“THE CONJURE CHEST” and 5 More True Paranormal Stories, and 2 Creepypastas! #WeirdDarkness

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Listen to ““THE CONJURE CHEST” and 5 More True Paranormal Stories, and 2 Creepypastas! #WeirdDarkness” on Spreaker.

IN THIS EPISODE: The brutal death of an African slave brings a curse upon the wooden chest he was ordered to construct. (The Conjure Chest) ***  In Tuscaloosa, Alabama there is a home built by slaves that is considered the most haunted in Alabama. (The Haunting of Drish House) *** Drivers are reporting strange, ghostly orbs following them on dark roads. (Haunted Roads and Spook Lights) *** Dang Tan Ngoc is a well-known conman who has used the names of multiple dead soldiers to con veteran groups into giving him money. One identity he stole created a fascinating but dark story. (The Strange Return Of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson) *** A woman comes home to find her visiting sister murdered – and police were convinced she was the one who committed the crime. So what went wrong with the case to allow her to get away with it? (Did Ida Do It?) *** A bordello, pizza, and a haunting. You can find them all at the Red Onion Saloon. (Red Onion Saloon) *** Plus, I’ll share two Creepypastas from Weirdo family members. “A Brief History of Egberting” from Louise Latham, and “Dreamality“ from Kara Raisch.

SOURCES AND ESSENTIAL WEB LINKS…
“The Conjure Chest” for The Unexplained Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/m9w2ffg
“The Haunting of Drish House” by Amanda Penn for Horror Media: https://tinyurl.com/y8bovtwp
“Haunted Roads and Spook Lights” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://tinyurl.com/ydfwg875
“The Strange Return Of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson” by Derek Faraci for The 13^th Floor: (site no longer exists)
“Did Ida Do It?” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://tinyurl.com/yamhvs69
“The Red Onion Saloon” by Amanda Penn for Horror Media: https://tinyurl.com/y7te6wqe
“A Brief History of Egberting” was written by Louise Latham for Weird Darkness
“Dreamality” was written by Kara Raisch for Weird Darkness

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(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

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TRANSCRIPT:

DISCLAIMER: Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised.

INTRODUCTION=====
150 years ago Jacob Cooley ordered his African American slave Hosea to build a chest for his first child. Hosea set to work, crafting a wooden chest of some remark. For some unknown reason his master was displeased with his efforts and beat his slave to a pulp, killing him. Cooley’s other slaves vowed to avenge the death of their friend and sprinkled the dried blood of an owl in the chest and had a ‘conjure man’ curse the chest. As if by magic, Cooley’s first born died in infancy and over the forthcoming years a total of seventeen deaths were attributed to the chest.
I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness.

SHOW OPEN=====
Welcome, Weirdos – I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

Coming up in this episode…

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama there is a home built by slaves that is considered the most haunted in Alabama. (The Haunting of Drish House)

Drivers are reporting strange, ghostly orbs following them on dark roads. (Haunted Roads and Spook Lights)

Dang Tan Ngoc is a well-known conman who has used the names of multiple dead soldiers to con veteran groups into giving him money. One identity he stole created a fascinating but dark story. (The Strange Return Of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson)

A woman comes home to find her visiting sister murdered – and police were convinced she was the one who committed the crime. So what went wrong with the case to allow her to get away with it? (Did Ida Do It?)

A bordello, pizza, and a haunting. You can find them all at the Red Onion Saloon. (Red Onion Saloon)

Plus, I’ll share two Creepypastas from Weirdo family members. “A Brief History of Egberting” from Louise Latham, and “Dreamality“ from Kara Raisch.

The brutal death of an African slave brings a curse upon the wooden chest he was ordered to construct. (The Conjure Chest)

If you’re new here, welcome to the show! While you’re listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, enter contests, to connect with me on social media, plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you’re struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

