Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com. 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 episode, it's a fireside frights episode where I strip away the fancy production, the music, the cool sound effects, it's just you, me, this campfire, and stories sent in by you, by Weirdo Family. If you have a true story that you'd like to share of your own, you can send it my way by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. It can be your story, or it can be the story of someone else. Again, just go to WeirdDarkness.com and click on Tell Your Story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to enter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Our first story tonight comes from Ella. She says, Hello again, Darren. Me and my mom had just got done listening to No One Believes My Paranormal Story. That's one of the episodes that I posted some time back in the podcast. She continues saying, I think you should do a part two. I have a story that I would like to share. It was a warm summer night, and my mom, my sister, and me were walking on a road behind my house, and there was a turnaround circle back there, so behind the road is a cornfield. I got that feeling I was being watched, and I mean everyone gets that feeling, but this time it was stronger. My mom was watching lightning about 10 miles away when I was a little bit worried. Then, back in the field behind the road, I saw two glowing, what looked like, eyes. I thought it could be a house light, so I pointed my flashlight that way, and then I saw it. A tall figure that was standing there watching us. He had to be seven feet tall and was black. He had short fur, too, but as I started pointing my light at it, it disappeared. I told my mom and dad, and they think I'm just seeing things, but my cousins, they believed me. I never walked the road at night ever again, and never will. Yeah, Ella, I don't think I would, either. At least not that road. What you saw, I had no idea. Since you couldn't get a really good look at it, it was in the shadows, in the trees. All you saw were the eyes. I don't know, but you said I was seven feet tall, so you got some sort of look at it. You said it had short fur, but you don't describe its shape or anything, so I don't really know what it is that you saw. In my mind, I'm looking, I'm thinking werewolf, but that's just because that's one of my favorite cryptids, but that could have been a big foot. It could have been a deer standing on its hind legs, trying to get to the leaves, and you only saw just short pieces of it, although you said it had black fur, so that wouldn't be a deer. Could have been a bear. I mean, when they stand up on their hind legs, that's pretty dang tumble, but I don't know what you saw. But still, and that's the whole thing, that's the whole scary part of it, because it's the unknown. If you knew what it was, that'd be different. If you knew that it was a bear, or knew that it was a maybe a wolf with black fur standing on its hind legs or something like that, even if you knew that it was big foot, there wouldn't be quite as much fear, because the unknowing is the scary part. Now, if it was a werewolf, I think maybe you'd be just as scared if it's a Hollywood werewolf, but who knows. But thank you for sending in your story, Ella. I appreciate it. Okay, let's move on to Kimberly. She says, Hey, Darren, Kim from Delaware here. First, I want to say how much I love your podcast, and I'm very proud to say I am a weirdo patron. Well, thank you, Kim. I appreciate that. What she's saying is she is one of my darkness syndicate members. I look forward to all your stories and especially love to hear you narrate books. I actually have a fictional story I might send to you for a Thursday episode, if you think it qualifies. To hear you narrate it would be an honor. Well, before I continue on with her letter, Kim, send it my way. I'll add it to my stack of stuff for creepypastas and for Thriller Thursdays. In fact, I think what I'm going to do is this next Friday Frights coming up on the 24th. I think I'm going to use stories sent to me by listeners, but all of the fictional ones. Fireside Frights is all the true stories. I think maybe Friday Frights could be something that we could do the fictional stories just for fun. Okay, anyway, continuing on with Kim's letter. This story is for your Fireside Frights segment, or however you choose to use it. It started out sort of Christmas-themed, and it's truly more of a warm and fuzzy affirmation story rather than scary, but still cool nonetheless. Sorry that it's long, but it continues to evolve over the last few years. This may be long enough for a Fireside Frights all by itself, LOL. Just kidding, but it is long again, sorry. I'm long-winded. Anyway, on with my story. My dad worked his entire life. He was one of 13 children, the second oldest of four boys and nine girls.  Okay, he was raised on a farm and worked from the time that he was old enough to help on the farm until the age of 85 when he sold his package store that he owned for over 40 years and finally retired. He sold the store on December 15, 2014, and on December 17, 2015, he passed away unexpectedly. He had shoulder surgery and came home two days later, and the following morning my mom found him not breathing. We assume it was a heart attack. My dad absolutely loved Christmas. He was like a little kid. He decorated the yard long before it became a thing to have all the blow-ups and Christmas lights all over the house. He'd rip open his presents and when he was done, he wanted more, so losing him a week before Christmas was very tough. As I know it would be for any family. However, we celebrated the holiday, as always, because that is what he would have wanted. Fast forward another year to a day in December of 2016. Dad had been gone almost a year. My house was decorated and we had candles in the front windows, the kind that came on when you put the batteries in and then they go off six hours later and come back on the next night. There were three candles in our front living room windows. My husband Dave and I left the house just as it was getting dark, and I noticed the middle candle was out. I figured there was just a delay in it coming on, probably due to the order in which I had inserted the batteries in the seven total candles that I had. When we returned about an hour later, it was still out, so when I came inside, I looked behind the curtains and the candle was gone. My son, Justin, who was then 21, and daughter Katie, 20, were both living at home along with our six-month-old granddaughter Kinley and Kinley's father. They were not home when we left, but they were all home when we returned and I asked them about the candle. They had no clue what I was talking about, but they would not have bothered it anyway. We're a very laid-back family and love a practical joke, but we just were not in the habit of playing jokes on one another. The window where the candle had been was a center picture window with two smaller windows on either side. There were drapes that went to the floor and they were closed, and there was a love seat up against that window. I looked everywhere for that candle. I thought that maybe it had fallen off the sill when we closed the curtains, but it was not on the floor, the window, the couch, nowhere. I even checked under the couch cushions as if that thing could have just fallen in between the cracks, LOL. It was gone and I was perplexed to say the least. So I go into the kitchen and my husband is in a living room in his chair watching TV. His chair is beside the smaller window on the left and I could see the living room from the kitchen. My husband never moved and my kids were in their rooms. I said aloud, but quietly, Dad, is that you? Did you move my candle? If it was you, I hear you. I miss you and I love you and I get it. You're stopping by to say hello to the one family member that believes in the paranormal, but please put that dang candle back because I can't find any more like it. I go into the living room, sit on the couch, and Katie and her boyfriend go outside to their car to smoke a cigarette. My phone rings and it's Katie calling from the car. I say, Hello? And I hear, Mom? What are you smoking? Are you on crack or something? I said, What are you talking about? She then proceeded to say, The candle is in the window, Mom. I was thinking there's no way. I had 100% visualization of that window, from the time I inspected the area until the time she called me. Sure enough, I pulled back that curtain and there sat that candle. Pretty as you please, dead center on the sill. I just smiled and said, Thanks, Dad.  He'd been sitting next to that window the entire time I looked for the candle until the time I saw that it had reappeared and no one had gone near that window. So I said, Okay, Dad, Dave doesn't believe me.  A while later, Katie went out and left Kinley with us and Justin left as well. We were in her bedroom changing her and Dave was helping me with something. I can't recall what, but the oven timer went off and neither of us could get to it right away. I'd set it to remind me to check the dryer because we can't hear our dryer buzzer from inside the house as our laundry room is in the garage. The weird thing is it's the kind that you manually turn and when it buzzes, it keeps right on buzzing until you turn it off. I set it one day and left and forgot about it and came home hours later and it was still buzzing. But poor dogs were not happy that day. However, on this night, Dad turned off that buzzer. I just know he did. It stopped mere seconds after it started and there was no one left in the house to turn it off. Dave started believing me then. Fast forward to January 2020. Katie now lives in her own home and is cleaning up and putting away her Christmas decorations. She has a huge island in her kitchen and she has cleaned it off completely and scrubbed it. Then she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor. When she stood back up there on the center of the island was a set of those return address labels like you get in the mail from Easter Seals with my Dad's name and old address on them and they were Christmas themed at that. My Dad had been gone four years by then and my Mom had moved into a retirement community. There was absolutely no connection between my Dad, my parents' home they shared and Katie's current home whatsoever. But somehow, some way, those labels materialized out of the ether to let Katie know that her pop was still watching over her and Kinley. Now the next part I'll keep brief but it's fine to share it. I've been worried about Katie and Kinley because her boyfriend had some issues that I felt put Katie and potentially Kinley in danger. I prayed for quite some time to remove him from their lives in such a way that he could not come after them and cause them harm but I did not wish him any harm. As I prayed to God, I also asked my Dad to make it so if he could. And he did. The boyfriend was arrested for a heinous crime on my father's birthday that same year, November of 2020 and he'll be out of Katie and Kinley's life for the next 20 years. I know my Dad had a hand in making that happen. He and God were listening for sure. Now we come to 2021. Sometime, very late fall, we had a couple of incidents occur involving a fan. Our house has central air but we're hot people so we like a fan blowing on us sometimes, even when it's cooler outside. We had a fan in the living room. It was a round, oscillating fan on a stand plugged in by the front door and blowing in the direction of my husband's chair. It was finally starting to get cooler here on the east coast and time to put it in the attic until summer rolled around again but I just hadn't done it yet. We not used it in a couple of weeks though but all of a sudden one day I hear Dave holler what did you just do? I was in the other room and I had no idea what he was talking about. He said the fan turned itself on. It was weird but we kind of rushed it off. It happened a couple of more times and finally I said once again, Dad, is that you? If so, please do it again but do it in front of me this time. Sure enough, I had gone out to my office. I worked from home. I forgot something so I came back into the house at a time when I would not normally be in the living room and I saw the fan turn itself on again as I entered the room. Once again, affirmation that it hit me. It was Dad's birthday. There is one more incident that has Dave and I completely baffled and I promise I'll be done. I mean, I've already written an essay, right? LOL. We have what we call our hallway but it's really more of a square space between the three bedrooms, bathroom and living room. There is a coat closet there, a carpet in the middle of the floor and a light in the ceiling in the center. The light was going bad and we just bought a replacement but hadn't switched them out as of yet. Dad had removed the cover and only one bulb was left in it. Last week I hit the light switch and it did not come on. I looked and there were no bulbs in it. I figured Dave had taken the last bulb out because it likely burned out. Then the next night, Dave did the same thing. He hit the switch, saw the bulb was gone and asked me why I took it out. But I didn't. Neither one of us did. So how does a light bulb screwed tightly into a light fixture just disappear? You ask. We looked all over the floor anyway and there was no bulb. Then later I see this bulb lying in the base of a coat and hat stand that sits against the wall in our hall. This stand was in the original courthouse in our county seat in the late 1800s to early 1900s. It's wrought iron. There's a mirror at the top, places to hang your hat and or coat, and areas at the bottom on either side where you would rest an umbrella and the tip of the umbrella would rest in this small well area at the bottom. The bulb was in this well area intact. This was one of those small chandelier bulbs that's made of extremely thin glass. Even if it could have fallen from that light and landed several feet away in this well, it would have, should have shattered. However, there is no way it could have dropped out of this light and fallen diagonally several feet away. I don't know what's up, but this time it does not feel like that. Darren, thanks for reading my story. Even if you choose not to share it, because I know it's really long, I'm still happy to share it with you, even though I have absolute faith that there is a life beyond this mortal coil still feels good to get some affirmation. Please keep on sharing those stories and posting those episodes. I enjoy listening to you every day, and I wish you and Robin all the best. Many blessings to you both. Kim, thank you. You don't have to apologize for sending me a long story. I like the long stories. I usually start fireside frights and end fireside frights with a longer story. You might want to rewrite this, though, and send it to me again a little closer to Christmas. Because this really is a great Christmas tale, except for that last part with that light bulb. It makes me wonder why you think it's not your dad this time, though. Is it because there wasn't a replacement bulb? Like if it was your dad, do you think maybe he would have brought a replacement bulb for you to put into the lamp? But since it's just the bulb that was missing, you think maybe there's something else up? It could be just a feeling. I don't know. It sounds like you and your dad were really, really close. I don't know if I should say that I hope you have more years with him this way or not. Does this mean that he's restless here, or is he somehow reaching down from heaven and helping you out in some way? I don't know. But it's a great story. It's interesting that you share this. There was somebody on YouTube that I was talking to, and she was commenting on one of my videos. It may have been you. I don't remember the woman's name, and I'm sorry if this was you, and I just don't remember. But she was having visits from her dad over the years as well. But then her mother started to fail in health. And once her mother passed away, or came close to pass away, I don't know if she's still with us or not, but she really feels like her dad finally did visit for the last time. So I told her, I hope that means that he's at rest in heaven now. So anyway, Kim, thank you very much. I really appreciate your story. This one comes from Diane. She says, my family and I were driving home from a long road trip vacation. We went from northern California through Oregon to Seattle, Washington. Before I continue on, I'm going to be in Oregon in March, actually, at Seaside, Oregon. I'm going to be there for a conference. So if you guys want to check it out, you can find that on the road trip page. Anyway, she continues, for the journey back, my husband and I decided we would stop only once and spend one night at a hotel at the midpoint, which happened to be Ashland, Oregon. We drove all day and much of the night, and we finally reached the town around 4am. Needless to say, my husband and I were very tired and eager to find the hotel. We had to drive through a residential neighborhood to get to the hotel. The navigation told my husband to make a left at a small intersection in one of the neighborhoods. As he was making the turn, our headlights cast light on a very strange sight. On my right, on the sidewalk, I saw an extremely tall, maybe 6'9", extremely skinny old man.  