 Welcome, weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Tonight, as you can already tell, it's a fireside frights episode where I step away from the flashy audio production and it's just you, me, this fire, the sounds God created for our backdrop and stories from you, my weirdo family. I tried to do these once a month, but I didn't have enough stories last month, so I had to skip it. That's likely due, though, to my computer crash where I lost all my files. If you sent in a story and you've not heard it yet and you don't hear it tonight, it's probably because it was lost in the computer apocalypse of 2022. And if you've already sent in a story, but you have more stories to share, feel free to send them in. In fact, you're going to hear from at least a couple of weirdos tonight who sent in multiple stories, and that's more than fine so long as you send them in one at a time. And unlike my other episodes, every story in fireside frights comes from listeners just like you. And I'm always in need of more stories, so please send in your own true paranormal or creepy stories, maybe something that's happened to you or someone you know. You can do that by going to WeirdDarkness.com and clicking on Tell Your Story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, Twitter contests, to connect with me on social media to keep up with the Weird Darkness road trip, you can also visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. We begin with an email from Karla. She sent this in saying, Hi, Darren. I've been listening to your podcasts on Spotify for a while and debated heavily on whether or not to email any of my own or my family's stories to you. Clearly, this one out. My family comes from a long line of female, let's call them, sensitives, because psychic doesn't seem to properly encompass what we do and experience. And as far back as I've been able to trace my family tree, it is dominated with females. Anytime a male is born, he does not seem to possess any of the family's gifts, and neither do any female children born to him, which has made it easy to trace an unbroken line of where these traits come from. This information is important because all the men in my family think all the women are either trying to play them for fools or just plain scare them. But the women can get together and talk about our experiences and know that we legitimately are not crazy. Before we continue on with Karla's story, I gotta admit, if this was my family, I'd be wondering if the women were witches. I'll tell one of my tamer stories, but not really mine, but my grandmother and mother's story as follows. And she calls this the Big Red Dog Not Clifford. It was the spring of 1966 or 1967. My mother was a small toddler of three to four years old. My grandmother had just moved to a new town with her third husband, Raymond, and was unpacking their second story apartment. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with their first child, a daughter that they would name Ray Ann, so she was really tired much of the time. My mother's two older sisters were at school and her infant sister was asleep in her crib, so my grandmother took the opportunity to put my mom down for a nap and grab one herself. My grandmother has always been a very devout Christian woman. She loved going to church and encouraged all of her children and grandchildren to trust in the Lord. You could probably imagine her thrill when she had seen that her living room window had a direct line of sight to her new church's steeple. It was with this view that my grandmother lay down on her living room couch to take her nap. You know how sometimes you fall asleep, but you don't know you've fallen asleep because you're doing mundane life things in your dreams that seem real? Well, that's what happened to my grandmother. She fell asleep, but in her dreams she could not fall asleep, and so went to the kitchen for some water. She came back and again lay down on the couch and tried to fall asleep again. After about five minutes of unsuccessfully falling asleep in her dream, the church bells began ringing. My grandmother turned to look out her window and froze in absolute terror. On the steeple of the church, slinking up to the peak, was a giant red dog with completely black eyes. The dog must have felt my grandmother looking at it because she said it turned to look at her, and in one single jump it came across three blocks and threw her living room window without shattering the glass and began growling and snapping at her. The only thought my grandmother had at the time was of keeping this monster away from her sleeping children, so she grabbed the nearest thing she could to use as a weapon. It was a ceramic crucifix with Jesus on it. She threw the crucifix as hard as she could at the dog and jumped from the couch. When my grandmother landed, the jolt from the jump caused her to wake up from the dream. Yes, my grandmother jumped in her sleep off of her couch. She could hear my mother sobbing in her room and went to check on her. When she got my mom calmed down enough to ask what was wrong, my mother begged my grandmother, please don't let that big red dog back in the house. My grandmother instantly went to the living room to find her ceramic crucifix in pieces on the floor near the window. When she started to pick it up to dispose of it, she said it was hot, like it had been in an oven. I have many more stories involving other female family members of mine as well as myself, regards Carla. What a way to start fireside frights. As you know, I don't typically read these in advance for fireside frights because I want to be able to kind of experience them along with you in the moment. Wow, Carla, that is terrifying. Interesting that your family has not the psychic, but the, how did you say that? They're not psychic, but they're sensitive. That's what you said. You call them sensitive, and yet your grandmother is a Christian, which is kind of cool that there's the combination there. A lot of Christians would see that and immediately think of it as like the devil or Satan or something because you're not supposed to have that kind of stuff. But hey, you know what, if you're born that way and you happen to be a faith-filled Christian and it happens to be one of the gifts God gave you, hey, maybe you have the gift of prophecy, you never know. But anyway, that had to be just insanely scary, both for your grandmother, your mother, the entire family. I can understand why you shared that with us. The big red dog with black eyes. I've heard of the black shuck, you know, like the Hellhounds, but they've always been black. Black maybe sometimes with red eyes. I've never heard the reverse of a red dog with black eyes, but apparently it's real. I mean, if it's not only in the dream, but also came into reality for your mother, that's some scary stuff. Wow. Thank you very much for sending that, Carla. And yes, I definitely want to hear more stories from your family. In fact, if you've got many stories like that, you've got a book in the making. Okay, moving on. This one comes from... let's see here. Unfortunately, I did not get the name of this person. Oh, yeah, Dave. Dave sent this one in. He said, Hi, Darren, love your show, especially that you accept spiritual experiences. I've submitted several true stories that you've read in the past. I don't know why, but I seem to always become very skeptical when someone claims many experiences. Weird, because of my family having a lot of experiences as well. I know, it just makes no sense. My mother is a very special person who has had many incredible experiences. I'll share one with you here. I was a very young child when this happened. We recently moved to the Sacramento, California area from Bountiful, Utah. One day we were driving on the freeway in our new green Plymouth Duster when my mom asked my dad to pull over. She said something was wrong. She asked my dad to check the car. He did, and said that there was nothing wrong, and we started down the freeway again. After a little time, my mom insisted there was something wrong, and she had dad pull over again, this time to check the wheels. Dad checked, and this time obviously irritated. He got back in the car with the same, and we started off again. Once again, after a few miles, mom said there was something wrong. Dad was having none of it, so an argument started up. Mom finally told him to pull over, that she and her kids were getting out of the car. So dad angry pulled over, once again, and started to inspect the car. While he was doing so, mom rolled the window down and told him to check the side of a specific tire underneath the car. Not happy that he would have to get down and stick his head under the car to see this location. Grumbling, he did it, and it got quiet. The trunk opened, the car was jacked up, and that wheel was replaced with the spare. Apparently dad discovered a massive blister on the inside wall, the size of a large fist, right where mom asked him to look. The mechanic was uneasy working on replacing the tire because of the danger that it posed. He said it was a good thing it didn't burst while on the freeway because it could have led to the loss of control of our car. So listen to those promptings, especially when they persist. Dave sent in another story, and here's how that one goes. I remember when this happened, but I did not understand it at the time because I was so young, and because my parents kept details from us to protect us. My siblings and I found out the details later. We were living in Rancho Cordova, California, near Sacramento. I remember how my folks always had trouble getting us to bed each night while living in that house. Once forced to go, us kids ran down the hallway to our rooms. We were all afraid while in the hallway, so we ran. What we did not know then was that mom and dad's clock radio would go off at odd times of the day and night. My mom was poked in the back while praying, and other strange poltergeist-type nonsense was happening. For context, my mom had a very spiritual experience at around 17 or 18 years of age. Afterwards, the veil was very, very thin and she could see the spirits that exist around us. Mom said that once the evil ones realized she could see them, they started to cause her problems, trying to drive her crazy. So one night, because of the juvenile poltergeist stuff that she was enduring, she made a really, really big mistake. She commented out loud how stupid they were, and if they thought they were going to cause her to do something wrong, they were fooling themselves. Or something along those lines. Well, they were listening because everything changed as soon as she said it. The less capable juvenile acting ones were gone, and the replacements were scary. A very evil presence began to stand in the doorway of her bedroom, and he just stared at her. I guess this lasted for several days. She tried to ignore it, but she said that it was unnerving. One evening she looked up while sitting in bed, waiting for my dad, who was in the bathroom, and this demon suddenly rushed her without any warning. She threw the blanket over her head and cried out for my dad. She was terrified. She then felt the mattress depress next to her, all while hearing my dad in the bathroom asking what was going on. She had the impression that if she did not resist this thing's advances, she would die. She was frantic, crying