STORY: THE CONJURE CHEST=====
(Continued from the introduction…)
Eventually the curse was lifted by a ‘conjure woman’. The chest can now be found in the Kentucky History Museum in Frankfort.
An elegant mahogany veneer chest of drawers, hand- carved by an African-American slave 150 years ago, resides in the Kentucky Historic Museum at Frankfort. Crafted in the Empire style, the chest has glass knobs on its four drawers. Nothing about its outward appearance gives any hint that tragedy has stalked its existence. That it’s known to historians as the “conjured” chest. Two decades before the Civil War, the family of one Jacob Cooley lived a sumptuous life as wealthy Southern planters. Jacob owned many slaves and farmed thousand of acres.
He was also an evil, despicable man who frequently beat his slaves for the slightest infraction of his stringent rules. Jacob Cooley ordered one of his slaves, an excellent furniture maker named Hosea, to construct a chest that would be used for his firstborn child. For some unknown reason, Jacob was angered at Hosea’s finished product and beat him so savagely that he died a few days later. Cooley’s slaves, led by an old “conjure man,” placed a curse on the chest for all future generations. One drawer was sprinkled with dried owl’s blood, and a “conjure” chant was sung.
All those associated with the chest would fall within the curse’s evil power. Although Jacob Cooley himself evidently escaped the malevolence, his descendants were not as fortunate. The baby for whom the chest was built died soon after birth. The chest was in his nursery. His brother inherited the chest, and he was stabbed to death by his personal servant. Jacob Cooley had another son, John, who inherited one of his father’s many plantations. The young man led a serene bachelor’s life until a vivacious young woman, barely out of her teens came into his life.
Her name was Ellie and she soon married John, nearly three times her age. The couple inherited the conjured chest. Knowing of the tragedies that had befallen her husband’s siblings, she put the chest in an attic. Meanwhile, Jacob Cooley’s youngest daughter, Melinda, eloped with a waggish Irishman named Sean. With nowhere to live, Melinda turned to Ellie. John and Ellie had done well and had accumulated several farms in Tennessee. They turned over one of these to Sean and Melinda to work. While Melinda bore her young husband a brood of children and worked from sunrise to sunset, Sean came to loathe the dullness of farm life.
Ellie Cooley tried to help, but Sean’s rebuffs made her presence unwelcome. To try to bring some beauty into Melinda’s dreary existence, Ellie snet over her father-in-law’s chest. It had been in her attic for a very long time and nothing had happened. She’d almost forgotten the chest’s legacy. Perhaps the “curse” was only a lot of talk. Within days, Sean deserted his wife for the bright lights of New Orleans. Melinda was disconsolate. She took to her bed with an “ailment.” There, Melinda soon died, an exhausted, grey-haired woman barely out of her thirties.
Shortly after his wife’s death, Sean was struck in the head by a steamboat’s gangplank and died. The conjure chest had claimed it’s third and fourth victims. The couple left many orphaned children. John Cooley was given the job of traveling to Tennessee to assign the youngsters to other family members. The youngest, a baby named Evelyn ran up to him, her tiny arms outstretched. John took her to live with his own family in Kentucky. Little Evelyn grew into a beautiful and intelligent young woman. When she turned sixteen, Evelyn passed an examination that provided her with a teaching certificate with which she took over a one-room schoolhouse.
She met and married a Scotsman, Malcolm Johnson, barely two months after she began teaching. As a wedding present, Ellie presented her niece with Jacob Cooley’s handsome chest. And the evil passed to a new generation. Evelyn Johnson had children and even adopted a young orphan, a girl named Arabella. The curse was all but forgotten. Evelyn had the chest but didn’t find it necessary to use right away.
However, after Arabella married some years later, Evelyn put the girl’s bridal gown in the chest. Shortly thereafter, Arabella’s husband suddenly died. That was the beginning of a series of horrible events visited upon Evelyn and Ellie. Arabella’s child died after her baby clothes had been put in the chest. Evelyn’s daughter-in-law, Ester, married to her oldest son, put her wedding attire in the chest. She died. Evelyn’s Aunt Sarah knitted a scarf and gloves to give her son for Christmas. While walking along a train trestle, he fell off and was killed a few days before Christmas.
Two other tragedies befell Evelyn’s immediate family, a son-in-law deserted his wife and a child was crippled for life in a bizarre accident. Yet Evelyn’s husband, Malcolm, was a success. A small man, always courteous to those around him, he parlayed a shrewed Scottish sense of thrift into a burgeoning business empire that at it’s height, consisted of mills, houses, a coal yrad, wharf and dry goods store.
Malcolm was an extraordinarily wealthy man when he died. Despite her material comfort, his wife was haunted by the memories of those around her who were struck down or stricken in some other way by hardship. She took her own life. Eleven persons. The “conjure” chest was taking it’s toll. As the twentieth century unfolded, the chest was inherited by Virginia Cary Hudson from her grandmother, Evelyn Johnson. Mrs. Hudson thought tales of the “curse” were heresay. She was wrong. Her first baby’s clothes were put in the chest. She died. Another child’s clothes were tucked in a drawer and she contracted infantile paralysis. Another daughter’s wedding dress was stored there, and her first husband ran off. A son was stabbed in the hand. He had clothes in the chest.
A friend of the family put hunting clothes in it. He was shot in a hunting accident. And so it went. Sixteen victims, all of whom had one thing in common: some of their personal clothing had been put in the conjure chest. Mrs. Hudson wanted to put an end to the curse. She found what she had hoped would be the solution in the form of an old friend of hers, an African-American woman named Annie. Annie understood curses and conjures. The spell cast by Hosea’s faithful companions would be broken only when three conditions were met. First, Mrs. Hudson would have to be given a dead owl without her having to ask for one. Secod, the green leaves of a willow tree had to be boiled from sunup to sundown. The dead owl had to remain in sight.
Third, the boiled liquid was then to be buried in a jug with it’s handle facing east, toward the rising sun, below a flowering bush. A stuffed owl given to Mrs. Hudson’s son by a friend accomplished the first requirement. Mrs. Hudson plucked leaves from a nearby willow tree and boiled them in a large, black pot. The owl kept watch from a kitchen counter. At dusk, old Annie and Mrs. Hudson took the jug and, with its handle pointed east, buried it beneath a flowering lilac bush outside the kitchen window. Annie said they would only know if the curse had been broken if one of them died before the first full days of fall. Annie died in early September. The seventeenth, and last known victim. The final private owner of the conjure chest was Mrs. Hudson’s daughter, Virginia C. Mayne. Though she may have been skeptical of the curse, and knew fully the story of its “lifting” by Annie and her mother, she never stored anything in the chest and kept it hidden in her attic. The Kentucky History Museum has it now. Mrs. Mayne donated it to the museum in 1976. According to museum registrar Mike Hudson, “The chest is in storage in our vaults, awaiting the time when it fits into a new exhibit.” Supposedly the curse has been removed. Has it? Tucked safely in the top chest drawer is an envelope… with a cluster of owl feathers inside. The museum isn’t taking any chances.