He basically looked all white, especially with our headlights on him. He looked at us from the sidewalk as the headlights shown on him. I said to my husband, what a strange-looking man. My husband was distracted with the navigation map and was busy making the turn and didn't seem to notice him. The next morning I asked him if he saw that super tall old guy in all white, and he said no. That's when I realized the details of what I saw did not make any sense. It had been 4am when we arrived, super chilly about 40-ish degrees, and an extremely tall and thin elderly man was taking a walk in a tank top and shorts. He had no jacket, I could see his long, lanky, bony arms. The other weird thing was my husband did not see him even though he was hard to miss. He had been illuminated by our headlights and appeared clear, real and very vivid to me. To this day, I wonder if I saw an actual person or something else. Thank you, signed Diane. Wow, Diane, I'm going to take a shot in the dark at this one and give you a couple of options, I think. First, I'm going to go ahead and say that it was a real thing, and your husband just missed it because, as you mentioned, he was taking care of navigation, he was in the middle of a turn. You don't want to take your eyes off of the road and what you're doing at that point. That happens to us a lot when we're in the weird darkness SUV, driving around, and Robin will see something on the side going, oh, look at that, they've got a big foot statue. Oh, look over there, there's this thing and that thing. And by the time she points it out, we're already past it. And so I can't see it. I'm too busy in the driver's seat making sure that we're safe. So that could be why your husband didn't see it. I wouldn't really read too much into that. So now we've got to take care of that image of the old man. My first thought is somebody who is suffering from dementia and maybe got out of his house or somehow left a retirement home in the middle of the night. And because he has dementia, he didn't think to put his clothes on, he didn't think to put on a coat or anything, he just started walking for whatever reason was in his mind, however irrational that would be. That would be my first guess. My second guess is still a real man, but not necessarily, well, you know, you know what, I take it back. There's only that one explanation that I can come up with. I was about to say that the second explanation could be that he just happens to live up north and doesn't mind the cold. But still, even then, the reason I say that is we're here in Northern Illinois, we're almost in Wisconsin. And it amazes us how many times we will go out driving like we're going out to eat somewhere. And we've got coats on, getting ready to go. And we will see somebody at a gas station getting gas in their vehicle who's wearing a tank top and shorts. And like you said here, it was like 40-something degrees, people will do that here when it's in the teens. It's just, they're so used to the cold here, it just doesn't bother them. And they figure, ah, we're only going to be outside a couple minutes, no big deal. Yeah, I'm not going to get frostbite that soon or whatever it is. I don't understand the rationale. I do understand getting used to the cold because I'm a lot more used to it now than I was when we first moved here in 2004. We originally came from the Kansas City area, but you're still not going to find somebody at the gas station filling up their tank or whatever, only in a t-shirt and underwear. So I think maybe my first explanation is probably the best, assuming that it actually did happen and that it was a real person, not some strange entity or paranormal event. And if that was the case, I had no idea what it would be, Diane, but I could totally visualize that when you were talking about it. You did a great job explaining it and describing it, so I appreciate that. Thank you. Okay, this next one comes from Janine. She says, hi, Darren. Okay, first, I want to tell you I love your podcast. It's been so great to listen to at home, in the car, at work. I'm in the office by myself on the weekends most of the time, so I'm really glad that I have you in the weirdo community to keep me company. Well, before we go any further, Janine, you're very welcome. It's really nice to know that we're keeping you... I'm sorry, not Janine, Janie. I apologize, Janie. It's nice to know that I'm keeping you company at work, especially if you're there alone. That could get monotonous for some people. I'm an introvert, and so I would probably be fine working all day, but if I was in the same place every weekend by myself, nobody to talk to, I think it would get boringly redundant after a while. In fact, I used to work at a country music radio station in Kansas City on Saturday mornings. If you're in Kansas City, it's KFKF, 94.1 FM. Long time ago that I was there, but I was the morning guy on Saturday mornings. I had to be there at 6 a.m. and I was there by myself until, I think it was 10 or 11, and at first it was great, because I mean, I had something to do. I was there talking on the air, so at least I was talking to somebody. They weren't talking back, but I was still talking to somebody, but after a few weeks of that, it really did get kind of monotonous and boring, even though I loved my job and I still love radio. I'm still doing it with the Weird Darkness radio show. I love radio, but even then, and working at one of the top stations in Kansas City, they tell me that I actually had the number one show in Kansas City for that time slot, which amazes me, because I was bored out of my skull, but I still did the show prep and did my best while I was there. So yeah, all of that to say, Janie, I'm glad that we keep you entertained and keep you company while you're at work by yourself. Okay, moving on with her letter, she says, all right, so here's my story. About 10 years ago, I was new to the single mom life. I was just getting used to sleeping in the bedroom by myself. Well, sort of. My two-year-old daughter would join me in my bed occasionally. On this particular night, she had fallen asleep on the right side of my bed, which was next to the wall. I was on the left. After drifting off to sleep, I was awakened in the middle of the night, but by what felt like a hand on my throat. I opened my eyes and realized I couldn't move. I never suffered from sleep paralysis before, although I had heard of it. It was at that point I saw a dark figure standing in the doorway. I got the impression that it was a man, even though all I could see was a silhouette. The figure looked like it was wearing a cape or long coat and flat, brimmed hat. I was struck with terror. I tried so hard to move. I wanted to sit up, scream, kick, something. It seemed like the harder I tried to yell, the harder it was to breathe. After what seemed like forever, I finally regained control of my fingertips. As crazy as it sounds, that was enough. The way that my arm, my left arm was positioned, I could reach my neck and I began scratching it in an attempt to make whatever was squeezing my neck let me go. I guess that was enough to break whatever spell I was under because all of a sudden, I was able to move. I gasped for air and grabbed my neck. What I felt both relieved and puzzled me. It was my daughter's tiny arm laid over my neck. I looked back to the door where the man had been. No one there. My door was standing open, haul light still on, but no shadows or silhouettes. Now logically, I know my daughter's arm was probably restricting my breathing and maybe the fear caused my mind to fill in the blanks. Seeing that man was not something I think I would make up. Thoughts? Since that night, I have had a handful of paralysis episodes. Nothing that intense, thank goodness, but it's always terrifying. Okay, she goes on and talks about the house that she grew up in, but before we get into that, let's talk about your sleep paralysis, Janie. That sounds like a typical sleep paralysis incident. Almost every time it happens, somebody gets the feeling obviously sleep paralysis means you can't move, so that's obviously part of every person's story. Some people think that there's somebody on top of them keeping them from breathing, giving them that heavy chest feeling, maybe pushing down on their chest, maybe choking them, or they feel somebody else is in the room with them, something like an evil presence. And you had sort of a combination of both on that. I'm glad it hasn't happened to you like that again since then because I had it happen. It is the scariest thing that I've ever experienced, and I don't want to ever go through it again. I have had slight sleep paralysis after that, but nothing with an evil feel all that. And I knew when it was happening on the second time. When it happened to me again, I knew what it was that was happening, and I knew just write it out, and I'll eventually get out of it, and I did. But that first time felt so, so evil. That's why I personally, there's a lot of debate about this, a lot of conjecture, but I personally believe that in not in all cases, but in some cases, sleep paralysis does have a demonic influence. And the you saw the shadow with a hat in coat makes me wonder if you saw the infamous hat man, the shadow person type of entity, whether the hat man is a shadow person or not. That's also something that people argue about go back and forth with. But regardless, whenever somebody sees the hat man, it's almost always evil. There's always a malevolent feeling. When people see shadow people, sometimes they do feel evil.  Sometimes they don't bother you at all. You just kind of glance at them and say, oh, hello there.  Like some people with ghosts, I guess. You know, some ghosts are okay. Other ghosts terrify you. It just depends on the ghost, I guess. But when it's the hat man, there is never been an incident that I've heard of that wasn't malevolent in some way. And obviously, that's what you felt in your situation. That's why I believe that in some cases sleep paralysis is there is a demonic aspect to it. I'm not saying it's a demon causing it.  And also another reason that I think that is, unlike yours, your story, most stories that, at least the ones that have been sent to me, the only way people break out of that when it comes to sleep paralysis and having the demonic presence on top of them, the only way they get out of it is by calling out to God or Jesus or Christ for help to save them. And they can't do it audibly because, of course, they're still in sleep paralysis. But in their minds, they are screaming, Jesus, Jesus, please help me. Please save me. But yours, at least in your accounting of it, you don't do that. You don't say that. You're grabbing your neck with your fingers that you finally got control of and got out of it. So you're the first incident that I've heard that got out of their sleep paralysis without calling upon God, but having the evil aspect to it. So I'm very happy that you got out of it, Janie. I'm really, really happy. So you asked for my thoughts. So there you go. All right. Now, moving on with the rest of Janie's email, she says, the house I grew up in. Backstory, the home that occurred in was a double-wide trailer that my parents purchased new when I was 13. My grandpa had given my mother a plot of land down the road from him for us to live on. It was right beside the cemetery, but I'm comfortable with that. It should be noted that the caretaker told mom and dad not to dig up next to the fence because the fence wasn't always there. The house sat no more than 10 feet from that fence. Take that as you will. Growing up, my older sister, younger sister and brother lived there in addition to my parents and I. We had a miniature American Eskimo spits named Mitzi. With all that said, there were a few things in that home that made my siblings and I wonder if the house had more occupants than we could see. Here are just a few instances. 1. There was a bathroom off of the utility room. Every time one of us would try to go in there, the door would be locked. It was a basic lock that you twisted to lock and unlock. I came out of that room once and checked to see that it was not locked, only to grab a trash bag and return to find the door locked. This happened to our parents too. 2. In the den, which was just beyond the utility room, our pup Mitzi would randomly look into the corner and bark. She was a very intelligent dog. She would bark if a stranger came to the door, but wasn't one of those dogs that just would bark for no reason. We never did find out what she was seeing in that corner. 