This episode is dedicated to the men and women of our Armed Forces and First Responders. Whether you are currently serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated. It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear. And I for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting what many of us take for granted. So thank you. Imagine this. You, your brother and sister, and some friends are staying in an awesome lodge in the mountains, something you do every year. Everything is great until a few of your friends decide to play a nasty prank on you.  That is, until something else appears. It's large, monstrous, and spewing fire. You both run until you're cornered on a cliff, but you both slip and fall. Your sister dies instantly, but you are still alive. Your body is broken. You can't move, but you're still alive. The creature that was chasing you has disappeared, and no one can hear your screams. Ten years later, your brother and friends return to the cabin. You are not the same person.  You've become the same as the creature that chased you over the cliff.  Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up this hour… The Wendigo. It appears in numerous areas of pop culture like the TV shows Supernatural and the X-Files, the movie Ravenous and games such as Dungeons and Dragons, along with video games like Final Fantasy and Until Dawn. But the Wendigo isn't just a creature from someone's imagination. I'll share a collection of some of the creepiest, most unexplainable nightmare stories collected from a handful of Reddit users whose friends and family either mostly or completely dismiss as fantasy and nobody would believe. At times these creepy stories sound too bizarre to be real, but every last person swears it really happened. But first, a creepy true story from one of our Weird Darkness listeners, Courtney Rondo. It's called It Was The Light That Woke Me. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to follow Weird Darkness on Facebook and Twitter, and visit WeirdDarkness.com to find the daily Weird Darkness podcast, watch streaming B horror movies and horror hosts 24-7 for free. Listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, send me your own true story of something paranormal that's happened to you or someone you know and more. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com.  It was the light that woke me. The light from the nightlight down the hall trickled into my childhood bedroom as I heard the familiar creaking of the opening door. As I looked down my bed towards the only entryway to my room, I did not see anyone that could be moving the door. It was opening by itself at such a slow and consistent pace that it didn't even seem possible without some source of steady force. With my eyes glued to the door and my heart racing, I immediately sat up in my bed, anticipating a hand to reach for the doorknob or for a head to peek in through the gap or for my older sister to jump in and scare me. She had never played a prank in the middle of the night, but it was the only logical possibility I could think of. The light was seeping in, revealing more and more of my room and the groaning hinges chilled me and were almost deafening against the dead silence. Terror had its grip on me and I remained frozen, clenching the blankets around my waist. Just before the door reached its maximum range, it finally stopped. The room was so well lit that I could easily distinguish every corner of my bedroom from my peripherals. I could feel my heart pounding all throughout my body, but I couldn't move, not even to turn on the lamp next to my bed. I was too terrified to move my eyes away from the door in case someone or something appeared. Minutes passed after the door came to a stop and I remained petrified as my heart continued to pound so hard it felt like waves were rapidly crashing against my whole body. I stared down the hall and hoped to see a string or wire to reveal that someone was just trying to play a trick on me, but no such luck. After staring at the door for almost 15 minutes, I finally chanced a split second glance at my bedside light so that my right hand would know exactly where the switch was. While I was sitting at the head of my bed and staring at my bedroom door, I shot my hand to the lamp switch. What I saw still baffles me to this day. The door was closed. Up next on Weird Darkness, I'll share a collection of some of the creepiest, most unexplainable nightmare stories collected from a handful of Reddit users. The stories sound too bizarre to be real, but every last person swears it really happened. But first, The Wendigo. It appears in numerous areas of pop culture like the TV show's Supernatural and The X-Files, the movie Ravenous, and games such as Dungeons and Dragons, along with video games like Final Fantasy and Until Dawn. But The Wendigo isn't just a creature from someone's imagination. That story is up next. I'd like you to meet the newest member of our Weirdo family. Meet Psyjack, a female arctic wolf. While visiting the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Kingsburg, Colorado, Robin and I fell in love with the place and their mission to save the lives of animals from abuse and neglect. I immediately felt drawn to Psyjack upon seeing her and decided to adopt her in the name of Weird Darkness, and that means you had a part in that, Weirdos. Psyjack was born in a safari park that couldn't care for her, but the Wild Animal Sanctuary steps in to save Psyjack and other wild animals from private owners and less than ideal living conditions. Psyjack now has a lifelong home in a large acreage, natural habitat near other wolves. Wild Animal Sanctuary has saved numerous other wild animals from abuse and neglect – lions, grizzlies, tigers, panthers and more. Visit WildAnimalSanctuary.org to learn more, donate to the sanctuary and maybe adopt an animal of your own, like we have with Psyjack. That's WildAnimalSanctuary.org. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. You can stay up to date on everything Weird Darkness and also maybe win some cool prizes at the same time by signing up for the email newsletter. It's free, maybe you could be my next winner. Sign up for the Weird Darkness newsletter for free at WeirdDarkness.com and you'll automatically be honored to win. Now the Wendigo. It appears in numerous areas of pop culture, but it's not just a creature from someone's imagination. We can trace the origin of the Wendigo back to the legends of the Native American Algonquin people, including the Ojibwe, the Salto, the Cree, the Nascapi and the Innu. Wendigo is plural for Wendigoeg, which roughly translated means the evil spirit that devours mankind. They are believed to roam around the forests along the Atlantic coast and the Great Lakes region where the Algonquin people once lived. Legends say that Wendigoeg were once humans, but were formed when that person consumed human flesh. It did not matter if there were a choice or a means for survival. The person would be overcome by evil spirits and transformed into a Wendigo. Another version of the story says that the very first Wendigoeg was a warrior who made a deal with the devil to save his tribe. In doing so, he gave up his soul and was transformed into a Wendigoeg. When peace was finally attained, there was no more need for the Wendigoeg and he was banished from the tribe, forced to live as an outcast. Regardless of which story you believe, the fact is the Wendigo is a terrifying creature. They have an insatiable hunger for human flesh, never feeling satisfied. This is reflected in their appearance as they are extremely thin and tall, often