STORY:  DRISH HOUSE=====
On 17th Street in Tuscaloosa, Alabama there is a home that is hailed as the most haunted in Alabama. It is called the Drish House which was formerly known as Monroe Place. Built mostly by slaves for John Drish and his wife on a plot of 450 acres, it was a beautiful home styled in both the Greek and Italian Renaissance style. However, as beautiful as it was, darkness from its past marred its beauty.
The owner John Drish already had a sad, morbid history when the house was built. He was a doctor and was married to a woman named Catherine Washington. They had a daughter named Katherine. Sadly, his wife died when their daughter was young. He sent her to live in Virginia with relatives because he believed living with a widower would not be good for her.
John Drish was allegedly a charming man and it didn’t take him long to woo and married a rich widow by the name of Sarah Owen in 1825. He brought his daughter Katherine back to Alabama to live with him but their relationship was frayed. So much so that a story of cruelty surrounds them. Allegedly, Katherine fell in love with a man John didn’t approve of. He locked her in her room with very little food and water and she eventually relented. She later married only to bring her sons back to the Drish house. She had divorced their father. Many rumors suggest that Katherine suffered from mental illness.
Though charming, John Drish was an alcoholic and he suffered from a violent temper. Sadly, John Drish would die because of this. There are three stories surrounding his death. The first is he threw himself from a second-floor balcony. The second is that he was drunk and fell down the stairs and the third story, alleges that he was trying to stop drinking and began to shake from withdrawals and fell. Regardless of which story is true, John Drish died in 1867 leaving his distraught wife to plan his funeral.
Sarah was so distraught that she became more and more eccentric. She planned an elaborate funeral. When it was over, she kept her husband’s funeral candles and hid them away. She insisted that they be burned at her funeral. When she died in 1884 no one could find the candles so her wishes were not met.
Sadly, these were not the only dark things to surround the Drish family.
Dr. Drish’s niece was murdered by her husband and there is also a rumor that a runaway slave hid in one of the towers but when he exited because he needed food, he was returned to his owner who burned him alive. There have been reports of a male ghost who is assumed to be this slave.
Since Sarah’s death the house has been used as a school, a church, salvage yard, an auto parts store and was also reportedly a prison during the Civil War. Besides the male ghost, ghost lights have also been reported near the top of the house and what appears to be a ghostly fire shooting from the third story tower. Of course, there is no fire when the firemen arrive. This occurrence is either blamed on the ghost of the slave or Sarah Drish who is believed to be angry because her wishes of using her husband’s funeral candles at her own funeral were not met.
Though the house fell in disrepair for a while, it has been restored and is now open for those who wish to hold events there. So there is hope that the dark history of the Drish house is gone and can now have a bright future.

BREAK=====
Up next… drivers are reporting strange, ghostly orbs following them on dark roads. (Haunted Roads and Spook Lights)
Dang Tan Ngoc is a well-known conman who has used the names of multiple dead soldiers to con veteran groups into giving him money. One identity he stole created a fascinating but dark story. (The Strange Return Of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson)
These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns.