3. The craziest thing I ever saw was a man standing in the living room. My brother, sister and I were cleaning up after supper when I saw him. It was just a glimpse and lasted only seconds, but it was enough for me to see that he was wearing overalls and a cap. Actually, as I turned around in my mind, it was my brother. However, as I turned and saw my brother on my other side, the realization set in that there shouldn't be anyone in that room. I did a double take and he was gone, so I decided to keep it to myself. Years later, it would come up in conversation with my mother. She had her own story about saying a man in overalls with a cap in that house. Neither of us knew about the other's story until then. 4. Other smaller things happened, like my brother and sister both being smacked at the same time while in different rooms by unseen hands, random knocks on the walls, hearing voices just out of hearing range, kind of like a radio playing in the next room, etc. I've heard the teenagers can project their emotions and almost cause a poltergeist-like haunting. I don't know that there's any truth to that, but it is interesting that my younger sister, brother and I were all teens at the time of these encounters. I'll have to write again about the things that my daughter experienced as she got older. Hope y'all can understand all of that. I'm no professional writer. Thank you for sharing my experience, Darren. Love your show and really enjoy fireside frights. Also, thank you for all you do in regards to mental health. It runs deep in my family and with so many friends. Thanks again, Janie. Well, thank you, Janie. I appreciate you sending the email. I love that you sharing your life with us here. And the second part of that, the one thing that really kind of jumped out at me is your dog barking at the corner. I think every single person that has a pet probably has had that type of experience. At least people with dogs and cats. They'll stop, they'll be running through the house and suddenly they'll stop and suddenly like look in one particular direction. And sometimes it's just because they're so revved up and they just need to take a break. I've heard it like crossed wires in their brain from a pet psychologist if they're like that wired. But when they stop in the same place and they're always looking at the same place all the time, you got to wonder what is going on there. And I think we've all had that experience. And yeah, the poltergeist thing, it does sound very much like you could have had the poltergeist idea. Now, not the man in the overalls and cap. That would be an actual ghost, I think. But the being slapped at the same time, the random knocks on the walls, that kind of stuff, hearing the voices, that I think could very well be poltergeist activity. And if what you share in the future is similar to that with your daughter growing up and hitting those teen years around puberty, that very well could be the case. Maybe your family is just that much more susceptible to poltergeist activity, I don't know. Let's see, our next one comes from David. He says, So, since you enjoyed my email a few months ago, I decided to share some shorter anecdotes from me and my family that have ghosts or demons or what have you in them. And yes, two different phenomena. So, unironically, we'll start with my brother, 1968, yelling, Get the blank out! But this was when he was in a college dorm room down south. He was laid up with a broken leg that afternoon, on the bed. It was dim but not dark with the sunlight from the windows. Wide awake and bored out of his mind, he lay there and spied a man looking at him. He could describe this person down to the cut of his hair and the scar on his cheek. Shocked, 1968, he's calling his brother 1968, by the way, in case you wondered why I'm saying that year. Instead of saying his brother's name, he's just using the year. Shocked, 1968, wanted to know who this man was. In response, the man just laughed at him, hence the expletive. Well, in came the roommate who ran right through the man and flicked on the light. The man was gone. Four decades later, this encounter haunts my brothers. Pardoned upon. Let me get something straight. The Christian Bible, any denomination, any translation, is clear. Human ghosts are very real. Whether those who are damned, those who are in heaven, and just visiting, and the most common, those on the way to heaven manifest. It's just in the last couple hundred years that Protestant or non-denominational pastors have perpetrated the myth that human spirits can't happen, or the myth that there is no purgatory on the way to heaven. Ignore your preacher, look in the Bible. All right, let me, oh man, this is a Church of the Undead episode, isn't it? Okay. David, I completely disagree with you. In fact, this coming week, this coming weekend, Church of the Undead, this coming Sunday, actually touches on what you just said there, regarding purgatory. Purgatory is not biblical. I don't know where you're getting that, unless you're getting it from a Catholic Bible, because I know the Catholic Bible is different than everybody else's. Maybe that's where you're getting it. I don't see where you find ghosts in the Bible. I'm not saying that they don't exist. I know that people in the Bible believed ghosts existed. That's why Peter, when he saw Jesus walking on the water, and at first thought that he was a ghost. But I don't see anywhere in the Bible where you're saying that those who've been damned, or those who are in heaven, that can visit, and stuff like that. I don't see that in the Bible. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. What you're saying, though, is that it's in the Christian Bible and I don't see it there. There's a lot of things that we believe in that aren't in the Christian Bible. I believe that Apple Jolly Ranchers are really good, but there's no Jolly Ranchers in the Bible. What I'm saying is there are things that we can believe and know that aren't in the Bible, but you're specifically saying that it is in the Bible. You need to point that out to me, because I do not see that. Anyway, I had to put that in there because that is not my thoughts. That is David's thoughts, and I just wanted to make that clear. Okay, so moving on. Anyway, once or twice I've been told to get the blank out by spirits. I don't find this funny, though I admit it seems to be a pattern in my stories that I share with you. In my late 20s, I went on a day trip with my folks and a nephew to New Pulse, New York, and the Huguenot Street historical attraction. That was so moving I went back a few times, both for historical reasons and, well, ghost stories. They actually have a separate Halloween tour where the local college drama club reenacts and tells the many ghost stories on the street, but I digress. It's a block of houses maintained in period style from circa 1650 to 1930. Each one a time capsule of life in Central New York State. It was one, the Lefevre House, one of I'll never forget. Circa 1800 style, a set of paintings of three family members in the very wooden main room. Two parents that looked far too old to have a 20-year-old and a daughter all over dressed. As the tour guide droned on, there weren't eight of us listening. One row and nothing behind me but a few feet and then a wall. But suddenly someone was behind me, and they wanted me out in no uncertain terms. They just weren't visible or audible and I quietly made for the door. On the way from that house to the next on that nice late summer day, I asked the tour guide if the house we had just left was haunted and he said, probably they all had stories. He then grinned. The next house is one that a fellow tour guide refuses to go in. A cold chill went down my spine. I returned to that tour and no one chased me out the next time, but I did hear the story of the three paintings. They had tried to hang the painting of the daughter upstairs, as her face troubled many guests, but she kept falling off the nail. Scrawled on the back was a note from the artist saying, I did my best. You see, the parents had commissioned that painting of their barely grown daughter the day after she died and two days before she was buried. I defy you to look at that face and not feel terrified. Art Bell did more to normalize belief in ghosts than anyone, but he never quite understood that ghosts need energy to manifest, hence the cold spots. Also, some hauntings are more like a reenactment or a natural recording of what happened, nor not the actual spirits who would otherwise be a haunting. I wish some of the ones I've encountered had been residual, but they just aren't. I'll stop here just for a moment. David, I agree with you on that one. Some hauntings are like a reenactment, a natural recording of what happened. In fact, I think a lot of them are that, and at which point, I don't know if you can even call them spirits. As you say, they're not really spirits, but it's more of a recording. I wouldn't consider those ghosts, although people call them ghosts, but I think it's just something that science has yet to explain. There's a phenomenon going on there. Maybe it's a slightly different dimension or something like that. There's a loop in time that takes place there, and we're seeing it over and over and over again, and we interpret that as a haunting. So, I agree. I think something like that does happen. Continuing on with David's email. As my dad's family is Italian, and his mother's Sicilian, we called her Nana, which is basically grandma. Anyway, she passed in 1997 in the hospital at the age of 98. After the house went up in flames, there was one silver lining. There was for a brief time a pleasant presence. Things being moved, curtains surprising us. Doors being found open. Everyone from 1965 to my eldest daughter who claims to have seen a full-bodied apparition who had passed five years before she was born. In fact, one day my dad was worried about his stray cat. She'd gone missing. I told him my kid had seen his mother haunting us, and playfully he said, Okay, mom, find the cat. The cat was on the front porch the next morning. I love your show, Darren. You have the perfect voice for this job. So in my 20s, I was thoroughly curious about the paranormal. I guess that never went away. Across the town square in Fairfield, Connecticut, I tempt in a bank building that was on its 15th or 16th ownership, and I was doing filing in the dark and dusty unfinished basement just around the corner from the well-lit and carpeted break room and meeting room. I saw things move. Shadow people. Each day I was there. I asked over lunch, and I was told specifically that a temp was doing the filing because no permanent employee would go in the unfinished basement. Well, there you go, Dave. Yeah, I think that one pretty much explains itself. He continued on. He says, Never touch a Ouija board. No good could come of it. This has been your PSA. So I left tempting at work at a call center of the local cable provider and its many-layered parking garage. The top west level always creeped me out, and I never parked there, even in broad daylight. I had a co-worker who claimed to know about the paranormal, and when I got out of work on a Sunday, I drove up to the nearly empty level and called him. I said I felt, despite the warm weather, that one corner was cold. Then I heard it clear as day in my head. Get the blank out, I told him. Get out of there now! I broke every speed limit going home. I locked the house door and set the alarm. Yes, I still lived with my parents. That night the alarm went off. No one knew why. All the doors were locked. There was no wind. But something had pressed the back door in with great force. The door nearest where I parked and had not been able to push the door open as if something or someone stronger had pushed back keeping the door shut. It was as if something had followed me home and tried to get in, but Nana had kept it out. Old lady was keeping her favorite grandson safe six years after she died. I remember a small child, as a small child, seeing angels dancing on the altar at mass, as if we had transcended time and space. Right out of the Bible. I know, but I couldn't read yet. Well, there you go, David. I think you just answered my question. You went to mass, so you are Catholic, so you're probably getting your purgatory thing from the Catholic Bible. Moving on, I adopted my eldest when she was six after marrying her mom. She spent the years before that living in her aunt's farmhouse. For years, the little one would giggle at jokes that she was being told and just say, that's papa when asked. No adult could see this kindly old man who made her laugh. This went on three full years until one day she pointed to an airplane out of the blue and said, papa is leaving and never mentioned him again. From four years old, she talked about deformed children who came from the attic and played with her. Always nice to her, but this story did creep my ex-wife and her sister out. Finally, there was the girl in the barn who had been naughty and was tied up. It was an empty hayloft. No adult saw anything, but my soon-to-be adopted daughter was adamant about distressed adolescents in the barn up there, she said. So I did an amateur cleansing and she watched the entity escape. Later, as I mentioned, she saw my grandmother in my father's house. She also saw an odd old lady in at least one apartment and all of this is not including what I mentioned in my previous email that you read a few months ago. My eldest, though not biologically mine, is like me, sensitive and finds that she often has to close herself off to the paranormal or she'd see more. She's avoided apartments in her young adulthood because what she senses there. I also want to note that none of these entities I've described in this email were ever threatening to her, just unnerving. I wish I found true crime more interesting. You do a good job of almost making me interested in it. Okay, so eleven years. I love these side thoughts. Just get out of nowhere, David. There's one sentence of a side thought and then back to your story. Okay, so eleven years I relocated to South Dakota at my former wife's demand. I visited the whole two famous haunted locations in Sioux Falls. My eldest and I found nothing interesting when we went to the Amidon Memorial, but that's a residual haunting and we were not there on the right day. Residual hauntings often have a schedule by time or weather or barometer and that's all I have to say about that. I was the haunted elevator in the Washington Pavilion and yes, I felt as if there was one more person riding with us and we couldn't see the fallen construction worker, but I can't prove it. So beyond what I've mentioned in the past, I did see a shadowy man in a hat in my bathroom mirror once. I don't think it was Heidi Hollis's hat, man. I'm pretty sure that he was a farmer who worked that land long before my apartment complex was built. Who the old lady was that peeked around corners and in on my new baby, only to be gone when you did your double take or stepped back to look in the room upon you just passed, is anyone's guess. Also, that baby, my youngest, used to be fascinated by whoever was in the corner entertaining her. At ten years old, she has no recollection of this now. I want to thank you for recommending that counseling service. I've reached out to them. My brothers, I get another line just out of nowhere. This is a stream of consciousness email. I love it, David. And you're very welcome for that counseling service, whichever one it is that you found. My brothers had a friend who died at 19 drinking in the early morning and getting behind the wheel of the car. Suffice it to say that R was practically a member of the family. He worked in my dad's restaurant as a teenager. As they were twelve and ten years older than me, I didn't know him well. I knew his family. I grew up with his little brother because he was the only other 1978 boy in the neighborhood, but that's neither here nor there. I often made pizza boxes in the storage attic of that restaurant. The first restaurant, not the one mentioned above. I did stock and clean and organize up there. 