first, but then Abdi started to laugh.
It was a release of tension, I guess.
Pure relief that whatever Ricky needed didn't involve covering
up some horrible crime. I remember Abdi joking around
saying, well, whatever the hell it is, it can't be worse than
that. As in helping Ricky hide the
body, that is. Ricky had been kind of laughing
along with this, at least after shaking off the offense that he
took at the suggestion that he was a murderer.
But when Abdi joked about how things could have been worse,
Ricky didn't laugh. He didn't even smile, because to
him things were about as bad as it was possible to get.
I think maybe an hour pass between us arriving at the
trailer and Ricky actually sitting down and telling us what
he needed help with. And when he did, that nervous
tension returned again. I mean, if it was more serious
than hiding a dead body, then it must have been really serious,
right? Serious enough to be scared of
the consequences, Serious enough to consider just getting the
hell out of there if he dropped a bomb on us.
But when he actually told us, it was this weird mix of depressing
and relief. Basically, Ricky wanted us to
call up just about everyone we knew, or everyone who we wanted
to save as he put it, and invite them out to the woods to set up
an encampment. If we didn't, they were all
going to suffer a fate worse than death.
In so many words, Ricky said that there was going to be a
major change in Canadian society, that folks were going
to be rounded up by masked soldiers and taken away to camps
to be fitted with microchips and all sorts of crazy stuff.
It was basically this giant conspiracy involving
international governments looking to wield absolute power
over the people, and the only way to really enforce that was
to eliminate huge sections of the population, basically anyone
who might put up some sort of resistance.
Ricky was convinced the whole thing was going to start within
a month, and although he wouldn't go into too much detail
about how he knew all that stuff, he seemed to think giving
away sources would put them on some kind of government hit
list. He seemed completely and utterly
convinced that his predictions were correct.
What followed was around six hours of convincing Ricky that
he was wrong. It wasn't easy, which is why I
mentioned the six hours thing. But by the time night had fallen
and Ricky was riding a low dose of LSD, we'd gone from making a
little headway to actually getting through to him that his
theories might just be wildly wrong.
We didn't fully convince him, not all the way.
But we did talk him down to the point where he agreed to come
home, mainly by convincing him that he'd be in the best
possible position to rescue people.
If the government did decide to start putting people into camps,
he could be like an early warning system.
He could recognize the signs, and that way he could be the
hero we needed when we needed him most, and it was a win win.
Either way, we proved things weren't as bad as he thought and
he could save our butts and we'd follow him to hell and back and
that seemed like the idea that really got its hooks in him.
Ricky agreed to come home with us, but not before he sobered up
a little. We could sleep in our car, he'd
sleep in the trailer and then come sunrise we'd get ourselves
some breakfast and then drive back down to Toronto and drop
him off at his parents place. After we agreed on that course
of action, we finished off our beers, walked back to our car
and agreed to head back over to the trailer come sun up.
It felt like a huge victory and the 2nd we got back to the car
we were texting people, mainly Ricky's family, and telling them
how he was finally ready to come home.
We were so excited we could barely sleep.
I kept thinking about how happy everyone was going to be, how
driving back into Toronto was going to feel like a victory
parade. I think I only nodded off for
maybe an hour or so before I could see the sky changing
color, and after that, Abdi and I just talked and tried not to
get too nervous as we waited for dawn to arrive.
Finally, around 6:30, Abdi and I got out of his car and then
started walking back through the trees in the direction of
Ricky's trailer. I remember feeling pretty
exhausted, but very excited to get back on the road.
I wasn't even thinking about food by that point.
I'd have happily rolled all the way back into Toronto and gotten
a bite there. When the nerves had died down,
the only thing that mattered was getting Ricky back home, home
where he belonged. But then, after getting within
maybe 20 feet of the trailer, we started to smell something on
the breeze. Something strong, something
artificial, something that smelled very, very much like
gasoline. I remember Abdi saying something
like, can you smell that? And I told him that I did.
And then after a few more steps towards the trailer, the door
opened up and Ricky appeared in the doorway with this gas can in
his hand. He told us not to come any
closer, and by then the stink of gas was so thick in the air that
it kind of stung my nostrils. He didn't say it in, and I don't
want you to get hurt kind of way.
He seemed mad at us and as we kept asking him what he was
doing, he kept telling us to leave while we still had the
chance. And that's about the time we
noticed that it wasn't just Ricky's trailer that was soaked
in gas. It was his clothes too, and it
was complete chaos. Me and Abdi were shouting
different things, but all along the lines of don't do it, you
don't have to do this, think of your family and all sorts of
stuff like that. Whereas the previous night when
Ricky treated us like friends and we could actually get
through to him, that morning was like a complete shift.
Like it was the first time seeing him and that last night
didn't count for anything. It was like he hated us.
Like he might have actually shot at us if he had a gun.
