this but but you think it's an intriguing theory i think most people though buy into that because they don't like the idea of there being a holy god who would judge their actions and their lives and you know some somebody that you would have to be beholden to somebody whose life truly does belong to that your life belongs to them whether or not you want it to or not you know he created you if you create something it belongs to you and even if that thing decides to run or you know or dis or disobey what you want it to do that doesn't change the fact that it's still yours um like your child i mean you're in a way i mean but you love your child no matter what they do they might want to disown you but still it's your child and you still love them and you want the best for them and you want them to do what you know is best for their lives even if they don't agree that you have to do those certain things in order to have the best life that doesn't change you from wanting them to do those things and trying to give them advice trying to give them guidance but you know they can ignore you that's that's what kids do so all right i'll move on to the net i know i that's that's sounding like a church of the undead i apologize folks all right let's just move on to the next one this one comes from uh sal he says hey darren i was just in chicago over the weekend for a good friend of mine's wedding my cousin and i flew out from lax on friday morning so we could see what a chicago night had to offer to los angeles single guys turns out it had too much for us to handle ha ha ha the wedding was saturday it was a beautiful moment that we were able to share with our childhood friend or as we la folk call it day one sandbox homies sunday we decided to explore the surrounding towns we ended up in justice we had a few bars and a bowling alley which was awesome we took an uber to the venetian gardens for dinner which local recommended the food was delicious we took another uber back to where we parked our car in justice the driver went down archer road uh archer road there it is uh it was dark and kind of creepy but i love that kind of stuff i was chatting with the driver when he spotted a young girl wearing what looked to be to be a white hoodie walking pretty fast on the side of the road she looked like she was gonna walk into the road so he flashed the high beams at her to get her attention she ever so slightly looked over her shoulder and moved back onto the side of the road he said i'm gonna ask if she's okay if she needs a ride would you be okay for her to ride with us i responded i don't think she's gonna want to get in the car with three dudes all of a sudden he stepped on it and yelled f that i asked dude what the heck's your problem he drove away fast until we got to a main street and then he tells me with tears in his eyes that my friend was resurrection mary i felt like a bucket of ice water was thrown at me followed by a bucket of hot water it was crazy i turned back to look at my cousin with his eyes wide and filled with fear and tears and he says her feet weren't touching the ground i haven't slept since that night thank you for your time darin signed sal well hopefully you have um slept since then uh you set this to me a week ago so hopefully you're doing all right now i wouldn't i've never heard of resurrection mary wearing a hoodie um from she's the the ghost is supposed to be so old you would expect it to be wearing dated clothing you know period clothing or something uh i don't know whatever who who knows when it comes to ghosts clothes you know maybe they have a maybe they have a ghost outlet somewhere and they shop at the weird darkness store and buy their own hoodies and stuff i have no idea whatever that is but uh yeah yeah i i can understand that being a little bit uh freaky not for you i'm but the uber driver so that that's what would scare me if i was seeing it i would immediately think hey there's a girl on the side of the road i'm on archer road she's wearing white i would immediately think resurrection mary i wouldn't necessarily believe it's happening but it would definitely come to mind but when the uber driver freaks out on you and pulls away like that and you don't know why he's freaking out until he tells you later that's a terrible way what kind of a rating did you give him i'm just kind of curious about that because you're not going to pull that stunt if you really do want to continue driving for uber uh that's that's pretty good that's pretty good by the way uh i did it was the last year i think maybe the year before i did a drive through um of resurrection cemetery i happened to be on archer road you know out there for a paranormal conference for paranormal chicago and i realized that i was there in the area so i went ahead and just drove through it it's daytime so it doesn't set it's not it's not creepy at all during the daytime it's actually a very beautiful cemetery but uh i'll try and look for the video on that and i will post a link to it in the in the show notes uh so that way you guys if you want to check it out uh you can let me write that down here video mary that'll that'll mean that that will remind me okay so thank you very much for the email alex i appreciate it okay this next one comes from let's see from carrie she says i know a lot of people have a story out there of the shadow man this happens to be true though i'm not a 15 or 13 year old when when you're young it's easy for your imagination to run wild i was in my late i was in my late i know she doesn't say she doesn't say what age she was i was in my late i know a lot of people okay there is all right all right when you're all right she was in her late 20s i started experiencing sleep paralysis i do not know what brought this on i've researched and read everything i could on this subject i suppose stress could have been a factor i've always been a stressed out kind of person though so why now why not before it still does not make any sense to me i definitely had worse stress than i was experiencing then it presented cause to me in later times how teams how be it uh what i do know this is not a friendly watch out for you kind of entity this is not child's play either it is evil and dark um i know a lot of people have okay there it is it started when i moved into a rental one summer things started quickly i would put something down only to have it disappear i assumed i had misleaded somewhere you know what they say about that though chalked it up stress next i was trying to ignore it i thought it was my imagination that was wishful thinking this went on for some time i started asking and looking for some answers the town i live in is small it's halfway up a mountain at night it's so foggy you can hardly see it doesn't matter what season or temperature i know humidity will cause it but so will frost strange i've seen weird lights heard things you cannot imagine i leave for work around 3am for work every morning i was about to make a left turn i checked once more before turning in the car's headlights there was a black shadow male form with a top hat it did touch the highway but floated or oh it didn't touch the highway but floated or glided across there's about two feet above the highway you can see its form it looked as if they were making its way across the tree line it just disappeared then two green eyes appeared believe me i floored it that night was terrifying for me rest of the story i got the hell out of there okay i have that's the first time i've heard of the shadow man having excuse me the hat man having green eyes there's people say that there's a difference between the hat man and shadow people but yeah definitely scary i would be wondering the skeptic in me i'd want to stop and look not at the not at that moment but maybe later i'd come back to that same area like in the daytime and see if somebody you know put a rope across the road or something and pulled something across as somebody was driving driving through just to scare them like they did you that'd be a very mean trick to do but all right anyway uh okay still got something here this next one comes from sam the story isn't really paranormal but it does have to do with a Ouija board and two very scared girls back when i was a teenager my best friend was sleeping over one night i had a glow in the dark Ouija board and as teen as teenage girls do we charged it up turned off the lights in my room upstairs closed the door and started playing around with it on my bed we never had any luck contacting spirits before but it was still fun to try and we were really into it since the mood was perfect with it being nighttime and with all the lights out all of a sudden we hear this loud banging on my bedroom door and the door knobs start rattling we hear this loud growling roaring from the other side of it and me and my friend are almost peeing ourselves from fear and screaming our heads off my friend jumps into my lap and i grab the back of her shirt and hide my face into her back both still screaming my bedroom door opens and there's my dad laughing and turning on the light he looks at us we're almost in tears being so scared he looks at the Ouija board on the bed and bursts out laughing even harder and goes so that's why you two were screaming so much i had no clue you were playing with that my dad likes to play tricks on people and it was heading up to bed and noticed we were being a bit too quiet and decided to scare us needless to say it worked better than he had planned and it's still the fun story to tell i don't think i've touched the Ouija board since thanks for reading this sign sam well there you go sam yeah good dad he scared you away from Ouija boards you don't play with them anymore that's that's a great parental lesson right there uh looks like okay we have another uh sam this one says Samantha all right here we go um we're a darkness fan i have the following very true story a little over a decade ago my husband and i rented a hundred year old remote rural alabama farmhouse on a sprawling 81 acres of land we just finished unpacking and settling in that first week and decided to take a break and go out for dinner upon our happy return we were met by a scene out of a horror movie our our four poster antique bed was filled with bugs that kept appearing out of nowhere and falling in layers onto the bed this was happening only on our bed as one has to do we checked all possible crevices including ceiling and walls and there was nothing coming through so we gathered the entire king size comforter left it outside and slept in a guest room the months following there were no more there were no more mystical bugs however there was constant scratching noises in the walls the home had no vermin or rats i didn't pay attention to scratching sounds and elected to put earplugs on to muffle the sounds since whatever it was wasn't garnering our attention on several nights a large dark apparition looking like what i could only describe as the grim reaper would hover over me and somehow i would feel the presence wake up see it yell at it since i was so sleepy say a few our fathers and hail marys and st michael's prayer and it would go away my husband saw it too and joined in on the prayers let me just add to this juncture that i had a very demanding job with the state as a parole officer so restful sleep was precious the last incident to happen in this charming old house