for my dad to help. This has been a sore spot for mom ever since, because the way she puts it, I could have been murdered, and he was acting like, oh my neurotic wife, and taking his own sweet time. When dad finally came into the room, she was angry with him and demanded that he call one of the local officials in our church immediately. This official met with him that night and listened to her experiences, and her description of the evil beings. He then chewed out my dad, telling him that what my mom was saying was true. He told my dad that he was not meeting his responsibilities in the home. He told my folks that the saying we are in a war between good and evil is not just a euphemism, that it was reality, an actual war. He also included that in his experience counseling others that when somebody has had something special happen or about to happen, that evil tries to counter it. He taught my dad not to force them from the home. Later that day, as my dad was in our home doing as he was instructed, my mom sat with us kids in the car. Due to our age, we had no clue what was going on. I just remember feeling tension in the car. When dad came out the house, he was as white as a sheet. Mom asked, you saw them, didn't you? Dad said no, but they made their presence known as they left, and he felt them go. She then asked, you did not believe me, did you? His chagrin, he admitted that he had not. Us kids were clueless asking, what are you talking about? What's going on? Who left? Mom's response was, never mind, you don't need to know. Of course, we found out the entire story once we were old enough. Mom also found out from our neighbors that there was a lot of speculation about the woman that lived there before us. Apparently, there was a lot of gossip due to so many men constantly in and out of the house all day and night. They inferred that she was possibly a prostitute or something. We wonder if that may have been what invited them in. Later, mom also told us why we were so afraid of going down the hall at night, going to bed. She said the hallway was like a type of conduit, that it was just filled with entities appearing at one end and fading away at the other end. She said they were miserable and so self-absorbed that they did not seem to know anyone else was around them, that they were so miserable, the best description of them came from Scripture, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I guess we just felt them because none of us kids ever saw them and since they never noticed us, mom did not think that we were in harm's way. And Dave actually sent in three stories over the past couple of months and here is the third one. After listening to your latest podcast, I thought that I'd send this story told to me by my mom. She said this happened to her when she was in her late teens before she married my dad. She was visiting some friends one evening when her friends decided to make a spirit board by drawing it on top of one of those old folding card tables. They also used an inverted tea cup with the handle as the point of the planchette. I don't know if she had ever heard of the bad things that could happen with these things. The group was asking their questions and she made the accusation that someone was making the answers by pushing the tea cup. At several points in this session, it stopped working and someone noticed that it always stopped when one of the young men came into the room. So when he left the room, they asked why it always stopped when he was there. It responded with a misspelled priesthood, spelling it P-R-E-S-T-H-O-D or something meaning priesthood. She said it could not spell very well. Apparently the young man was a priest in his church. Her friends kept denying that they were doing it so she wanted to do it on her own. They all said it does not work with just one person. She said if it's really working, it would work with only one. So she tried it and she said it worked. She said there was an oppressive feeling, dark responses and she got really uneasy. To lighten things up, she asked if Santa Claus was real. It didn't respond. So she started singing, here come Santa Claus, here come Santa Claus. She said she got the impression that it was angry at her taunting because the cup suddenly flew across the room and shattered on something across the room. We were always taught not to mess with these things because of the evil associated with them. Great stories, David. Thank you very much for sending those in. Like I said, you can send in multiple stories as David did. He sent me three separate emails with those stories and I just decided to include all of them in this episode of Fireside Frights because I needed the stories. If you have multiple stories, please send them in. Dave, what a childhood you must have had. Oh my gosh. You're kind of like Carla. You've got those stories. You could make your own book too. It's amazing how many of you send me stories and then you say you have lots more stories that happen to you because none of this stuff has ever happened to me. I've had that one sleep paralysis incident that I've told you about in the past. I won't go through it now. But other than that, I've not really had anything. My dad has had experiences. Friends have had experiences. You obviously have had experiences. I don't know why it is that here I am the host of Weird Darkness and I haven't had these experiences. Not that I want any, by the way. I'm not asking for them at all. But it's just interesting that so many of you end up having these encounters. So many of them that you can send in multiple stories. All right. Continuing on, that is. We've got this one from Rod. Well, my story starts out like others. My older brother is trying to scare the crap out of me as usual. Being the youngest of four children, I was always the laugh for my two older brothers and older sister. We grew up in a small town in Wyoming and with Wyoming having more antelope than the whole state put together, you can imagine how desolate this place is. But it was and where we all call home today. We lived in a small town called Grover, population around 90. Just about three to four miles from the big town that we know as Afton, population of 1600. We lived just off the main highway and our grandparents lived just east of us in a beautiful lodge cabin about a mile from us. On our grandparents land laid the small graveyard of Grover. My grandpa owned the land that the graveyard set up in till the mid-60s or 70s until he just donated it to the town. As you can imagine, growing up in a small community, you learned as a kid how to have fun being adventurous. We seemed to always have dirt bikes and four-wheelers to ride, and we took full advantage of this. I was around 10 or 11 years old when I first remember the stories of the glowing headstone. As a kid, I was always curious about the supernatural, or as we called it back then, ghosts. We always rode our bikes looking for our next adventure. One night, my brothers were telling me about the glowing headstone in the Grover graveyard that was less than a mile away from where we lived. They said that if we head up towards our grandparents on their dirt road after dark, of course, you could see the headstone glow. Just past the bridge or canal, we called it, you start looking towards the graveyard, you could see it glow, glow a lime green color in the shape of a headstone. Well, of course, I called bull on this and I had to check it out for myself. I started to head up our grandparents' road. Once I got past the first bridge, I started staring up towards the graveyard that was only about a quarter mile away. I went slow, trying to see it. Heck, I wanted to see it. After going back and forth on that road for a few minutes, there it was. A bright, light green light, excuse me, a bright lime green light, just like the shape of a tall, round off top headstone. I was intrigued. If you went four or five feet up or down the road, it would just disappear. You had to be in the exact spot. I was excited and scared at the same time. Later on in my life, as I hit my teenage years and driving was the only thing on my mind, this spot became a place where you could take your date or girlfriend if you had one and show her this remarkable mystery. Most of the people who had seen this could not believe it was real. By this time, me and my brothers and next door neighbor who hung around with us had investigated why this headstone glowed at night. We went to the graveyard during the day and tried to guess what headstone it was. We had a pretty good guess of which one it was, but when night came and we went back to the spot where it would glow, the direction or the glowing was coming from was off. Just didn't match up to where we thought it would be. We even tried to follow it from the spot on the road right to where it was in the graveyard, so we jumped the fence and headed toward it, but about 200 yards away, it would stop glowing. This made no sense to us. As soon as we walked back toward the road, it would start lighting up again and glowing again. What the heck, we thought. It didn't matter if it was a full moon or cloudy, if you found the spot on the road, it was glowing. After a time, people forgot about this mysterious site. I'm in my mid-40s now, and I can't seem to find that spot again, nor has anyone else. It just disappeared. Maybe it was a headstone and its natural glow just gave out? Did the headstone, if it was one, get removed? During the time of its peak glow in the mid-80s and 90s, we noticed and seen for ourselves strange people around the area of the graveyard. I myself saw a line of people about five or six of them dressed in black with masks on, front and back, two-sided masks, never seen anything like it, holding candles and walking to the graveyard at dusk. I did not stop to say hello, but I got off of that road that led to the main entrance to the graveyard and went back home. It makes you wonder, what were those people doing? Devil worshipers? Witches? What I know is that once the weird visitors stopped coming to the graveyard, the glowing headstone stopped appearing as well. Coincidence? I think that might be so. Hard to believe something like this anyway, but I've seen it all and it still gives me chills when I think about what was happening up there and why that headstone glowed the way it did for so many years. Thanks Darren for letting me submit my story. I work on the road a lot from state to state and enjoy listening to your podcast for the past few years. Thanks for getting me through the long drives to and from work, weeks at a time. Every time I hear welcome weirdos, it makes me smile, knowing that I belong to this weirdo family. Well, thank you very much, Rod. And yes, you are definitely a part of this weirdo family and with stories like that, you're more than welcome to send your stories in too. Glad to have you on the roads doing what it is that you do. I don't know if you're a trucker that moves things from one place to another just so the rest of us can live our lives the way we do. If that's the case, thank you for what you do. This next one comes from Nina. Dear Darren, I love your podcast and listen to it almost every night. I truly hope that you'll consider including my story of my experience with a shadow person on your show. It doesn't matter if you'd like to include my name. I've never told anyone besides