Which is why that leave while you still can.
Line has just had such a chilling effect on me and almost
worked in making us back off before he closed the door to his
trailer. Ricky told us one last time to
stay back. I didn't have any trouble
staying away from a trailer that I was pretty sure was about to
explode into flames, but Abdi clearly wasn't in his right mind
at the time because I had actually to drag him down to the
ground to keep him from trying to rush up to the trailer and
stop Ricky in his tracks. What happened next seems kind of
like a blur. I remember hearing the sound of
the fire starting and Ricky wasn't kidding when he said to
stay back because there was an actual bang and I felt the heat
on my face. I didn't see much of the flames
after that though. I was facing back towards where
OB's car was parked, basically trying to tackle him away from
the burning trailer. When he finally gave up trying,
I was focused. Focused on getting him back to
his car, getting his keys for him.
He was definitely in no condition to drive, and then
telling him to call 911 while I drove us to the nearest highway,
figuring that was the best place for the fire department to see
us so we could guide them into the spot by the lake where
Ricky's trailer was. Abdi could barely speak while he
was on the phone, and it got to the point where I thought that
I'd need to take over and talk to the dispatcher myself while
struggling to keep the car on the track.
Like I said, the whole thing was total chaos, but in the moment I
didn't really have time to process any of it.
Not until the whole fire department was housing down the
trailer and we had a moment to ourselves before the cops showed
up. And that's when all the emotion
hit for me. Seeing them put the trailer out
and thinking there's no way in hell Ricky survived that.
And then it was O BS turn to try and console me when it was my
turn to break down, right up until the cops showed up and we
had to talk to them about what had happened.
We thought we'd be going back to Toronto as heroes.
And I'm not trying to say that we would have been saving him as
much because obviously Ricky had agency and all of that and it
would have been him making the decision for himself.
But getting to be the ones who actually brought him home, that
would have been a hell of a thing, you know?
And I was so excited for that. So to go from there, to having
to drive back and tell Ricky's parents that he was dead all in
the space of about an hour, it was my own personal hell, and I
truly mean that. I lived hell on Earth for a day
and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
There was a reunion in the end. It was just never one that I
thought it would be. All the old crew showed up to
pay their respects at Ricky's, some that I hadn't seen in
years. I felt it devastating that it
took his death to finally bring us together, but it was also
very uplifting that people dropped what they were doing to
come comfort Ricky's family as well as each other.
And I just wish that it could have happened when Ricky was
alive. I wish that there were enough of
us up at that trailer to drag him into the car and drag him
back to reality before he had a chance to do something so
insane. And it was insane.
Ricky didn't seem like he was in control of himself when he did
that, and I refuse to believe that he was.
I just hope that he can forgive us all for not acting sooner,
for not trying to rationalize something that now that I look
back on it just isn't healthy, no matter how happy someone
claims it makes them. I get that some people call
themselves introverts and prefer to be alone or away from large
groups, but we're still social animals.
We need that connection, even if it is one that we can keep at
arm's length. So please people, check in with
your friends, check in with your family and especially around the
holidays you can leave people be, just don't ever leave them
alone. To start off, I'd like to state
that I'm a 20 year old male who lives in the UK in a house with
my family. My family consists of my dad,
mom, sister, 2 stepsisters, one quite young and the other almost
as old as me and a young stepbrother, so there are a lot
of people living in this house. We also have a German Shepherd
who is quite large and protective of the property.
As well as that this story needs some background to make sense.
I currently live in a town in the UK that could be considered
safe, but it has its fair share of dangerous people lurking
around. I previously worked at a gas
station where I've had numerous encounters with people trying to
shoplift, many of them carrying knives and such.
I hope this gives you a brief idea of what my neighborhood is
like. Now that that's been said, This
story happened only a few days ago.
My cat had been missing for a few weeks, which wasn't normal
for him, so I was evidently quite worried.
I've been keeping my window open every night in case he came into
our garden and started meowing like he usually does when he
wants to come back into the house.
I had spent the past few nights going out and looking for him,
but finding and hearing nothing. This night was like any other.
I was spending the night playing games and listening closely for
anything coming from my window. At around 3:00 in the morning, I
thought that I had heard something, so I bolted
downstairs because I believe that what I was hearing was my
cat. I thought of taking my dog with
me in case I needed protection, but I realized that would be a
terrible idea since the cat is scared of the dog, so if the cat
really was out there, he would just run away.
The second he saw the dog, I went outside with a flashlight
in hand and started to hear weird noises.
I couldn't put my finger on the noises at first, but when I
listened closer I realized that they were the sounds of
scuffling around the back of the garden where we have a garage, a
greenhouse, and a chicken coop. My first thought was there was
some sort of animal trying to get at the chickens.