is as follows at the time my rottweiler dog was very close to me and would sleep at my bedside one night my dog woke up by my woke me up by growling and when i looked much to my amazement and horror i saw three people there were two men and a woman dressed in business attire talking amongst themselves and looking at me they were ghosts i could see them but they were also see-through i didn't take my eyes off of them and nudged my husband awake and asked if he saw anything he described them just the same way they kept talking and pointing at us but by this point seeing as my dog was not growling anymore and not sensing any danger and being so sleepy i told them to keep their voices down please ask them to kindly leave us alone and we all went back to sleep seriously that's what you did you got ghosts right there in front of you you just quietly asked them to keep it down because you're trying to sleep you are way too cool with this savannah way too cool that that is something i would not be doing i would be freaking now if it's a daily occurrence and they're all the time yeah or yeah they eventually you get used to it you say hey guys can keep it down tonight you know tomorrow's going to be a rough day all right i get that but for your for your first experience to say hey keep it down we're trying to sleep in here like they're like they're teenage kids in the other room and you're that's great all right let me get let me get a sip here again before i move on okay uh this next one uh comes from uh let's ask want to make sure they don't want to be anonymous okay from allison i've got a creepy one for you when i was young we lived in fairly rural colorado between glenn wood springs and veil it was new years and i was supposed to spend the night at my bestie's house unfortunately i didn't know until that night that her stepdad was really abusive stepdad and her mom spent the night arguing when he got tired of mom he turned his anger towards my friend and her brother i was terrified but eventually told him to leave everyone alone i tended to be my bestie's defender at school so it came pretty natural to defender at home he threw me out of the house for my efforts and locked the door behind me it wasn't that long of a walk to my house about a half mile so i headed home it was really kind of creepy out there and i was a bit freaked out already by what had happened at my friend's house and then i saw a manlike shadow just off the road i ignored him but picked up my pace after some yards i took the chance of sneaking a look over my shoulder the shadow had moved forward with me i wasn't far from my house so i decided to make a sprint for it i've never been more scared in my life luckily we never locked our doors so i could just fly in and slam the door behind me i locked it and then ran through the house locking all of the doors and windows once that was done i peeked out the window by the front door a man was standing at the base of our driveway i headed to our kitchen and sat hidden by the counters with my dad's chef knife in my grip until my dad and stepmother got home from their new year's celebration i never told them what had happened on my way home just the things had gotten upsetting at my bestie's house and i couldn't sleep next day we heard that ted bundy had escaped from the glenn wood springs jail just west of us was it him rationally as an adult i know it probably wasn't but whoever it was he scared the heck out of me nonetheless wow yeah ted bundy yeah he escaped twice from custody so i don't know if that was him or not but yeah that would have freaked me out although saying that i have i'm wondering if maybe it was actually a supernatural entity coming out of such a dark creepy um tension-filled situation with your with your best friend's house i always wonder if maybe like a like a spirit attached itself to you a spirit of anger or or whatever um and and kind of followed you home you know maybe trying to attach itself to you just just a guess i don't know you would think how do what does that say about me that i'm more willing to believe a supernatural entity than it was ted bundy who was a real person that okay man i gotta i gotta check myself on this on this stuff once in a while all right anyway thank you very much for the email allison appreciate that uh this next one comes from jane she says hey my name is jane live in eerie pennsylvania an appropriately placed or appropriately named place my husband and i currently live in a house that his grandparents lived in we bought the house after his grandparents passed my husband wanted the house to stay in the family we've lived in this house for the past 29 years when we first moved in i did feel like someone was checking in on us but nothing ever bad we did renovations on the house including the basement in the basement there was an old pool table that wasn't in good condition so we broke up the pool table and bagged up all the billiard balls and q sticks and threw them away i even watched the garbage men load it all up several years later after renovating the basement we adopted two cats that would love to spend time in the basement one day i found our cat pouncer by the water heater playing with something i reached down to pick up what he was batting around what i found really shocked me there was the white cue ball from the pool table that we had broken up and thrown into the garbage several years earlier i know the first thing most people think is that we missed this cue ball and it was under the water heater well that water heater was replaced a couple of years after we got rid of the pool table and a new furnace was put in too there wasn't any possible way that cue ball could have been back in that basement i remember putting it in the girl in the garbage bag myself thank you for letting me share my story i've had many more experiences in my life seems like i have experiences in almost in almost every place i've lived in but experiencing this since i was a teenager thank you jane so right so you got a pool playing ghost nice so um yeah so you've got it the anabelle doll thing going you throw it away and it comes back to you anabelle kids toys kids balls now you know now a billiard ball the cue ball uh well i could be could it be a it could be a cursed object i guess or a haunted object i don't know i've never i wouldn't why why would it be a cue ball that would be possessed though i mean you could be a really really uh great pool player love play in the game but why would you attach yourself to the cue ball that's that i could a pool cue i could maybe see i can see the pool table see again why am i rationalizing one thing but not the others you're getting a little insight into the mind of marlar here folks all right moving on this one comes from emma that's promised by true spooky tale although i'll admit as scary as it was at the time it now just seems quite bizarre all right well let's see what emma has to say then i'm writing this from my studio looking out onto several acres of very windy and drizzly woodlands in the not so sunny south wales village of glennaman uk glennaman i hope i'm pronouncing that correctly after hearing your recent story about the omenford couple who fled their home after recording strange noises underground it inspired me to write in and tell you of our little spooky encounter whilst living in our old house our old house was set in the next village to where we currently live whilst waiting for this property to become available we were living in a little minors cottage set in a lovely quiet little row of only eight houses ours being the middle story had it that someone was once murdered on this street and apparently the murderer hid and then fled from here as there's a train track at the bottom of the garden anyway i digress the story is unrelated and although we knew of this old tale the house had always seemed nice and calm despite being built in 1905 and probably having seen quite its share of passings to the front of our property was a small walled section with a front gate which separated our house from the road we have a small dog so upon returning whoever was last in always shut the gate so if the front door was ever opened the dog couldn't run out onto the road this part's important as it was a particularly creaky metal gate on the nighting question it was cold but calm autumn night far enough on in the year that it was dark fairly early so we had all the candles lit and we're relaxing watching tv at the time we had a curved set where either end reclined which tended to mean we would sit on opposite ends so as to take advantage of our own recliners we were quite alarmed to hear what sounded like someone turning the handle on our front door and trying to enter we knew this wasn't possible as the gate had not opened so no one could be at the front door then a few moments later i felt an icy blast drift past me as if someone had opened the fridge right beside me the refrigerator door right beside me at first i wasn't sure what had just happened that was until i looked over at my fiancé and before i could tell him what had happened he exclaimed did you just feel that i've gone ice cold it was as if something had walked past me and gone straight over to him the night went on without further incident that was however until we went to sleep we were awoken in the early hours of the morning to what sounded like someone bouncing a ball against the wall in our bedroom this went on for a couple of minutes and then moved to the stairs sounding as if someone was rolling a ball down the stairs you know what it'll bounce down a couple miss some and then continue down bounce bounce miss bounce bounce bounce the finale was when the ball appeared to be rolling along the boards in our attic all in all the whole experience lasted approximately 15 to 20 minutes now there are a few things to note here but the main is that all these sounded as if the ball was being bounced or rolled along on a wooden floor on a wooden floor we had carpet on the stairs and the attic had been insulated under one of the warm home schemes meaning there was no exposed beams they were all inches deep and foamy insulation we lived between two elderly neighbors both of which lived alone with no children in any of the nearby houses the final twist to the tale was when i was talking to one of my neighbors a few days later when i couldn't stop thinking about our late night encounter i asked him if in all the years he'd lived there if he had heard any strange noises his reply left me even more surprised after a short pause he said that nothing really happened in his house the only noise he used to hear was me bouncing the ball for the dog on the skirting board in the hallway our dog never owned a ball i gave up buying them as a puppy and when he was a puppy he refused to bring them back despite us now living in a 1600s farmhouse with at least one death on the property and pleased to report all is calm that's however apart from the occasional waft of cigarettes when neither of us smoke or the shadow of a small animal assumed to be a cat that can be seen walking through the kitchen towards the living room and finally whatever it is that our dog can see on the yard that he regularly stands and growls at anyway i hope you enjoyed our spooky tale of the night a ghost decided to come in the house hide out for a few hours then wake us up in the middle of the night to