measuring at approximately 14.8 feet in height. Their skin is yellowish in color and taut across their bones like leather stretched on a rack. They have long yellowed fangs and long tongues protruding from a stag skull head. Their eyes glowing specks in the dark. Bezel Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, described a Wendigo as, gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion, the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets. The Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody. Unclean and suffering from separations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption. Natives long attributed disappearances of local forest dwellers to the Wendigo, believing they were eaten. The creature has been spotted by more than just Native Americans. In fact, early settlers reported seeing a Wendigo near a town called Rosso in northern Minnesota. They claimed that every time this creature was spotted, a death followed soon after. The question is, is the Wendigo real, or is it the result of mental illness and susceptible believers? Wendigo's psychosis is one of the more dramatic mental illnesses characterized by an intense craving for human flesh. In accounts reported by Jesuit missionaries, it was reported that humans became possessed by the Wendigo spirit after being in a situation of needing food and having no other choice aside from cannibalism. The following was taken from their reports in the Jesuit relations. What caused us greater concern was the intelligence that met us upon entering the lake, namely that the men deputed by our conductor for the purpose of summoning the nations to the North Sea and assigning them a rendezvous where they were to await our coming had met their death the previous winter in a very strange manner. Those poor men, according to the report given us, were seized with an ailment unknown to us, but not very unusual among the people we were seeking. They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy, but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounced upon women, children, and even upon men like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously without being able to appease or glut their appetite, ever seeking fresh prey and the more greedily the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies and, as death is the sole remedy among these simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness. One famous case of Wendigo psychosis is that of a plains cre trapper from Alberta named Swift Runner. During the winter of 1878, a year of starvation and misery for the cre people, Swift Runner and his family were starving. His eldest son died, with food and emergency supplies just 25 miles away. However, instead of making a move to get supplies, Swift killed and ate his wife and five other children. His case was not cannibalism as a last resort, but a man with Wendigo psychosis. In the end, Swift Runner confessed to authorities and was executed at Fort Saskatchewan. The legitimacy of Wendigo psychosis has been a highly debated controversy since the 1980s, leaving some researchers arguing that Wendigo psychosis was a fabrication, the result of naive anthropologists taking stories related to them as truth without having observed the behavior itself. Others argued their credible eyewitness accounts as evidence that Wendigo psychosis was a factual historical phenomenon. When I was a teenager, there was an abandoned mental hospital a few towns over. We used to urban explore it. One evening we were walking around. It's pretty dark, we hear something, shine our flashlights to the left and a dude is just walking down the hall in the dark, no flashlight in full scrubs. He doesn't say anything, doesn't make eye contact, nothing, just keeps walking straight ahead. We keep our flashlights on him until he turns the corner. We don't say anything to each other and we don't stop running until we get back outside. Once we're outside, we stop to catch our breath and discuss. All three of us saw it. It was not my imagination. No one ever believes us. First, let me say that my friend is a completely normal guy and I've worked with him in the engineering realm for quite a bit. He's definitely a smart guy and doesn't have a screw loose, so to hear this story was crazy. He moved into this house in Portland, Oregon, and it was a little off. When he first moved in, he heard some creaks and stuff, but it was mostly just old house noises. Then sometimes he could swear he heard footsteps or doors creaking open and closed. The most peculiar thing about the house was that even with all the shades drawn up and letting the sun in, it seemed the house was always dark. He asked his roommates about the noises and they all had agreed that they had heard peculiar things around the house too, in particular the basement. The basement had some stairs leading down and from what he described, there were two rooms, the main room with the stairs in it and another room attached that had an extra door in it on the opposite corner of the first door. He was a drummer and he had his drums set up in the main basement room to practice drums. The first of the strange things to happen would be in his bedroom. He saw smoke-like stuff coming from under the door and it started moving up toward the upper corner by his door. He thought the house was on fire as the smoke-like stuff began to cluster in the corner so he opened the door and was going to bail, but when he opened it and looked into the hallway, the hallway was totally fine. No smoke, no fire. Then he looked back into the corner and all the clustered smoke had vanished. After that, sometime later, he was in the bathroom, taking a pee and he heard the door open. Without looking behind him, he says, hey, hang on a minute, I'm almost done. But the door didn't shut so he finished up and then turned around to one of the most frightening things he had ever seen. Clearly, in front of him was an apparition of a young girl in a plaid dress and he looked at her from bottom to top and when he got to her face, starting from her feet, there was nothing there and he could clearly see through her just a blank face.  He just shut his eyes and ran to the door that he thought was open through the ghost, but then he ran straight into it because apparently it was still closed.  Finishing this story, I have such crazy goose bumps. I promise you, it's not bull, but nobody else believes him. Paranormal experiences, encountering extraterrestrials, extraordinary states of consciousness, spiritual phenomenon, encounters with non-human entities that can't be explained by science. These stories of what people have come across are ubiquitous here on Weird Darkness and often those who've had these encounters choose to stay quiet and not even tell close friends or family out of fear of ridicule and they suffer silently trying to deal with the internal horror of what they've experienced. If I'm describing you or someone you know, there is now a place you can turn to for professional counseling from experts who, unlike others in their field, are open to the paranormal, supernatural and extraterrestrial experiences of others and they're not there to explain away your experience but to help you recover from it and move forward with living. I'm referring to the Opus Network. If you want to reach out for help or learn more, look for the Opus Network towards the bottom of the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. Do you have a true paranormal story that has happened to you or someone you know? You can share it by calling the dark line toll-free at 1-877-277-5944. That's 1-877-277-5944. I might