This didn't worry me because we have a very aggressive rooster
that can and will attack anyone that gets too close to the
chickens. He has done so multiple times in
the past. I started walking closer to the
back of the garden and the noises started to sound more
human, like it sounded like multiple people were running
around. I was confused and stopped for a
moment, standing there and listening.
A gut feeling started brewing in my stomach, telling me to just
go back inside, but I couldn't move.
I didn't know if it was because of fear or me trying to come up
with a reasonable explanation for the sounds.
The more I listened, the more frequent the sounds got, as if
something or someone was trying to lure me to them.
I went back inside to grab the biggest knife I could and
started scanning the garage with my dog, finding nothing.
When I got back outside I heard the chickens going crazy, which
made me think that there was an animal attacking them.
I walked to the chicken coop to check on them and make sure that
they were OK and they calmed down.
As I exited the chicken coop, I soon realized the sounds had all
stopped. I stood still, searching for the
sounds, trying to strain my ears after what felt like hours,
standing there in the pitch dark with my flashlight, not daring
to point it in the direction of where I heard the sounds
previously, I snapped out of my days and bolted back into the
house. I made sure to lock the front
door, and when I got to my room, I left my window open.
To my surprise, I heard whispering coming from the
garden, and then a sudden metallic bang.
I thought I was imagining things, and this is all some
sort of dream or hallucination. The next night I went out again,
calling my cat's name multiple times, but I got no response.
Then I heard the snapping of branches coming from the
direction where the greenhouse was located.
I stood there and I heard a person scraping or hitting
something with a stick, followed by footsteps coming towards me.
I hurried back into the house and I heard my gate opening, so
I locked the door just in case. Right after I closed the door,
the handle slammed down, which scared the life out of me.
I immediately thought that it was someone from my garden
coming for me. I opened the door ready to fight
the person on the other side, and it turned out to be my
sister coming back from walking the dog.
I'd like to say thank you to her for scaring the soul out of me
and putting me in full fight mode.
She asked me why I was going around locking all the doors and
I explained to her everything that had happened over the past
few nights, specifically what had happened the night before
and that night. After I told her the story, she
obviously didn't believe me and told me that it was all in my
head. I told her that the sounds were
there right now and asked her to come with me if she didn't
believe me. We stood in the garden listening
and on cue the sound started back up again.
My sister stopped dead in her tracks.
I looked at her and said I told you so.
She shushed me. The sound of someone jogging or
sprinting towards us came from the darkness.
We both ran back into the house and my sister reasonably
demanded that we lock all the doors in the home.
On the third night of looking for my cat, I was sitting in my
room and decided not to go outside because of all that had
previously happened at two AMI decided to go outside and look
for my cat. Once again I put on my coat
because that night I was determined to finally find my
cat and put this all behind me, not caring how long it would
take. I stood there in the open, pitch
black outside again calling my cat's name, but I didn't get a
response. I went to the front of the
garden with my flashlight, looking and calling for him as
well. After not getting any response,
I sat myself down on the front steps of my house, flashing my
light and still calling for my cat.
An hour went by and I got thoroughly bored just sitting
there doing nothing. I started walking around the
garden again, headed towards the greenhouse.
I stopped myself remembering what had happened the previous
night, thinking about it. I went and got the dog both for
protection and because as stated before, the dog would bark if
the cat was there. This would tell me if the cat
was there or not. I know, genius thinking on my
part. The dog and I went towards the
greenhouse area, knowing that either my cat was there or there
was some random person. I let the dog go and she did
nothing. No barking, just silence.
This gave me a feeling of relief that allowed me to walk after
her, still scanning the area. And then I saw it.
The discovery that chilled me to my bones.
Someone had sunk a stick into the ground through a plastic
bag. Now you might be thinking to
yourself, why did a stick in the ground scare you?
The reason being that it was sunk so deep into the ground,
not even I, being pretty fit, could take it out of the ground.
Someone had stabbed that stick into the ground with a scary
amount of force, making the situation worse.
There was a pumpkin sitting right next to the stick knife,
as I called it. But here's the thing.
We don't grow pumpkins. We never have.
But there was a pumpkin sitting in our garden.
It clicked in my head. There had either been one person
or multiple people in the garden that night.
The sounds that my sister and I had heard were people sharpening
the sticks and messing about with them.
They had been making noises around the property to lure
someone out, to investigate and do God knows what to them.
In that moment, I was thankful to have had the common sense to
run away when I did, because thinking about what these people
could have done to me in the dark gives me chills even as I
write this. After this revelation, I checked
behind the trees and such, making sure no one was there.
Content with not finding anyone and making a note to myself to
come back in the morning to get a clearer picture, I returned to
my steps. I sat there waiting for around
an hour longer, starting to get tired, bored, and hungry.