my immediate family about this occurrence. Please forgive my nervous feelings. Here goes. Blessing or curse? I do not truly know. Though with my four-year-old daughter and I together witnessed a shadow being, everyone I've told thinks that I'm crazy. My husband even says that he believes I'm lying. I didn't want to see this being. My daughter, afraid of disappointing her father, told him that she doesn't remember what happened very clearly. It clenched white knuckles with my daughter's tiny hands gripping around my knees. She was paper white and shaking. I understood her almost unbearable fear that fear is so large and strong that its grip is like concrete, poured and dried. It makes moving completely unthinkable. The shadow being was tall. It was at least six feet and male. He stood, facing the both of us, defiantly. A small, quiet voice told me that the light switch was directly behind my head. I realized that I didn't need to avert my eyes to reach behind me to flip the switch. It was a powerful feeling that if I looked away, this being like a rabid dog would attack us. As I slowly bent my arm behind me, the shadow dropped suddenly to the ground. Before I could flick the light switch, it crawled in humanly fast. It went to the end of the bed, around the corner and behind the long curtain in front of the windows. In less than a split second, it had completed all of those moves. Of course, once the light was on, the being was gone. To show my daughter that he was not anywhere, I showed her every part of the room. I knew for certain then she'd seen the same as I had. She said, Bom, he's not any of those places. He went behind the curtain. I pray that I never see one of these ever again. If I do, I'm better equipped now. I only hope that my daughter doesn't forget what I have tried to teach her. I don't want her to see it again either. If she or anyone else does, there's a name that terrifies them. The biggest difference between us and them, we don't have to live in fear ever again. Thank you for considering this. Thank you again for everything sincerely, Nina. Nina, thank you very much. I'm guessing that that name that terrifies them is the name of Jesus, but you don't say that specifically in your story. But I'm guessing that's what it is. Interesting. Again, you and your daughter, but not your husband, kind of makes me wonder if maybe you're related to Kara's family or Karla's family. Kara's family. The ones with the sensitives. But I'm not giving last names, so you can't look it up. But interesting that it's the females in your family that it happened to. This next one comes from Carol. This one actually, a Carol is a guy. He says, Dear Darren, thank you for your podcast. It helps me stay awake on my hour drive home from work at 2am. My name is Carol and I grew up on a ranch south of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. As a farm kid, I learned how to drive almost as soon as I learned to walk and one of my favorite things to do was to search for interesting antiques and old treasures on my dad's ranch in the old abandoned houses. One day I was digging around in an attic of a 100 year old house when I found a box of letters written by a 16 year old girl from the early 1920s. As I stood in the attic reading those letters, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I felt like someone was watching me. I heard a door open and closed downstairs and I realized that I was the only person within five miles of this house. I got scared and ran out of the house. I glanced up at the window of the attic before I left and saw the curtains move like someone or something had brushed by them. I avoided that house for several years until my senior year of high school. So friends of mine were looking for a place to party and I knew that it was in the middle of nowhere and I felt that with a lot of people there that it wouldn't be as scary. So we planned to meet up at this house and spend the night. That was a big mistake. We had all unrolled our sleeping bags in separate rooms and were getting ready to go to sleep when everyone in the house heard a baby crying. I say everyone because we all came out of our rooms and met in the hallway. No one there had a baby so we were all trying to figure out where the crying was coming from so we all followed the sound to a room in the back of the house that no one was in. The door was closed and we could all hear the crying on the other side of the door. When we opened the door, nothing was in the room. We got scared and decided to leave. As everyone got in their vehicles, it was my job to kill the breaker at the back porch of the house so I ran to the back, pulled the breaker box arm and dashed back out. As my friend was driving and I was in the passenger seat, he glanced in the rearview mirror and stated that he thought I turned off the power to which I was surprised and firmly declared that I had. He then asked why there was a light on in the attic and I turned around and saw the light in the attic. I refused to go back to check on that light. Twenty years later, I was driving by that house with my wife whom I had never shared that story with and she said that house gave her the creeps like someone was watching us. Just writing about this scares me to this day and I am a 51 year old man. Carole, it doesn't really matter what age you are. You get scared no matter what. I am actually surprised that you were able to go back twice with your friends and then again you passed by with your bride. That is a bravery right there. I don't know if I could go that far. This next story comes from Moira. Hello, Darren. This is my first time writing into Weird Darkness or any radio show slash podcast for that matter. Like many of your loyal listeners, I found your show Weird Darkness during the 2020 pandemic lockdown as a way to fill the silence while working from home. Your theme caught my attention and your voice drew me in but it was the way you presented the stories that got me to stay. I started at episode one and am now finally up to current. I admit I was disappointed and annoyed when by the end of 2021 and early 2022 you were just reposting your old shows more often than not as I had come to rely on and look forward to new and interesting tales. I understand now that you had hit a particularly rough low in your life and had let your show falter due to this. It is good to hear you are doing better and that you are bringing new life back to the show that so many of us have grown to love and depend on to get us through the week. So, now that I am caught up, I thought I would offer a little bit of my own weirdness to you in your show. Though you can see my given name in my email address, I tend to write and post under the name Moira and would prefer that you keep my given name quiet. I have a small presence online at moirasmusings.wordpress.com where you will most likely find my poetic endeavors which may also appeal to you. By the way, before I continue on here, she spells Moira M-O-I-R-E, so moirasmusings.wordpress.com if you are interested in that. Okay, so it should continue on. What I am sharing with you in this email below is a true and very real bit of my own oddness. I hope you and should you choose to share it, the rest of your weirdos find it interesting. We dream. Everyone dreams. Some remember them. Some don't. I have always dreamed bright, technicolor, vivid dreams. Dreams so real that upon waking I must determine where I am and the shape of my reality. Then several years ago, I was provided a medication for my asthma that made my dreams even more vivid, more sharp, bright, and real, and the shape of my dreams changed. More often now as I teeter over the edge of wakefulness and to sleep, my mind splits between waking and dream. I can feel the weight of my sleeping body, see the darkness behind my closed eyelids, hear the sounds of the household as it settles in for the night. However, at the same time, I am watching my dream unfold while also living within the dream. It is rare that the dreams in this state are pleasant. More often than not, horror comes for me here. In this strange, split realm, I am the terrified victim trying to escape my night stalker and the observer trying desperately to change the scene to wake up. I try to open my eyes, move my hands, dode my leaden body to wake, while simultaneously I am battling the horror in my subconscious. It isn't so much lucid dreaming. I cannot change or direct the outcome as double-minded dreaming and it is terribly uncomfortable. However, the double-minded dreaming is a fairly rare occurrence. It is the second type of disturbing dreaming that unsettled me the most. You ever had someone else's dream? You ever dreamed a dream that wasn't yours? Have you ever screamed within a nightmare that didn't come from your own subconscious? I have. Vividly. I have been a little boy, terrified, hiding under a table as a large man cursing in Spanish raged in the other room. The man drunk and angry, wearing a sweat-stained t-shirt, smelling of hard work and liquor, hair shaggy and a long beard looming large in the little boy's mind. The terrifying tyrant. Beyond the little dream boy, hiding from his, my abusive father, I can dimly see the sleeping mind of the man the little boy's become. His nightmare brought on by his impending fatherhood. I have been a woman, dressed in long black robes, walking out of trees onto a gravel road. Seeing before her, me, a line of protestors with signs and behind her, me in the distance, men marching towards them with guns. I hear French and other languages being spoken. Some, she, I recognize. Some, she, I do not. Her, my vision, is oddly obscured, like she, I am wearing a veil or perhaps something is wrong with her or my eyes. I feel the panic in her and my chest as she and I try to turn towards the protestors. Our legs tangle in the folds of the long robes as we slip on the gravel, falling at the feet of the other robed women and being helped up by them, turning to face the oncoming men with guns. Beyond this sharp, too vivid scene, I can see the sleeping shape of a woman who doesn't yet believe that she is safe. Over and over in my dreams, I see the world from behind someone else's eyes. A passive observer, hearing languages I do not know while listening to the translations in the mind of the person with whom I am dreaming, living their fears with them, sharing their nightmares, feeling their horrors. It's strange, waking to the dark of my room, heart racing in terror, trying to dispel the fear and the lingering mist of someone else's thoughts from my mind. So I can sleep again and perhaps this time dream my own dreams within my own mind. I have other stories, both true and not, that perhaps I'll share someday should anyone be interested, with deepest regards, Moira. Moira, if that's a true story, that is really unique. I've never heard of anybody having that kind of experience. You watch movies where people see something through the killer's eyes or there are also other movies where you can dream and step into somebody else's dream, but that's intentional, like they have to use a machine or something in order to make it happen. But that's all fiction. If this is real, then I have to wonder, are you truly experiencing the dreams of someone real or is this just a freaky way of you dreaming? If it's just a dream of you dreaming with somebody else who you think