95% of the time it was no big deal. When the time I was like 13 instead of household chores, I washed restaurant dishes and made pizza boxes for spending money. But every so often I'd just know that I was not alone in the attic or someone or something was over there or over yonder in the attic. Sometimes if he or she or whatever was right in the middle and I would feel him looking at me and just stay downstairs and find some corner or wall or fridge to scrub. As a teenager, I had some amazing work ethic. Various employees over the years joked the attic was haunted, not the restaurant, like the other, just the attic. My dad left the business for a while and leased the building. I was not in there for like seven or eight years, and by then I'd grown up. Dad's return to the restaurant industry was a spectacular failure. Fast forward 15 years, we had a local ghost hunter give a talk to bring in business. A work friend, an older woman brought in a friend she'd never introduced my then wife, my brother, or I to hear the talk. The woman claimed to be a clairvoyant. As I mixed her drink, I tried not to chuckle. Then when I served it, she very nearly gave me a heart attack. This place has one ghost, doesn't it? I almost spilled her vodka tonic. In the attic, she asked before I could answer. Um, yeah, I put the drink down. His name is R. She got the name, the diminutive, just right. Does that mean anything to you or your brother in the kitchen? I didn't sleep that night. Truthfully, the man who gave the talk in the last segment was a true believer in alien UFOs, and you bring a lot of content, Darren, but I'm forever skeptical that UFOs are alien. I want some of them to be. I believe there's an intelligent life in the universe in many places, but until a gray rings the doorbell and shakes my hand, I'll look for simpler explanations for sittings around our world or for sightings around our world. All right, well, I'll comment on that before we continue on with your email. When it comes to the UFOs, I tend to believe that they're not extraterrestrial. I think they are probably one of two things. They are either interdimensional, coming from a side dimension to ours, or they are fallen angels, demonic in nature. And I have no idea which one has more credence or if any of them have or if either has any credence at all. The only reason that I say that they're not extraterrestrial or that I don't believe they are extraterrestrial is simply because it would be so difficult to make that kind of trip from even the nearest star that could possibly have a planet with life on it. It would take so, so long. It would have to be multi-generations of a trip. You'd have to have so, you'd have to, you'd be starting and you'd have your grandson and then your great grandson and your great, great grandson and it would just go on and on and on until you finally got to Earth. And that just, that seems so impractical, plus the amount of power it would take to get up to that speed. They had done studies on it. For us to get to the speed of light would take more fuel than we could lift to get off the ground. So, they granted, they were probably using a completely different kind of fuel. They wouldn't be using fossil fuels to get here. But all I'm saying is they've shown it'd be so difficult to reach the speed of light just because of the amount of energy that it would take and then the length of time it would take and just to get here and find out that we're people who have a hard time even getting along with each other. So, why would they stick around if they did get here? They'd probably leave saying, ah, no, that planet's not worth messing with. Yeah, that's just trouble waiting to happen. So, that's why I think that aliens, UFOs, stuff like that, aside from the ones that can be explained, those that are not explained or can't be explained, possibly are either side-dimensional, multi-dimensional or whatever, or they are like fallen angels, like demons, something like that. Okay, moving on with Dave's email. I don't normally take that many breaks during somebody's email, but he keeps coming up with these side ideas and I just got a comment on them. The closest thing I had to a cryptic encounter was more than 37 years ago. I believe in cryptids. Well, many cryptids, maybe not all, but I avoid places they are reported. You won't catch me near Bigfoot sightings or the Jersey Devil, but I saw a seven-foot-tall lizard-headed man looking in the window at me once. My mom won't talk about it, but she added better curtains the next day. Sorry, it's not an exciting footnote. Doctor Who Talked About Perception Filters. Why You Forget You Saw the Tardis. You don't want to know you saw it. Obviously, that's fiction, but I don't know sometimes.  He's in South Carolina now, and I'm not sure the house is still there on the rather large and nice block of land, but it was an oddly configured house and had a large front yard. It had a rocky driveway and cul-de-sac. There was a side strip of a small forestry area, a foresty area, and then a back foresty area that butted into someone else's foresty area and there as little hill or mound with bushes and weeds with a small stone fence facing the narrow strip of backyard to the house where there was a deck. Between the hill and the smaller strip of forestry area, there was a little shed. I mowed the lawn, I raked the leaves, I never went on the hill, I never went behind the shed. I know I was terrified of going behind that shed. Till the day he sold us that house, I never set foot on the hill or went behind the shed. In fact, the greenery on the hill and overgrown grass behind the shed never got maintained, and I asked him about it recently. Now, my cousin is not a believer in, well, anything, but he confirmed that he owned a couple hundred yards of hill and yard behind the line of that wall and the shed, and he never walked it, never maintained it, and after buying the house, never even set foot on it. He couldn't give a reason. He and his wife just ignored it and filed it under out of sight out of mind. Why would a homeowner, family, and guests ignore that much unobstructed land? He had kids that never played on it, professional lawn care when he got sick and always ignored it, like you wanted to not know that it was there. I m sorry I keep using the year my siblings were born instead of their names. I know you hate that, but my sister was insistent. I could not share her stories with any more identifying factors, and I m consistent. That s okay, David, we understand. As long as you explained it, I understand. Riverside Avenue goes from Route 1 in the center of Westport, Connecticut to the train station. You could just about see the house I grew up in if you stopped at the light on Treadwell Avenue. I walked it to the deli by the bridge or the other direction of the church. My middle school was on that road. The post office was on that road.  To get to the train station, through the post office or the video store I worked at in college, you drive under the interstate overpass. There are buildings and even some residences on both sides, but it is after all a long river. Driving to the train, you pass several lights and are stopped in traffic at one before the bridge, you ll pass a building on the right. When I lived there, if you could have told me the name of the closest of the closed restaurant on the building, I would have given you all the money in my pockets. Invariably, I got the same question. Is there a building there? This anomaly caused Edward Sanderson to write not one but two scary stories, but that s fiction. I m telling you, I walk or drive past that structure no less than three or four thousand times. I actually remember crossing the street to walk on the other side more than once without thinking about why. I remember one day in my 20s, stuck in traffic, seeing the building and looking away thinking, oh, someone went out of business. And then I forgot about it. In fact, several restaurants went out of business. It was right there in plain sight, but people treated it like it was out of sight out of mind and several fancy bistros went under fast and it went alone. I mentioned to several people who passed it daily and they all thought the whole lot was empty. It was only after seven or eight tries that I remembered it and researched it. There is no story, just failed businesses. So again, I tell you, I grew up in a town of 22,000 people, now almost 28,000. Many of them commuters who used that train station. And yet to most of them, including my parents, siblings and former wife, the building that stood for decades at 580 Riverside Avenue before mercifully being torn down just didn t exist. I don t know why this building, why this building, an impressive structure of multi-stories was so easily forgotten. But it s one of those memory holes you just can t explain. Memory holes may be a whole episode of Weird Darkness, this weird cultural phenomenon that people just ignore something they all experienced and all of them saw or what have you. Well, before I continue with your email, David, that almost sounds like it be a Mandela effect. Maybe there was something there that happened.  He had undiagnosed bipolar and depression. So that leads me to another PSA. Do not let anything come between you and your doctor prescribed medication. Go to the Hope in the Darkness page and get help. In fact, if you re depressed, pause the podcast and go to that page right now. Don t let the depression beat you. Don t. You are worth more than that. My mom and I are both on our proper medication, and she s now older than grandpa ever was. Now remember, he was a practicing Roman Catholic of the pre-Vatican II days. In his worldview, suicide meant hell. Of course, the Catholic Church officially published teaching in 1981 that states the mentally ill are not necessarily morally culpable and recommends getting counseling and not committing suicide. But since 1981, suicides are buried in Catholic cemeteries with complete funerals. Their souls are commended to God s mercy. Of course, my parents weren t Catholic when I became Catholic when I was 22. The spring of my 22nd year, I began to read about plenary indulgencies and read the Bible cover to cover in several translations. I also picked up some Greek, Hebrew, and more Latin along the way. Then one glorious night after fasting and prayer, completely by surprise, I saw my grandfather, and he was not happy. He wasn t sad. He wasn t angry. He actually smiled at me and said, Tell your mother I love her very much. I just knew he was fine. That story gives my mom a lot of comfort. I later discovered the Saint Gertrude prayer, not recommended, but not condemned, and allegedly, through her intercession, God will reveal to you how long you will live. I got the number 87, seven years older than the grandfather above, and five years younger than my paternal grandfather. I don t necessarily put much stock in private revelation, but when my youngest child was on the way, I took a test at the OB s office for life expectancy, and they came up with at least 87 years. Amazing how the same number appeared. Take from that what you will. I m almost 45 and no longer congregate, and I d rather not think of that. Look, I related these factual tales as best as I could. They are either first hand or second hand from people I believe to be truthful. You can take what you like from them. My mind can t debunk them, so I believe them. Maybe someday I ll share a third hand, so I collect it over the years. But for now, I feel that one degree of separation is the maximum I can allow and still believe the story. I have a footnote for the attic story. Working in the restaurants the day after R died and the accident was over a thousand miles away, he heard his dead friend call his name more than once. Without the rest of the story, I would just chalk that up to grief, but I don t know about the rest. Okay, that s the end of Dave. What a long email. You re just gracious, Dave. You probably had a hand cramp after doing all of that. I know that I ve got a scratchy throat, so let me take a sip of something here real quick before I continue. Okay. Well, David, you mentioned something there towards the end. Oh, the St. Gertrude Prayer. That s something else that I don t believe in. That s something that s one of the reasons that I left. I don t mean to be bashing the Catholic Church. Please don t take it that way. It s probably coming out that way. I don t mean for it to. I actually was born and raised in the Catholic Church. I left before confirmation, which takes place, I think around the age of 13, something like that, 13 to 14. It s kind of the Catholic s way of saying you re an adult and you re committing your life to the Catholic Church. I just wouldn t do it. I didn t feel right about it. Even though I didn t understand why at the time, the reason I never went back to the Catholic Church is because I just disagreed with some of the things that they taught, and there s going to be something in every denomination that you have problems with. I m not picking on the Catholics. The Southern Baptists have things they believe, and Nazarenes have things they believe, Presbyterians. Everybody has something that they believe, and not everybody believes it. It s all secondary issues anyway. The main issue is you believe in Jesus, that He died for your sins, rose three days later, conquering death, went to heaven, and has a place for you in heaven. You give your life to Him. He s your Lord and Savior. Anything after that is just secondary and it s not a salvation issue. But I never understood the whole praying to saints thing at all. I know a lot of people will pray to Mary.  The Lord is with thee. And then there are other prayers for particular saints, like you mentioned here, the St. Gertrude Prayer. I don t understand why you would go to a saint anyway if you could just go straight to God. That s the whole reason that Jesus came to earth was so we could go straight to Him. So the whole idea of going to a saint first to be like the middleman between you and God just doesn t make any sense to me. And if He does use saints for some reason in order to do things down here, I don t know why He would. He s got these angels. I don t think that s what we don t think that s what we re created for. But anyway, even if He did, He d be able to give them the assignments.  It s not like the movie, It s a Wonderful Life. Okay? Even in that film, everybody s praying to God. But it s not like the angels all gather together in a wonderful life at the beginning and say, Okay, whose turn is it? Let s go down there and let s see how it s going to work. I just can t imagine that it works that way at all because those would be saints. Those are not angels. Clarence is not... I mean, in the movie, he s an angel, but he actually was a human who died and went to heaven. We don t become angels. We re saints forever. We re humans. We re men and women for the rest of eternity. That s just who we are. Angels were a completely separate being. It s like dogs and cats. One s never going to turn into the other. It just doesn t work that way. Angels were something completely different. So, I m getting off on the tangent. I m sorry. I will move on. All right, let s see here. We ll go to Trason. I think that s how we pronounce your name. If I m pronouncing that incorrectly, I apologize. But Trason says, Was my family cursed, haunted, or was it just the house? I ve been trying to figure this out for most of my life. But in the last four or five years, I ve started truly investigating the situation in an attempt to answer the question once and for all. Is my family cursed, haunted, or was it just the house I grew up in? To keep things simple, I ll start by telling you that my paternal great-grandfather was not a nice man. He was angry and actually went to prison for a year for attempted murder but was let out of prison on a technicality. The dogs that they had track him weren t state certified yet. That s what heck of a technicality, dang. It would be less than a decade later when he was out plowing a field and a summer storm blew in, lightning struck him and the team of mules and killed them all. The local townspeople would not help my great-grandmother retrieve the body because, as previously stated, he was not well-liked. Also, he was considered a bad omen that he had been killed by lightning. So my great-grandmother and my grandfather retrieved him and brought him on a flatbed truck to the coroner in the next town over. One weird incident and we would consider it a fluke. But we re going to move forward several years. My grandfather settled, married with six children, three girls, three boys. He and my grandmother decided to build a house. Of course, they were poor people in rural Arkansas, so they did what they had to do. They took a job tearing down an old hotel in town and recycled whatever materials they could into building their own house. The property itself is another story. Another house once stood on it, and the story we ve been told is that the man who lived in the house hanged himself. The townspeople didn t feel that it would be right for anyone else to live in that house, so they burned it, with all his belongings still inside. I know at least part of this story is true because I ve actually dug up remnants from the old house through the years. Back to the house itself. They built this little house out of pieces of an old motel and other scavenged lumber, so while the house was technically a new construction, the pieces that made it up already had years of history soaked into the wood. My oldest uncle came home one winter night around seven. It was dark, and as he pulled into the driveway, he noticed his youngest sister around six at the time sitting on the peak of the roof.  