I went back into the house, the acceptance of my cat being dead
lurking in the back of my mind while I continued to mess about
on my PC with my window open. And then once again, I heard
meowing. I rushed outside so quickly that
I forgot to put on shoes, but I also had the presence of mind to
grab a knife on my way out. Deciding that if anyone was out
there, I'd confront them on the spot, I reached my gate and saw
my cat standing on the fence. I dropped my knife and my heart
was filled with joy. I can't explain to you how happy
I was to see him. There had been no noises since
that night, but I'm still wary when I go out at night.
I thought about this experience and realized how lucky I was to
not have gone further into the greenhouse that night.
I could have been killed right there, or one of my younger
siblings could have heard the noises and gone out themselves
and they'd have been killed. I try not to dwell on it too
much because the thoughts truly disturb me.
This story comes from my experience in the military,
specifically from a certain training area in Arizona.
I won't be too specific about where exactly I was for obvious
reasons, but the location isn't really important.
It's what happened while we were there and what I saw that I
still think about to this day. For context, I was raised in a
rural part of North Idaho, so the outdoors are very familiar
to me. At first, training in the
deserts of Arizona didn't sound too bad.
I've been in for a few years at that point, knew my way around
and was a good soldier in my opinion, always doing my best to
keep a level head. Our training started sometime
around mid-october when the air starts to get colder and wind
plus rain effects you more than it usually does.
If you know anything about the desert and temperatures, it can
get very, very cold and fast at night.
Even if it's 90°F out at lunchtime, it could hit well
below 20 at night and the wind and rain that usually
accompanied it didn't help. The reason I specify the night
time conditions is that's the only time we were allowed to run
our training and operations. We were testing equipment for
the army, but could not go out during the day because it had
the potential to screw up communication between airplanes
and such. So at night when little to no
aircraft were out, we would head out and begin our training.
We started at 9:00 PM and ended missions at 6:00 AM.
That way we could sleep during the day and train again at
night, sometimes multiple times in a row.
Now personally, I believe that there are creatures and entities
on this planet that we can't really explain.
Little did I know, I was about to have two encounters in a
single night, one of them face to face.
The first happened at about 11:00 PM.
Three other men and I were scanning a road and field to
watch for opposing forces. They were played by other
soldiers in different uniforms for training purposes, so we
were on our guard. It was my job to watch the field
and the road while the other two made radio calls waiting for the
signal to move in further. I moved maybe 30 feet away from
them to get a better spot for pulling security.
I backed myself into a Bush with some leaves still hanging to
somewhat cover my position. On my left was a wide open field
with a single tree in the middle, about 300 feet away from
me. It only had two branches, both
in very awkward positions for a tree.
One was angled upwards while the other one seemed to point
straight out at the road on my right.
On the other side of the road I was watching was a tree line
which turned into a hill that we would be walking up later after
we got the green light. As I scanned the field and the
road for opposing forces or vehicles, I spotted some
headlights cresting over a hill not too far away from us.
They were easy to see with our night vision.
You could see someone using any kind of light for miles, as if
it wasn't already easy enough to see light at night.
I raised my voice to tell the other two men that there was a
vehicle coming, and to tell everyone else to stay hidden.
I pushed myself even further into the Bush so that I would be
completely concealed. The truck drove right past us.
We had remained undetected. My heart was racing, excited to
have stayed hidden and been so close.
But what happened next made my heart sink.
I looked back out at the road and field to see if there was
anything else coming, and when my eyes crossed over to the
field the tree had moved. I rubbed my eyes and refocused
my night vision to see if that would help, but the tree had in
fact moved closer to me, and the branches had also moved.
Both of its dead limbs now seem to point at me.
It was about 200 feet away from me.
I convinced myself I was just seeing things.
About 5 minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder causing me to
jump a bit. It was just my teammate.
He said it's time to move up you Good.
I turned to face him when I said I was ready to go, but when I
turned back to take one more look at the field, that tree was
gone. I sat there on one knee in
disbelief. To have hallucinated the trees
distance and shape was believable to me, but to have
made-up the tree entirely to myself?
No way. A chill ran down my spine as I
searched for the tree before cautiously emerging from my Bush
and walking back to my team. As I did, I constantly looked
over my shoulder at that wide open field that was all of a
sudden empty. This put me on edge for the rest
of the night and we still had not completed our objective.
After another hour of walking through the woods and a couple
of open fields, we finally arrived at the objective.
The mission was a little tricky. We had to infiltrate a small
mock village and secure an HVT high value target.
Only after all that could we call the mission complete.
For context, all the opposing forces we were fighting were
just other soldiers in uniform, all using blank rounds with
lasers. This let us train for a real
world fight without getting hurt.
When you get hit by a laser, a beeping sound will come from
equipment on our body armor, which means we were considered
injured and had to play dead anyway.
Our front element was spotted by the opposing forces, so we had
to fight to take the village. It was both fun and intense.