STORY: HAUNTED ROADS=====
Roads have always seemed to attract about them tales of the strange and unusual. They push out, further and further ahead of us, their destinations not visible, mysterious, as the landscape rushes by us, sometimes bringing with it bizarreness. It is perhaps this almost primal sense of oddness that has spawned countless tales of haunted roads, inhabited by all manner of strange entities and apparitions. One feature of some spooky haunted roads are ghost lights, also called spook lights, dancing and twirling in the dark to baffle and amaze, and sometimes they seem to be far from harmless.
Some malevolent spook lights seem to be linked to some sort of phantom motorists, and perhaps one of the more well-known of these is said to prowl a rural road in Switzerland, in St. Johns County, Florida, in the United States. Here there is a modest little road called Greenbriar Road, which runs just east of the main town, and there have for years been tales of a rather aggressive spook light that stalks vehicles that dare to drive along here at night. The enigmatic light is typically said to look just like a motorcycle headlight, which will pull up behind cars and steadily catch up no matter how fast one goes, growing ever larger in the rear view mirrors of the startled drivers.
The light of Greenbriar Road will then either chase the car until it is gone, or bizarrely perch itself atop the vehicle, sort of piggybacking the car for some distance before blinking out of existence as if it were never there at all. In some cases the mysterious light has even been blamed for causing crashes along this lonely stretch of road. The most common origin story for this mysterious light is that it is the wraith of a doomed motorcyclist who died along the road when he was decapitated after running into a telephone pole wire, and that he now terrorizes the stretch upon which he met his fate, with only the headlight of his phantom bike visible. One witness named Todd M. gave an account on the site Weird U.S. thus:
*****A few years ago I went to see Greenbriar Road at night with three of my friends. We had heard the stories about that light that people see and we wanted to see it. We drove up and down the road for like forty-minutes trying to see something but never saw anything until we got ready to leave. My friend Tom was driving and he looked in the rear view mirror and said what is that? We looked behind us and there was the headlight of a motorcycle coming up fast. We slowed down a little and thought that the biker would pass us but then just as it got right behind us about a hundred feet the light went out. There was no motorcycle or anything. We turned around and went back but didn’t see anything. I really think we saw a ghost biker of that guy that was killed on his motorcycle on that road.*****
The malignant Greenbriar ghost light is so well-known in the area that it has been the target of paranormal investigations and even scientific studies and police investigations trying to find a rational explanation for what people are seeing, but no explanation has ever been found. Speaking of phantom motorcyclists, there is another similar spook said to haunt a remote stretch of road winding through the rural farming community of Exeter, in Tulare County, California, which is supposedly the stomping ground of a similar ghost.
In this case, in the 1950s a group of friends allegedly decided to play a prank on one of their friends by stretching out some rope across a narrow road called Bardsley road, in the Fresno Valley, after which they lied in wait for their motorcycle riding pal to come cruising by on his way home from work. The plan was for the rope to just hit him in the chest and knock him off his bike, which was pretty mean but they didn’t intend to seriously hurt him, certainly not kill him.
The story goes that the rider came along the darkened road as expected and also hit the rope just as expected. What wasn’t expected was that the rope would be too high and lop his head clean off to go rolling across the pavement. In the aftermath of the gruesome accident, people started occasionally claiming to see a bright light shooting up and down the road, sometimes accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle engine, and with the full apparition of a headless rider visible as well. Motorists and people walking along the road at night have also told of being followed or even chased by the phantom motorcyclist, and it is believed that if you encounter the rider you will be cursed to be in an accident yourself.
Adding to these a is headless rider is said to prowl Creek Road of Ojai, California, apparently riding a vintage 1940s motorcycle and appearing as a glowing light at first, often pulling right up next to motorists to bang on their vehicles or chasing them. Interestingly, Creek Road is ground zero for all manner of ghostly phenomena and high strangeness, including at least two phantom horse riders, numerous apparitions, a smoking, horribly burned and disfigured entity called the Char Man, and even a supposed vampire, making a headless motorcycle rider actually one of the less bizarre tales from this place. For more on phantom motorcyclists, you can read my article on this phenomenon here.
Other sinister spook lights seem to be malevolent spirits or even possibly demons. Located out just northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, is St. George Island, which is home to a historic sugar cane, cotton, and corn plantation from the slave days called Kingsley Plantation, established by a man named Zephaniah Kingsley in 1813. The original plantation would quickly grow, until Kingsley owned around a total of 32,000 acres of land and employed about 200 slaves. Despite having so many slaves, Kingsley was known for being a very lax and kind master, allowing his workforce to basically do whatever they wanted when they were off duty, and they were allowed to sell any crafts they made on their own time. Kingsley even married one of his slaves, Ana Madgigine Jai, who would go on to take a prominent management role on the plantation, own her own land, and end up being one of the richest women in the state.