Only to find her sitting beside his mom on the couch watching TV. He convinced himself he had imagined the entire thing. A few more years go by, and my father and two aunts are out with friends or watching a movie depending on who is telling you the story. The time was between 11 and midnight, again depending on your narrator. They pull into the driveway and the kitchen curtains pull aside, and the three distinctly see a face for an instant before the curtain drops back into place.  The next day they re all chatting and one of them asks my grandmother why she was up when they came in last night. She replies, I wasn t up when you came in, we went to bed at 9, I didn t get up until this morning. In 1981 my youngest aunt was very ill, her fever kept rising and doctors couldn t find the cause. Finally, one fateful night my grandmother calls my dad and asks him to drive them to the children s hospital in Little Rock. Less than half way there they come upon a roadblock. They re advised the main highway s been closed and they ll have to take an alternate route. It cost them about an hour and a half of drive time. Later they d find out that a Titan II missile had exploded and the highway was shut down as authorities frantically searched for the warhead that had blown off the missile. They arrived at the children s hospital and the doctors advised that it was time to call the family in. Another of my uncles during this time has a dream. Lying in his car in the parking lot he dreams that he lays his hands on her forehead and she immediately wakes up and is healed. He figures anything is worth a try at this point, so he runs into the hospital, jumps in an elevator and for the first time in his life faints. He wakes up with doctors placing him in a wheelchair and his wife telling him that my aunt has passed away. Christmas was always a big deal in our family. A Christmas Eve everybody would gather at my grandparents house, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my grandmother s mother. Then Christmas day would be a day of laughter, relaxation, and feasting. One year another of my aunts and her husband were sleeping in the living room, which was directly across from the bedroom where my great-grandmother was sleeping. She was in her upper 80s, so when they heard her get up and make her way toward the kitchen, they kept an ear open, wanting to make sure that she didn t fall and hurt herself. They heard a cabinet door open and shut, then footsteps coming back down the hallway. My uncle raised up to watch her go back into the bedroom, except no one walked by. It was only the footsteps, straight down the hallway and into the bedroom across the hall, but with no one accompanying them. A few years later, my grandmother would pass away from cancer. My grandfather couldn t stand to live in the house where she had passed and sold it to my dad. I was about three at this time, and that s where my part in this story begins. I slept with multiple nightlights every night to keep the shadow people at bay. None of them seemed aware of my presence for a long time, but eventually one seemed to realize I could see her, and she would stare intently at me throughout the night. It was terrifying. Cabinet doors opened and shut. The house was always cold in places, but we blamed that on a shoddy, drafty, poorly insulated old house. You could hear footsteps, random noises, the classics, if you will, but we learned to blame them on mice and ignore it. Once when I was 16, I had been out with some friends and came home well after midnight. I walked into my bedroom and saw a little girl standing in the corner of my room, looking up at my deceased aunt s baby doll which had hung in the corner of my room forever. I said, Oh, I m sorry, and backed out of the room. Realizing this was the most ridiculous answer to seeing a spirit in the world, I turned the light on and walked back in. She was gone. By photographs I ve seen since, this was most definitely my aunt who had passed, but her presence would become stranger after my sister s kids were born. They moved into the house. We moved into a smaller house. They needed a space, and at the time I was about to be out on my own anyway. They heard all the same noises, felt like they were touched in the middle of the night or shaken awake. My nephew, who knew a little girl there, he would become so frustrated that the rest of us couldn t see the little girl he could see. He had an imaginary friend named Bobby. Bobby lived in an old bus behind our house and was sad because his family had died. My nephew was too when he told us these stories. Then one night as we walked through the house, he pointed at a painting that my dad had left behind in the hallway and said, Hey, why is there a picture of Bobby there? If you re wondering, the name of the painting was Grace by Roda Neiberg. Eventually the house continued to fall into worsening condition despite our best efforts, and my sister and her husband built a house right behind it. Their daughter had one of the bedrooms that faced the old house. After about a year, she begged to be swapped into one of the rear bedrooms that didn t face the house. After much questioning, she told me she didn t like the man with the dog on the chain who watched her through the window. She said he was totally black and so was the dog, and he wore a black Abe Lincoln hat. Several more years went by and we tore the house down. I was convinced that all of my family s paranormal struggles had been tied to that house. There was a clear and definite change in the feel of the property after it was gone. I was 25 and felt safe walking outside after dark for the first time in my life. The oppressive atmosphere was gone. But now, some seven years later, we each have a small peculiarity in our own home. Something lurks in the back of my house sometimes.  My dad s peculiarity is less menacing. He enjoys taking things and leaving them in places they could not have been weeks later, like the time it left my old iPod in his kitchen, an iPod that I hadn t seen in ten years. My sister s is just noisy, constantly sounding like it s murmuring or moving things about. We thought we would get rid of the house and whatever resided within it, but in reality, was it ever the house or was it my family to begin with? Is it a curse? Is it just something that happens? I hope one day I have an explanation for all the things I ve seen. I d actually love to include them in a novel one day. Well, Tracen, you do have some great skills here as a writer. I would love to see that novel once you pen it. I do have a couple of thoughts here. The idea, and it goes right back to your question that you start with, was my family cursed, haunted, or was it just the house? I think it was the house. And I think it s the house because of the pieces that were taken from the motel. Pieces of a house or piece of something that was cursed or whatever can take that energy with it from the stories that I ve read. The prime example would be James Dean s spider race car, Little Bastard, when it was finally taken apart after so many people who had owned it ended up having either deaths or bad things happen to them. Somebody finally took it apart and pieced it out. And even then, some of those pieces that went into other people s cars caused those people to have issues. So, if that car was truly cursed, then that would explain it. Well, maybe the motel had its own, not necessarily cursed, but maybe hauntings that went along with some of those pieces. And maybe the spirits were attached to those pieces. So, when your family built that house out of those pieces, it brought the spirits with them, which would also explain why you had so many different kinds of spirits being seen by different people. Once the house was torn down, maybe because it s still on the property, maybe those spirits had some way of attaching themselves to the new houses that were on the property. Now, that part I don t know. That would just be a guess. The latter part of your story, where everybody has their little incidents, that sounds poltergeist to me. And whether that has anything to do with the original house that was built from the original hotel, I have no idea. But it is interesting that you ve all gone your own separate ways.  Peculiarity. You all have a small peculiarity in your own homes. So, have you taken anything from that house that you used to live in? Is there something in your house that you ve kept for sentimental sake? Maybe that s why. Maybe all of you have actually taken something from that house, maybe unknowingly. And maybe that s why. I don t know, but that would be my guess. This next one comes from Jack. He says, Hey, Darren and fellow weirdos. I ve been catching up on the podcast and recently came across one of my own stories titled I See Shadow People, and I thought I d give an update on that. A bit of backstory, as the original is from 2019. I suffer with anxiety and depression, and I see shadow people, which seems to be connected to how I feel on any given day. On good days, I may not see them at all. On bad days, I could see them everywhere. They always seem to creep closer and closer on my worst days. At the time that I sent in my first story, I was in a highly toxic relationship. I felt emotionally abused, manipulated and trapped with no escape. As you can imagine, my mental health was fragile to say the least, and the shadows were everywhere. Always watching, always getting closer like they were feeding off me. I got out of that relationship eventually and moved in with my brother for a little while, and at that house I had my scariest experience with them. Home alone, unemployed and feeling generally crappy about everything, I was laying in bed watching some shows when I got that overwhelming feeling of being watched, yet I couldn t see my shadow companions anywhere. Thinking nothing of it, I just got up and closed my bedroom door. Two seconds later, three loud, distinctive knocks shook my bedroom door. This was the first and only time I ve known the shadows to make any noise and actually interact with the environment around us. Understandably, I was terrified, like they now had a physical presence and were coming for me. I barely slept that night, and my door remained closed until the sun was fully up. Two months later, I met a wonderful woman who I m now proud to call my fiancé. Well, congratulations, Jack. That s awesome. Since then, my mental health has been improving, and I ve seen the shadows less and less, but they re still around. But one thing truly amazes me about her, and it s that the shadows seemed scared of her. She went away for a weekend, and I was home alone. The shadows were lingering around me that weekend, but the day she came back, I was doing the dishes and I could see one out of the corner of my eye. I ignored it as usual, until I heard the front door open and I kid you not, I saw the shadow run out the back door, out of the house. Now I don t see them when she s around. I m the happiest I ve ever been now, and the shadows generally leave me alone. I ve never believed in people having auras or that claim to see them, but I d be lying if I said I wasn t interested to hear what those people would have to say about my fiance s aura. Thank you from a fellow weirdo, Jack. My gosh, Jack. I have to wonder about your wife. What are her beliefs? What does she think about all of this? You don t mention that? Does she work in a ministry somewhere? Is she a born-again Christian? I wonder if maybe that has something to do with it, because he who is in me is greater than he who is in the world, so they know they couldn t, if she s born again, they know they couldn t do anything to her spiritually. They couldn t harm her in that way, and maybe that would scare them off. It s, I have never heard of shadow people and depression or anxiety being tied together. I can understand why somebody might feel anxiety upon seeing a shadow person, but I ve never heard of people being more apt to see shadow people if they suffer with anxiety and or depression. That s interesting. I ll have to look into that a little bit more. Being someone who suffers from depression, I ve never seen a shadow person, so I really don t know what to think of that, but it s interesting that you ve had that all your life and that they actually change behavior depending on who you are with, your fiancé. You definitely need to marry that girl. She s definitely your security blanket. Congratulations on that, Jack. I m really happy for you. I ve got to have to do some looking into that. That s just so weird. Okay, this next one comes from Tina.  This time it has a true paranormal experience evolving my connection to my grandmother and her final phone call. It includes two different explanations for the final message, as I wasn t sure if I could quote this specific song. Hope it makes sense. Use the words of the song if it won t cause you legal issues. I know Dolly wrote them, but I heard my grandmother in the message. Thank you for all that you and your lovely bride do for all us weirdos. Praying for your continued success, your sister, weirdo and Christ. Tina. Thank you, Tina. Here is what she wrote. She calls it one last call. Growing up, my grandmother Douglas and I were very close. She kept me as a baby so my mom could work. When my sisters came along six years after me, I spent as much time with her as I did at home. When I was old enough to shadow her at the nursing home when she was a vocational nurse, I became her little student. By my early teens, I could even tell you that she was about to call before the phone even rang.  She grew so forgetful she could no longer live at home. She went for a time to live with my aunt and spent her last days in the same nursing home she had worked for so many years. We could see each other a handful of times while she was with my aunt, but I didn t go see her in the nursing home. I tried, but the thought of her not recognizing me was too much to bear. My grandmother passed away the morning of Mother s Day, a day I had chosen to muster the courage to go see her. The night before, I had the feeling that she wouldn t be there. When I got up that morning, my mom called and asked me to come by her house before I stopped by the nursing home. As soon as I got out of the car, I began to cry, even before my mom met me halfway up the drive to break the news. When the words came, I howled, not crying, not screaming, howling to the heavens like an animal in grievous pain. It collapsed into my mom s arms and sobbed until nothing else would come. Over the next few years, I was so broken.  