After walking for hours, not doing much, we finally got to
train and work on other skills. My team was in charge of
securing the HVT, so after we had eliminated the OPF or my
team and I moved to the building he was supposed to be in, The
HVT was simply a soldier in a white robe that we had to
capture in order to call the mission complete.
When we finally got to the building, which was simply A1
room building with two large doors, I had one of my soldiers
open the door so that I could peek inside.
When he did, I saw a silhouette in the back of the room.
I was about to yell and tell him to put his hands up, but
something was wrong. This person was far too short.
They had long black hair and what looked to be a black robe
under our night vision. I hesitated and this shadow
person in the room broke into a Sprint right at me.
My heart nearly jumped out of my chest.
I panicked, firing off 3 blank shots.
When the smoke cleared, a yell came from inside the room.
My adrenaline was pumping now more than ever, and I moved in
yelling as if I was trying to scare someone.
I expected to see it again when I swung into the room, but when
I looked it was just the HVT covering his ears because my
shots had echoed, becoming very loud in that small space.
I had trouble relaxing as my soldier came in after me and
without question began to search the man, pretending to detain
him. The HVT had not seen the black
figure that charged me. He had no idea what I was
shooting at. We wrapped up the mission,
leaving the field around 5:30 in the morning.
As we drove away, with the rising sun chasing away the
desert's mirages and the mountain shadows, I still could
not shake the thought that what I had seen felt so real.
Thankfully, that was the last mission we did out there, and I
had trouble sleeping for days afterward.
Needless to say, this confirmed my belief in the fact that there
are things on this earth that are beyond our understanding
right now, and I'm just thankful it didn't go down any worse.
Although this might not be your conventional scary story, it
sure as hell was the most unsettling, otherworldly thing
that's ever happened to me, and I think some of your viewers and
listeners will get a kick out of it.
So I used to do a lot of trail running near the Asabo River in
Northern Michigan. Some of my favorite routes were
right in the middle of the Huron National Forest, and passed near
some pretty good fishing and swimming spots, too.
I used to load up my pickup truck, drive a few miles
upriver, and then run in a big old loop until I got back to my
truck, feeling like I'd lost a few pounds in sweat alone.
Both sides of the trail are shrouded by tall white and red
Pines, occasionally birches and the like.
It's very scenic, very lovely, But it gets hot as hell in the
early July afternoon, and some days I'd much rather have been
tubing down the river then sweating my butt off on the
trails. Some sections of the trail are
pretty close to nearby highways, so typically you could either
hear a distant radio or music playing from a passing car or
truck. But then on one day in early
July, like I said, I heard something which sounded like
classic rock music coming through the trees.
I used to run without headphones if I was trail running because
it's not the kind of place where you want to lose your
situational awareness. As I was running, I could hear
the sound getting closer and closer, like I was about to see
some ATV or bike off rotors coming along the trail at any
moment. Within the span of 30 seconds it
felt like the sound had gone from being very distant to
sounding like it was almost on top of me.
But bizarrely, even though the sound was so loud I couldn't see
its source. It must have been easily within
30 feet of me, just off to the left in the forest, and it
should have been obvious, but it wasn't.
The sound got a little louder one second and it went from
sounding like a cross between heavy metal music or a high
pitched engine to sounding like a great buzzing of tiny wings.
Then I saw it. It was perhaps 5 feet from me,
and the second I laid eyes on it, it appeared as a big
shapeless shadow floating through the trees.
There were little flies, thousands of them, all buzzing
in unison in this big cloud that moved like it was 1 ethereal
body. They're buzzing, sounded like it
was in differing octaves of the same note.
Definitely not classic rock music, but still eerily
mesmerizing. But then the cloud of tiny
buzzing insects suddenly and unexpectedly veered towards me.
I tried to back up, but the cloud moved surprisingly fast,
and before I could turn and really Sprint to get away, I
felt and heard the cloud of flies envelope me.
I was expecting to feel them biting or stinging me, and I
started to scream and wave my arms in a pointless, flailing
attempt to keep them off of me. I could hear them and feel them
buzzing in my ears, and even though their wings were probably
no bigger than an eyelash, their combined buzzing sounded almost
deafening As the cloud took me over.
I could feel my skin crawling, not from sheer fright or
disgust, but because there were literally things buzzing and
crawling all over me for a moment, and it made that moment
feel like an eternity. But just a second later, the
buzzing subsided and the cloud moved on.
When I opened my eyes, I caught one last glimpse of it before it
disappeared among the trees again.
Then, as it left the area for good, the audible buzzing
diminished and it's noise warped back into what sounded like ACDC
being played from a small tiny speaker.
It was easily the most frightening, unsettling, and
downright skin crawling thing I'd ever experienced.
The kind of thing that, if I didn't know any better, I might
think was a demonic manifestation.
I mean, go back a few 100 years and a more religious ancestor of
mine might have died of fright when this dark, shadowy presence
veered towards them out of nowhere.