play ball from weirdo listeners Emma and Hugh thank you guys great story i really appreciate you sharing that with me Emma and Hugh 1600s your your house was built that is an old house 400 year old house that is amazing well then again you're in the UK so you're gonna ask some old houses there but that old we're so used to hearing the here in the states thinking ooh the 1800s wow that is ancient how can you live in a house that old and you're in the 1600s you've got castles for crying out loud you can live you can live in something that's thousands of years old but again the bouncing ball what is it with bouncing balls for this fireside frights if you've never seen the movie the changeling starring George C. Scott you really do need to see it it's it is definitely something that every time one of these stories pops up that's what i feel like we're you know i feel like i'm watching here in my head talking about the ball going down the stairs something rolling or rolling back and forth in the attic that kind of thing all right this next one comes from uh from uh oh wow uh she goes she goes by adi but apparently her real name is a darin so very very similar to mine in pronunciation not spelled the same but still that's kind of cool anyway first of all i've been a self-professed atheist i was raised christian but i've recently gotten back into magic spell work while working with a few deities it's an interesting journey and second my possible paranormal experiences see mom passed away in 2019 and at the time i wasn't open to the idea of any sort of afterlife and i just accepted the fact that she was now gone but now as of this year things have been happening around my house that are just off one i was downstairs in the kitchen and heard something slash someone walking from the living room and the through the dining room towards me but i saw nothing two about a month or so ago i was about to leave for work and was holding my bedroom door a jar and suddenly felt it being jerked closed i looked and there was no one on either side of my door three around a couple weeks ago i was just leaving the laundry room down the hall from my room and after i closed the door and was about to close the door the laundry room kept fumping against the door frame it really spooked me four both times this morning when i went to go out for a smoke on the back porch i found a cigarette butt placed in the middle of the chair the first time and the second time i found one to the side of the chair no one else was awake at this time and we live on a few acres sorry for the long message darron i look forward to hearing from you and the next podcast you drop love your content thank you adi well thank you adi i i appreciate that uh they they got a good they got a good story here they do uh the cigarettes would definitely be the thing that that would throw me a little bit especially since you live on several acres and nobody else was around uh the downstairs hearing something walking that seems to be something that people talk about on a regular basis and i'm sure the experts would come in the skeptics and try to explain that one away um you're the door being a jar and feeling it being jerked closed yeah there you know that one that's a good one that's that's a good one adi that one so that one would be a little bit harder to explain oh it was just a draft yeah right like drafts pull the door against you like that um the laundry room i i had a hard time understanding exactly what you were talking about that i don't know if the laundry like if like if the uh the washer was was pounding or if it was the door that was pounding but anyway thank you very much for the email adi i i appreciate it okay this next one comes from will she use a letter k uh my husband and i just finished building our dream home i was it was an old farmland his grandfather used to own it's nestled among trees and a creek runs behind no home had ever been built there one night when we were still getting settled in i stretched out on the couch in the living room to watch a movie my husband was fiddling with something in the back of the house usually for me i drifted off to sleep i and i woke up as the movie credits were rolling by still lying down i glanced at the front door the man was standing there looking at me i slammed my eyes shut when i opened them he was still there i rubbed my eyes roughly he was still there i watched him he watched me i was not scared but concerned with a strange man to come in the house he was about five foot eight or so wearing old-fashioned farmers clothes stetson like hat mid-thigh denim jacket he stood in profile the room was fairly dark but i could see he had a sharp nose i decided i had best sit up and when i did he was instantly gone over the years i've tried to convince myself that i was obviously dreaming except for a couple of things primarily was the feeling i had of unspeakable immense love total acceptance a feeling that i was okay also a feeling of pity and a little sadness these feelings stayed with me for months and months i felt like the old man just wanted to see what we've done with the place after promising myself i would never tell anyone about this i couldn't hold it in i felt like i was walking on air when i told my husband guess what just happened he immediately said i had described his grandpa i never knew him or had ever seen a picture of him because he'd been dead for many years before i married my husband my mother-in-law said the same thing my husband died of cancer at age 62 here in the house but i still live here his grandpa is welcome back anytime wow okay first very sorry for your loss about losing your husband especially to cancer that'd be a horrible way to go interesting that uh grandpa's welcome didn't mention anything about your husband's ghost so hopefully he's gone on to a better place and he's and he's happy kind of interesting how how family will stick around like that this next one comes from andy he says darren hello hope you're doing well today after listening to your youtube channel i decided to send you our family's experience and yes it's true it may not be the most frightening or bizarre experience you've read but it sure was interesting living through it hope you have a nice rest of your day thanks darren signed andy all right well then let's take a look at andy's story here and see what he has to say he calls it simply our paranormal experience dream home nice this is a long one let me take another step another drip or another drip another sip it'd be a drip if it was coffee but it's not not coffee this time around okay starting to lose my voice but i'm also seeing an ending to these emails coming soon so maybe i maybe i can make it through all right um where am i andy and here is your okay in november 2009 my wife and i moved just a few miles away from where we were living in the city in our dream home that sits on two acres out in the country here in southwest michigan the home we purchased was only four years old and sold to us by a young couple who built the house themselves and had two young children we had one daughter at the time who was three years old we were in a hurry to get moved in because days after we moved into the home i was leaving for a two-week mission trip to zambia africa one evening after i returned from africa my wife and i were sitting in bed and heard a crash coming from the basement bathroom i went down to find the shower curtain rod with no curtain yet installed on it laying on the floor i didn't think much of it at the time i just figured that perhaps the previous owner had not installed it correctly a few nights later i awakened around 2 a.m to find a living room light on outside our bedroom my wife slept as i got up to turn it off as the light was annoyingly keeping me awake in the morning i told her that she left the light on in the living room when she went to bed and that it woke me up during the night she insisted it was totally dark when she went to bed after me i checked the light bulb and it was firmly screwed into the socket it was not a touch lamp so i could not figure out how it came on by itself a daughter uh had not gotten up during the night to turn it on either a few months later after i came home from a business trip my wife stated that while i was away our three-year-old daughter came out of her room one afternoon where she was playing and asked where's daddy my wife explained to her that i was still on my business trip she said our daughter insisted that i must be home because she heard my voice talking to her as if i were in the room with her a few months later my wife and daughter were in our basement while i was at work one afternoon my wife said she froze as she heard multiple voices upstairs she could hear them speaking but could not make out what they were saying she thought perhaps they were robbers and was terrified for her and our daughter's safety she thought it was odd that she did not hear footsteps though the voices then abruptly stopped a few moments later after a lengthy amount of time she slowly went upstairs to find that no one was there and had not been there she could not figure out who or what had been upstairs talking by spring of 2011 we had a second daughter late each night i'd wake up to use our master bath toilet and then leave our bedroom to walk down the hallway to check on the girls who shared a bedroom one night i went to our bathroom and then walked through our dark bedroom to head to their room just a few feet before making it through our bedroom doorway the lamp on the end table next to our couch right outside our bedroom door came on it illuminated the room i was about to enter i froze with my heart racing my first thoughts were that someone had broken into the house after a few moments i rationalized that i would have heard at least something in all that silence like soft steps walking across the carpet it also didn't make sense that a thief breaking into a home at night would turn on the most obvious lighting source in the center of the house i gathered my courage and took a few extra steps to walk into the bright living room where the lamp was i found that no one was there the next morning when i told my wife what had happened i could not explain to her or understand myself how that lamp came on in the middle of the night at that very moment i was about to enter the room combined with everything else that had happened this is when we really felt as if something paranormal was coming into our was occurring in our home a few other things happened over the next few years that we could also not explain i finally phoned the previous owners one afternoon and made small talk for a while i told them that we loved the house and we were grateful that they sold it to us years prior i asked them if they had ever had anything odd happen in the four years they lived in the house when they asked what i meant i explained the multiple events that we experienced while they agreed that the events we experienced were eerie they insisted that they had not had one thing happen in their four years of living in the home one evening in 2013 after we had put our daughters to bed i was in the kitchen with our small dog sugar it was dark except for the glow of our laptop computer at a nearby table i bet over to give a give a dog cookie to sugar when i stood up a female voice whispered hey very clearly in my left ear because my wife would