Although conditions were much better for slaves on the Kingsley plantation than they were elsewhere, there was some amount of tragedy on the plantation nevertheless. At some point one of the slaves allegedly took to beating and raping other female slaves, even according to the stories murdering a few and hiding their bodies in the wilderness. When the other slaves got wind of this grim behavior they are said to have gathered up a lynch mob to hunt the perpetrator down and had him strung up and hanged on a massive, spooky looking oak tree right in front of the plantation along the main road to the premises, leaving his lifeless body to swing there in the wind. Although Kingsley would move to Haiti along with all of his slaves in 1837, it seems that at least some of them remained, in a macabre sense.
Over the years the Kingsley plantation has come to gather quite a reputation for being intensely haunted, supposedly by the ghosts of those murdered here. One is a woman in white that is frequently spotted roaming around, and has a habit of photo-bombing pictures taken at the locale, while another is an unearthly screaming or wailing that supposedly emanates from the old abandoned well on the property, said to be from a victim of the crime spree whose body was unceremoniously dumped down there in the darkness.
However, one of the most frightening of the spirits of the old Kingsley Plantation is supposedly the vindictive spirit of the mad slave murderer himself, who terrorizes the plantation’s creepy and rugged unpaved road. This particularly malicious spirit typically takes the form of two malevolent, angry looking red lights, said to be his glowing eyes, earning the phantom the name “Old Red Eyes.” These lights will supposedly appear right behind cars right about at the old oak tree and chase them, in some reports even relentlessly attacking them. One report of an encounter with Old Red Eyes was described by a witness thus:
*****I’ve saw Old Red Eye several years ago. I have a friend that lives just off that road and had taken him home from Jacksonville one night. It was about midnight and after dropping him off, I was driving back down that road to the hard road and looked in the side mirror on my car and saw two red lights. At first I thought it was the tail lights of another car but they were too close together. I slowed down a little and watched them in the mirror and it looked like they were coming closer. I knew that I had not passed another car and it did not seem like a car would be coming down that dark road backwards. I stopped and stuck my head out the window and looked back and there was nothing there. Then I looked in the mirror again and there they were and they were right behind my car. I gunned it and got the hell out of there. What I saw wasn’t a car.*****
Just as ominous is the appropriately named “Demon’s Road” in Huntsville, Texas, which is already spooky enough, as it meanders through groves of twisted trees and darkened woods and ends up at the desolate Martha’s Chapel Cemetery. The real name is Bowden Road, but it has earned its nickname in the decidedly frightening phenomena that have been reported from here, such as shadow people, a ghostly child with glowing eyes on a tricycle, a hulking faceless beast, a strange hooded figure, and arms reaching out from graves. There are many spirits said to lurk along the murky stretches of this road and in the cemetery, but one of the creepiest is a ghost light that seems to be quite malicious indeed.
Motorists venturing down the Demon’s Road have often reported mysterious red lights hovering about in the dark, the number of which seems to depend on how many people are in the vehicle at the time. These spook lights will supposedly aggressively pursue cars, and spookiest of all, will leave unexplained handprints on the outside. Indeed these lights have plagued many who have travelled down the road, often leaving those handprints and always hostile, sometimes even clawing or grabbing at cars to leave scratches and dents behind. What could this diabolical force be and why does it want to attack vehicles? Who knows?
Another case in Texas of an aggressive ghost light is that said to roam a road in Hardin County leading from Bragg to Saratoga, which actually at one point was a part of the Santa Fe Railroad back in the early 1900s before being paved over to be turned into a road. In an area called Big Thicket there have long been reports of a multicolored spook light hovering about at night along the road and in the surrounding wilderness, with many of them pointing at the light being quite evil.
Even from the beginning the reports of the Big Thicket ghost light, also called the Saratoga ghost light, were far from friendly. Hunters reported being chased by the lights, and it was not uncommon to hear of them rushing amongst horses to send the animals into a panicked frenzy, to the point that on at least one occasion a horse drawn wagon was forced to go crashing into a ditch because of the lights. At the time the lights became a pretty widespread rumor, attracting all sorts of curiosity seekers, and author F.E. Abernethy would explain of the phenomenon in his book Tales from the Big Thicket thus:
*****Light-seers poured onto the road by the hundreds. People of all ages and intellects came to see and test their belief in the supernatural. They shot at it, they chased it, and they tested it with litmus paper and geiger counters. A preacher harangued the road’s multitudes from the top of his car, making the Light as an ill omen of the world’s impending doom. There were some nights the light didn’t show at all, but for the most part it was there to inspire stories that could be passed on, to change and grow at the will and imagination of the story teller.*****
In later years the light did not stop its antics in the slightest bit, with reports of it chasing people or even attacking them common, such as cases in which the light stopped car engines, burned people’s hands, or even violently knocked them down. There have been reports of cars being dinged, dented, or smashed by the ghost light, and it is generally not something one wants to encounter while driving down the already eerie rural road. As usual there have been many attempts to rationally explain the Big Thicket Light, such as that it is some sort of illusion, swamp gas, or merely headlights, and there have been a fair number of more paranormal explanations as well, including that it is the spirit of a hunter or Civil War soldier, or even that it is a curse placed over a lost Spanish treasure. Whatever the case may be, the stories of the evil ghost light of Saratoga persist.
Texas seems to be a haven for such spook lights, because there is another road in this state that has its own scary stories of such entities. In the area of the Mitchell Flat, east of Marfa, Texas, there have long been reports of mystery lights floating out over the desert landscape since at least the 1800s. The phenomena are usually described as dancing orbs of light that zip and zoom low to the ground over the parched desert scrub, and they have collectively been coined the “Marfa Lights.” While the phenomenon is puzzling but usually harmless and distant, there have been some reports that show these lights can be rather frightening on occasion.
In one report from Weird Texas, one man named Tim Stevens gave an account of a very bizarre experience witnesses by a friend of his father’s named Roy while traveling down Route 90 in the 1970s. According to the report, Roy had been driving for hours out from San Antonio after sunset and just before dark, and there had been no other cars out on this remote stretch of the highway that evening. Suddenly, he noticed what he took to be headlights in his rear view mirror. For some time the lights remained a comfortable distance away, but at some point the lights quickly closed the distance to follow right behind him. The report explained the following sequence of events:
*****My dad said that Roy had been driving with the lights a comfortable distance behind him for several minutes when the vehicle sped and up and approached his truck rapidly. For a few seconds, he honestly thought he was about to be rear-ended. Before an impact occurred, however, the lights stopped a few feet short of hitting his truck. At 60 MPH, in the middle of an otherwise deserted highway, it probably wasn’t too much to ask for the courtesy of a little breathing room. So Roy tapped the brakes. The driver of the vehicle behind him maintained his distance. Roy again tapped his brakes––no response. Finally, very annoyed, Roy jammed hard on his brakes for a fraction of a second. To his amazement, the vehicle behind him stayed the exact distance from his rear bumper as it had been. Roy decided to try a different approach. He said he floored the gas pedal making his small truck shudder and lurch ahead. The speed crept up to 80 MPH. The lights behind him reacted in perfect unison, staying several feet behind his truck, as it approached speeds Roy was sure he’d never pushed it to before. At nearly 100 MPH, the truck was beginning to vibrate badly, but the lights did not waiver. Enough was enough. Roy eased off the gas and let the truck coast down to a sane speed, and then he stood on the brakes. The tires screeched and smoked, and the truck pitched and slid slightly to the side––but the whole time, Roy watched the lights in the mirror. They stayed in exactly the same spot until the truck came to a stop. Roy then saw something completely unexpected––the lights shot out, off the road to the right, and fired across the desert like missiles. He craned his neck around to try and follow them visually, impressed by the driver’s driving on what was sure to be very rough road. He smiled and was about to drive on when a thought occurred to him. He frowned, and, making sure that he wasn’t about to be run over by a big rig or other traffic, put his truck in reverse and slowly backed up maybe a couple of hundred feet. He checked the barbed wire fence line for a road, a gate, or other break of some kind where his pursuer might have slipped through––but there was none. Roy said he was pretty spooked, alright. Off in the distance he could see lights moved swiftly across the horizon.*****
Whatever this was, whether it was connected to the Marfa Lights or not, it certainly seems hard to explain away as a trick of light or headlight reflections from the distance. Ghost lights have been a persistent phenomenon within the world of the weird, and there have been countless theories to try and explain them. Yet, none seem to touch on those lights that seem to reach out from the merely mysterious to lash out at or harass those who encounter them. Is there some explanation for this or is this just hoaxes and tall tales? If it is indeed real, then why do these particular spook lights cling to these locations, and why do they seem so hostile and threatening? It seems to be beyond our ability to comprehend at this point, and these lights may flit about the periphery of our understanding prowling their haunting grounds without ever being satisfactorily explained.