is real in your dream, or if that's a real person somewhere in the world that you are dreaming along with, that's strange. I have no idea what to say about that. I have no theories whatsoever. If you're listening right now, and I'm talking to anybody, if you've experienced this where you not only dream, but you're dreaming the dream of somebody else and you know that it's somebody else's dream, tell me the story. I would love to hear those stories. Good or bad. That's a completely new one for me. Never heard of that before. Okay, moving on, this one comes from Jim. Hi Darren, just finished listening to the episode on angels. Fascinating topic and phenomena. Well done. I was surprised to hear the story from the man who was rock climbing and started to fall and had an unseen hand push him to safety. About 20 years ago, my partner and I were hiking along a river gorge in New Hampshire. We stopped to look over the edge of the river about 50 feet below us. Turning to continue hiking, I stumbled on a rock, overcorrected and fell backwards, arms flung out to my sides, falling over the embankment. Rather than landing back first on the rocks far below, I was propelled forward back to the trail. I felt a huge hand push me and before I could say anything, my partner who witnessed this said, my God, it's like a giant hand caught you and pushed you forward. That's pretty much what it felt like. One more anecdote, I believe that we can be used by angels to help those that were unaware of doing so. Many years ago, we lived in a metropolitan area. On a day off from work, I was doing the usual errands and to mix it up a bit, decided to do some shopping in a western suburb. After a 35 minute drive, I arrived, pulled into the parking lot and kept driving around, seemingly unsure of what to do. I was pretty sure I was losing it as I was at my destination, but not stopping or parking. After about five minutes of circling the parking lot, I exited, got back on the freeway and headed east, way east. About 45 minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of a chain grocery store I never went to, didn't like and was frustrated to see that I was there. I drove down one parking lane, then another, when I see an older woman I know waving her arms at me. I stop and roll down my window. She then tells me that she was praying for an angel to come help her. She was off work with a back injury and couldn't lift much of anything and had a full car to groceries to load. I load her car up and offer to follow her home to unload them. She said she had a neighbor who would do that, but that her guardian angel sent me as she had been asking for help from strangers with no luck. It stands out in my memory as I had my plans, got to my destination, but couldn't stay there and had no clue as to why. The pieces came together when she told me her story, so I often wonder how many times were used to help like that, but never know. Anyway, great episode. That's a great story, Jim, and I agree. I think we are used by God in so many different ways we will never know on this side of eternity. There's a song, an old Christian song that was a classic called Thank You, and essentially it's you going into heaven and being approached by all the people you helped in your life that you had no clue you had helped. And I think it's going to be cool when we make it to heaven and actually have that experience. I'm not saying it's going to happen exactly like that, but we'll probably know that we've helped certain people and that we don't know that we've helped up until now. But yeah, be kind to others. You never know who you're helping. And the Bible even says that sometimes you are helping an angel unaware. So you could be helping an actual angel out there sometimes, or I'm sorry, entertaining angels unaware that is. Anyway, maybe we are the angels once in a while. You never know. I don't believe we are actually literal angels, but we can definitely be a tool used in the hands of God. So thanks again for that story. This one comes from Blake. Hey, Darren, I wanted to share a creepy occurrence with you. So when I was younger, I grew up in a house with woods surrounding it, including trails and a creek out back. So me and my friends would sometimes dare each other to walk through the trails that led to my neighbor's driveway about a quarter mile away at night. These woods had no light sources or houses in them, so it was extremely dark. The only thing to lead us through was the light of the moon ever so slightly shining through the cracks between the trees. One night, I was dared to go through. So of course, after my friends calling me a sissy a few times, I went in. So my friends all posed up on the back porch to watch and yell through the woods at me. I get about halfway through the woods, telling myself, you've been in these woods a million times, never saw anything scary besides snakes and occasionally a fox or two. But this time was different. I start getting nervous as my friends' voices start to fade off more and more with each step. I finally reach the peak of the hill where I can see the light shining on my neighbor's shed in their yard. A feeling of hope consumed me. I got this, I said. But when I saw, when I looked to the light, the second time, I turned hope into fear. I see a tall, rough-haired looking shape, at least seven or eight feet tall, so I freeze. I stand there for a few minutes, slowly looking all around me, not being able to make a move. I finally get the courage to take a few steps backward, and of course, I step on a stick, which froze me again, was shocked. This large, living-being shape starts to take a step in my direction from what I can tell. So I panicked and turned back once again, only being led through the woods by my memory of the landscape and the moonlight, running faster than my legs have ever carried me before. I make it back home, literally, jumping up all the steps on my back porch with my friends watching. Slip and fall down on the deck, smearing the blood on the boards from all the briars that I had no clue I'd even run through. My friends were laughing at this point, thinking I just got scared and ran back, but that wasn't the case at all. I frantically told them to get inside and told them what had happened. Some believed what happened, some didn't. From that day on, I never went in those woods within an hour of nightfall. And another occurrence, so this isn't much, but it's true. So there's been multiple times now that I've come home to see my wife and son, and I walk in the house, put all my belongings on the landing table, and start to creep up the stairs to sneak up on my son, who's usually hiding to try and scare me. As I get halfway up the stairs, I hear a woman speaking, sounding like she's in mid-conversation, so I instantly think it's my wife talking with my boy. I sneak through the house and as I get about halfway to our bedroom, the voice stops. So at this point, I imagine they realize I'm home, so I think they're finding a good hiding spot. So I jump in the room, growling like a wild animal to scare them. Nothing. No one's there. So I look in every corner, behind every door, every room, no one is in the entire house. What really hit me at this point is that not one of our three dogs has started to bark or run up to me, letting me know somebody is in fact in the house. I'm a little weirded out at this point. So I proceed next door to my mother-in-law's house, which we go to regularly. There they are, sitting in the kitchen. I spoke to my wife. They had not been at our house for over two hours. This has happened a few times now, and it's the same sound. A woman's voice in mid-conversation, then when I get closer, it stops. No one is there. Just wanted to share, and like any input you have on this occurrence, I don't have any input, Blake. Nothing useful, at least. Sounds like you have a ghost, typical ghost. If it bothers you, then you could always have somebody come and cleanse your house, like a priest or something. But if it doesn't bother you and it's just kind of a unique phenomenon, hey, keep it around. Show it off at parties, who knows. Okay, this next one comes from, I have no idea if it would actually happen with multiple people in the house. That'd be the weird thing, though. See, if it doesn't happen with other people in the house and it only happens to you, then there's got to be an intelligence behind that, because it knows it's you and nobody else. See, so that's, I don't know. Yeah, all right, you know what, talk to a priest. That would be my way to go. This next one comes from Amy. Hello, Darren. I have a near-death experience I'd love to tell you about. When I was in Girl Scouts, we used to go on an end-of-the-year camping trip to the nearest amusement park. We have several amusement parks here in the New England States. Meanwhile, my Grammy was dying at the house and we were living with her. She was in hospice at the home and any day, our Grammy would pass away to go see God. My Grammy was my hero. She taught me to believe in God and helped all of us become Catholic. I was not doing very well. I had severely been dieting to lose my baby weight. My meanie told me that I was fat and that my teeth were not white. Back then, my teeth were stained with soda and candy and pizza. I learned to be alone while the divorce was happening with my parents. My papo was a menace too and did not believe in medicating his children and since we lived under his roof, we could not get treated with medication and I was struggling with anorexia and undiagnosed bipolar. I was 5'1 and very deathly skinny. At any rate, my Girl Scout troop went on an annual trip to Maine to see their amusement park and zoo. I told my mom I did not want to go on the trip because I was so tight with my sickly grandma. I pleaded with her to let me stay with her and my family. She told me in the exact words, Go have a good time. Everything will be all right. There is no need to fret. When we got to the campsite, I was crying my eyes out. I missed Grammy once we got to the campsite. We decided to pile back in the van to go swimming. I fainted going into the van, so I decided that I should stay on the kitty side of the pool and just splash around. This got me good and tired. When we got back to the campsite, I went straight into the tent and dozed off to the sound of music through my Walkman. The next day was sunny and bright. We went to the amusement park and zoo. I got to pet a few animals, see white tigers. We all had a grand old time. We all got to go swimming and ride on the fun rides. We bought trinkets at the souvenir shop. It was a great time. Later that night, we were at the campsite and chit-chatted for a while. Then we were tired and we all crawled into our tents. Well, I could not sleep. I was properly too hyper with sugar and the excitement of the day. Well, I decided to put my Walkman on my ears and back then we had headphones with a cord. I also should mention I sometimes toss and turn in my sleep. Well, I fell asleep and the cord got tangled around my neck and almost suffocated me to death. During my sleep, I saw a tunnel and a dark, long tunnel at the end. Then way in the back of the tunnel was a bright, white light. I tried running to the light but it was hard to get to. But there was a man with long, flowing, golden hair in an ivory white flowing robe with his hands outstretched. He opened