frequently want to show me something she found on the internet i looked over at the laptop computer thinking i would see my wife the chair was empty i quickly went into my daughter's bedroom a few steps away thinking my wife was by our girl's beds and had whispered out to me from there she wasn't there either i went down the hallway to the other end of the house to find my wife in bed with the blankets over her reading a book i asked if she had tiptoed real quickly down here after saying something to me in the kitchen my now only 30 to 45 seconds if that had passed since i heard the woman's whisper in my ear my wife replied you finally heard voices too didn't you for the previous four years i didn't believe that she and my daughter had heard voices in our home i believed it now and i could not explain from where these voices were coming with everything that we experienced up to that point we didn't necessarily feel afraid just bewildered and confused none of us were ever physically touched by anything we had ever saw any ghostly apparitions on a sunday afternoon in 2016 i went into our basement utility room which houses our water heater and furnace as well as my tools and workbench among other household appliances it's a good sized room with no windows and just one door i entered the room to find my power drill in its hardshell plastic case sitting upright in the middle of the room on the concrete floor it was as if someone had set it there i paused for a moment and wondered why i had left it there in the middle of the room i then realized i hadn't this drill in case normally sit on a shelf with other encased power tools at a height that makes me stand on my tippy toes to reach it of all the power tools in their cases on that shelf how did just this one come down how could it have landed in such an upright position and with no damage from the height it fell i was baffled and put it back on the shelf not two days had passed when i entered the utility room once more to now find two wooden slats about four inches wide and two feet long each um two feet long each that i used as window props laying in the middle of the room on the concrete floor in the same spot the drill and case had been sitting they were lying next to each as if someone had placed them there together it was not as if they had randomly fallen these slats were normally kept on an upper shelf approximately eight feet off the floor this is an area that my wife or small daughters would need a ladder to reach them if they could even find them discovering the drill case and now these slats in the middle of the room all on their own in such a short amount of time frame had me flabbergasted once more i'm not told my wife what had happened with the drill case and wooden slats about a day later she told me that she went down to the utility room to get something for dinner out of our extra fridge when she entered the room a can of spray paint that was on the floor behind the door got knocked across the room i got the chills when she told me this i told her that i have not been using any spray paint for weeks and that those cans were a good six feet away from the door the door she entered is the only way into that utility room the only way that this paint can could could get behind the door would be for someone to be in the room and to do so it just wasn't humanly possible to place anything behind the door i then explained what happened just days earlier with the drill case and wood slats it was as if something in our home was trying to get our attention i've lived at many addresses across several states in my adult life and had never had even one of these experiences happen at any of those houses because the previous owners never had anything peculiar happen to them i began to wonder what we had done to bring this into our home after years of odd and unexplained events it finally occurred to me what may be causing our bizarre experiences during my mission trip to africa shortly after we moved into the home years earlier i brought back multiple wood objects of different sizes these objects were hand carved by various villagers in different areas of zambia through which we traveled perhaps one of these wood carvings i thought could contain an evil entity witchcraft is very much alive in that part of africa so while i could not prove it definitively i believed this to be a strong reason for what was happening in our home shortly after the utility room incidents i put an end to what was happening i went downstairs one night to get something from our basement even though the basement was dark i didn't turn on the lights as i knew it would be a quick trip down and back to grab what i needed as i entered the basement i passed by a window that faces our backyard the window alarm went off and it startled me this is the type of alarm that needs the windows to physically open to make the alarm trigger all i had done was walk by it like the lamp going on years earlier this alarm waited until i was near it to go off and loudly sound i had had enough being a devout christian i said out loud you will no longer bother my family and you are not welcome in this home in the powerful name of jesus christ you will leave and you will not return i'll admit my heart rate was up there a bit i paused for a moment in the silence as if awaiting a response and then went back upstairs my wife immediately heard from me what had happened with the window alarm and what i said out loud afterwards although we experienced seven years of unexplainable events and voices no one in our family has had another incident in our home since it whatever it was was commanded to leave oh andy what a great uh well i want to say testimony or story whatever that is amazing when i was reading through that before you got to the end where you were talking about the carved object that you brought back i was picturing in my head somebody that worked with their hands somebody who liked working with power tools or with tools in general maybe working with wood maybe working with electricity working on houses stuff like that because you know the lights turning on the uh you know the the drill the wood slats it just it for some reason in my head i was thinking to somebody that somebody that liked to work with their hands you know like like a handyman type of thing so when you got to the zambia um wooden thing that you brought back the wooden um artifact that kind of made sense because that would have been made by hand by somebody who was really good with their hands are really good with working with wood and stuff like that and so i was kind of on the same same wavelength but i did not did not expect a cursed object uh that that definitely was not my thing but man you you knocked it out of the park when you got the told this thing to get out in the name of jesus christ so many of these stories work that way when when if somebody doesn't believe in in christ they'll go and they'll try to uh to usage or something like that um and sometimes they'll try to try to make friends with the spirit okay whatever but so many times if it's an evil spirit it won't go away until the name of jesus christ is said it is amazing how often that happens and this is not just me being religious even though i i am and i'm going to be a bit biased towards this solution it happens so often you have to wonder why unless there truly is power in jesus christ because that's the only thing that explains it especially the sleep paralysis incidents so many of those people can't get out of them i'm not not all of them obviously because we've shared some that don't but so many um they'll get out of it by by asking jesus to save them or telling the demon or whatever it is to get out in jesus name it's amazing how often that happens and when somebody and they'll they'll have repeat sleep paralysis incidents sometimes but those those who use jesus name don't at least not that i've heard of if you're if you're somebody who had sleep paralysis and you have you know tossed this tossed out the demon and jesus christ's name and it left you alone if it did come back i want to know because i would like to know about that but i've never heard of it happening before somebody somebody saying you are not welcome here in the powerful name of jesus christ you will leave and you will not return that's those are some powerful words man so well done i knew you were christian right from the get go because you said that you were on a missions trip in zambia so i knew right then and there okay this guy's gonna be a man of faith he's gonna have an interesting story uh really appreciate that thank you so much for sending it andy okay this next one comes from uh crystal hi darren i don't know if you still have interest in imaginary friends stories of course i do crystal of course i do uh but i have a story of something some adults might call imaginary it started when i was about four or five years old my parents moved into a house with me and my newborn sister the friend of theirs wanted us to house sit for a year i remember it was an old house almost a farmhouse i loved and heated that house i had a big bedroom at least to me that had a bed a small dresser and a small table i like to use it also had a bay window with cushions to sit on the bench where i loved to sit and stare outside the bed was on loud springs and also old which would alert my parents when i was up despite this bucolic setting good word usage there i felt things that were wrong about the house first i absolutely refused to go into the basement there was a demon yes i knew what one was called there there was a demon there that i was convinced would hurt me my mom tried to coax and or demand i go down there with her but i'd make such a fuss not to once i only went halfway down the steps before i planted my butt and wouldn't go further during this time i started having terrible nightmares now described as night terrors i remember only pieces of the dreams but i do remember being terrified by what i called the demon of demons wow that's not ominous at all okay um i understood it liked to torment children and i was his choice of the moment i would wake up sitting bolt upright eyes wide with tears and fear i'd scream for my parents to comfort me or run for the comfort of the bay window i then try to stay awake by leaning against the coolness of the window watching for the sun to come up or daddy to get in the car for work once either of those happened i felt safe enough to climb back into bed until mom came to wake me up for the day sometimes i lost the battle with the sandman and fell back to sleep many times the terrorizing renewed even there even after my family fulfilled our job and moved to a house a few miles away the demon continued its torment on me this lasted until we moved north after i finished second grade i felt relieved once i realized i was safe from it that lasted until i was in my early 20s when i met a girl who by then shared my interest in things paranormal and was considered to be new age one night my friend her boyfriend and i were sitting in my room talking and being young adults in general at one point the boyfriend seemed different he managed to say i don't feel right then the boyfriend wasn't him anymore the thing said hello to us but told my friend he wasn't here for her its gaze leveled on me and a smile slid across its lips do you remember me little girl it asked as i saw horns