Hey guys, it's Chris, and it has been a while.
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Thanks so much. Let's get into the story.
And all of a sudden we hear music and it sounded like there
were people dancing on the dance floor about us.
This is really freaky, man. Like what is going on?
Did we go back in time somehow from HV studio?
This is unnerved. Welcome back to the Unnerved
podcast. It's where normal people share
their abnormal stories. And if you enjoy true stories of
the strange and terrifying, then you're in the right place.
I'm your host, Chris Rickey. What if the most unexplainable
moment of your life didn't happen when you were searching
for it, but when you were just trying to survive?
What if something you were never meant to witness revealed itself
simply because you wandered into a moment that wasn't intended
for you? In today's story, Gary recalls a
time as a reckless teenager sneaking out in the dead of
winter with his friend. Their outing quickly turned into
a genuine fight for survival. Cold, wet, and alone, with no
one to call for help, they overheard something that wasn't
meant for the living. This is his story.
Gary D Here in southern Ontario, back when I was, I don't know,
about 15 or 16 years old, being young and stupid and bored.
A good friend of mine, John, two of us were always trying to find
something to do because we were both night owls.
We'd stay up late at night, we'd sneak out of the house here,
parents wouldn't know we were out and we'd meet up and close
to where we lived there was a a large wooded area, a large park,
baseball diamonds and a lot of hiking trails and cliffs going
down to a lake. So anyways, on one of these
bored occasions, we decided we'd go for a walk at about midnight,
nobody around and it was the dead of winter.
I think it was sometime in end of January or so.
So it was freezing cold out, snow flurries and we were
walking through the woods and we came upon this small, it was
actually like a either a small lake or a very large pond.
I figured it's probably about 15 feet in the middle, 15 feet
deep. We knew this place had a lot of
snapping turtles and frogs and that type of thing.
I'm not sure if there are any fish in there.
But anyways, being the dead of winter, the the the surface had
frozen over and while we were just walking around, one of us
jumped out on the ice, said hey, this seems to be safe.
Stupid people do stupid things. Like I say, when you're young,
you do stupid things. Next thing you know, the two of
us are standing in the middle of this small lake, just standing
there talking, and all of a sudden the ice gets away into a
crashing in the water and it just hits you.
Your body turns to lead, you lose your breath, and we're
treading water trying to get out.
And we figure that's probably the end of us.
Luckily there was a fallen tree close by.
I was able to reach a branch, pull myself out, John grabbed my
leg and somehow he crawled over top of me to get up onto the
branch. We got out of the water OK.
The first problem was solved. Second problem was that it was
like well below 0. Freezing cold, windy, and we're
soaking wet. We're drenched.
We don't have the luxury of having a sauna close by or hot
towels and mid, you know, it's midnight and for us to get home,
we've got about a 15 minute jog and there's no way we're going
to make it. So we're thought, what can we
do? We're we're shaking like crazy.
The water is freezing now and our hair, we touch our hair.
It's like frozen solid. Her clothes are getting very
hard. So we start running and we're
shaking and, and we thought there is a place that we could
reach probably within about 5 or 6 or 7 minutes if we run.
There was no there were no houses around us, so there was
no residential area. There was no gas station or any
stores. The only thing that was close to
us was an old abandoned dance hall from back to the 1920s or
so. I know they used to have formal
dances there has quite a history, but it'd been shut down
long ago. It was all boarded up, but you
could still get up out of the dance floor area.
We knew by having walked by there before that down there was
kind of a knee level. There were windows that were
boarded up going into a basement below the dance floor, probably
where they kept inventory. And we thought if we get there
and we can kick the boards in because they were just nailed
in, we can kick the boards and get into the basement and
probably find something down there to throw over us to warm
up. Anyway, we ran like crazy.
We, we like I say, we're a couple of popsicles running
through the woods at midnight. You know, this was before there
weren't any, any cell phones to call for help.
So we get to this place, to the dance hall there and we, it's
called the pavilion. So we kicked and kicked and
kicked. We managed to finally kick those
wooden boards in. We get inside, we lower
ourselves down. Like I say, it's in the basement
and luckily I always kept a lighter and a little plastic bag
in my pocket. So when we felt, when I found
the water, it did not get waterlogged and soaked.
So I was able to light a lighter, reach around and I
found some old newspaper, rolled it up, basically made a torch
out of it, made a couple of torches.
John and I just walked around, looked around.
It was really cool down there. It was like old brick walls,
very musty down there, a bunch of old barrels and really
rundown. Looked like nobody had been in
there for a long time. So we look around and we managed
to find some potato sacks, like burlap sacks.
So we kind of threw a bunch over our backs, wrapped around our
arms and kind of, you know, sat down on top of a barrel and kind
of just shook back and forth trying to warm up.
And once we got a little bit warmer, we kind of investigated,
walked around the basement, thought it looked pretty cool.
And you have to figure being by now it's probably, you know,
12:30 at night, and we hear nothing but the howling wind
from that window. We broke in and you can hear the
wind howling, dead silent, just our voices and us breathing
heavily. And then the weirdest, craziest
thing happened. We're sitting there and all of a
sudden from above we hear music, people laughing and talking.
You can almost hear the clinking of glasses.