I mean, it's the closest thing to a ghost or spirit I think
I'll ever see. Just this inexplicable,
mystifying presence that heralded itself before it became
visible. After I got home, I did as much
online research as I could to try and figure out just what the
hell I'd experienced. This was back in the fall of the
year 2000, a time when the Internet wasn't nearly as padded
out with information as it is now, but I still managed to find
a few relevant websites which gave me a clue as to what had
happened. Apparently, during the summer of
just a few months prior, Grand Traverse County discovered it
had a major tent Caterpillar infestation.
They're called that because they make little webs that look
almost like tents, and they completely strip the leaves of
trees that they make their homes in.
Obviously this wasn't all that good for the environment, so
officials in Traverse City consulted with some nature
expert who told them that flooding the area with black
flies who like to lay their eggs on the tent caterpillars,
cocoons would thin out the infestation and return the
balance of nature. Believe it or not, there are
actually companies out there who specialize in breeding things
like black flies or any other insect species that might prove
valuable in managing ecological problems, such as a tent
Caterpillar infestation. They probably made 10s of
thousands of dollars selling the city of Traverse a whole bunch
of these little black flies. And because they'd been living
in swarms and closed spaces for their short lives, some stayed
in formation longer than others, I guess, and resulted in the
thoroughly spine tingling sight that I had witnessed in the
woods that day. It was nice to have some kind of
explanation for what happened. I didn't think anything
supernatural was at work or anything, but I was still
creeped out by the experience. Having something to explain what
happened that actually made sense to me on an environmental
level gave me an awful lot of Peace of Mind.
I guess There's a lot of things in the world that are like that,
things that are really creepy, even when there's a perfectly
rational explanation for them. But I'm certainly in no hurry to
experience them, because feeling that huge cloud of swarming,
buzzing black flies swallow me up and the raw terror it
produced in me, it's not something I ever want to feel
again. So this is going to be a really
wild ride and there are some pretty personal family details
in here too. I'm not naming any names or
places to try and keep my anonymity.
So basically a few years back I found some old photographs of an
uncle on my dad's side. There were photos that I was not
supposed to find, and the reason behind that was pretty obvious.
The only photos I've ever seen of this uncle who had moved away
when I was much younger were from when he and my dad were
kids or in their early teens. I'd never seen him as an older
kid or a grown up because by that stage he was very distant
from the family and then moved across the country before I was
out of kindergarten. Apparently he came to see me one
time when I was a baby, but aside from that, I had no real
memories of him, just the old photos my dad let me see.
But by that day I saw the photos that he didn't want me to see
and everything kind of just fell into place.
I remember opening up the little envelope, taking out the
pictures, and feeling this intense feeling of confusion for
a few minutes as I flicked through those pictures.
The photos seem to be taken at a music show of some kind, As I
remember thinking, did my dad used to be a punk?
Because there was a lot of that kind of style among the people
attending the show. But then the more I looked, the
more I noticed that two or three people appeared over and over
again. They had closely shaved heads,
wore big black boots and denim, and each had a swastika either
on their jacket somewhere or tattooed somewhere prominent
like their neck, shoulder, or arm.
That grabbed my attention all on its own.
But the thing that really had me pulling back was the fact that
one of these skinheads with that tattoo looked a hell of a lot
like my Uncle Alan, the one I hadn't seen since I was a baby.
There was actually a moment where I thought one of the other
guys might have been my dad. So when I was half freaking out
by the time I climbed down from the attic and took the pictures
to show mom, who just kept saying I think you need to talk
to your father about this in a way that told me that she knew
the whole story but didn't want to be the one to have to tell me
now. Anyway, about half an hour
later, my father and I are having a massive yelling match,
mostly surrounding the fact that he and mom had chosen to hide
something huge from me. But the thing that really made
me explode was how he started telling me Alan's not a bad guy.
You don't understand. Now imagine being me in that
moment and having your dad tell you that your Nazi uncle isn't a
bad guy. I mean, that's the dictionary
definition of a bad guy, right? I couldn't understand why Dad
would say something so insane when the evidence that his
brother was some evil bastard was right there right in front
of him. And the argument got really
intense. Things got very emotional, but
as much as I tried to get my dad to talk to me about it, to
explain why he'd kept things hidden, he just didn't want to
talk to me about it at all. And then after I don't know how
long, he burst into tears and it's the only time I'd ever seen
my dad cry. My mom then basically chased me
out of the room, telling me to give your father and me a minute
to talk. And much like my dad crying, I
rarely saw my mom get that mad. Seeing dad cry had already shut
me up, but then seeing my mom, so furious, had me running
upstairs when she started to snap at me.