and tusks outline the boyfriend's head shoulders arms and torso i suddenly felt small and scared again as i answered and choked yes it laughed replying good and then asked do you still fear me i swallowed hard which helped me find the courage to say no not anymore apparently it was not convinced and asked why i simply told it i stopped you it should be noted that by that point in my life i'd convinced myself the nightmares stopped because i taught myself how to block it from coming to me i was wrong however the demon told me it left because i got too old to be anymore fun with then it decided i wasn't worthy anymore i did the snort smirk and oh really to him which he clearly did not like he tried to say more to try and scare me again but i had enough with a confidence i didn't feel i told him told it that it wasn't welcome anymore and declared it to be banished from my friend and house with the final i'm not finished with you and a couple other idle threats i reiterated my banishment declaration it was then the boyfriend uncurled himself and stretched his somehow aching body he asked what happened and we told him all that transpired as we each understood it i explained the short version of what i'd already told you and your readers the boyfriend then said i feel like i want to eat raw fresh meat as he rubbed and flexed his jaw we all nervously laughed and proceeded to break down what kind of demon it could be have me give any additional information i could and so on we soon quit that endeavor and then went home and they went home thankfully i have not had any more issues of that kind again well that's my story hope you and the rest of the weirdo family enjoyed this my husband and i really enjoy your show by the way thank you science crystal well thank you crystal i appreciate the kind words there at the end and i'm glad to have you and your husband as part of our weirdo family i'm glad it's really it's always great when i hear of couples listening to the show together that's that's rare for podcasts most people are listening in their car driving to work or something like that or maybe going to sleep at night it's neat when when people are listening together so thank you for sharing that what a story though now at first if it wasn't for what you saw i would have said okay the boyfriend he probably maybe you'd shared this story before and so he knew about it and so he was playing playing along playing around with you you know trying to scare you but you saw on the face the horns and everything come on come on to him that's all you you can't fake that so i'm guessing this really was something that you would dealt with and as a little kid as a tiny kid four or five years old something that you that you experienced called the demon of demons who comes up with that at four or five years old you might know the concept of a demon well when you as a kid like four or five you probably know the concept of the devil because you've seen all the cartoonish pictures of him the red suit the forked tail you know carrying around the pitchfork and he has horns i get all that but to know what an actual demon is and then to to come up with like a demon of demons to know that there's a hierarchy of demons like that because there is that is that's scary that's i almost said impressive but that's for a for a young child to know that that's really disturbing that really really is so yeah i think i think something was definitely tormenting you and to to then start hanging out with kids or young adults i guess who were of the new age they were not i don't know your spirituality so i because i don't think you mentioned it in here i think i would have would have caught if you said that you were religious or christian or something so you not being christian and them not being christian you know being pagan or new age or wicking or whatever they were you you say new age but they probably weren't protected as well which made it easier for that demon then to infest the boyfriend at least temporarily because if you're a christian my this is my what i truly believe i don't have proof for it but a lot of i get this because i've heard it from other from people that i trust and i it makes sense to me if you are a born again christian so you've actually given your life to christ you cannot be possessed you can be oppressed you know you can be tormented by demons but they cannot actually enter you and control you uh because in the bible it says he who is in me is greater than he who is in the world uh so if jesus is in you you've accepted him into your life a demon can't take his place he's in you so he stopped that stops that from happening um so that's at first one night when you said that you you had stopped it i thought okay well maybe that's what she meant but no you would actually just you thought you'd found a way to to keep it away but so very cool story man i really appreciate that crystal thank you so much for sharing it uh let's see here i've got oh wow world was done two more all right um dear mr marlar i'm from north carolina by the way this comes from uh cindy i'm from north carolina not far from the devil's tramping ground i thought i knew everything about the devil's tramping ground but i learned a couple of new things about it from your podcast i've listened to many many many podcasts like yours and yours is by far the best well thank you so much you're so i appreciate that it's very nice of you your voice is so easy to listen to cool well let me before i get continue on let me write down devil's tramping ground i'll put a link to that episode in the show notes as well in case anybody hasn't seen it it's actually a very recent episode so you've probably all have already heard it but just in case i'll put that down there so i need to look for the uh resurrection mary video that i made and the devil's tramping ground um episode somebody oh yes right we also talked about imaginary friends let me let me write down that episode as well just so ever just so i can make sure to get to it okay all right uh anyway uh she says i have two paranormal experiences to share with you both auditory the first was when i was staying with a friend whose house was way off the road in the woods by itself it was a very old house she and her boyfriend were in the process of renovating it she and i were sitting on the couch chit chatting and having a beer when from the back of the house the clear low male voice says her name we both jumped and looked at each other and asked each other did you just hear that her boyfriend nor anyone else was there at the time and with no road nor houses close by so we know it was not of this plane i get chills just remembering that the second was a year or so after my grandfather went home to jesus my entire life he would call for my grandmother when she was in another room to do different things for him for example ethyl call so and so for me or ethyl bring me my hat he always did this even when he got sick in the nursing home he would call for her a year or so after my grandfather passed my brother my son and i were in my grandmother's kitchen with her just talking went out of nowhere we hear a shout from the back of the house ethyl i knew from my brother and my son's faces they had also heard it very clearly as i did my grandmother said is someone here she'd heard it too she looked out the window to see if someone had pulled up in the driveway no one my brother and i waited until we left to discuss what we'd heard my grandmother doesn't believe in the paranormal even though i know that time she had also witnessed it my brother my son and i all agree that was my grandpa's voice that gave me chills thanks so much for what you do i love how you put the verses and quotes at the end of each podcast the podcast gets me through a lot of house chores if you use my experiences you could refer to me as sick lunch lady okay sick lunch lady i'll instead of cindy i'll call you a sick lunch lady that's funny all right uh yeah you would think your grandmother would actually recognize her husband's voice instead of just saying is there somebody here you would think oh my gosh that's my husband yeah there's because if it's somebody that you know even if it's somebody from years ago but you're very very close to you know that voice when it comes like like if they call you out of the blue before they even say who they are you hear that but that voice you just know it's them so and she was so used to him being in another room yelling ethyl i would have thought that she probably you know what i'm guessing she probably did recognize the voice she just didn't want to let on because it probably scared her not like not like fearful terrified type of thing but it would have startled her especially because because she didn't believe in the paranormal and she didn't know how to explain it and maybe she wasn't sure exactly you know what you would heard you may have heard somebody yell it too but but maybe you didn't hear it in your grandpa's voice you know but she did you know um any anything you can to try and rationalize it away so all right uh let's see here moving on to our very last one all right this one comes from jane uh hi again it's jane from eerie pennsylvania hey i truly hope you don't mind that i'm emailing you again i don't mind it at all i don't mind you feel free to send me as many stories as you would like uh i was listening to your chamber of comments that you had on july 16th by the way i think is truly awesome it's so very sweet of you to take time out of your day to share your emails as well as answering them that's the reason why i decided to email you i was listening to the email from one of your listeners that was quite lengthy but asked a very valid a great question to me as well she basically had asked if any if uh one can believe in god as well as believe in the supernatural that really hit home for me i listened very intently to what she had to share as well as what you shared so thank you for that that email had me thinking about an experience i had ever since i heard that i've been kicking around the idea of emailing you the thought had not left me alone so here i am i promise i won't keep bothering you as i know you truly are a busy person with a lot on your plate it's just this thought wouldn't leave me alone and kept telling me to share it with you you know what you don't have to you don't have to apologize for emailing me okay that's that's what fireside frights and the chamber of comments is all about i love getting emails from people and i don't have anybody else sorting through them i'm the one that reads them so if you send them to me i will see them i may not necessarily reply immediately sometimes i'll set it off to the side and reply here in a firefight fireside frights or in the chamber of comments but i do see them so and i don't mind that at all i'm in front of a microphone all day long being being a professional voice actor it's what i do it's a nice little break actually when i get emails from people so don't worry about that all right okay anyway continuing on with jane's email she says i haven't shared this with many people in my life just just those i thought i could trust and those i thought would appreciate it its experience was when i was 29 i just turned 53 last week let me give you a little background info so this might be a bit lengthy so far that i so far that i do apologize oh i'm sorry so