use your story in a future episode. We now continue with more creepy, true stories from Reddit users. Stories that are sometimes hard to believe. I'm going to preface this by saying I went to boarding school for six years. This boarding school was in the middle of a one-stop light town and on a hill 800 feet up. The school used to be an old monastery. It was hundreds of years old and huge. Four stories including a basement where there was a boiler room and long hallways. I used to be in charge of cleaning the gymnasium at night. Every student had a job that they had to do either at night or in the morning to help take care of the school. It taught you some practical things and all. Anyway, I was there by myself that night getting ready to start sweeping the gym. The gym had two floors to it. The upstairs part was the weightlifting area and you could see it fully from the bottom part of the gym where the basketball court was. As I stepped into the gym, one of the basketballs starts rolling a bit. I look around to see if any doors are open and none are. I chalk it up to randomness but see that it's continuing to roll. As I watch it, it makes a full circle around the entire gym and then stops right next to my feet. At this point I am a bit scared but figured it was nothing. I heard a creaking coming from the second floor and I looked up. There was a girl just staring right at me. As soon as I made direct eye contact with her, she bolted to the stairs that would take her to me. She let out a scream that I could not describe. I was terrified and frozen in place. Thankfully, she didn't come to me but took a left and bolted through the main doors of the gym. They didn't open. She just went right through the doors. I noped the hell out of there. I told some of my friends but none of them believed me. I am walking home from a friend who lives on a country road a few kilometers out of my hometown in March of 2001, another friend with me. As we walk, we both notice an orange light in a field a few hundred meters to our left. We both glanced at it but both ignored it, putting it off as a tractor or a farm vehicle of some sort. We keep walking when we both get a strong whiff of ozone. Both of us turned and looked at the field just in time to see an orange ball of light a few meters round rise and then rocket into the air soundlessly.  We ran most of the way back to his place and told his parents what we'd seen. They pretty much laughed at us and his dad suggested if we had seen anything at all which he doubted it was probably just ball lightning. No one else really believed us either and there weren't any sightings reported in our local paper. I was walking to the local skate park when I turned a corner just in time to watch a seemingly homeless man against a building wall shoot himself from under his chin.  It was like a ten minute walk slash run back to my house at which point I told my dad everything. He calls the police and drives to where I said it happened. Thirty minutes or so later he comes back and says there was nobody there. No blood, no gun, no body, nothing. Three cops questioned me and I got accused of lying at first but the sincerity of my horror and detail led them to believe I was developing schizophrenia and maybe hallucinated it. I've never hallucinated a day in my life. This one is from a teacher of mine. He's a great guy but he swears on his pride that this one is true. It was during his college days. He was living in an apartment with three other guys. They'd been living there for a couple of weeks when weird stuff started to happen. One night they had some friends come over so one of them had to sleep in the futon in the living room. The friend was woken up in the middle of the night for no real reason but when he opened his eyes there was a thin blonde girl hunched on the ground next to him. Now not much can make a six foot four 250 pound tough guy panic but this did. He just started hollering and yelling for his friends to come out as he grabbed for every square inch of the sheets. His friends thought he was just messing with them but his face said otherwise. They just hung out for the rest of the night until they calmed down. They eventually ordered pizza just because they were no longer tired. When the delivery guy got there he was surprised. Hey, this was my old place when I was in school. My teacher chuckled, Hey did weird stuff happen when you lived here? The pizza guy went blank.  They moved out the next day. I have a little brother, he's three years younger than me. When I was in sixth grade we were home alone during the summertime and playing around as brothers do. Wrestling around, chasing each other around the house, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary. I ended up chasing him into our parents' room and we were throwing stuff back and forth at each other having a little fake war across the bed at each other. You know, kid stuff. It popped into my head that it'd be funny to scare him by shutting off the lights. Well, there were no windows in our parents' room so with the lights off it's pitch black except for whatever light creeps in from under the door. I retreat to the door and decide at the last second it'd be funnier to leave the room, turning the light out as I passed and closed the door behind me, leaving him in the darkness alone. Maybe scare him a bit. So I did. I shut the door behind me as I turned the light off and left the room, turning around to listen to see if he was panicking and wanted me to come back in. But he didn't want me to come back in. What are you doing? I heard him say. Yes, he thinks I'm still in there, I guess. He didn't see me leave the room so I keep listening. Jacob, what are you doing? You're freaking me out. Please stop. That's odd. I wonder what he's talking about? I keep listening. Jacob, I'm not joking. Get away from me.  Did he just say get away from me? Laughing, I yelled through the door to him. Dude, I'm not even in there. He screams loudly like he's been stabbed or something. I mean a blood curdling scream. I freak out and try to open the door. It's locked. I didn't lock the door, so why is it locked? My little brother is still screaming begging me to help him. Hurry, please. Now I'm panicking. I have no idea what to do. I'm like 13 years old. I weigh 90 pounds. I can't bust this door down. My little brother is in trouble. I have to get to him. He stops screaming. I try the door handle again and to my surprise, this time it opens effortlessly. It's unlocked. I open the door and turn on the light and I see my brother in the corner crying. After some consoling and apologizing, I finally get him to explain what happened. He tells me that when I turned the lights out, his eyes hadn't adjusted to the light yet and it was just dark. After about 20 or 30 seconds, his eyes started to adjust and from the little bit of light leaking in from under the door, he saw me standing in the corner with my back to him when he asked what I was doing. I, from what he saw, turned to him and started walking slowly across the room toward him. I kept coming until I was standing over him, looking down at him. He said he couldn't make out any features though, just a dark figure with a shadowy face. He saw a hand extend out towards him and grab his shoulder. The hand was cold and very strong and it hurt him. When I opened the door and turned on the light, the figure was gone. It just wasn't there. I never saw anything myself. My brother is now 23 years old. I'm 26 and to this day, he will not talk about this event. We have friends who have heard the story through me and will tease him about it. He simply leaves the