Like, I know it was already a tense situation, but seeing dad
cry and seeing mom get so mad, that's what made me realize that
there might have been more to the story than just my uncle
being a jerk. I was still angry, but I also
felt kind of dumb for not realizing that there was a whole
back story behind my uncle and his especially bad life
decisions, and it was one that was very painful for my father
to have to remember. I knew it would be a crazy
story. There's no way that it couldn't
have been. But when I sat down with dad and
he told me the whole thing from start to finish, I had to pick
my job off the floor afterwards. Uncle Alan was just two years
younger than my dad, and they were best friends growing up.
But around the age of 13, my uncle's behavior started to
change and he became my dad's polar opposite in just about
every way. He fell in with a bad crowd, a
really bad crowd, and the deeper he went down that Skinhead
rabbit hole, the more he became completely incompatible with any
kind of civilized society. Those were basically my dad's
words, too. He didn't want my uncle around
me when I was a kid. He still loved him, but he
wasn't about to let some meth head around his daughter, and
the same applied to almost everyone else, too.
He became a pariah and soon living in the city got too much
for him. You can't exactly walk around
with those kinds of tattoos and not get yourself into trouble, I
guess. So Uncle Alan started looking
for some other place to live and that's when he heard about some
white supremacist militia turned doomsday cult living out in the
middle of nowhere. He and Dad were talking around
the time he moved away, so Dad doesn't know exactly how it all
came about, but Uncle Alan ended up living with these people and
basically preparing for the end of the world.
Not the end in any biblical sense, but like a helter Skelter
style race war, that it ends society as we know it.
There were all kinds of people out there too, from all walks of
life, whole families too, but they were all there because of
that one ugly thing that united them hate.
Yet having families meant that there were kids there, a bunch
of them, but apparently not everyone had their best
interests in mind. Somehow, Uncle Alan discovered
that a few of the guys that he'd stayed with were in the process
of trying to groom one of the girls that was part of one of
the families. I don't know how exactly, but
there was some kind of confrontation and Uncle Alan's
worst fears were confirmed. He went straight to the group's
leader, but instead of acting on the tip and investigating what
was going on, the leader tried to downplay the whole thing and
told my uncle that he was just being paranoid.
Personally, I think the guy was in on it, but excuse me if I'm
kind of biased towards literal Nazis.
Anyway, Uncle Alan figured that he was faced with two choices at
that point. Number one, do nothing and just
allow these racist scumbags to groom a little girl or #2, find
a way to get those kids as far away as possible, and do so by
any means necessary. I guess he knew he couldn't
prove that the guys were trying to groom the girl, so there was
a chance that the cops wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
But what they'd be very interested in was all the
illegal weapons and bomb making equipment that they had stashed
up there. And so my Uncle Alan became a
snitch. Apparently he helped the feds
sneak up to the place the group was staying to.
If he hadn't, there probably would have been another Waco out
there in the woods, and all those kids might have been
killed in the crossfire. Heck, they might even have done
like a Jim Jones and killed everyone so the feds couldn't
get to them. So I understand why he'd
cooperate to the point of actually guiding them in or
telling them the secret password or whatever it was.
But then after that, when everyone was up on charges,
Uncle Alan had to go on the run. He could have turned state's
witness, got a whole new identity, but he didn't want to
work with the feds any more than he had to, and he didn't want to
go running to Uncle Sam to protect him from anyone or
anything. And so instead he pays my dad
one last visit and then just disappears.
I asked Dad what was said during that last meeting, and
apparently it was mostly Uncle Alan explaining what had
happened out there in the woods and then apologizing for being
away for so long without reaching out in any way.
He then apologized again because he had to move far away and
never come back because there were people who wanted dad.
You see? I guess it was already a risk
meeting my dad and they met somewhere quiet after dark too.
So I guess Uncle Alan was really serious about being in danger
after that. Dad never saw or heard from him
again, not Even so much as a phone call.
I don't even know if Uncle Alan came to regret his beliefs or
his actions. I hope he did.
And in my head I like to imagine that he found some dignity in
helping those kids, or at least trying to help them, and that he
was able to build himself up from that.
But then again, maybe he's still the same guy, and I'd call him a
piece of crap to his face if I ever met him and he still has
those disgusting tattoos. But it's just kind of weird to
think that a person like that could at least do some small
amount of good in the world. Not enough to balance out the
hate that he has, but still better than nothing, I guess.
I've been walking and running on forest trails for most of my
adult life, and here are some of the weirdest, creepiest, and
most frightening things I've experienced on those trails.
One day I went trail running on a rainy, foggy day.
There were no other cars and I didn't see any other people up
there, but I was around 5 miles up the trail, which is about 8
kilometers for you. Find people across the pond.
There's a part where the trail is really steep and you kind of
slow down and stoop low to avoid this really low hanging branch
so you can't really see what's on the other side.
But then I pass under the branch, stand up, and suddenly
I'm face to face with a raccoon head sitting on top of a big
rock, deliberately placed facing the trail.