for that i do apologize when i was around eight or nine my mother was in the process of separating from her second husband my stepfather he and i never got along and let's just say he was kind of cruel to me so i went to live with my grandparents for a very short period of time just until i could be with my mother again during the time i was with my grandparents my grandmother made sure to take very good care of me she was a very devout catholic and what did we raised catholic as well she made sure i went to church every sunday and learned and learned all i could about god while there i indeed needed i i'm so sorry folks i'm stumbling over this one her writing is perfectly fine it's just me i did indeed learn to accept god and love him my mother and i were back together after the school year and when we were reunited i did keep keep up going to church and kept up learning about god when i became a teenager i did become lazy and didn't really go to church but i didn't stop believing in god and prayed to him every night thanking him for the day's blessings you're not the only one jay i think teenage years is something that we all kind of walk away from church for a while just because we're trying to find ourselves trying to find out who we really are you know do we really believe in this stuff that mom and dad have been teaching us all our lives and quite often we do come back to the church but yeah those those years that's that's when i walked away too um she says i did find something amazing about my praying to god now i'm probably reading too much into this but i sometimes swear the things i prayed for would happen so fast i was it was shortly after i got married i remember going to the local animal shelter and saw a cat there i felt so bad for this cat it was there because its owner had passed away it didn't have a home anymore i so wanted to adopt this cat but my hubby wouldn't go for it so i'd prayed so hard for this cat to get adopted i called back the next day to check on it it literally got adopted an hour before i called that's just one example i have but things like that would happen all the time here's the experience that i had that still lives with me today when i was 29 years old my oldest daughter was three at the time and my youngest was a little over a year old my hubby was going through some medical issues that we were trying to get down to the bottom of little did i know at the time it would take us two years to finally get a medical diagnosis and a plan to treat him but during this time my husband had gone through so many tests and doctors only to get no answers well again when i was 29 on the particular night i remember being at my lowest and so sad and not knowing where to turn my husband wasn't doing well and my youngest daughter was also sick that night but just typical little kid things so after i put my girls to bed and my hubby was asleep in bed i came out to the living room sat down on the couch and just started talking to god i was talking out loud to him as if he were in the same room with me as i sat there talking to god with tears in my eyes i felt as if i were being held in someone's arms like someone was giving me a big bear hug i suddenly felt very tired and sleep just came over me very fast so i thanked god for listening to me and said good night i went to bed that night i had the most wondrous dream ever my dream didn't seem like a dream to me it felt very real in every aspect in my dream i found myself on a beautiful mountain side next to a babbling stream i could hear the running water of the stream in my dream the colors of the mountain side were so brilliant they just stood out i felt utter peace calm tranquility and love i didn't have a care in the world at this place when i turned my head to look around i found animals sitting next to me all kinds of them they were just sitting there next to me then all of a sudden i heard my name called by a man's voice it was the most beautiful sounding voice i have ever heard i looked up because i was sitting down but i looked up i saw the face of jesus surrounded by a golden light he had the most bluest eyes i've ever seen and the biggest kindest smile i could ever imagine i was in utter shock that i couldn't find my voice for a moment he took that time to sit down right next to me he reached over and took my hand in his and smiled at me i looked at him and just couldn't believe what i was seeing as if he were reading my mind he just laughed and smiled at me more he then said to me don't worry everything's gonna be okay i'm here for you i was speechless but then i finally found my voice and asked but why me surely there are bigger and better people than me he laughed again and the laugh was the sweetest sound i ever heard he told me that he was there for me because i've always put people before me and wanted to let me know that he was there for me i then remembered that i had forgotten to pray for my sister-in-law that night and before i could even say a word he said my sister-in-law was going to be okay as well as for everything i prayed for before i went to sleep i then woke up the next day with such a sense of peace and love that i just can't put it into words now i know there are people out there that think that i may have made all of this up in my imagination but i can assure you i did experience all of this that experience has stayed with me ever since it happened i did share it with a reverend of our local church he thinks that i did indeed get a receive a visit from jesus but i should be careful with it not sure what he meant but i will always treasure it with that being shared i've also had my fair share paranormal experiences i truly believe in both i know you share your emails with your listeners and i'm okay if you want to share this i just ask no one judge me too hard thank you so much for letting me share this very truly personal experience with you thanks again hugs jane i don't know if i could if i could end tonight on a better story did not plan it that way at all i went from the oldest to the newest emails this one came in just yesterday jane wow what an amazing story and i think i know what your pastor meant when he said that you need to be careful um because some so many people would take this and immediately think jesus took me to heaven he showed me exactly what heaven's going to be like and we can't know that we can't know that it was just a dream he and granted god does speak to us through dreams i have no doubt about that whatsoever i'm not saying that he always does but he can acts 217 your sons and daughters will speak what god has revealed your young men will see visions your old men will dream dreams so yeah god does speak to us through dreams once in a while so i don't doubt that at all but you can't necessarily say this is exactly what jesus said to me you know you can't do a thus say it the lord type of thing you don't want to you don't want to put yourself in the uh in the shoes of being a false prophet you know you can't call yourself a prophet for that but yeah i mean the way you were describing that though i said that that sounds like heaven to me uh the beautiful surroundings like that the animals living together you know the lion the lion and the lamb that by the way which is not in the bible uh that was actually in last in last week's church of the undead uh that the lion and the lambs together isn't in there but the the the uh the wolf and the lamb lying together the whole the whole point is there are no there's no pray you know there's no um there's there's no uh pray and predator situation when it when it's in heaven and i do believe that that animals will be in heaven i i truly do believe that i i think that's that's part of uh you know what the but what when the bible's talking about all the animals living together in harmony like that i think i i think heaven is going to be that way so when people ask about their pets why not yeah i if if animals are going to be there anyway why not have our pets there if it's something that we truly loved and heaven is all about love why not have that have you know the pets that we loved there so uh jane that that is really great i really appreciate that um folks that that's the last email if you want to email me your paranormal story uh you can send me true stories or uh fictional stories the fictional stories will be used in a uh in a future like like maybe friday frights that i'm hoping to bring back soon or like or maybe a thriller thursday if it's a true story though i share it right here on fireside frights you can email me just go to well just email darin at weirddarkness.com that darin again is d a r r e n and uh i'm gonna leave you to uh with with this uh isaia 40 verse 29 the lord the everlasting god gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak and a final thought from simone wheel to be always relevant you have to say things which are eternal i'm darin marlar thanks for joining me for this fireside frights episode of weird darkness answer george possessor of a magic each one right here on the other hey weirdos our august weirdo watch party is saturday august 5th with a movie presented by a perfectly named horror host show the weirdness really bad movie with dav binkley. dav will be presenting 1962's dreck of a film the magic sword starring basil wrath bone and trust me wrath bone is the only good part about this movie the son of a sorceress armed with weapons and armor assisted by six magically summoned knights embarks on a quest to save a princess from a vengeful wizard that's right it's not just an awful movie it's an awful historically incorrect period piece movie you got a two-headed fire breathing dragon cursed shrunken people a giant ogre that looks like a guy in a werewolf costume a wicked and ugly witch you'll see the cone heads from saturday night live well they look that way at least you've got dated special effects terrible acting and costumes that look like they were ripped right out of a money python skit the weirdo watch party is always free to watch online with all of us so grab your popcorn candy and soda and jump into the fun and even get involved in the live chat as we watch the movie it's the magic sword presented by the weirdness really bad movie show saturday august 5th starting at 10 p.m. eastern 9 p.m. central 8 p.m. mountain 7 p.m. pacific see a trailer for the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the weirdo watch party page at weirddarkness.com it will see you on saturday august 5th for the weirdo watch party bonus points if you're wearing your renaissance festival costume while watching when salem roanoke took a job near his family's new home as a hired hand in the texas hill country he anticipated learning the ranchers trade but a series of strange events shocking murders and unholy revelations divert him down another path this terrifying trajectory puts him directly into the middle of a struggle between monsters magic and men armed and backed by a militia of ranchers salem attempts to combat the creeping tide of evil that threatens to engulf his new home and destroy the people most important to him will salem manage to save his home or have his actions condemn everyone he hopes to save the witch trials a summer of wolves and season of the witch by sr roanoke available in paperback kindle and audiobook versions look for the witch trials by sr roanoke on amazon or find it on the audiobooks page at weirddarkness.com that's weirddarkness.com slash audiobooks 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 slash listen