room, refusing to acknowledge it. He's admitted to me that even almost 15 years later, he is bothered by what happened that day. He still has nightmares from time to time. He still doesn't have any explanation for what happened. Coming up, more eerie, scary, horrifying or terrifying stories from Reddit users who swear it really happened when Weird Darkness returns. The town is standard, a small mid-western town where nothing ever happens. Quiet, peaceful, and tucked away among the cornfields and away from the dangers of the outside world. Unfortunately, there was nothing normal about standard. There has been an evil that has been awakened and now the residents are slowly going crazy. Men for no reason are coming home and murdering their families, and dark forms are appearing in people's mirrors. The evil is spreading and now it's up to ex-Chicago cop Robiletto to find it. Time is running out and the neighbors are becoming quiet shadows as they watch him. He doesn't have long before it'll start to get into his mind, and then he himself would be making that deadly trip home. Inside the Mirrors by Jason R. Davis, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample or purchase the title on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. I'm Darren Marlar. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. If you'd like to check out the Weird Darkness merchandise, you can find it in the Weird Darkness store. You can search through all the merchandise by clicking on Store at WeirdDarkness.com. We now continue with more of those creepy unexplainable nightmare stories from Reddit users who swear the stories are real. I haven't told anyone this story since I was a child because when I told my cousins what was happening, it scared them really bad and it got me my second only weapon with a belt by my dad. Now as an adult, I don't mention it because I just don't know what it was and I don't want other adults to think I'm nuts. When I was in second grade, I woke up one summer night, dead of night, to a woman floating through my window into my bedroom. Oddly, I wasn't scared. I just sat up and asked, what are you doing here? I remember she answered me, but oddly enough, the next morning I couldn't remember what she said or even what her voice sounded like. I couldn't even remember what she looked like. So next I said to her, in true eight-year-old fashion, well, you better get going because my dad might wake up and then he'll be mad. She slipped out of my already cracked open bedroom door and I went back to sleep. Sounds like sleep paralysis, right? Wrong. The next day I was really excited that I had my own fairy godmother and I named her Crystal and I thought in my head, please come back. Come back and wake me up at dawn so we can talk. I kid you not, the next morning, just as it was getting light outside, I hear someone whispering my name. I realized that this was real and she was a ghost and I froze. I stayed as still as I could, not even able to breathe and just prayed as hard as I could.  I could feel her right by my head. As I'm typing this, tears are coming to my eyes. Okay, it happened once. Coincidence, right? Nope. Every time I would get brave and say out loud to her before going to bed in my room, okay, come this time. I swear I won't get scared.  At this point I'm thinking it still could be night terrors, right? I mean our eyes have receptors sensitive to light that wakes us up, thus causing me to wake up at dawn and hallucinate this stuff. Well, here's where it all gets real. Next summer I tell a friend that this is going on while we're camping together. She doesn't believe me, so I ask her to come tonight. We're sleeping in the same tent and my friend wants to see for herself. At dawn, I hear her calling my name and my friend's name. We don't move. She leaves and we both sit up and my friend heard her too.   I just don't think about it anymore and never when I'm alone at night. I grew up on the west coast of Ireland in County Galway. One night, when I was around 16 years of age, I woke up in the middle of a gale with rain pelting the windows and wind whistling through the cracks. Now on this night there was only me, my mother and my sisters inside the house, as my father was away minding the cattle due to it being calving season. Normally I'd be helping him out, pulling calves out of cows, vaginas and the like, but not so on this night. We had these spotlights to illuminate the outside of the house and what are these spotlights shown directly up into my window and even with the curtains closed it would lighten up the room. The shadows of branches and long blades of grass would project onto the ceiling and the gale, being what it was, caused a frantic wildness to characterize this night's shadow play. I watched the shadows on the ceiling and listened to the wind roar outside for a short while. In fairness though, I was busting for a pee so I sat up to take off my blanket and looked over at the door.  My view of the door was such that I couldn't see from my bed into the hallway unless the door was wholly ajar. The door was only slightly cracked but it was open enough to allow the width of a human arm and their extended into the room was just that. The arm was pale white and judging by the shape of the hand on the end it appeared to be female. It had a classic shroud-like sleeve ending a few inches before the wrist. It waved palm side down for about five seconds and then retracted. Now the gale and the lights, shadows and all that was bearable. Even the arm and hand wouldn't have been grand enough. I could have pegged it down to sleep paralysis but man, the way that arm retracted back into the hallway and the way the door handle moved downwards as the arm retracted and the way the door slammed after it, I couldn't breathe. I began to roar and shout. I managed to get my bedside lamp on and covers off and I began running around the room opening the door of the hallway into nothingness, not a soul awake in the house besides me and the ghost.  Well, I calmed down and slept on the floor in my mother's room that night. That house had been built by my parents so nobody had died in it previously. Nothing else even slightly paranormal had happened in that house before or since. When I was about one year old I was lying in my crib for a nap like a one-year-old would do. My mom came into the room to check on me, changed my diaper if needed. She said that she found me standing up in my crib, looking at a chair that belonged in the dining room and saying, birthday, repeatedly over and over again. She was freaked out as neither she nor my dad had put the chair in there. Later that day she was looking at her calendar and saw that it was my grandpa's birthday and he had passed away a few months previous. She swears to God that it happened, but I don't know if I believe her. War itself is a monster. However, across the centuries there have been reports by soldiers of actual monsters in the theater of war. Some experienced fighters even claim that they have been reduced to primal panic and dread when faced with creatures that, in their mind, should not exist. If the stories are true, soldiers deployed on the battlefield may just have more to fear than simply their human enemy. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up in this hour. You've heard of the gunfight at the Ok Corral, but that was just men versus men. To get really exciting, you need true stories of gunfights between men and extraterrestrials. On Okokoki Island is a small channel of water known as Teach's Hole, named after Edward Teach, and where it's said that he met his end, and his ghost still lingers. If Edward Teach doesn't sound familiar to you, it could be that you know him better as Blackbeard. But first, I'll share a few stories of real-life horrors reported by men on the battlefield. Not about the horrors of war, but about the supernatural monsters they found within it. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to follow Weird Darkness on Facebook and Twitter, and visit WeirdDarkness.com To find the daily Weird Darkness podcast, watch streaming B horror movies and horror hosts 24-7 for free, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, send me your own true story of something paranormal that's happened to you or someone you know, and more. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com.  A relatively recent report of a wartime monster sighting comes from an anonymous U.S. Army Special Forces squad member who was tracking a Taliban person of interest in the mountains of Afghanistan. The squad's objective at the time was to observe a village for several days in the hopes of witnessing suspicious activity or persons which was hoped would inform and lead to a successful raid. The team comprised six men at the base, with two others whose job it was to observe the village at closer quarters. Over the course of a few days, suspicious activity was indeed witnessed by the squad, just not the sort they were expecting. Almost immediately, the team experienced technical problems. They had trouble maintaining contact due to static. Believing the magnetic content of the rocks to be the issue, the eyewitnesses described leaving the squad's base with some of the other men to reposition the satcom in an attempt to get a better signal. It was around dusk at the time. As they neared the satcom, one of the soldiers spotted a man in a white robe running through the rocks outside the village. Lacking reliable communication and worried about the mission being compromised, the men packed up their equipment and got ready to move. They were all on high alert as they trekked back to their outpost. Covering their tracks as they moved through the darkness, the witness stresses the carefulness with which they retreated. Regardless, every so often, he claims he would catch a fleeting glimpse of something white moving in the distance. After a short while, he reported what he had seen to the others. An officer said he had seen the same thing. They were being followed. The sense of urgency and panic increased. They were a small unit, completely exposed, without a means of communication. Not only that, the witness reports that everything felt strange, the air felt heavy and sort of sweet, the silence hummed loudly. Now enveloped in the darkness of night, the team put on their night vision goggles. With the world cast in a perfect green haze, they scouted their surroundings. The men could see nothing and no one moving behind them. However, the danger of the night was far from concluded. What the witness describes as having happened next is chilling. Hallucinations happened, but what happened was beyond comprehension. First we heard a sound like a huge airplane taking off, a loud low buzz that slowly increased in pitch. We had to yell over comms to hear each other. Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing what looked like glowing eyes staring back at me, but once I would enter my focus on where I saw them, they would disappear. We were panicked. Everyone was holding their rivals at the high, ready. We were expecting some kind of ambush attack. Then it all just stopped. Everything got dark.  We stopped, dug into the side of the mountain and performed S-L-L-S. Stop, look, listen, smell for about ten minutes. Nothing, not even bugs. The air and the land were silent. The team was thoroughly spooked and overcome with fatigue and eager to get back to camp. However, they were very aware that something waited in the darkness for them, something which very possibly had intentions to harm them. They moved quickly through the scrub until they were met by the side of a man dressed in light-colored robes. The man was slowly making his way towards them. According to the witness, the way that he moved was unnatural. He seemed to pass through any and all obstacles in his way, as though they were made of air. He seemed to melt over and around the rocks. Through the nods, night vision goggles, his eyes glowed. I scoped up on him and saw that he was looking directly at me. It was pitch black. There's no way he could have seen us from that distance without any kind of night optics. Suddenly, he stopped. He picked up one of his limbs and held it in the air, almost like he was waving at me. Then the arm melted back into his form, like it wasn't an arm at all, but some kind of extendable proboscis that was meant to look like an arm from a distance. I was about to ask the guys if they could see him when he suddenly disappeared. After he disappeared, the team, shaken and weary beyond words, were able to finally make their way back to the base. In the distance they saw lights flickering near the village. They all but forgot about both this and the strange otherworldly man until a few days later. According to the witness on that very night, the village they had been observing was raided. However, it was not the raid they had been working to inform. Apparently the team had moved into the village, found it completely abandoned. They also found several men in the area where I had seen the lights that night. The corpses had been ripped to shreds and based on the sheer amount of blood, a general consensus was that there were more men that were killed there than just the bodies that were found. It went in the official records as a successful raid with several enemies, KIAs. Unofficially, no one has any idea what killed them. All I know is whatever it was, it chose those men and not us. Whatever the men saw that night and whatever happened to the village remains unknown. More true stories of wartime monsters coming up when Weird Darkness returns. If you or someone you know struggles with depression or dark thoughts, I'd like to recommend The Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There, I've gathered numerous free resources to help you fight depression, including the Seven Cups app, connecting you with people who've also struggled with depression and know what you're going through and they're there to lift you up. You can even connect with professional listeners there to listen at all hours of the day. If you're having dark thoughts that you can't control, there is the Suicide and Crisis hotline where you can call or chat online anytime 24-7. Our friends at the International Foundation for Research and Education on Depression are doing what they can to give us the tools we need to fight against depression in the days ahead. And as always, if you are in an emergency situation where you're contemplating taking your own life, you can call 988 in the US or 999 in the UK. These resources are either free or have free-to-use options and are always there when you or someone you love needs them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. You can stay up to date on everything Weird Darkness and also maybe win some cool prizes at the same time by signing up for the email newsletter. It's free and every month I draw one name at random, maybe you could be my next winner. Sign up for the Weird Darkness newsletter for free at WeirdDarkness.com and you'll automatically be entered to win. We now continue with more true stories of wartime monsters. The Lombards were a powerful, Germanic tribe that ruled much of Italy from the 6th to the 8th century AD. Paul the Deacon, a scribe of the Lombards, tells of a strange story in their history. In their early days, the Lombards were confronted by an overwhelming tribal army, whose numbers greatly surpassed theirs. Their passage was barred, however the leader of the Lombards thought of a plan. He spread a rumor that amongst his allies were a pack of savage, dog-headed man beasts that waged unyielding warfare, drank human blood and cannibalized themselves if they could not reach their enemy. The opposing army, not wanting to confront such an enemy, let the Lombards pass unmolested.  