It looked fresh, too. The blood hadn't finished drying
and its eyes had been gouged out.
It still looked like a fresh wound.
It was very unnerving to randomly come face to face with
that on a foggy day alone in the woods.
I stayed very well away from that head, kept on going, and
didn't see anything else weird that day, unless you count 2
crows following me circling above me the whole time I was
there. The second thing happened when I
was running a new trail that I'd never been to before.
I was having a lovely time until I came to a long, straight
section of the trail and I could see up ahead 2 trees that look
like they've been propped together to create an incomplete
archway over the trail. On the tip of each tree was a
deer skull placed so that if you walked in the center of the
trail, they were both looking down at you as you pass them.
Seeing this obviously set off some alarm bells, but I just
kept running. You can bet that I stayed ready
to pull out my can of bear Mace from my little Fanny pack.
Moments after I passed that archway with the skulls, I
started getting chills all over and I felt like I was being
watched. I also remember it suddenly got
very quiet in the woods, where moments before I could hear
birds and the chatter of small animals in the brush.
Anyone who is an experienced outdoorsman can tell you that
sudden silence in the woods is not a good sign.
Generally, it means there's a predator of some kind nearby.
It almost feels like the whole forest is holding its breath,
waiting for it to pass. I only made it like 20 feet past
the archway before that bad feeling in my gut convinced me
to turn around and leave. I felt like I was being stalked
or watched the whole time I was going down the trail until I got
closer to the parking lot. I didn't see a thing, though.
To this day, I have no idea what that was all about, but I'm glad
I listened to my gut and turned around.
Any supernatural explanations aside, it easily could have been
a cougar or a grizzly bear that was living out there, or maybe
even a moose. I didn't see or experience
anything other than the feeling of being followed or watched.
And when you're out in the mountains alone, though, you
trust that gut feeling. This one took place in the same
place as the first story with that raccoon head.
This time I was not alone and I had three friends with me.
Something to note is that there was only one way to get into
this Canyon and to reach the trailhead you have to park on a
residential St. up in the hills and walk on the trail past like
three people's houses. When we arrived, there were no
other cars around, so most likely no people up the trail
either. Early on in the trail, we
encountered our first oddity. There were some clothes on the
trail laid out on the ground as if though someone had recently
been wearing them. A shirt, jacket, pants, boots,
socks, all arranged as if someone had been laying there
and then just melted away, leaving only the clothes behind.
I thought it was weird as heck, but I made a joke that we might
find some crazy naked person running around here on the way
up and we laughed it off and kept going.
Not much further up the trail we saw the 2nd oddity.
Just a whole bunch of camping equipment in a big old pile.
I'm talking big hiking backpacks, tent bags, sleeping
bags. All of this gear looked brand
new, never used. There was enough gear for like
10 people and there was no one around.
I thought that was weird, but we kept going.
Well, we saw a couple more similarly big piles of gear
stashed in Clearview along the trail, but again, no one at all
around. Further up the trail.
We had probably gone 3:00-ish miles or 4.8 kilometers at this
point, and we encountered yet another large pile of gear, but
this time it was right in the center of the trail for some
reason. I remember there were a few
backpacks sitting next to each other and they were just full
bursting with something I wanted to look.
I really did, but none of us wanted to touch the bags or open
them up. It gave us all kind of a weird
feeling. I remember there were a handful
of leather coats strewn about that area too.
For some reason at this point, my friends and I were getting a
little uneasy about all of this because none of this made any
sense and it'd be quite an undertaking to bring all of this
camping gear up to this trail. It's not an easy trail, and it
was enough gear that it would take probably 20 to 30 plus
people to bring it all in one go.
We decided not to touch anything and just kept going.
I remember a very distinct moment when something changed.
I led the group and climbed up a boulder to continue on the
trail. And what do I see up ahead?
Yet another big pile of equipment laid out in the middle
of the trail. Suddenly, at that moment, it got
quiet. And as you know, that's never a
good sign out in nature. Nothing changed other than that.
But this feeling of dread came over me suddenly, and my
intuition was telling me to get the hell out of there.
So I turned around and said executive decision.
We're leaving, no one argued. My friends had picked up the
same vibe as I had. It was kind of a tense hike, but
we didn't see anything other than the stuff that was still
there or anyone the whole way down.
When we arrived at the car, I called the nearest Ranger
station and told them what we saw and I never heard back from
them. I have no explanation for any of
this, but ultimately what was weird to me is that they brought
all this stuff up there and just left it in Plainview of the
trail and then they were just gone.
The last couple of piles we saw in the middle of the trail gave
off a distinct it's a trap vibe for some reason, and we didn't
see or hear another person up there.
Where did they go? Why did they bring all that
stuff up there and vanish? Why did they leave all their
stuff behind and what the hell did they have in those
backpacks?