his mouth to speak and at that moment the voice of my Grammy came blaring out from within the darkness and I hear her say, It is not time for her to go yet. With a wisp of the man's hand, it was sent hurtling back to the land of the living and I awoke. The minute I awoke was the moment I started to uncontrollably cry tears of sadness because I knew in my soul that my Grammy, who was down in Massachusetts, had saved my life and went to heaven in my place. I cried myself to sleep that night and in the morning it was miserable outside and miserable inside of me. I was asked why I was so sad and I told them I knew Grammy had passed on and that I almost died and they thought that I was making things up. All that morning and day it was dark, luminous, cloudy around us. When we arrived for lunch at Friendly's, I tried to call home but with no luck. What good would it do me if I made that call? I knew what the outcome was and all I wanted to do was get home. When we arrived in our city and my mom was late coming to get me, another ominous sign that I knew what the outcome was. When I finally got into the car, I looked at my mom and she had dried tears on her face. I told my mom how I knew and she just needed to come out and say what was going on and sure enough my suspicious, ominous truth was told and I let out a big cry of anguish and thus that low lying cloud of forbidding doom was lifted and a heavy, darker, denser cloud of depression came about and thus started my grieving process of the loss of my Grammy. I'll always miss my dear Grammy and will always think of her fondly for she not only rescued me from our dad horribly controlling our lives to come and live with them, she also saved my life. This account is the actual truth of what happened to me. My grandma did save me and my family. Grammy is my hero forever. As she should be, Amy. As she should be. Sometimes we take for granted those who came before us, those who are older, who, whether or not they're still in our world or not, but we need to look back on them with respect and you can see there's so much love there that your Grammy had for you, Amy. I'm really, really happy to know that she stuck around long enough that she could step in and save your life when she did. Great story. This next one comes from Michael. Greetings, Mr. Marlar, or to whom it may concern. My name is Michael Todd. I'm the founder and lead investigator of Spook Earth Paranormal, based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I've been researching and investigating the paranormal for over 14 years. I wanted to reach out today to share a story concerning an incident in 1981 which started my interest in the paranormal. I'll do my best to keep the story brief. During my years recording, taking hundreds of photos and literally hours of video, I have managed to acquire a fairly impressive array of evidence. From apparitions to disturbing demonic voices, having my hair pulled, being scratched, bruised, nearly losing a toe to being shoved through a doorway by something unseen, I have run the entire gamut. But the incident which started it all began on a very cold night in January of 1981. In a nutshell, I worked as a security guard at a defunct factory called DeSoto Furniture. I was a young man barely 23 years of age. I was teased because of my age by the older guards, and I was fed tales of phantoms, ghostly voices, and even the chance of running into a demon, said to haunt the upper office area. This building was huge with cathedral ceilings, and this particular night it was cold, snowing, and the wind was literally howling outside. I admit I was a tad nervous as I started my first security round. We called it a round, as I had to patrol the whole building on foot, punching a key inside of a clock as I stepped at the various key stations. I was making my way upstairs into an area called the finishing department, and outside the old windows I could see snow cascading down. My footsteps echoed loudly in the large empty rooms and deep shadows filled every corner as lights were few and far between. I suddenly sensed something was wrong, and while I dismissed to the older guards' tales, I did feel like I was being watched and possibly scrutinized. As I neared a small door leading into another section of the finishing department, I stepped up a small two-step landing, and as my foot hit the door jam to go into the other room, a large man-sized shadow ran right in front of me, moving right to left. I cursed loudly and almost dropped my clock. This was a time well before cell phones, and I only had a pocket knife and a plastic flashlight for weapons. I challenged the shadowy being and shined my light in the direction the shadow had went. I expected a transient or a would-be burglar, but to my surprise, there was nothing. The direction the intruder ran was straight to a wall with the only exit chained and locked from the inside. I was scared. I will admit I almost urinated myself, but I had to make a choice. All I could see was snow coming down outside, and dead silence was all I could hear. I was not tired or distracted, so I saw what I saw. It was tall, dark, and wearing dark clothing with a large overcoat of some type. I found nothing after research of the room where I checked the windows and doors. All locked. I went back to the guard shack to decide what to do. I didn't call the police nor my boss. I became watchful after that, and yes, I occasionally heard odd sounds, but never saw the figure again. I did hear a rumor, I could never find proof to verify it, that a transient was murdered by another transient over a dispute over space in a boxcar. This happened in or around 1900 on tracks not far from the location's guard shack. This building is gone now, having burned down in the fall of 1982. The incident I encountered led me to now, and I am still on the hunt for the unseen. I hope you find this a story of interest. Perhaps your listeners will enjoy this recollection of a frightening moment I lived through. I appreciate your time. Sincerely, Michael Todd, founder and lead investigator of Spook Earth Paranormal. Thank you, Michael. Great story. I almost pictured that as the hat man, but you didn't mention any hat, but the dark figure, the shadowy figure, even wearing the trench coat, it just sounds so much like a hat man incident. But shadow people come in all shapes and sizes, or it could have been the ghost of that transient. You never know. By the way, I am including the information here with Michael's last name and that he is the lead investigator of Spook Earth Paranormal because I would like to open it up for other paranormal investigators. If you have stories similar to this, if there's something that's happened to you during an investigation that you want to share with me, I would love to see those stories. And I can almost guarantee there are enough paranormal investigators listening right now. We could probably make an entire episode out of nothing but paranormal investigator stories that come specifically from Weirdo family members. So if that's you, go to WeirdDarkness.com, click on Tell Your Story, and tell me somewhere towards the top of the story that you are a paranormal investigator, and that way I can set it off to the side and use it for a special episode in the future. Our next story comes from Stephen, and it's a short one. I'm listening to your experience at Blind Frog Ranch, and I have a story similar to yours, but a different location. I live at the Alabama-Florida Line, grew up in Bemidji, Minnesota, I have no idea, somewhere in Minnesota. I took my wife and kids to my hometown a few years ago. My wife has a deformed vertebra that presses on her sciatic nerve to the point it hurts her constantly, sometimes debilitating. Bemidji is located in Itasca County. It's also the headwaters of the Mississippi River. You can walk a 20-mile stretch of the river only inches deep. While there, my wife walked almost a mile and a half, pain-free. That's really nice, Stephen. So it's not the Blind Frog Ranch, but there's another portion, I guess, somewhere in that area. Are those considered healing waters? You don't mention that. Yes, it's such a short paragraph you sent to me. I'm interested to know if that area has that type of legend attached to it. Let me know. For those of you who are wondering what my experience was at Blind Frog Ranch, I won't go through it here. It would take too long. But if you go to WeirdDarkness.com, just use the search function and type in Blind Frog Ranch, and you'll be able to find it there. It's about a 10-minute story, so I won't take the time to tell it here. Our next story comes from Xena. I want to start off by telling you I've always believed in the veil between a spiritual world and what we call reality. I say this to say, what if it's the other way around? We read in the Bible that we're here for a short time, and if we follow God's law, we have eternal life free from this terrible world. Anyway, I have another true story for you. I'm not crazy, nor looking for attention. I just have had some crazy experiences. Here's another one. I in 2007 went on a four-day trip to New Orleans. My mother had passed away in March that year, and I had divorced officially in November of 2007. My favorite uncle was in the hospital, and his prognosis was not good. I felt the need to get away, so I did. Summer, August, to be exact, I went. By myself, let me say I love New Orleans. I took tours, so I would not be alone and vulnerable. I took a Katrina tour, devastating. I was shocked at what they expected to hold off the water, the levees. They're just two-sided hills around the canal. Then the ghost tour, cemetery tour, seeing Marie Laveau's grave, not touching it, keeping my comfortable distance. I went out to the swamps and saw gators. After all that, I went out to the quarters. Had a drink, took in the music, hung with the bouncers, again trying to be safe while alone. Before the night ended, I sat down with a fortune teller. I don't remember what he told me, but when I got back to my hotel room and got comfortable watching TV and falling asleep, I felt something get in the bed. I thought, eh, I'm tired. It's whatever. Then I felt something move next to my back. It was turned away. I was laying on my side. I had an incredible feeling of being watched. So much so, I jumped out of bed, turned on the light. Nothing was there. The room was small. Nothing. But I grabbed my hotel key, fled the room in my pajamas, went down to the lobby and asked to be moved. I was not going back into that room. The staff did not seem surprised. They didn't seem startled. Not a crazy look from any of them. They just gave me another room, escorted me to get my things. I would not go back in there alone and in the new room, I was safe. I don't know if on my tours or seeing a fortune teller or something came back with me or if something was already there, I believe something came back with me because I spent two nights in that room and nothing. Did I forget to mention it was my last night there? It was. I was so scared. Called my dad. So the next day in the airport, while waiting for my flight back to New York, I received a phone call that my uncle had passed away. I was so far away. So sad I had lost two important people within five months and a husband. Was it my uncle that came to say goodbye or something that came back from my exploring the