Yet at the time and for much of human history, the existence of a race of dog-headed men was almost seen as a matter of fact. Various ancient Greek writers, including the father of history, Herodotus, wrote of dog-headed men living in the mountains of India and Ethiopia. These canine men, also known as Sinuscephaly, have been described as hunting for a living and communicating by barking with one another. The Greek physician and historian Tessias had this to say of the Sinuscephaly. They speak no language but bark like dogs, and in this manner make themselves understood by each other. Their teeth are larger than those of dogs, their nails like those of these animals but longer and rounder. They cannot be defeated in war. St. Augustine suggested that these dog-headed men descended from Adam. Other saints, including St. Andrew and St. Bartholomew, have described such creatures as well, whose hound-like appearance disappears after baptism. For several centuries, theologians debated whether such dog-headed men, assuming they were real, had a soul and thus needed the Gospels talk to them. In The Legend of King Arthur, it was told that he defeated a great army of dogmen on the hills of Edinburgh. Several medieval explorers have also claimed to have witnessed these dogmen. Writing in his travels, Marco Polo described encountering them on the Andaman Islands. They have heads like dogs, he said, and teeth and eyes likewise.  They have a quantity of spices, but they are a most cruel generation and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race. Arguably most peculiar of all is the legend relating to the patron saint of travellers, St. Christopher. There are many different origin stories relating to St. Christopher. However, one story places his origins at a battle between the Romans and the savage North African tribe called the Marmerite fought about 300 AD. This tribe was renowned for their ferociousness in battle, their cannibalistic tendencies and, most of all, their heads being those of dogs. During the battle, which the Romans ultimately won, a giant beast of man was captured. He had a dog's head and he was named Reprobus. Whilst the legend takes many forms from there, all agree that the warrior Reprobus converted to Christianity and took the name Christopher. After being a soldier of Christ for some time, he was martyred in Syria and was eventually sanctified. According to the medieval Irish passion of St. Christopher, this Christopher was one of the dog heads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. While this story is undoubtedly odd, the saint's canine head was such a well-known attribute that it inspired religious iconography for centuries. Stories of fearsome Sinasephaly can also be found in eastern sources with the Buddhist missionary Wai Shang describing an entire island off the east coast of China being filled with a race of dog-headed men. Tales of dog-headed men, it seems then, were commonplace. Everywhere around the world, people believed that there was indeed a savage race of men with the heads of dogs bent on murder and cannibalism. It is possible that many of these tales had their roots in ignorance and prejudice. However, when the enemies of the Lombards heard the rumor of the Sinasephaly that day, there was much for them to fear. The Battle of Chickamauga, which was fought on the 19th and 20th of December 1863 near Snodgrass Hill on the Tennessee-Georgia border, was one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, second only to the Battle of Gettysburg in regards to the number of casualties. Indeed, it is said that so much blood was spilled on the battlefield that a creature of great malice was drawn to the devastation. A beast with green, glowing eyes is claimed to have haunted the land long before the arrival of the Civil War. After the Battle of Chickamauga, some reported seeing such a creature moving among the corpses near Snodgrass Hill. Such reports allegedly described the monster as being human-like, with eerie green eyes and a huge, deformed jaw from which terrifying fangs protruded. In the centuries after the Civil War, visitors and rangers at the Chickamauga National Park have reported encounters with the same green-eyed creature. Some say that the entity is a ghost of a long-dead warrior. Others say that it is something else, something inhuman. Whatever the truth of the matter, the creature is known by those who report encountering it simply as old green eyes. In the 1970s, two different and unrelated people had accidents near the same location in the park. Having driven their cars off the road, wrecking them after seeing a pair of glowing eyes. However, one of the most notable encounters involved Edward Tinney, a park ranger. Speaking during an interview in 1981, he explained how he was walking through the park at around 4 am sometime in 1976 when an inexplicable chill rushed over his body. The very next moment he watched as a green-eyed being stepped out of the darkness. In his own words, when it passed me, I could see his hair was long like a woman's. The eyes. I'll never forget those eyes. They were glaring almost greenish-orange in color, flashing like some sort of wild animal. The teeth were long and pointed like fangs. I didn't know whether to run or scream or what. Then the headlights of an approaching car came blazing through the fog and the thing disappeared right in front of me. Unfortunately, like so many sightings of unknown creatures in wartime, the original accounts of old green eyes have become obscure and largely forgotten, lost to the tides of time. More true stories of wartime monsters coming up when Weird Darkness returns. The Lord of the Elements wants to change reality. He's enlisted the evil Zeltan to help him, and together they'll try to recruit Stanley, a man gifted with incredible imaginative capabilities to help them. Unless Edward and his friends can stop them, that is. A tale of white and black magic, quantum physics and a plot that twists in turns. If you like science fiction, fantasy and horror, you'll love The Last Observer, a magic battle for reality by G. Michael Vasey, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample of The Last Observer on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. We now continue with more true stories of wartime monsters. Of all the sightings of mysterious creatures in wartime, none is more widely reported than the rock apes of Vietnam. Throughout the Vietnam War, fighters on both sides of the conflict regularly encountered large bipedal apes in the dense jungles. Bizarrely, Vietnam is home to no such wild apes. Even before conflict found its way to the jungles of Vietnam, there had been a long local tradition of strange creatures lurking in the wilderness. Various names had been assigned to the creatures by local peoples, including batatut, ujit, or forest people. Particularly sighted within the Vu Quang Nature Reserve, such stories describe muscular bipedal beings with ape-like features around six feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair, accepting the knees, soles of the feet, hands and