Did she know? Was she disappointed in me for not coming to see her? All I wanted was to know that she was okay. Whole, happy. I felt like I d let her down. We stayed with my parents after the funeral, and late that night, after everyone else had gone, my dad said that he had something for me. He came back with an old black rotary phone. I recognized it as the wall phone from my grandmother s house. He made a joke about how I should take it, just in case she wants to talk. It was a bittersweet joke, as I wanted to talk to her so badly. On the way home, I placed the phone on the floor board at my feet. We were listening to talk radio, not hearing it, just letting it cut the silence. The phone rang. Quietly at first, just enough to make my husband and I look at each other in silence. Then louder and stronger, on the third or fourth ring, my husband said, I think you should answer it. I told him I can t, and moved the phone to the back seat as it rang one last time. As soon as I was safely back in my seat, the talk radio signal faded out, and Dolly Parton s I will always love you faded in. At the exact moment the lyrics say, If I should stay, I would only be in your way, and so I ll go, and yet I ll know that I will think of you each step of the way, and I will always love you. And with the words, I will always love you, the radio faded back into the talk program. There are logical explanations, road vibration, signal ranges, etc., but I know in my heart it was my grandmother telling me everything I needed to know. She was not mad, not far away, and would, in fact, always love me. Great writing, Tina. That would be so freaky. And no, honestly, I don t think that was road vibration or signal ranges or whatever. If this is one of those black bell phones, then you know the difference between a bell being hit just temporarily and an actual phone ring. Because if an actual phone ring, it s going to hit that bell numerous times for a few seconds, pause, and then hit that bell numerous times for a few seconds, and then pause, and keep doing so until the call either gives up or until you pick up the phone. You can t chalk that up to just road vibration or anything else, especially if the phone s not plugged in. The phone has to be plugged in if it s going to ring like that for an actual phone call. Yeah, I had no doubt whatsoever that was your grandmother letting you know she loves you, she understands. I don t think you have to worry about not visiting her when she was in the nursing home, because as you mentioned, she wouldn t recognize you anyway. I think at that point, she was probably so deep within her own mind that, I don t know, I don t know how dementia works on a personal level. Nobody does, because when you re going through it, you can t really describe it. So I don t know exactly what would happen to somebody in dementia, but you know once she passed away and gave you that, there was no ill feelings regardless. She obviously loved you very, very much. This next one comes from Moa. He says, he or she, I m sorry, I m sorry, I don t know if that s a female or a male name, I apologize. Anyway, I have a genuine experience to share with you, they say. My son Cass and I were home alone. He was 15 years old then. I was lying in bed and exhausted from a long day, which could explain what happened next. I opened my eyes and a young Cass was dealing at my bedside. I called his name. He came into my room and gasped. He walked toward me and I felt two small hands pushing him away. His heart raced and he could not get to me. As I saw a boy, he saw a girl. A few weeks later, our friend stepped by with a new boyfriend. He looked at me and smiled. He shared that he was spirit sensitive. He then shared, not knowing our experience, that I have a young girl spirit who was attached, who has attached to herself to me, and that she ll take forms of different people or animals for me to know that she s near. I was speechless and relived that I might not be weird. I ve recently learned that weird is terrific, thanks to you. Thanks for your time. Stay weird. Moja. Interesting that you would see one thing and your son would see something completely different yet you re both looking at the same entity. That s something new. I ve never heard of that one before either. We ll see this one comes from Anonymous. Hello, Darren. I prefer to keep my story anonymous as I don t like to share details of my life with the world. First of all, love the podcast. Next, my story. It s a little different than most, but here goes. A little background first. I had a not-so-great childhood. My mother and adoptive father were alcoholics and addicts. I was never hit or anything, but life with them was anything but pleasant. I hadn t seen my biological father since my mother took me from him when I was four. I can t remember anything before that particular point. Nothing.  I was not raised with religion, though I would often choose to attend Saturday evening mass with my adoptive grandparents or Sunday services with my neighbors. I even taught VBS, for those not familiar with it, VBS s Vacation Bible School. I researched every religion, well, religiously. The more I researched, however, the more jaded I got. All I could see were the similarities in stories and ritual, which I took to mean that they all ripped each other off and just called it something new. I couldn t find any that spoke to me, though I found them all fascinating. Hence my path was atheism. But not one of today s atheists who bash anyone with faith. I just found it so sad that people needed religion to keep them on a moral path. When I was 20, I moved away from my family, tried to get a fresh start away from the burden of responsibility that was thrust upon me. I met a man who was from a town close to my hometown. We hit it off immediately.  When I told him, and his response was, what are you going to do about it, I knew immediately that whatever I chose to do would never involve him again. That was my choice. I also knew I would never terminate my pregnancy. Atheist or not, murder is murder.  I went into labor, rough labor. Drugs to speed it up, to slow it down, back and forth. 36 hours later it was discovered, way too late, to be moved to a hospital equipped to perform C-sections. The baby was too large for me to have naturally. So I managed to have her naturally, but was torn apart and bled profusely. I saw a nurse carry the baby to a bassinet to be cleaned, but I didn't see it from my place in the bed. I saw it from above. I floated above the scene, watching the doctor panic as he tried to stop the bleeding, watching nurses pump more blood into me, watching my mother talk to me as I lay there with glazed over eyes. Then there was this warm, intense light emanating from behind me. I turned to look, but all I saw was white, well, whiter than white. Then I heard a soothing voice say to me, You have a choice to make. You can come and leave all the pain behind, or you can go back to be with your daughter. Neither is the wrong choice, but it is yours alone to make, and it must be made now. I looked back to the scene and saw my mother once again, and I knew without a doubt I would not leave my daughter behind to be raised by her.   This experience changed my entire perspective. I was no longer an atheist. There was something beyond this life, beyond humanity. I wasn't sure who was right, but I knew that there is indeed a God, Creator, Source. That was 26 years ago. Today, I am a Christian. Up until fairly recently, I was more of a deist, but circumstances I might write about later have shown me the light. Stay strong in your faith. Wow, Anonymous, that is incredible. My heart sank when you first told me that you were an atheist, and I understood why. But for you to share your story, that you turned around, I want to know, even if you don't share it with the rest of the weirdo family, if you want to just send it to me, I would love to hear why you decided that Christianity was for you.  That's really interesting. I would love to hear, as we say, your testimony. Okay, moving on to Sean, and he says, Hi Darren, I listened to your live scream on Halloween, and I said that I would type up my story for the program. It's taken me a while to do it, because I don't have a computer now and have to type it up on my phone, which can be annoying, and this is a bit of a long story. Here we go. My dad owned an old farmhouse in Auburn, Washington that was no longer in the country due to the city that grew up around it. It was a creepy house from the first time I saw it. I didn't grow up with my dad, but developed more of a relationship in my late teens until now, and it gave me an opportunity to start over when I was 18 in a new area that had more opportunities, so I packed my stuff and moved to Washington. I didn't have any experiences that I recall the first few nights there, but the first night I spent in my own apartment after cleaning it up was troubling. I didn't have much in the apartment other than the things that were left behind that were useful. I'd fallen asleep on a cot and was awoken when I felt a presence, and when I opened my eyes there was an old man's face looking down on me.  I jumped up, but he was gone, and I checked all the windows, doors, under the bed, the closets, and nothing was there. I didn't think it was a ghost, and tried to rationalize it away. I didn't notice too many other things for a short period of time because I really wasn't a believer in the paranormal. A few months later, an apartment on the top floor became available, and a woman I worked with at a restaurant next door decided to move in. She used to complain about a blue mist that would fill the corridor, and my dad dismissed it as nonsense. I really didn't think much about it. Then one night, the neighbor called me to ask if her lights were on. I asked, which lights? Your car lights? And she said, no, my apartment lights. I went outside to see and said, yes, your lights are on. And she asked, which ones? I said, all of the apartment lights are on. She said adamantly that when she left, she made sure all of them were off because she'd been experiencing all the lights on after returning home when she knew she had turned them all off. She sort of started freaking out, and I was a bit nervous about it as well. When she came home, I met her in the parking lot, and when I did, we looked up, and all the lights were flickering like the typical haunted house movie. The details after this are a bit blurry for a little while, and I don't recall anything major happening. I always felt an oppressiveness in the place, and a deep darkness, but I contributed it to the area the house was in. It was near a town called Unumclaw, which in silage means evil spirits, so I contributed the feelings to that. During the time I lived there, it seemed that there was something at work that was trying to destroy me. No matter what I attempted to do, I was met with extreme resistance. Heavy depression set in, and I began to have a lot of suicidal ideations. I moved away from that house for a while and had other paranormal things that happened, which I'll have to write another time to stay focused on this major one. I do believe them to be connected, even with the minor ones that happen now, which I think are them saying, we are still here. So about 10 years later, it really picked up. I was homeless in Seattle for a bit and ended up moving into a basement apartment that was unfinished and in the process of being remodeled. Just a side note, there was an old man that lived in the building when my dad bought it, and he would constantly be having conversations with someone that was not there. There were times when we would hear him yelling at it, but often couldn't hear the words he was saying. He ended up dying of poor health. I remember he lived permanently in the kitchen area with the rest of the apartment cordoned off. I asked him why he didn't sleep in the back bedroom and he said, no way, never. Which was odd in the way he said it, but will become obvious later in the story. So after he died, we had to clean up his mess. We gutted the place, and in all actuality, this is when it became practically unbearable. I always felt like there was an electricity in the air and that something very bad was about to happen. I would constantly see little things darting around the apartment. I knew it was normal for people to see things out of the corner of their eye, but I started noticing how many times it was happening and that it was hundreds of times a day. I don't know why I never tried to record it, but I didn't. I had a roommate, who I will call Chris, move in, and he took that back bedroom that the old man refused to take. We added a smaller bedroom onto one corner of the house and I took that. Not too long after that guy moved in, I noticed he began sleeping in the kitchen area too and refused to sleep in the back room. I began to put the pieces together and things got worse. I was slipping into a deep depression and really wanted to kill myself. I mentioned to Chris some things that were going on and he relayed me a story of his own that fits in later. He said one day he was in the kitchen area and he took a selfie in the mirror and when he looked at the picture he said he saw the face of an old woman right behind his left shoulder looking at the camera. He was pretty scared and moved out shortly after. So after Chris moved out I began to try and finish the remodel, which in my opinion was making the activity worse. I finally got the finishing touches in, put carpet down and moved into that dreaded back room. While I was getting ready the back room, I had an impending doom feeling on Christmas Eve and I eventually heard a voice say run. I don't know if it was audible, but I decided to get away from that place and walked around town for a while. I ran into a friend of mine and asked him to come to my house and hang out because I was really scared. He came over and I told him a bit about what was going on. At that time I had an EMF detector and the readings were off the chart. Being that I am an electrician I thought maybe there was something wrong with the wiring, so I began measuring the room and it was very strong in one corner and there was a box sitting there. I moved the box out of the way and tested the wall corner that was behind the box and it was way lower. So I set it on the box and it redlined. I opened the box and there were old Nazi memorabilia from the 3rd rank. It was something that belonged to the old man. My friend was really scared and wanted to leave but I begged him to stay and I immediately took the box to the dumpster. Things took a turn for the worse. I was terrified of my house. I couldn't sleep nor relax there. It did seem that the back room was worse, hence why nobody was ever utilizing that room. One night I was stuck in the almost falling asleep mode when I was jerked to the foot of my bed and halfway dangled off the end. I was terrified. I had no money to go anywhere else so I stayed. Around this time I was feeling what felt like spiders or fingers being drugged across my body. I also felt something sit on the bed and I tried to pull the covers over my head but could not because there was an unseen weight on the bed. I used to keep the lights on in the hallway to deter people from breaking in at night because I lived in a somewhat high drug crime area. I'd see shadows from underneath the door going back and forth and I'd hear whispering.  