quarters? There were a lot of deaths due to Katrina when I went there. Some were still displaced. A lot of flooded out homes and a glimpse of hope because as promised, Brad Pitt and a company he worked with were building houses that would float if and when a flood would come. I saw a couple of them. I don't know what was in my room that night, but there was something there. I'd put it away in the cobwebs of my mind due to the funerals and my grieving, but I wanted to know as I'm writing you now. I guess I'll never know, but whatever it was in the dark late at night in the hotel room, I was scared. I can understand why you would be scared, Zena. And I know a lot of people would be mad at me for saying this, and I'm not going to say that you shouldn't because it's a personal decision, but biblically you shouldn't be going to fortune tellers because supposedly that opens you up to invitations which could very well have been the case here for you, Zena. I'm not saying that is what happened, I'm just saying that it is a possibility. Or maybe it was your uncle coming to see you. I really don't know. But if it was your uncle, he was doing a horrible job in saying goodbye because he scared the crap out of you, unless of course your uncle had that kind of sense of humor. I really don't know. Moving on, this next one comes from Susie. Hi, Darren. This is Susie from rural Ohio. I love all aspects of Weird Darkness and especially fireside frights. Even though my tale is short and not very frightening, I'd hate for you to run out of stories for the campfire, so here is my small submission. The first story belonged to my mother, a sweet little old church lady who never talked about the paranormal, but once claimed she saw a UFO. Two years after my father passed away, she sold the old farmhouse they lived in for 40 years and moved into a small, newly built ranch style home in our small town. Shortly after settling in, she claimed she started hearing movement in the attic space that would sometimes follow her to different rooms. She didn't scare easily, but it did unnerve her a bit. I don't know what made her think it was my father checking in on her, but one night, she announced to the noise, honey, if that's you, you're scaring me, I'm fine. She said she never heard anything in the attic again. Did he follow her to town just to make sure she was doing okay? We'll never know. The next story is my own experience. One winter night, I had gone to bed much earlier than my husband. Knowing he'd be watching a movie, I closed the bedroom door, something I don't normally do, but thought the TV would keep me awake. I was drifting in and out of sleep anyway, so after a while I got up to ask if he would turn the sound down. I drowsily made my way in the dark to the bedroom door and was brought up short when a human sized dark shadow appeared before my bleary eyes. I'm an avid listener of many paranormal podcasts, so my brain immediately said, shadow figure. After a momentary fright, I realized it was my own shadow showing in the dark because the door is painted white. I debunked my own experience. Thanks for all you do, Susie. I love it, Susie. Thank you so much. Oh, wow. Well, you're right, that one's not, well, it's still a scary one. I mean, you said that it wasn't a scary story, but that is scary. Even the one that you debunked yourself. That's hilarious. I love that. See, not all paranormal stories are paranormal, but they're still entertaining. So feel free to send those in too. Thank you, Susie. That was great. I needed to laugh. Okay. This next one comes from Jonathan. Hey, Darren. I love writing these stories to you. I believe this is my fourth. If I have them, I'll keep sending them. As always, thank you for this podcast. Makes my days at work go a lot faster. I have a story for you. Is it true? I'll get back to you on that. When I was a teenager, I was incredibly involved in Boy Scouts. I spent every summer either going to summer camp or working there. The camp was isolated in North Carolina. Closest large town was an hour away, so it was very quiet when the lights went out. If you walk this camp long enough, you'll notice some large trees are shattered from the top and working their way down. Every year, more of these trees start to show up. What causes that, you might ask? Simple. It's the tree devils. The tree devils would find a home within a tree, usually long pine. Once it would wake up and want to cause havoc, it would burst through the treetop, shattering every branch and knocking the bark right off. This would usually happen during a bad thunderstorm. You could easily find evidence of a tree devil being out when you'd find its glowing yellow pee laying on the ground. The smell was so strong, you'd think a skunk had just sprayed. While the tree devil was out, it would knock down canoes on the waterfront, eat all the bacon before breakfast and worst of all, it would break the slushy dog machine. Acts like this would go on until the tree devils would get tired and find themselves another tree to snuggle into. It was one tree that was so old and large that one tree devil tried to escape from it and failed. Today, you can still see his face within a large knot on the tree. During a full moon, you can stab or pick at the face and a bloody goo would come out. Best way to keep the tree devils from attacking you is to travel using the buddy system and keep the flashlights turned off. To be safe, it's better to just stay in your camp. The tree devils don't like large groups. Well, as most things fun at summer camp, it was just a story. The trees were from lightning strikes, the glowing yellow pee, just Billy, he drank way too much mountain dew, or was it the goo in the glow sticks? Of course, this was more believable than wild albino apps on the loose. I remember when we were in scouts, I didn't go to boy scouts, but I was in cub scouts. My dad, in fact, was the cub master. And we'd go out camping and we didn't have tree devils, but we did have the snipe hunt. And I'm sure many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Granted, there is an actual snipe bird, but that's not what we were hunting. We were hunting something that was furry about the size of a gopher and had two giant teeth in the front. And our job was in the middle of the night to go out and try to find these snipes and catch them in large plastic trash bags. Of course, somebody would catch one, usually one of the scout leaders. And he would make a big ruckus about it and say, I got one, I got one, I got one. But then by the time we got there, we'd see a rip in the bag. And apparently the snipe had run off. What we didn't know is that they were using bricks in these bags. And the more they shook the bags, the easier it was for the brick to just rip right through. And they showed it to us as evidence. And of course, we bought it hook, line and sinker. It wasn't until the end of actually, I don't remember if they did tell us at the end of the night, if they were just playing with us or not. I don't remember that I do remember eventually fighting out that it was, you know, just a joke. So you know what, I don't blame the adults for that either. I mean, the whole Cub Scout camping trip is supposed to be for the kids, but you know, the adults got to do something for fun. So at least it's that way of having fun while the rest of us are having fun too. This next one comes anonymously. Hello, Darren. I'd like to remain anonymous. This is a true story. I'm not really sure where to begin, so I'll start here. I was in a very tragic car accident, a very bad one. A while back, but a month prior to this, a very peculiar thing happened to me. I was up drinking the night before. I wasn't feeling too tipsy when I ended up going to sleep. I don't remember any dreams from that night, but at one point in the night, I heard a woman loudly say my name. It did not sound angry or mean, just very stern. It sounded a lot like my mother's voice, but now I think back on it. It may have been my dad, my dead grandmother's voice, and I was awakened at that very moment after hearing my name. I was laying on the left side of my body, and when I woke up, I was looking at the far corner of my room, and I saw what seemed to be a shadow person, maybe four and a half feet tall. I was beyond scared. I had goosebumps and just felt very scared, and I knew I was awake because I reached to turn on my lamp next to my bed, never breaking eye contact with the thing. So how could I be asleep and still be moving to turn on my lamp? As soon as I turned my lamp on, it was gone. After the light was on, I was still shaking a bit and still staring at that spot. I had goosebumps as I do now, writing this. I sat there for about 10 minutes before I worked up enough courage to turn the light back off, and when I did, it was gone. Then, as I said, I was involved in a very bad car accident. After this accident, I was talking to my other grandmother, and she told me something that sort of making me piece all of this together in a different way. She told me a week before the accident, there was a female cardinal. Cardinals are said to be a sort of vessels for spirits in the physical realm, not like bad spirits, but that of loved ones, etc. The cardinal would go up to her living room window and peck, and she said that she would walk to her kitchen window, and it would follow her and peck at that window. The next day, the same thing happened, but this time, she wanted to see if the female cardinal would follow her, so she went to a couple more windows, and it would follow her and peck on the windows. On the third day, she took a Snapchat picture of the bird and said, this cardinal keeps following me. What is it trying to tell me? Then, four days later, the accident occurred. I am wondering if what I experienced and what my other grandma saw were some sort of connected warning from my deceased grandma trying to forewarn or tell me about the accident. I second-guess the voice that woke me up that night now after hearing what my grandma told me about her and the bird, and because my grandma was a beyond loving woman, but also a no BS kind of woman, and she could be stern. That is why I am thinking that the stern voice was my grandma's because it sounded like the voice that she would use when she used to get my attention as a boy. I also feel as though she was the cardinal, just trying anything she could to get the attention of me to try and help me. I was somehow not hurt at all in the accident. I have no idea at all how I wasn't injured, when the accident was so devastating. I think my grandma was there with me that day and protected me and was with me the whole month prior to this. Thank you for letting me share my story. I don't know if I am trying too hard to find connections between all the events, but still thought I should share it. By the way, after the accident, the first podcast I listened to was your Church of the Undead episode, If There Was a God, Why Is There So Much Bad in the World. I just want you to know it really helped me, and I have listened to Weird Darkness now for about five years. It was the very first podcast I ever listened to. I was even enjoying it when I was overseas, but thank you again. Thank you, Anonymous. I appreciate the very kind words there at the end. Thank you very much for that. I know you're sending this in, you're wondering if I have any comments on