face. A commonly reported trait on the forest people is their displays of boldness and on occasion, aggression. In Borneo, where the creatures are also claimed to exist, witnesses state that they do occasionally kill humans. Whilst the locals of these regions consider the creatures to be a fact of life, the batatut was relatively unknown to the outside world. That was until war pushed its way into the creature's supposed habitat. Among American soldiers, the creatures were known as rock apes, supposedly because of their propensity to hurl rocks at soldiers. In the decades after the Vietnam War, veteran testimonies of encounters with these creatures are commonplace. One such veteran, who served as an airborne infantry squad leader with the 101st Airborne in 1968 to 1969, described seeing numerous brown and reddish-brown rock apes around the Ashaw Valley. Although sightings of the creatures were common, they were likely never killed. As silence was the rule of the jungle, unnecessary gunfire was to be avoided at all costs. According to the eyewitness, the higher echelons of command wanted confirmed body counts and not mysterious creature sightings. As such, many rock ape sightings were unreported at the time. Another testimony comes from Michael Kelly, who served from 1969 to 1970. In the year 2000, he described how eight rock apes surprised a squadron of his platoon, resulting in open fire being launched at the creatures. At first believing the mysterious apes to be the enemy, being the correct height, they looked very much like soldiers in khaki, the firing had been non-stop as the creatures hurled themselves through the trees. In Kelly's own words, all except one was light brown to reddish brown in color, and about three and a half to four feet tall. One dark, almost black male, remained fighting to protect the other's retreat as he was flying through the branches and rushing the men with his teeth bared. Despite the large amount of gunfire, when Kelly searched the site, he could not find a single drop of blood. With such a multitude of spectacular reports, one cannot help but wonder just what the rock apes were and if they are still around today. Over the years, a wide variety of unconvincing theories have been proposed, from the widespread use of highly hallucinogenic drugs like LSD by soldiers to mass confusion of mysterious, six-foot-tall bipedal so-called rock apes with Vietnam's largest native primate species, the critically endangered three-foot-long-tonkin snub-nosed monkey. It seems that, for now at least, the answer to this mystery will remain hidden deep within the dense jungles of Vietnam. In the Pacific Theater of World War II, troops reported witnessing peculiar flying humanoids. Described as possessing a pair of large, leathery wings like a bat, these creatures were said to have been spotted close to military installations on numerous occasions. Silent and shy as they were reported to be, military eyewitnesses could not escape the unnerving feeling that these unearthly beings were somehow observing them. Many of the alleged sightings date to around the time of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Years afterwards, reports of flying humanoids in the Pacific were still being made by soldiers. One such report came from Sinclair Taylor, a U.S. Air Force private who was on guard duty at Camp Okubo near Kyoto, Japan in 1952. The sound of the creature's wings first drew the private's attention. To begin with, he thought he was looking at a giant bird. However, as it flew closer, it became clear that it wasn't. According to Taylor's testimony, the enigmatic being had the body of a man about seven feet tall. It also had a seven-foot wingspan. After having flown closer to the private, the creature stopped and hovered in the air. Panicked, Taylor began firing his weapon at the flying creature. When he looked back at the spot where the winged beast had been, it had vanished. No blood, cadaver, or any other physical evidence was left behind. Even more bizarre is the fact that Taylor was not the only witness to this creature. It has been reported that when he declared the incident to his sergeant, it was revealed that another guard had witnessed the exact same creature the year before. Although private Sinclair Taylor had no knowledge of the previous sighting and had no contact with the other eyewitness, the two descriptions of the winged creatures were astonishingly similar. Theories as to what Taylor and others saw include secret military projects and the misidentification of local wildlife. Misidentification suggestions include crows which are reported to be much larger in Japan than in other parts of the world. Certainly, in some countryside areas, crows with a wingspan twice the size of the typical carrion crow are described by rural farmers. These super-sized birds are also reported to be more reserved and less vocal than the common crow which fits with descriptions of alleged flying humanoids. This being said, misidentification of crows or other large birds does not account for the alleged human characteristics of these creatures. Nor does it explain their seemingly unnatural ability to survive a rapid gunfire as reported by Sinclair Taylor. As such, the true nature of the flying humanoid creatures of Japan remains a mystery. When Weird Darkness returns, you've heard of the gunfight at the Ok Corral, but that was men versus men. To get really exciting, you need true stories of gunfights between men and extraterrestrials. Hey Weirdos, have you signed up for the Weird Darkness email newsletter? It'll keep you up to date on what's happening with the podcast when our next Weirdo Watch Party will take place. You can see when the next sale in the Weird Darkness store is scheduled and more. Sign up for the Weird Darkness email newsletter for free at WeirdDarkness.com. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. One of the most controversial of all of Bob Lazar's claims made after he allegedly briefly worked in late 1988 at a portion of Area 51 called S4 is that he read a series of highly classified documents on various aspects of the UFO phenomenon. One of those documents Lazar maintained told a strange and sinister story of a violent confrontation between security personnel at Area 51 and a group of aliens that were in residence and working at S4 alongside a scientific team. It was a confrontation that reportedly resulted in more than a few deaths, far more than a few. Lazar had admitted that he cannot say for sure that the briefing papers he read were the real thing. He has acknowledged that they may have been nothing but disinformation designed to swamp him with both real and bogus material. Why might the project leaders at Area 51 do such a thing? Simple. If there were concerns that Lazar might blow the whistle on what he knew, which as history has shown he did in 1989, mixing up the truth with a more than liberal amount of lies might have an adverse effect on his credibility. It should be noted that's exactly what happened. That said, although he cannot say for sure that the documentation was the real deal, he does recall the contents of the material in relation to this firefight situation. According to Lazar, the deadly confrontation occurred at some point in 1979 in the S4 facility. Lazar said, I believe the altercation came about in 1979 or sometime like that and I don't remember exactly how it was started, but it had something to do with the security personnel. The aliens were in a separate room. I think it had something to do with the bullets the security guards were carrying and somehow they were trying to be told that they couldn't enter