I was wondering where it came from and being that no one in the house had a baby, I went to my neighbors and asked him if somebody had a baby there. He told me no. I didn't bother knocking on the middle floor door because I knew him and his wife were out on a date so I went to the top floor and asked the man that lived there and he also told me no. So my last thought was that maybe the dumpster near my bedroom window had a baby in it so I reluctantly went and looked and the dumpster was empty. I continued to hear what sounded like a rocking chair going upstairs because we hadn't replaced the sheet rock on the ceiling and it was easy to hear things from up there. I'd also continued to hear a baby crying in footsteps. That was it for that night. The next day I worked on refinishing cabinetry outside and the man from the middle floor came to tell me what happened in their house when they got back. When they got back from their date, he unlocked the door and walked into the hallway and turned on the lights and saw an old lady carrying a baby dart from the kitchen to his home office. He thought somebody had broken in so he ran in the room and it was empty. He checked the windows and throughout the house they were all locked and nobody was there. So this was the first time multiple stories started relating to each other. One morning I was listening to the traffic report on 10.00 a.m. The dial started changing by itself and ended up at 105.3 FM, a Christian station. Their little jingle song for the station said Spirit1053 and it played that right when it switched over like a message from the Spirit side. I wasn't so scared but it was very unusual. On another day close to this I was hanging out with my neighbor at his house with a mutual friend. At one point I heard something that sounded like music winding up like those old record players. It was old 1920s type music. I didn't say anything but my friend did comment and say, where is that music coming from? I said, you hear it too? Wow! I was so happy that they had heard it because I thought I was going insane at this point. We looked around and couldn't find the source of the music. It was coming from what seemed nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Some time later I was sitting in the living room area of the open kitchen. I was watching videos on my laptop and I saw a piece of 4 inch pipe about 4 inches long hover over the countertop and wobble in the air and fell straight to the ground. Things were always coming up missing like keys, wallets, anything that was of importance. I spent hours looking for missing items only for them to show up in the middle of the table or some obvious place I most definitely checked already. I discovered one way to keep the negative energy and activity down and that was I played a Christian worship CD on loop, playing all day every day.     Some dark shadow darted east through the wall and into my neighbor's bedroom. This was at midnight. I went and talked to the neighbor the next morning and he said he was startled awake at midnight by some negative force and had a hard time falling back to sleep. Unfortunately, after work one day I was really depressed, tired and wanted relief. I decided to leave work early and purchased several tall boys of malt liquor. I went home and commenced to get drunk. Not a good idea in that house. I ended up calling a friend of mine that was very active in the Catholic Church. She said after speaking with me she noticed my voice changed into that of a Middle Easterners voice. She asked me, tell me, what is your name? And I repeated back to her in Latin, which I don't even know.  I have no recollection of that happening. She told me the next day when I called her. I could tell that she was very concerned and hurt by what I said even though it really wasn't me. So being that I was Catholic at the time I did what I thought you should. I met with a priest to try and get help. I took a 50 mile trip on public transportation to meet with him and was very disappointed.  I said, okay, I'll call you. Got up and left, defeated. I deleted his number and renounced Catholicism at that point. I went home ultimately defeated with no hope that things were going to change. I started sleeping on the couch in the front room as it seemed less active there. It helped some, but not much. I still barely slept. I decided there was only one way to stop this.  I drank some beers to get the courage and crushed up a whole tray of decon rat poison and drank it. Somewhere along the line I guess I was yelling and screaming. I heard a knock at the door and thought it was my neighbor, so I decided to check and say goodbye, but it ended up being the police and they entered my apartment. I went back to sitting down and finished the poison and they asked what it was that I was drinking after they had discovered the station I set up in the kitchen to crush up the rat poison. They rushed me to the emergency room and I had no lasting effects of the poison, thankfully. I began to get some help by a lack of sleeping and mental problems. I was in the psych ward for about 10 days until my friend came and picked me up and I spent the night at his house because they were concerned about me trying it again. The next day he took me home and did a walkthrough to make sure there wasn't anything there that I had harmed myself with. At this point things did lighten up a bit. I started spending more time with my Christian friends, was at work more, and was coming up with a plan of changing things. Around this time my dad was negotiating the sale of the property to another party and the sale went through. We all had maybe one or two months to move out and find somewhere else to live. I basically moved out once I found a place up north of Seattle. It took me some time to get adjusted to the house I moved into because it seemed like a normal house. I slept way better and things started improving. On the night before the scheduled destruction of the house I had a very odd dream. I was standing out in the parking lot of the house and in front of the house was a semicircle of about 20 people facing me with their backs to the house. They all looked frail, grayish and bony. They looked like dead people. Right before I woke up they all said help us and I darted awake. I drove down to where the house was located later and the house was completely demolished and placed into trash containers. That was the end of that house. This was in mid 2016. I continued to have hundreds of dreams of that house even until recently. It was always the same. I was living in the house without the new owners knowing. They never quite caught on as I was sneaky. The very last dream I had of the house changed a bit. I was living there and the new owner finally found me there. I told him I'd pay or help with the project, but I ended up telling him that I'd be leaving. I haven't had a dream of that house since. I've had many other things of a paranormal nature take place now that I work at a couple haunted apartment complexes. I'll share about them in another story. I even have video evidence of one very strange happening. Thanks Darren for your podcast and reading my story. I've not been the same since all this happened. Sincerely, Sean. Long story Sean, but oh my gosh it was exciting the whole way through. That is incredible. You've got a movie right there. You've got a novel going into a movie. I am so ticked off at that Catholic priest right now. Assuming that what you've told me here is true. I take people's word for it. There are so many things in this that it just makes me wonder how much of it's true. I'm not saying that you're lying. It's just some of it is just so on the nose. But the Catholic priest saying that he'll talk to your guardian angel for 200 bucks. That is sick beyond sick. There's that story in the Bible about Jesus turning over the tables of the money lenders and money changers because they were being so dishonest. I can't imagine what he would do to a Catholic priest who said that he would interact with your guardian angel for money. That just... Man. The idea that you even stayed a Christian at that point is that says a lot about you. I want to know by the way what CD you were using that you played on loop. I'm just kind of curious if it's something that I actually used to listen to or even still have in my collection. I just want to know. There are so many different turns and twists in this. Sometimes it feels like sometimes it looks like it's a demonic entity. Sometimes it looks like it's a poltergeist. Sometimes it's shadow people. You've got a little bit of everything in here. That's what makes me think you've got a great book there. If you could sit down with somebody who knows how to write, if you're not a writer yourself, although you did a great job with this, if you could sit down and write that, you might have something that people would go after. That is a really, really descriptive story, which really helped me to tell the story. So thank you very much for sending that in. Okay, this next one comes in from... Let's see here. I want to make sure that they're okay with me saying their name. Okay, we'll say this is from Kel. Dear Darren, thank you first of all for reading my comment to you in your Chamber of Comments episode.  Please note before you read on the air, my spelling might not be the best for my abbreviations. So read before reading on the air. LOL, hope it's all right. Well, too late now. I should have read your email before reading your email. Sorry. I'll do my best though. I'm from Nicholas County, West Virginia, so yes, I live in the home in the Mothman in the Green Eyed Monster State, among others. I have been in the paranormal ever since I was a kid, saying that I can sense and see spirits. I'm grateful that my mother never stunted this gift. Let's go forward in time to around 2014. I got to do an investigation with a group of people led by Sherry Brink, which is an author who writes about the paranormal here in West Virginia, but I digress. As we go to West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia, the tall building loomed with the turrets, very ominous. It was about 8pm as I entered the building, already starting to sense a lot of energies. I grabbed the EMF detector, which is used for electric magnetic fields, and the spirit box cycles very fast through radio frequencies. This is how the spirits can manipulate and pick out words to use. As my small team that was with me, which was my friends, Aaron and Tiffany, we started investigating. I didn't realize it, but after a while, I ended up by myself as I made it into a block. I was standing, asking questions in the complete darkness. If there are any spirits near me, can you tell me? Through the spirit box came a male voice. Can you see me? I would respond in a humorous tone, because let's face it.  I respond, no, I'm blind.  Oh, I love that, okay. I got to investigate Moundsville another time, and here is another experience. I went with my other friend, Stephanie, that I had at the time. She was also a paranormal investigator and a sensitive medium like myself. We made it to the hospital wing of the West Virginia State Prison as I sat down on one of the carts and had the spirit box on as I just let it cycle.  However, it wasn't until my friend sneezed, and through the spirit box, you heard a female voice responding, hello?  As we kept investigating through the massive premises, we ended up in solitary confinement about 3am, and this is where they kept some of the prisoners that were unruly. She was on one end of the block of cells, and I was on the other. I got really quiet because I heard water hitting metal. It was a metallic clanging sound. I'd asked her if she could hear it, and she said yes. The energy would begin to get heavy. As I took a step, I felt a hand wrapped around the calf of my leg, which startled me because I was standing outside of one of the cells that one of their extreme prisoners was in. He was a part of the skinheads. I looked back at my friend that was still maybe four feet away from me, and I'd reply in a shaky voice, did you grab my calf muscle? I knew she didn't.  I felt like I didn't get the statement out of my mouth before she rebutted, no, but did you grab my elbow? I told her that I didn't as we proceeded to swiftly walk towards the exit. As we got outside in the courtyard near where the church is, I took a deep breath and responded, that was scary. Those are just a couple of my experiences doing investigations. I've done private homes and other places, so if you'd like to hear other stories, I'll share them soon. I've got a load of them all the way from my experience from the Lucy Borden Bed and Breakfast and the Hollywood Roosevelt to name a few. Even my own property has spirits, and I am one to also collect haunted items, so trust me, I have plenty of stories for you. Sincerely, your fellow weirdo, Kel. Well, yeah, send your stories my way, Kel. I appreciate it. And yeah, you might have had a couple of spelling errors in there, but you did a pretty good job. No need to apologize on that one. Let's see, this one comes from Chance saying, Hey Darren, I'd like to share a story that happened recently. It's been hard typing this out, but I'll do my best. He calls this Black Dog. I was mowing the lawn on a Friday afternoon, and something compelled me to turn around, and what I saw is a little hard to describe. At first glance, it appeared to be a large black dog that I've never seen in the neighborhood before, nor have I seen it since, running across the road to the neighbor's house and disappearing into the woods. As the dog ran, it appeared fuzzy, and its body frame changed drastically during its run. It appeared to morph between the typical canine frame to that of what I can only describe as a big cat, like a leopard or jaguar. It would oscillate between these states, and sometimes it was somehow in both forms at the same time. At first, I didn't know what to think, but it wasn't heading my direction, and I just explained it away as I was tired, so I ignored it. About an hour later, I got a phone call from my dad telling me that his grandmother's health just plummeted unexpectedly.  She died that night, with my large, obnoxious family and I showing her much love as she passed on. The story has been sitting in my email drafts since August, with the full intention of submitting it in time for the September fireside frights, but I felt like whatever I typed wasn't good enough. I kept editing and rewriting it over and over again. After I listened to your podcast about omens and their meanings, I knew I had to share, and I realized why I couldn't send the story. It's because I didn't want to let go of this story. In a way, I'd be letting go of my great-grandmother by doing so. But I think I've finished grieving for the most part. Rest in peace, Granny. I'll see you when I join you in his kingdom. Thank you for the work you put into your show. From your fellow weirdo in Christ, Chance. Well, Chance, thank you very much. I appreciate that. I'm very sorry for the loss of your granny, but it's good to know that she's in a better place and that you will see her again someday. Yeah, the black dog thing, that is scary. You never know if it's an omen until it's too late. See a black dog on the road? Is it just a regular black dog or is it an omen? You only know later on if something's happened that you can attribute it to.  Is it because I saw a black dog that I'm associating it with this bad event? Or was it really a bad omen? It's one of those things that's really hard to put a finger on. I got one last story, and I always like to keep a long story for the last. This one comes from Anonymous. Hi, Darren. I've been thinking about sharing my story with you for quite a while, but I never took the time to sit down and write it out. I'm legally blind and using speak to text, so I'll do my best to proofread and edit the story when I'm finished.  Well, I did not know that before reading this. Thank you. I really appreciate you being a part of the Darkness Syndicate. That really means so much to me.  