STORY: RETURN OF SGT ROBERTSON=====
In Washington D.C. there are two walls that, from far enough away, appear to be black slabs. As you come closer, you start to notice the etchings on the walls. Closer still and you will see that the etchings are names. In total there are fifty-eight thousand three hundred and eight names, each one belonging to an American man or woman who lost their life in the Vietnam War. Most of these lost souls returned home to be buried, but far too many (some who died but were never found, others who were taken as POWs, etc.) never came back. For the families of these missing 1,200 people, there is a hole that will never be filled. A hole created by uncertainty. By fear. By grief. To this day there are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, hoping for a miracle; hoping that their loved one will return and with each passing year, the chances of that miracle happening shrinks. For the family of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, that miracle happened in 2013, no matter what the world tells them.
John Robertson was 32 when the helicopter he was in was shot down over Laos in May 1968. The copter, carrying Robertson was never recovered and in 1976, he and the other passengers were declared dead. In 1982, Robertson, along with his brothers in arms, had his named etched into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall; he can be found at panel 64E, row 008. At the same time as the memorial was opened to the public, the US government received reports that Robertson was alive. Robertson’s wife and children weren’t told.
Tom Faunce never had an easy life. Born in Detroit, Faunce’s father died when he was young and while Faunce never liked to speak about it, his children believe that their grandfather perished in a house fire. After the death of his father, Faunce spent a life in and out of orphanages and detention centers, suffering abuses he preferred to keep to himself. When the chance came, Faunce joined the US Army and spent 27 months in Vietnam. His time in the military gave Faunce something he had been missing; a family.
After the war Faunce became a born-again Christian and chose to live his life by a simple but honorable credo; radical love: no one left behind; no one left unloved. Faunce spent his life traveling the world on humanitarian missions, doing his best to ease the suffering of others. In 2008, Faunce was on a humanitarian mission in Vietnam when he heard about John Robertson, the American soldier who had been living in a small village. Faunce set out to the village to find Robertson.
Robertson was old and he had all but forgotten how to speak English. He sat with Faunce and explained what happened in May 1968; his copter was en route to a rescue mission when it was shot down over some mountains. Robertson survived the crash but was instantly taken captive by North Vietnamese soldiers. For four years they kept Robertson caged up, beating and starving him. At first, they tortured Robertson in hopes of gaining information from him, but in time, the torture just became something to pass the time. When he saw his chance, Robertson escaped from his cage and ran. He evaded the soldiers that pursued him and broke out of the forest before collapsing in a field where he was found by a woman he would later marry and have four children with. For reasons unknown, Robertson never tried to contact his family in America. For over forty years, John Hartley Robertson lived with his new wife and children under the name of his new wife’s dead husband, Dang Tan Ngoc.
Faunce pushed Robertson, now in his seventies, for more information; he wasn’t about to blindly trust the man, but he hoped, deep in his heart, that what he was being told was the truth. Robertson was clear on some details, but other things, like when he was born or the names of his American children, he couldn’t remember. He was suffering from dementia and would often break down in tears. Faunce, with the help for Emmy-winning documentarian Michael Jorgensen, searched for more information on Robertson.
They found that the US government had been contacted by Robertson multiple times, but they never informed his family.
Robertson first contacted the US military in 2006 to tell them that he was alive. In the information he filled out, Robertson wrote down the name of a non-existent high school and the wrong address for his US home. He also misspelled his own name.
Robertson tried again in 2008 and this time he was taken to the US embassy in Phnom Penh where he was fingerprinted. His prints did not match the ones on file. As far as the US government was concerned, this was another case of a Vietnamese man trying to trick the military into giving him the back pay that Jon Robertson would be owed.
Tom Faunce wasn’t so ready to call Robertson a liar. His belief is that the US authorities are working to keep Robertson and other living US MIA/POWs in Vietnam silent, though the reason to do so is unclear. Faunce and Jorgensen took Robertson to Edmonton, Canada to meet his only living sister, Jean Robertson Holley. After a brief moment, Jean was sure that the man standing before her was her brother back from the dead. Jorgensen turned the story into a documentary, titled UNDOCUMENTED, in 2013. Shortly after the premier, US authorities released new information on Robertson.
In 1991 former CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer Billy Waugh traveled to Vietnam to find Robertson and obtain a DNA sample to testing. Waugh was successful, and the test proved that Robertson hadn’t taken the name Dang Tan Ngoc from a dead man, he was Dang Tan Ngoc.
How Dang Tan Ngoc, a Vietnamese citizen of French origin had found the name of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, or why he chose it, is unknown. What is known is that Dang Tan Ngoc is a well-known conman who has used the names of multiple dead soldiers to con veteran groups into giving him money. Waugh believed that Ngoc had collected thousands of dollars over the years.
Still, Master Sgt. Robertson’s family held out hope. In November of 2013, they started a GoFundMe in hopes to get the money needed to perform their own DNA test. While they were unable to reach the intended goal, the Robertson family was able to get the test done. The results showed what Waugh had found over 20 years earlier, Dang Tan Ngoc was not John Hartley Robertson.
Men like Dang Tan Ngoc, men who take advantage of the grieving and the hopeful, are true monsters who walk the Earth every day. To lose a family member to a war can be nothing less than shattering to one’s soul. To lose them again because of the actions of a conman is something no one should ever have to feel. The want to believe that your loved one is alive and well overtakes the rational side of your mind, pushing out all doubts because, in the end, all any of us want is a happy ending.