And it sounded like there were people dancing on the dance
floor about us, like dozens and dozens of people, like loud
crowd. It almost sounded like it was
New Year's Eve somewhere. And there was like big band
music playing. You could hear the horn section
and just a big boisterous crowd. It's not like just one of us
heard it and we're having a mental break or something.
We were both listeners. Do you hear that?
Yeah, I hear that. And then we hear somebody with a
microphone talking, talking to the crowd, and they're all
clapping and cheering. And then another song starts and
then the dancing starts again. So this is going for a few
minutes. And then suddenly just stops.
Dead silence again. And all you hear is the wind
blowing us breathing, and we can look at each other and say, did
that really happen just now? So we went around just kind of
look in the basement some more. And then another weird thing
that we found down there, we found a huge pile long what we
believed to be was human hair. Long curly hair, brown hair.
Why the would there be a woman's hair or several women's hair and
laying at a big pile there, a huge pile of it that could have
easily filled a couple of pillows just laying there
between the barrels, no blood or scalp or anything like that.
So while we're there talking about trying to figure out what
happened here, suddenly that music and dancing starts again
up above us. So we're kind of looking at each
other, eyebrows raised, going, holy crap, what's going on up
there? There's no way there can
actually be people up there dancing and talking and
drinking. It's like close to 1:00 in the
morning and it's pitch dark, so there's nobody out there.
So we hear it again, same thing. The music, trumpets, the
laughing, the clicking of glasses, and then somebody's
yelling. And so we said, OK, let's, you
know, do we climb out the window, try to go up there and
see what's going on? But then we saw an old wooden
staircase going up from the basement, going up towards the
floor of the dance floor. But we went up it and we banged
on it, hoping somebody would open it.
Nothing. And we noticed there was a big
chain and padlock on it, So there was somebody walking.
We could hear the creaking of the floor, the floorboards.
We heard heavy shoes. We heard the dancing.
And we started yelling and yelling.
Nothing, nothing. And again, just, you know,
suddenly it just stops. And again, we looked at each
other and said, this is really freaky, man.
Like, what is going on? And then we kind of warmed up
enough so that we could, you know, get home and hope that our
parents didn't get up to check in our beds to see if we were
there or not and call the police.
But we crawled back out. We went up, looked at the dance
floor, which was right above us. We went up the little stairs or
on the outside. It was just pitch dark.
It was just deserted. It was dirty.
There was nothing there. There were no people.
There was no band. There was no, no, there wasn't
anything. It was just like a deserted
dance floor with the wind howling through.
It was some snow laying on the on the floor.
So we just got to look at each other.
We book it back home, and luckily our parents didn't find
out that we were, that we'd got over there and what had
happened. They never found out that we
fell through the ice first of all, and almost died.
And then we never told them about what happened with us
breaking into that building, which could have gotten us into
trouble. But what we did do is I can't
remember if it was the next day or a few days later.
We went in the middle of the day.
We went back to that pavilion to check it out and we noticed that
probably the park authorities or somebody had come along, put up
new boards and screwed them in this time.
So extra layers of wood, lots of screws so there would be no way
anybody could break in. And again, we looked up at the
dance floor and had a heavy layer of not dust, but it's like
a filth. It hadn't been walked on or
danced on in a long time. So again, we we discussed it
many times over the years. Just saying, remember that
freaky thing that happened? We knew, you know, we joked
around saying, what could it have been?
Why did we hear that? Was it kind of a, you know, did
we go back in time somehow? We go into some invisible time
machine And we thought, well, maybe when we fell through the
ice and both of us were just, you know, close to death, Maybe
we were in the early stages of hypothermia or something and our
brains were going to mush and we're losing it.
But how would the two of us, two of us both have the exact same
thing happen to us at the same time and hear the same thing?
But that's my story. But it was scary at the time,
but really cool to think about now.
What makes Scary's story so unsettling isn't just what he
heard, it's when he heard it. After a near death experience,
after cold shock, after exhaustion, and after fear.
In medicine, there's something called cold water immersion
shock, a physiological response that can disorient the brain,
distort perception, and even cause hallucinations.
There's also hypothermia, which can create confusion, auditory
distortion, and time disorientation.
So yes, it's possible that what Gary and John experienced was
neurological. But there's a problem with that
explanation. They heard the same thing at the
same time, in the same way. The same music, the same voices,
the same sudden, impossible silence.
Shared hallucinations are exceptionally rare, and the
physical environment doesn't support the idea of actual
people being present. The dance floor was locked,
chained and padlocked, and they went back later.
It was empty, undisturbed. No footprints, no instruments,
no signs of recent use. Just silence.
Some researchers believe that certain places, especially those
tied to intense emotional events and hold on to fragments of
experience, Not ghost in the traditional sense, not conscious
entities, but echoes, moments replaying themselves like an
imprint in the environment. In this case, a dance hall
filled with music, laughter and movement repeated long after the
people are gone. If that's true, Gary and his
friend didn't encounter something that was aware of
them. They simply stumbled into a
moment that wasn't meant for them, a moment that may have
been replaying itself for decades, unseen and unnoticed
until 2 freezing teenagers drifted into a place that was
never meant for the living. Thanks again for listening to
Unnerved. If you enjoyed this episode,
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Until next time, take care. Music.