They don't have to worry about spending the $5 a month or whatever they do, but those of you who really want to support me do that, and I do not take that for granted. Thank you so, so much. In fact, I just set it up recently where people get stickers and mugs and stuff like that depending on the level. So hopefully, if you've not already, you'll be seeing something in the mail soon. Okay, moving on. She says we discovered your podcast. Okay, my life was turned upside down in 2021 with very little notice. I'm sharing my story to help spread dementia awareness and to hopefully help even one person who may need to hear this. Don't worry, there is a paranormal aspect to my story. Thank you for taking the time to read my email. In 2015, my dad passed away from leukemia after a year and a half battle. He passed away shortly before his 71st birthday. His actual day of passing was three years and one day after his mother. Thankfully, my dad was still able to make it to my small courthouse wedding just two months before he passed away. In the time following his passing, I spent three nights a week with my mother at her home as she was living alone now. After about three years of being a new and first-time homeowner in Cook County, Illinois, my husband and I realized it was not going to be sustainable for us to stay in Illinois.  Anyway, they practically would tax you on using your own bathroom and toilet paper. My husband and I decided to move down to South Carolina, where my in-laws had recently retired. Our property taxes now on our home, now for the full year in South Carolina, is what we paid monthly in Cook County. After moving, I made a plan to fly up and visit my mom every six months. My mom was not a comfortable traveler, so it was up to me to come and visit her. I made the first few visits, but soon COVID-19 hit. I missed one visit due to my husband having surgery, so essentially by the time the vaccinations for COVID-19 came out and we felt comfortable with me coming to visit my mother, it had been two years since I had seen her in person. We did, however, talk on the phone together every single day. This is where I need everybody to start really listening to this story. I was 36 years old at the time.   Every once in a while, she'd say something that made me wonder if she was having some memory problems like her younger sister. The things she would say, though, were easily explained away and I told myself that my mom was strong and she would not get dementia. She'd forget certain little small things, but then remember big things, so I told myself not to worry. It's very hard to watch over a person and their behaviors when you do not see them in person. Please keep an eye on your parents, even if they are not in their 80s or 90s. Look for declines in their lack of judgment. Make sure that they are paying their bills on time. Look to see if they are making all their appointments. Keep an eye out on them if they are asking repeatedly how to use a certain piece of technology that you have already explained to them. If you can, check their refrigerators to make sure that they are stocked with the proper food that they need. Keep an eye on the driving skills and look to see if they are getting lost in familiar places. See if they are losing their train of thought mid-sentence or using the wrong word to describe something. They can easily hide or explain away their memory issues early on in the disease and the most likely not admit to having any problems. When I finally got to Illinois to visit my mom after the two-year break, I knew within five minutes that something had gone terribly wrong. My stomach sank lower than I could ever imagine. My mom was no longer familiar with the grocery store that she had been going to for 36 years. She had to ask where certain items were that she bought regularly. She'd asked me questions multiple times, even though we had answered them and decided on what we were going to do. We would go to bed super early, around 6 pm, which was fine with me because I needed some time alone in my childhood bedroom to figure things out and to talk to people about what to do. I would also cry privately alone in my room from the stress and emotional pain of knowing I was losing my mom before she was gone. One night she even came past my room around 8 pm and asked what I was doing awake so early and asked if I'd gotten enough sleep. Sleeping problems and having trouble telling the difference between morning and night is also an issue with people who develop dementia. A trip was quickly coming to an end and I did not know what I was going to do. I'd just gotten back into the workforce after taking some time off because of COVID. I alerted all of my mom's neighbors to the situation and gave them my phone number. I called her doctor to inform him and see what we could do. He said that he could not do anything unless she came in or something major happened like her forgetting to pay her property taxes. She was doing just fine paying all of her bills and they were all up to date so we could not forcefully bring her into the doctor's office. I did make her an appointment with him while I was there but she did not want to go. I stocked my mom's fridge up with food and supplies before I left to limit her having to go to the grocery store. I returned back home with knots in my stomach, super stressed and with adrenaline constantly in my veins. I was that type of stressed where you're on a high alert and just can't calm down. This stress level lasted for a few months until what my mom's doctor said, quote, something happened, unquote. Now before I get judged for leaving my mom and going back home please know hindsight is 2020. I was terrified and handling the situation all on my own without any close family to help. I did make my mom an appointment with her doctor after I left but she forgot to go. I called the emergency clinic in her town that she frequently visited for small medical issues and asked them if they could put a note in her chart saying that her daughter had noticed some memory loss. I was hoping that maybe if she went in there the doctors could do some tests and set her up on the right track for treatment. The nurse on the phone said they were not allowed to make any amendments to her chart so that effort was thwarted. Luckily my mom had one really caring neighbor that was keeping an eye on her for me and we talked regularly. Also please know I would never if moved out of state if I had any inkling that anything was going on with my mom when we moved. Dementia is an umbrella word for memory loss. There are several different types of dementia including Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, Korsakov syndrome, Lewy body dementia and frontotemporal dementia. Some people can have several types of dementia at once which is called mixed dementia. Alzheimer's disease is commonly accompanied by vascular dementia. Dementia symptoms are different for everyone and the decline in severity can range from a slow progression to a very quick progression. At midnight one night I was woken up by a phone call from an 847 number. This was my mom's local area code and before I could even answer the phone I knew something was wrong. To keep it brief my mom had gone to the grocery store at 10pm at night to go and pick up some treats from my dad to bring to his mother's house that morning. I know that doesn't make sense. That was what my mom told the police officers. She'd gone to the grocery store at 10pm at night thinking it was the morning and picking up some goodies from my deceased father to bring to his deceased mother as he visited her every Saturday morning when they were alive. Apparently a concerned customer noticed that my mom was disoriented and called the local police department. They watched her drive home and noticed that she was having trouble driving and even had trouble identifying which house was hers. At this point she was unsteady on her feet and apparently took a tumble in front of the police officers and they said that she may have bumped her head so they were calling an ambulance to bring her to the hospital. I was awake from midnight that night to 5pm the next day on the phone with doctors, social workers and at home care services and my mom's neighbor. My husband and I quickly made arrangements for my mother in law to come and stay at our house and watch our dogs and guinea pigs. We took the 13-hour drive up there straight in one day to go and help my mom.  In the meantime my mom's neighbor was keeping an eye on her for me and visiting her regularly. Please know this though, if your parent is on Medicare and you are acting as their health care power of attorney or maybe even just in charge of making the decisions for them while they are in the hospital, you can deny their release from the hospital if you are uncomfortable with them leaving. I kept telling the doctors that my mom had some memory issues and that she lived alone and could not be sent home alone, especially if she was unstable on her feet. They told me that they ran some tests, there was nothing wrong with her whatsoever. I told them they needed to do some kind of brain testing or whatever tests they can run for dementia because she thought my deceased father was alive. It was in the middle of the COVID pandemic so they were in a hurry to release her from the hospital. They told me they were going to release her because they could not find anything wrong with her and all I could do was just go along with it. I did not know that I had the right to have her stay in the hospital until a nurse told me way later on in my mom's whole situation. The hospital sent her home in an Uber alone.  My mom was delirious, delusional, dehydrated and very weak. As we were sitting there with my mom laying in the hospital bed, a commercial came on the TV. It had this song that goes, I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I nudged my husband and asked him if he heard what I heard. He said he did. Now this song is the one song my dad absolutely wanted to be played at his funeral and it was. Every time I hear this song I think it's my dad saying hello to me and reminding me that I'm not alone. It's not a very common song played anymore at least on the radio stations that we listen to. It does pop up now and then in my life and reminds me that he's still watching over us. The commercial and that song was literally playing over and over every time there was a commercial break. I'll let it coincidence but I truly believe my dad was reminding me that he was there and watching and taking care of us. My mom spent about a week in the hospital getting her strength back. While she was there she asked me who the woman was standing in the corner of the room. There was no one in the room but me. I asked her what she looked like and my mom said that she had long dark hair and was very pretty. I had no idea who this could have been but I know she was also having some hallucinations. I was wondering if she was possibly seeing some of her family in spirit form. She asked me if I had seen my dad anywhere and I told her I had not. I asked her if she had seen him and she told me that she had not either. I was a bit relieved that she told me she had not seen him because I thought maybe he was coming to take her away with him. Also at one point my mom had managed to wrap up a hospital blanket into a bundle. She was holding it like a baby and staring down at it.  We had not mentioned going anywhere and we were not getting ready to take her home yet. I just agreed and told her that was fine. Fast forward, one week in the hospital, two weeks at a rehab center and mom was now placed in a permanent memory care facility that I had found for her. At this point my husband had already left a few weeks prior to go home and get back to work and the animals. When I finally got to go to the care center to visit my mom after all of the ridiculous COVID quarantine protocols she was doing better than ever, walking around steadily and talking and looking healthy. As we walked around the care center she suddenly stopped and bent over to pick up a penny. She handed it to me and I safely put it in my pocket. My dad's sister always said that when she found a penny she knew it was grandpa, her father, saying hello. I took this as another little greeting from my father. After being away from my home and family for two months I finally returned back to South Carolina after I knew my mom was settled and comfortable.  I hated to bear the thought of selling my child at home and doing it alone and without my mom knowing what was going on. I was advised to catch the market at that point before it started declining. I had hoped my mom could one day return home but with this disease they do not get better. I had a fear that if I sold her house she'd one day become coherent enough and ask me to go home. After a ton of research and getting advice from many people I came to the realization that my mom would no longer be able to stay in her home no matter what. At this point she did not know she had any memory problems and was in the mindset that the memory care center was where she worked and when she wasn't working it somehow turned into her personal home. She once told me that she was very upset with my dad because he kept having people over to the house and they could not afford to keep feeding all of those people. I just had to laugh because only my dad could still be in trouble with my mom even when he was in heaven.  I literally worked all day every day alone and wanted to get back to my family. There was one bedroom in the house that I refused to go into because it just made me feel so uncomfortable. For privacy reasons I'll tell you that there was another person who used to live in the house but no longer lives there and no longer associated with my family. I wholeheartedly believe that this person had some kind of negative entity attached to them most of their life. One time my family and I heard this person in the shower talking demonically to themselves. I think maybe they were just trying to scare the rest of the family. Also, when my father passed away he passed away in his own bedroom at the house. This same person actually took a selfie with my father's corpse saying that they wanted one last photo.  Well, I was there getting my mom's house ready to sell. I slept in my parents' bedroom because it felt safer and it also had an attached bathroom. Like I said, my father passed away from his leukemia in his bedroom and the paramedics actually laid him in his bed while we were waiting for the funeral home to come. Let me tell you, it was a bit unnerving to be sleeping in the same bed in the same bedroom. One day, I was going through boxes of paper and file folders. I decided to sit in the foyer and lay some of them out along the floor for more space. I opened one up and started going through some paperwork. Like I had mentioned earlier, I am visually impaired and my vision is not great. I took a second and looked up from the file folder. Laying on the tile floor about 12 inches from the file folder was a penny. I did not hear anything fall out of the file folder nor did I feel like I had dropped anything. I laughed to myself and picked up the penny and put it in my pocket to save. I looked up and greeted my dad and told him that I got his message. While I was cleaning out the house, I'd regularly talk to my dad and tell him how much this whole situation sucked. I'd occasionally crack a joke or tease my dad about something just to lighten the mood. I remember finding my parents' wedding album and sitting on the couch one night to reminisce through it. Seeing my parents at such a young age and seeing how happy they were and thinking about their young lives and future together made me break down in tears. I cried and apologized to my dad