okay let's talk about it signs you have hurt the narcissist there are very clear signs when you have hurt these narcissists but sometimes you may not even realize that you have hurt them it may have been something you said or did I mean I've had experiences with narcissists where you can't even go you can't even go out of the house for 10 minutes they go crazy that's really the most obvious sign that you have hurt them is that they get really angry they want to hurt you and it's really insane how from one incident they can end up being on this never-ending mission to destroy you just because you did one little thing wrong and now they're coming down on you like a ton of bricks just because you made one mistake it's really ridiculous but this is what these people do do one little thing wrong and then they're on you it's like that's it for life they hold grudges they experience a lot of bitterness and resentment as though the situation was unfair doesn't matter if you meant to or not the truth isn't important to the narcissist doesn't even matter if you did nothing wrong they feel as though something was wrong they feel angry or upset about something so you must have done something to them that's how they see it and once they feel like you've done something to them they just can't let things go they're on a mission to hurt you like they say hurt people hurt people once they hurt they don't know how to deal with it they don't know how to regulate their emotions their way of dealing with it is to hurt you to reject their insecurities onto you and that is why they will get very angry they will insult you put you down they will try to punish you they will damage your property they may even become physically violent and if all else fails once they know that you're on to them you're no longer susceptible to their manipulation they will just discard you because that is another way for them to hurt you or at least they think it is they give it a silent treatment they cut you out of activities or interests that they think you want or prefer and they will also triangulate you with other people they'll do anything to hurt you they'll do anything to make you envious or jealous but even then the craziest thing about this which even up until this day I still can't get my head around it but this is the truth this is the reality of it and that is that they actually don't care so much about how you feel or what you're actually going through they're not really that bothered if you're angry or upset about something they did or if you're envious or jealous bitter resentful whatever it is they're actually not that concerned about that as long as it seems like to them as long as they perceive it that way that's enough for them that's really the craziest thing about it is that when you've hurt them they're not really that concerned about having hurt you as long as they can exist in this fantasy where they feel like they've got one on you in some way as long as they can trick you to believe in that for whatever reason you were hard done by you suffered something unfortunate it doesn't have to be true as long as they can trick you into believing that that is enough for them it's really a mind boggling thing but that's how they think but yeah a lot of the time they will want to see blood and I don't mean literally although in some cases that may be true as well but they they will want to see you going through it they will try to hurt you they will try to make your life difficult and inconvenient they will try to set you back in some way because they're hurt a person who is happy and contented and they're actually fulfilled with their lives people like that even if you hurt them they're not going to come after you they're not going to feel they need to punish you if you hurt them deliberately and intentionally they might just cut you off and not engage with you again but they're not going to go out of their way to tear you down that's the difference between a good person and a narcissist because a true victim just wants to be left alone in peace they're not really that concerned about revenge but anyway that's all I've got to say on this topic I hope that it resonated with you if it did please give it a thumbs up and as always leave your thoughts in the comments I do read all of the comments every day thank you all and have a good day


Ready? Ready? Handball! Okay. Oh, it's that buzzard. That's what's interesting to her again. You see it? Yeah. I wonder if there is...


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Okay, thank you, Marisa, for this nice introduction. I'd like to thank all the organizers for inviting me, for giving me the opportunity of giving this talk to this amazing group of scientists. I'm a PhD student from the University of Campinas, and I'd like also to thank Marco Zaglia, who's my PhD advisor, and all the friends and colleagues and all the collaborators of Marco's lab. So I will talk about the Dehida Higgs model with a neutral evolutionary process, which is a simpatic speciation. So let's talk a little bit about speciation. And specious formation process are in the center of biology, and they are important not only to explain the patterns of diversity that you can observe now in nature, but also it helps us to understand the origins of biodiversity, and maybe it's possible futures that we can forecast under different scenarios, under different conditions. And so it's useful to classify speciation according to its geographical mode of speciation and on one side of the zero, there are the allopathic speciation, which is the process of the emergence of species with the interruption of the gene flow due to geographical barriers, such as mountains, rivers, or a piece of land separating two lakes or whatever. And on the other side of the zero, there are the simpatic speciation process, which are those that occur without the complete interruption of the gene flow. A good definition of simpatic speciation is due to gabrylets. It's the emergence of new species from a population where mating is random with respect to the place of birth of the mating partners. It was proposed by Darwin as an important process of diversification. And although it's very contagious process, there are some examples in literature claiming that some species have embers due to a simpatic speciation process. And how can we model this kind of process in mathematical ways? So here I will talk about the Derrida Higgs model, which is a neutral model. So there's no selection mechanisms forcing the diversification. And it shows simpatic speciation. And it was based on the spin glasses theory and was proposed in 1991 by these two guys. And how does it work? Well, we start with a population of n individuals and identical individuals. And these individuals are defined by binary chain of plus one and minus one of size B, which is the genome of an individual. Actually, the entries of your binary chain can be any number that you want. So you can choose plus one or zero or the pair of numbers that you like the most. And for every part of individuals, alpha and beta, we can measure how close they are with this quantity that's called the similarity between the pair alpha and beta, which simply counts the number of alleles that they have in common, despite of a normalization here. And it's defined in such a way that the similarity among between two identical individuals is one. And how the evolution occurs, it's an IBM process. And we have your population of n individuals. So you choose a pair of individuals. So you have a pair of individual alpha and an individual beta. And each one has its own genome sequence, this binary chain. And then they are combined to generate an offspring. So can reproduce, generate an offspring. And this offspring will have its genome given by the combination of the genome of its parents. And so each allele can come from parent alpha or parent beta with the same probability. And then we can build this new genome. And additionally, there is a mutation rate. So every allele can flip to the different value with a probability related to the mutation rate. And we repeat this process of choosing a pair n times. And then from one population, we can build an entire new population. So this process have non-overlaping generations. So generation T generates the new generation T plus one, which will be a slightly different population from the previous one. So what do we analyze in this model? So the thing that we analyze here is the evolution of the similarity distribution. And here we start with a identical population. So there's a peak at one. And then it starts to evolve moving towards smaller values. And at some time we can see that it finds an equilibrium. This distribution finds an equilibrium. And how can I explain that? Well, for the infinite genome case, we can prove these equations. So the similarity between two individuals of the next generation is given in terms of the similarity of their parents. And from this equation, we can define an algorithm and then we can run this algorithm and generate all the evolution of the similarity metrics among the population. And here is something that you can find. And we can see that after some time, there's an equilibrium of this distribution in the system. And we can analytically calculate this equilibrium. It's simply take, we simply take the ensemble average of this equation. We can find a recurrence equation for the average value of the similarity, which has an equilibrium solution. And this is the equilibrium that you can find here. However, the purely random mating is non-realistic as also this is not interesting because nothing happens. And so now what we're going to do is to include a minimal similarity. Now there's this threshold. And so if a given pair has its similarity above the threshold, they can reproduce, otherwise they can't. So what we have here now is the similarity starts to evolve. It starts to move towards the equilibrium. However, at some time, it crosses the threshold. And at this point, it's an important point because a large number of pairs cannot reproduce anymore. And so something weird happens and we can find from the simulations that this is what occurs. There's the appearance of this peaks. And this peak we can relate to a species. We can see this peak as a species A, this other peak species B. And these will have the inter-specific similarity between both species. But why can we do that? And let me try to explain that. And the best way to explain this is through network theory. We can think about the individuals as nodes of a network and the nodes are connected if the individuals can reproduce. So if their similarity is above the threshold and what the Derrida Higgs dynamics is doing is simply raising some connections of this network. And at some point, there's the formation of components in this network. And then I'm sorry, I'm gonna finish this and then there is a question. Okay, okay. So we can make a correspondence in between the network that you have with the histogram that you had before that I showed you. And so the peaks above the threshold are the connections that exists in this network that is still exists in the network. And the peak below the threshold are the connections that no longer exists in the network. So what's the question? I cannot see nothing here. It's okay, Armon, go ahead. I have two questions if you want, maybe you can answer it after. But one is, I guess I missed what determines the relative fitness between the genome. Is it a projection or is it? No, no, there is no fitness. There's no fitness. It's a neutral process. Oh, right, right. Okay, my bad. So the evolution is due to only mutations and mating. There's a random rate. So then the time scale of mutations, is that, I mean, relative to the... Yes, it determines the velocity. It determines when this deformation of the peaks will happen, but it's not something that we is studying right now. Okay, because... At this moment, this is not important. That's what I want to say. Okay, okay, because the only thing I'm alluding to is because, I mean, in adaptive dynamics, I guess there's this controversy with sympatric speciation. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to see if you could comment on that later. Maybe we can have a discussion later. There was a question about what these models have to say about speciation in asexual populations, but at the moment you are having mating, so it does not apply. But I think we can discuss later, if you'd like to answer that later after we see more about them. Okay, later we can come back to these questions. And thank you. So moving on. And here, from this point of the evolution, we can simply recognize each component as a new species. And why can we do that? Because there's a kind of reproductive isolation between these components. So no individual from this component can reproduce with an individual from this component. However, there's a new feature to define a species here, and that's the gene flow, because this individual cannot reproduce with this individual, they are not connected, but they are within the same species, within the same component, they have an indirect gene flow here. Well, so species appear. And because we're dealing with infinite genome, this transition is really fast, and the distribution is narrow, and the transition is fast, so there's only one condition to define speciation in this process. So when you have infinite genome size, the condition for a species formation is simply that your threshold needs to be greater than the equilibrium value, which defined only terms of the population at the location rate. So this is quite simple result. However, if you want to find infinite genomes in nature, I think you cannot do that, but you think that maybe you can try to find large enough genomes. However, when you try to investigate what happens, when the genome is finite, strange things start to appear. So in 2016, Mark Uzagiar published at this work where he investigated this problem of finite genome, and he discovered that there is a minimum genome size in order to have speciation. So what's different from what we had with infinite genomes? And he also discovered that this size of genome is large. So no small values of genome, but this need to be large. And when your genome is not large enough, so your system finds a new equilibrium. So here we can on this GIF, we can see that for this set of parameters, and the equilibrium should have been one over six. So it's really small. However, the distribution finds a new equilibrium around the threshold. And then you need to increase the genome size in order to have a specious formation in this model. Here we can see the formation of non-trivial structures in the distribution, which are a characteristic of the components formation and then in the network. So it's characteristic of the speciation. And there remains the question, what's the minimum size in terms of the parameters of your problem? Or in other words, how large is large? What's the analytical solution of this question? And unfortunately, this is still an open problem, and this is the focus of my PhD research. Well, and why is this important? Because this is a so simple model and why should we care about it? And that's because the DHX model is a tri-model that can build a lot of different models. So we can study parapatric speciation with the geographical mode of speciation that lies in the middle of that arrow. We can also study phylogenetic patterns because we can save all the evolutionary history in this process. So we can build phylogenetic trees and then compare with real trees, real phylogenetic trees. We can also study convolutionary dynamics, for example, in this really wonderful work of Deborah and Marcos, they studied the co-evolution of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA and its role and the barricode hypothesis of specious identification. And we can also study migration dynamics. We can simply run this model into different islands, for example, so the population will evolve under different, according to the DHX dynamics, but there is a migration rate also between them. So this is a nice model to build a long list of different things. What are we doing now? What do we have to understand this process of finite genome size? We can have a mean field approach for this problem. So we can prove that this product, the product of the same level from different individuals is given by a Bernoulli random variable and dependent on this delta, which is a non-trivial function of the previous population, of the previous similarity matrix. And here you can recognize the term that appeared when you have infinite genome size. And this is a non-trivial function. And remember that the similarity between these individuals, the individual often better, is given by a sum of these random variables, which are independent and they're identical distributed. So this is a sum of IID random variables. And therefore the probability distribution of the similarity is given by a binomial. So we have the binomial, we have its average, we have its mean, its variance. And this equation also defines an algorithm that you can run. This defines what I call by a mean field algorithm. And here is a result that you can have from this algorithm. From here we see that we start with an identical population. So the average similarity among the population is equal to one. And then it starts to evolve, the dynamic is turned on. And it starts to evolve and for small values of the genome size, it finds an equilibrium. And when we increase the genome size, it's there's this jump, there's this transition with something really cool. If you connected this to the real dynamics, because when we have small values of the genome, there's an equilibrium. And if you increase the genome, there's a transition. There's the transition of species formation. And how can we study this analytically? This is algorithm, we take the several average of this term, it's quite hard to do, but it's not impossible. So, and then we find this new recurrence equation for the average similarity of the next generation in terms of the similarity from the previous generation. And however, it's also a function of this value p. And p is the amount of the similarity distribution that remains above the threshold. So it's the probability of a given pair in your population to be mating compatible that they can mate. And because of this structure that appear in this recurrence equation, there are two different possible equilibrium of this process. And to explain what's going on, what it means, let me try to do that here. So you have your similarity distribution. It starts to run. And then when it finds the first equilibrium, you need to compute the amount of the distribution that remains above the threshold. If this amount is greater than a critical value, then this is an equilibrium of the system and the evolution stops here. However, if this value is below that critical value, so this equilibrium is no longer an equilibrium of the system and the distribution starts to look for the second equilibrium. And that's the transition that we saw in that picture. And because the variance here in this mean field approach is proportional to the one over the size of the genome, the greater the genome size than average, the distribution, then it's easier for this jump to occur because your distribution simply needs to cross the threshold in order to P become really small and then P will be smaller than the threshold and then there will be this transition. And to see that these things work, and here in the absence of the threshold, we can analyze the model. And here we can see that recover the results that we have before for infinite genome size. And here we can see that the mean field approach describes really well what's going on on the day-to-day dynamics. And even for this variance, it's a good description. And when you include the threshold, there is a phase transition. We can build this phase diagram. I am not sure if I have time enough to explain that. So I will skip it, but I can come back later. So, but there's this transition. We can compute this transition. However, this is not the transition that's described by the day-to-day model. And here, the genome size is really small for the same set of parameters when you do this, the dynamics with the day-to-day model. To show what's going on here, we can see that while the day-to-day dynamics finds its equilibrium, the mean field keeps evolving. So the mean field will have found, if this was the case, it will have found its equilibrium really far from the day-to-day equilibrium. We can see that the same things happen for the variance. While the variance stops to evolve, it finds an equilibrium value, the day-to-day dynamics keeps evolving. So this does not, this mean field approach does not explain the exact day-to-day dynamics. And to only to finish my presentation and to summarize the things that I told you about this model is that the day-to-day is a neutral evolutionary model. So there is no fitness functions, there are no selection mechanisms. And this model presents Sympathetic Speciation for large genome sizes. You can see that we're not talking about places or something like that, or geographic of these things. However, there's no gene flow interruption when the evolution is occurring. While the species is appearing in your process, there is no gene flow interruption. So this is a Sympathetic Mode of Speciation. And however, although we know that for large genome size, there is speciation, how large is large is not known yet. There's a mean field approach, which I can build, which I told you. And however, this mean field approach does not describe the day-to-day transition, which makes this approach, it deserves the name of mean field because it's really good far from the transition but not on the transition. And from the mean field approach, we learn that the amount of distribution that remains above the threshold is really important, which is something different from what we have for the infinite genome size case, because the only thing that we need to know is the average of the distribution. But now, the mean field teaches us that the variance is really important also. And we're starting now to understand why when we take average calculations, everything goes wrong. And this average calculations don't work here. And we're searching for ways to escape this kind of calculation. And although this is not an easy problem, we are very optimistic that we can solve it. And thank you one more time for your attention. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, here I am.