this. You're curious as maybe you were trying too hard to connect things. That I don't know. If your grandmother was trying to warn you, she was doing a horrible job at it. Just the idea of waking you up in the middle of the night by hearing your name, or seeing a female cardinal act very strangely towards your other grandma, how does that... I'm not saying that it wasn't your grandmother, by the way. I'm just trying to make sense of this, because what good does that do? You. There's no message there. It's not like the cardinal was coming in and pecking out signs saying, don't go out on such and such day or drive carefully. Nothing like that came your way. Even if this was your grandmother, there was no message relayed to you to give you any clue as to what was going on, or even any clue that they were trying to talk to you. This is all after the fact. You're looking at this in hindsight and trying to put it all together, which is what most of us do. But before that, there was really no... What's the word? There's no information being sent to you to tell you to walk a different way, or drive a different way, or do something different in your life in order to avoid an accident. Nothing like that. So if it was your grandmother, I'm not saying that it wasn't, but if it was, she did a horrible job in trying to warn you. She had to have thought, then again, it could have been the only way that she could get through, and she just couldn't get a message through. And that was just her trying, her dead level best, no pun intended, being dead, but her best in trying to reach out to you. And it was the only thing she could do. I really don't know. I don't know anything about that side of eternity as to how it works, but there you go. Those are my two cents. This one comes from Carly. Hi, Darren. I wrote in before, but you said you lost stories with the computer crash, man. Since I've been sitting on a few, I figured I'd send some in. This one I'll call Charlie. So my boyfriend, slash fiance, slash my children's stepdad, Matt, worked for a company that was tearing down some old houses on an old base. Some of them had mold, but not all of them, and since he was in charge of which house was which, he knew which ones he could bring stuff home from. That being said, my kitchen got remodeled, and so did several friends' bathrooms and kitchens. I even got new appliances. Well, he also found this nice solid bed frame we really do not need. So I hopped on Facebook Marketplace to sell it, and along with this dresser with a round mirror, he found them left in a basement of one of the houses. Nobody would buy it. I had two people who were going to take it, but then saw the model number on the back and refused. The number, model number, 666. Product number, 99666. Maybe we should have gotten rid of it another way, but instead we kept it and gave it to my four or five-year-old. Things were fine for a while, but then one day my stepson was talking to my daughter about who she was talking to earlier. Not missing a beat, she said, Charlie. He asked, is Charlie your imaginary friend? She said, no, I was sad. Nobody would play with me, and I had no friends, and she said from the mirror that she would play with me. I said, okay, and she crawled out of my mirror and she's my best friend now. A stepson and I stared at each other. He said, you're lying. She shook her head and said, no, she's real, you heard us talking. I looked at him like, oh, yeah, did you say you heard her? He said, yeah, but you were just talking in funny voices, right? She shook her head, insistent, she was real. For years after she would play with her, I would hear her talking to her and throw open the door and she'd be in there all alone. I'd say, who are you talking to? She'd say, Charlie. I'd ask, is she still here? She'd say, no, you scared her, so she jumped into the mirror. Finally one day she said she doesn't want to play with Charlie anymore. I asked, why? She said, we don't get along anymore. She's mad, I'm too old. Okay, storage, but whatever. So time goes on and she keeps complaining about the dresser. I'm mentioning Charlie, just how she didn't want the dresser anymore. Finally I'd had enough of her complaints and moved the dresser outside. Where another friend comes over and looks at it and was going to take it, but then here comes my daughter telling her Charlie story at this point, she's nine or ten, so my friend says, yeah, no thank you. That night my partner and I take the dresser apart and burn all the wood. We took the mirror to the garage as it was a very nice mirror and we very much like mirrors. Not long after that I start to see a little girl playing with my youngest daughter. When I walk up, the girl would disappear. She appears to be about five. I'm not the only one to see her. My friend has her own story, which I'll include now. My friend has a seven year old. One day we were walking down to my garden. I have a playground for my kids, slides, swings, a tower and a sandbox. My friend looks over and sees her daughter playing in the sandbox. We go down and check out my garden and walk back up to the house. I have two acres or so, so we're spread out. We walk by the playground and she goes, I wonder where my daughter went. I walked into the house and checked all the rooms for kids before we walked down to the garden. Her daughter was in my youngest room playing Barbies before we walked down there. So I look at her and say, she's been inside playing Barbies this whole time. She got pale and wide eyed and asked, so who was in the sandbox when we came down? I swear I saw her. Both girls around that age were inside. It was Charlie. I told you about the boy buried in my yard in a previous episode, so she has a friend to play with sometimes. I just worry about hearing about evil spirits living in mirrors. I should get rid of the mirror and maybe get rid of Charlie too. Thank you for all you do. I absolutely love your podcast. So many blessings to you and your bride. And this being Mental Health Awareness Month, thank you for being so invested in helping others out of the darkness. I lived there for a very long time and have only recently come out of it to see the light. It's bright out here for sure. Thank you and stay blessed, Carly. Thank you, Carly. And if you're listening, thank you, Charlie. I did not know, I think you said this to me in June, and I didn't realize that June was Mental Health Awareness Month. I thought that was October. October, I think, is Depression Awareness Month. Maybe that's what it is. It just happened to be, by the way, that also happens to be the month that we do our fundraiser for depression, not because it's Depression Awareness Month, but it happens to be Halloween Month, which is a big month for us here for obvious reasons. It's also the anniversary month of Weird Darkness, so it just seemed to make sense to make that the month for our fundraiser. And it turns out to be Depression Awareness Month as well. I guess I didn't realize June was Mental Health Awareness Month. Very interesting. Speaking of stories about things coming out of the mirror, if you are interested in something like that, it's a fiction story, but there's an audiobook that I narrated from Jason R. Davis called Inside the Mirrors, and it's just part of a series that he's working on called The Guardian Series, which is really, really good. Jason R. Davis is a great author. You probably remember something called Hatched, Invisible Spiders, that I shared here in the podcast before. That's also the same author. In fact, it's the same universe. It's not the same story. It doesn't continue that story, but it is in the same universe and even has one of the same characters in it, which was really cool when I was narrating to say, hey, I know that character. He was in your other book. But Inside the Mirrors by Jason R. Davis, you can find that on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. It's not one of the free ones, but if you scroll down, you can find Inside the Mirrors and listen to it yourself. You can listen to a sample if you click on the link for it as well, but definitely worth a listen if you're looking for something strange and eerie coming out of the mirrors. Okay, this next one comes from Kerry. Good morning, sir. Let me start by thanking you for your podcast. It was the first one I ever listened to. Wow. Before I continue on, it's amazing how many people will say that Weird Darkness is the very first podcast they ever listened to. I don't even know how they found out about it in order for it to be their first podcast, but so many people, not a ton, but enough of the emails come in saying it was the first podcast. It's very humbling. It really is. So all right, continuing on. Needless to say, I am hooked, Kerry says. I'm a fellow Christian and migraine sufferer, and I feel at home with all of your wonderful weirdos. You've asked for us to share our own stories with you, so here is mine. Please note that this is a very difficult story for me to share with you. It's hard for me to share with anyone. I'd love to hear what your reaction is. Several years ago, my son had left for the military, and a friend and I were looking for a place to rent. It would be myself, my roommate Donna, and her 15-year-old son, Billy. She said she knew of a beautiful old farmhouse, but the owner wasn't keen on renting it out. Since she's known him for years, she asked him, and he agreed to let us rent the place. It had been empty for some time, so we started working on the place immediately. We both had second shift hours, so we'd go over and paint and clean the place up. There were a few odd things that happened during this time. Lights that were off would be on, tools and paint brushes were in different places, and we'd hear footsteps and doors moving on the opposite floor to the one we were working on. In all of our excitement to finish, we seemed to write the occurrences off to the fact that the other one must have moved this, or it's a very old house, built in 1913. My future roommate and I kept different schedules, despite working very similar hours. She would do her errands and work on the house before work, and I, a lifelong night owl, would do mine afterwards. One night, as we were very close to moving in, a friend and I were putting the doors on the refrigerator when we both saw something move from the dining room to the laundry room behind us. We both turned white and were obviously both scared, so I suggested that we write down what we had seen instead of blurting it out. This way we wouldn't influence each other's perspective. We had in fact seen the exact same terrifying ghostly white woman in a white flowing gown who seemed to float just above the floor. We were both done and we left the house leaving most of the lights on. I didn't go back the next day and neither did my roommate after I told her what had happened. Two days later, we resumed our repairs, as we were anxious to get into the house. From the moment we moved in, it was little things that we almost write off naturally, trying to rationalize. My roommate had knee replacement surgery shortly after we moved in. It was a planned procedure and the reason Donna had taken the only bedroom on the ground floor. There were three bedrooms upstairs, which on two sides was the third floor. For weeks, things were quiet enough to ignore and I started dating a guy that I worked