the area with the bullets, possibly because it was hazardous. The bullets could explode through some field or whatever. Lazar continued that despite the warning, one of the security guards did indeed enter the room with the bullets, something which resulted in a violent and lethal response from the aliens. Lazar recalled that the papers he read described how the security personnel were all quickly killed by head wounds, the same fate befell a group of scientists on the program too. Timothy Good, who interviewed Lazar at the height of the controversy surrounding his claims, said, the incident is said to have led to the termination of an alien liaison at the Nevada Test Site. It's important to note here that there is a variation to this story, not from Lazar, who stuck to his story which he read out at S4, but from a band named Paul Benowitz, who in the late 1970s began digging into claims that an alien base did exist below the New Mexico town of Dolce. From intelligence personnel at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, Benowitz learned of a story of a fatal encounter between hostile aliens and a security team in the lower levels of the Dolce base. The different location given to Benowitz is just about the only difference between what Lazar was told and what Benowitz was told. Clearly, both scenarios cannot be true, something which means we must give deep consideration to the possibility that the papers Lazar read were not the real deal. They may well have been disinformation. So might have been the data provided to Paul Benowitz. In other words, there is a strong likelihood that both tales were fabricated and fed to Lazar and Benowitz as a means to confuse the truth surrounding what is really going on at Area 51 and which may actually have nothing to do with real aliens, hostile or not. On Ocracoke Island is a small channel of water known as Teach's Hole. This inlet is reported to be the spot where the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, preferred to anchor his ship. It is also said to be where he met his end and some say his ghost haunts the spot to this day. Blackbeard roamed the Atlantic from around 1716 until 1718, robbing ships from the West Indies to the Carolinas. He had a reputation for unbridled ferocity. When Blackbeard went into battle, he strapped multiple pistols and multiple cutlasses to his body. Most frightening of all, he wove fuses into his long Blackbeard and set them on fire just before he stepped onto the captured ship. This towering figure, armed to the teeth, sporting a sparking flaming beard must have been absolutely terrifying. Ships captains would surrender without a shot being fired. Blackbeard's rain on a high seas came to an end November 22, 1718. Virginia Governor Alexander Sportswood sent a ship commanded by John Maynard down to the North Carolina coast to track down and kill Blackbeard. Maynard surprised Blackbeard and a skeleton crew anchored at Teach's Hole. In the ferocious battle that followed, Blackbeard was shot five times and stabbed no less than 20. The pirate crew was all killed or captured. Blackbeard's head was chopped off and hung from the bow sprit of Maynard's ship. The pirate's headless body was thrown overboard. Legend has it that the headless body swam around Maynard's ship three times before sinking below the waters. Ever since then, it has been said that Blackbeard's ghost haunts the spot known as Teach's Hole. Many people have reported seeing a strange light moving beneath the water in the cove. This ghostly light is thought by some to be Blackbeard's spirit swimming through the waters searching for his missing head. There are those who believe that on stormy nights you can hear Blackbeard's voice calling out in the wind. On nights when the angry wind is roaring and the hard rain is coming down, many people have heard a horrible roaring coming from this hidden cove. They say that it is an unearthly noise that sounds like a pained human voice bellowing, where's my head? While his reign of terror on the seas was short, Blackbeard's legacy lives on in the legends of North Carolina. We're also learning even more about this frightening pirate every day, ever since the discovery of the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge. Archaeologists and historians have been working on recovering and restoring artifacts from this sunken ship captained by the notorious pirate and we're discovering fascinating details of what life was like on an 18th century pirate ship. While Blackbeard's viciousness has gone down in history, these stories may be a fact of history being written by the winners. Except for the final battle, there's no record of Blackbeard ever having killed anyone. The show, with the massive arsenal and flaming beard, may have been deliberately designed to avoid a fight. Blackbeard seems to have understood that having a reputation for being a bloodthirsty murderer could save you the trouble of actually being a bloodthirsty murderer. And while pirates are considered to be bad guys of history, it's hard not to sympathize with the pirates over the British Navy. Pirate crews were better treated and better paid than Navy crews. Furthermore, pirate crews were on their ships by choice. As opposed to the Navy crews, many of whose members would have been pressed into service. Pirate ships were also essentially democratic institutions. The pirate captain would be elected by the crew and generally selected on the basis of competence and fairness as a leader. The captain's decisions on where and when to sail would be put to a vote and his authority became absolute only during battle. This was a stark contrast to the British Navy at the time where the captaincy of a ship was based more on being born to the right family than on any ability to competently lead a crew. It's also important to remember what the pirates were stealing and from whom. A large portion of the vessels passing through the Atlantic at this time were holding enslaved human beings as cargo. When intercepting a slave ship, pirate crews would routinely free those otherwise destined for a life of unimaginable misery. These men would be offered the opportunity to join the ship's crew. With chances of their being able to return home being tragically small, it was an offer many of them took up. Records show that as much as half of any given pirate ship's crew in the early 18th century would have been composed of freed Africans. Even Blackbeard's trusted second-in-command who died fighting with him at Teach's Hole was one of these men, known to us only as Black Caesar. While many pirates did kill and plunder, they were killing and plundering from people who were themselves killing, plundering, enslaving and exploiting lands which had been invaded and were held by force. What seemed to offend the authorities so much about the pirates was not their tactics, but that somebody else was getting a cut of the action. You can follow the show on Facebook and Twitter at Weird Darkness, and please tell others about the show who love the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And if you'd like to be a part of the show, you can call into the dark line toll-free and tell your own true paranormal story or a story that has happened to somebody you know. That number is 1-877-277-5944. Again, the toll-free number is 1-877-277-5944. And you can email me anytime at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. James 3, verse 10. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. And a final thought. Remember your yesterdays, dream your tomorrows, and live your todays. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.