with. He and I were pretty much inseparable from our first date. He'd spend the night at my house since I had two dogs and maybe every third or fourth night we would go to his house. He had two cats that can be left alone for longer periods, but had access to go in and out as they pleased. I don't know if he was more sensitive to what was going on in our house or if whatever was there was targeting him, but he seemed to be more affected. One night in the shower, I heard him knocking things down and he stormed out of the bathroom insisting that something had grabbed his leg while he was in the shower. On another night, it was standing atop the stairs. It turned and spoke with him as he ascended when he took off running towards me, screaming that someone had just grabbed his ankle midway up the stairs. The stairs were solid wood, with no way for anyone to do this. One night, Mike and I were lying in bed when we heard scratching on the window screen. From my side, we were on the third floor, no trees. Once we were paying attention to the scratching noises, we heard what sounded like a woman moaning outside the bedroom window. We were too scared to look out and we both just lay there until the sun rose. On another night, Mike and I were working and my roommate heard my rescue husky playing upstairs in my room, directly above her room. My husky, Merlin, didn't interact at all with anyone other than me. She figured we'd had a maintenance issue and had been sent home early from work. She began calling my name Carrie, Carrie, nothing. She got up and, using her walker, she made it to her doorway at the bottom of the stairs. She continued to call my name and then saw a figure that looked like me come out of my bedroom door and disappear across the hall. Upstairs, my room was at the top of the stairs to the right. Directly across from me was a spare room that we were going to fix into a guest room. Currently, it just had our extra belongings inside. Opposite the wall between those two bedroom doors was the entrance to Billy's room. The layout is important here in a moment. The house's fixtures were very old, with door knobs, etc., being original to the house. The lights were on pole chains that the light fixtures themselves. You had to go into the center of the room to turn the light on. When the light was on, you could see light on all four sides of a door and the stairs and floors were really noisy. As things would happen, Mike and I started to want to stay at his place more often. But I couldn't be away from my two dogs. They were my babies. We spent Thursday night at Mike's and knew that Friday night Donna and her son Billy would be staying in a larger city an hour away with their boyfriend. He was a truck driver and was rarely home, so they seemed to be jumping at the opportunity to spend some time together. Mike and I were initially excited that we would have the house to ourselves, even though we'd only been together a few months now. We were looking forward to the day that it was just us. After work, we came home, made supper, showered and had watched a movie. It was around 3 am and we were lying in bed with my two dogs between us. One final noteworthy feature of this old house was that the chimney ran through my bedroom, not in the wall itself, but about two feet away from the wall. I used a tension rod and hung a curtain up and tucked my bed on the other side. As we were laying in bed, we clearly heard what sounded like footsteps on the bottom floor and then those same footsteps coming up the stairs. Mike and I were looking at one another confused, so I began to yell out to Billy as we knew Donna was not well enough along in her recovery to climb stairs. No one answered and the footsteps continued. Agitated, I yelled threateningly at Billy to answer me, stating with all that's gone on in this house, this was not an appropriate joke. No answer. As the footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped just outside my door, both of my dogs began growling and staring at the door, neither were moving off of that bed. Still insisting that Billy stop and answer me, I'm so frightened I could barely think. The sound of the pull chain on the haul light startled me as the haul light turned on and the light was visible, all the way around the door. Then the old metal door knob starts rattling as if somebody is shaking it or attempting to turn the knob. Suddenly the door swings open into my room and Mike and I just sit up in bed and look around the chimney to see who has just opened the door. There's no one there. I'm yelling at Billy to fess up and screaming at Mike, insisting that he man up and go see who's opened the door. Mike refuses to budge. There's no answer from anyone outside of my room, so as my fear turns to anger, I hop out of my bed and slip into the closet to get a bat. My dogs are both still visibly shaken and refusing to get off the bed. They've now backed up against Mike's legs. I very sheepishly proceed to stick my head out into the hallway, asking, who's there? And other dumb questions. I don't see anyone upstairs or as I look down and can see the backside of the living room. The lights are off downstairs except for a night light. There are no noises and I don't see anything strange until I notice that the guest room across from my room's door is slightly ajar. Very bravely and foolishly, I push the door open with the end of my bat and muster up the courage to go to the center of the room and pull the light on. There's no one there. Nothing is out of place. For some unknown reason, I let my guard down at this point. I'm talking to Mike, who is still on my bed with my dogs and explaining to him that there's no one here. I rest a bat on my shoulder and proceed to walk back to my room. As I'm crossing the landing, I glance up and over to Billy's room and there, in front of his double window is a large, darker than dark shadow figure standing in the most unnatural stance I have ever seen. I could feel the evil radiating off of this thing as I started running and screaming across into my room and slam the door shut behind me. Mike and I got up and dressed and we took everything we could load into our two vehicles and drove to Mike's house a full county away. I proceeded to pay rent at that house for the remaining six months on our lease, but I never went back. I left things of monetary and sentimental value, but I refused to go get them. Even though I paid the bills, I lost a friend. Donna and I do not speak anymore. Four years later, I got the nerve to drive by the house, but it had been demolished. That surprises me because it was beautiful and it had great bones. I've accepted the fact that I may never understand what happened in that house or why, but I have never regretted my decision to leave. Not for one second. I forgot to say that's our final story and what a way to end our fireside frights. Goodness gracious, Carrie, what a story. You wanted me to give you my reaction. I would want to know why the house owner was so hesitant in renting it out. Is there a reason that he didn't want people living there? You said that it had stayed, that it had sat abandoned for at least a couple of years before you and your friend moved in to start cleaning things up to make it livable. So what happened two, three years or however long earlier that made it an empty house? That's what I would want to know, because not only does this man have an empty house, he's refusing to rent it out. There's got to be a reason for that. Maybe he just likes his privacy. I don't know. But he obviously was willing to let a friend go in there, but he didn't want to rent it out to somebody he didn't know. I don't know. That just seems strange to me. It almost feels like he was afraid of something in that house or what might happen to someone being in that house. That's the only thing I can come up with to begin with. Mike, by the way, I don't know if you're still with Mike or not, but dang, he does need a man up. I would never live that down. We thought somebody was in the house, and I was too scared to get out of bed and go check, and my wife got up to do it. Oh my I would hear about that for the rest of our days. We did commit till death do us part. I would hear that story till death do us part. There's no way that I would never hear that story again. She would be telling that story to friends and family saying what such a coward I was. She would think it's funny. I would be embarrassed. And rightfully so. So, Mike, if you're listening, I hope you've since changed your ways. And those dogs, wow, for a dog not to jump to your rescue, something definitely was there, something really strong, to the point it's going to scare your dogs from protecting you, which is what a dog typically wants to do to its owner because it believes it's part of the family. It loves you like you love it. It wants to step up and be that protector. And for the dogs not to do that, they're so scared they're staying in the bed with Mike. You had something majorly going on there. And maybe that's the reason they demolished the house. Maybe there was just too dark of a presence there. And who knows what they did between the time, if you're leaving and the time it was destroyed, maybe they tried to bring in somebody to cleanse the house spiritually or not. But maybe that's the reason it was demolished. Maybe there was just such a dark presence there that they decided just to wipe it clean and get rid of it. Who knows. Anyway, thank you so much for that amazing story, Harry. I really appreciate that. And again, first podcast that you listen to. Thank you so much. I am really honored by that. Thank you everybody for listening. If you did like what you just heard, please share this episode with somebody you know who loves the paranormal, strange stories, true crime, monsters, unsolved mysteries. And also, especially if you're listening to Apple podcasts, leave a rating and review of the show. Doing that helps the show to get noticed. You can also email me anytime with your questions or comments through the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That's also where you can find all of my social media. You can listen to the audiobooks that I've narrated, both free and for purchase. You can shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for the email newsletter. You can find other podcasts that I host, like Church of the Undead that was mentioned earlier. I also host allegedly. You can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or somebody you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. And of course, I need more stories for fireside frights. I used every single one of them that I had in my folders. So, if you want to hear a fireside frights next month, you'd better send in those stories. You can do that by visiting WeirdDarkness.com and then click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and stories in fireside frights episodes are 100% submitted by Weird Darkness listeners like you. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright Weird Darkness 2022. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Hebrews 11 verse 1, Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. And a final thought from Jay Hudson Taylor. Satan, the hinderer, may build a barrier about us, but he can never roof us in so that we cannot look up. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.