BREAK=====
When Weird Darkness returns…
A woman comes home to find her visiting sister murdered – and police were convinced she was the one who committed the crime. So what went wrong with the case to allow her to get away with it? (Did Ida Do It?)
A bordello, pizza, and a haunting. You can find them all at the Red Onion Saloon. (Red Onion Saloon)
These stories are up next.

STORY: DID IDA DO IT?=====
Mrs. Ida Quinlan and her 9-year-old son Johnny went out to buy a pair of stockings at around 9:00 the night of February 1, 1896, leaving her baby in the care of her sister, Mrs. Sophia Grant. They took a streetcar to the store, several miles away, purchased the stockings and other sundry items, returning to the house at around 11:00. Ida rang the bell but there was no response, so she went the landlord who lived nearby and got a key to the house. Entering the sitting room, she was surprised to see the drawers of the chiffoniers pulled out and the contents spread on the floor. She called for Sophia and getting no response went into the kitchen where she found her sister lying dead on the floor, covered with blood. Horrified, Ida ran from the house to seek assistance from the neighbors. At least that was the story she told the police. The following day Ida Quinlan was arrested for the murder of her sister.
They lived in a three-story tenement in the Charlestown section of Boston. It was a two-family home but at the time Ida Quinlan and two children shared the house with her sister Sophia Grand, and their brother Angus McLeod, a conductor on the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. They also took in lodgers; John Thompson a brakeman on the same line as Angus had a room there.
Sophia had married B. W. Grand three years earlier but after a few months, they decided that they did not want to live together. She stayed in Charlestown and he lived in Providence, Rhode Island where he had a dry goods business. It was said Sophia and her husband were on friendly terms and corresponded frequently.
Dr. O’Brien examined the body for the police and determined the Sophia Grand had been struck in the head several times with a blunt object, fracturing her skull. She was wearing nothing but a nightdress and stockings but had not been sexually assaulted. There were no signs of a struggle but a rocking chair in the kitchen was overturned; she was probably struck while sitting in it.
Robbery was thought to be the motive, but no one from the house could say that anything was missing. Ida thought Sophia kept $25 in one of the drawers but that could not be confirmed. The doors had been locked when Ida returned and there were no signs of forced entry. It could have been one of the residents of the house but everyone with a latchkey had an alibi. It might have been a former lodger who kept his key, or possibly the killer had climbed a drainpipe and entered through a broken window on the third floor.
But the police did not think it was necessary to go so far afield; Ida Quinlan’s story did not stand up to close scrutiny. The police had several reason to suspect Ida of the murder: she had a record of violence having been charged with assault and battery three months earlier; Ida’s husband David had moved out due to her bad temper and drinking habits; she was the last to see the murdered woman and the first to find her dead; she could not explain why she left the house after 9:00 and traveled so far to make a purchase that she could have made at a store near her home; it was unusual for her to keep her 9-year-old boy out past 11:00; after finding the body she ran from the house without first checking on her baby; their guard dog, a large black Newfoundland named Fred, gave no indication of being disturbed by an intruder. The police were convinced that Ida Quinlan was guilty and arrested her for the murder of her sister.
Additional evidence was gathered. Dr. Wood, of Harvard University, who did forensic analysis for the police, examined the dress Ida wore and found blood—not in blotches which might have resulted from touching the body after death, but small spots as if spattered. Her mackintosh, shirtwaist, and shoes also had spots of blood. 9-year-old Johnny Quinlan, when questioned, said he had been by his mother’s side all night, but the police found witnesses who contradicted this. At 9:00 a delivery man came by with a dozen bottles of beer Ida had ordered. Normally he would have carried them upstairs for her, but this time Ida carried them herself. While she was inside, William D. Doughty, a tailor on his way to his shop saw a boy standing alone on the street, he recognized him as Johnny Quinlan and said hello. Ida and Johnny had been seen apart long enough for her to have murdered Sophia.
The biggest problem for the police was the absence of a motive for the murder. Relations between Ida and Sophia were cordial. There were no recent arguments or long-standing feuds between them. It was said that they disagreed on religious matters but not enough to incur violence. Ida would not benefit financially by her sister’s death. There appeared to be no reason for Ida to kill her sister.
In spite of this, the police were ready to take their case to the grand jury. Without a motive, it was doubtful that Ida would be indicted for first-degree murder, but the police were sure she would be charged with second-degree murder or at least manslaughter. But the grand jury was not impressed by the evidence against Ida Quinlan and did not return any indictment.
While they vowed to keep investigating, the police were reluctant to pursue any other theory. They had gone all-in against Ida Quinlan and they still believed that she was guilty. “Their reputation as officers rests on their claim,” said the Boston Daily Advertiser, “and it could not be said that they would attempt to pass over any other clew, yet it can easily be seen that it would be very hard for them to get up much enthusiasm in working over something that would be a slap in their own faces.”
The Boston Police found no more evidence against Ida Quinlan or anyone else in the case. The murder which made sensational headlines in February was all but forgotten in March.

STORY:  RED ONION SALOON=====
In the small city of Skagway, Alaska, on Broadway Street there is a building built with planks cut by the town’s founder, Captain William Moore. This building is interesting for three reasons: a bit of naughty history, pizza, and a haunting.
The naughty history of the building began just after its completion when it opened as a bordello in 1898 called the Red Onion Saloon. This was during the gold rush, when miners hoping to hit it big traveled through Skagway, which had been dubbed “The Gateway to the Klondike” on their way to find gold nuggets. Miners would come in looking for entertainment in both drink and ladies, and they found both in the Red Onion Saloon. The first floor was a saloon where the men would imbibe alcohol and dance with the women. The second floor contained ten rooms where the men were entertained by the ladies who inhabited them. Choosing the ladies was done with dolls. Each had a doll that represented them behind the bar. If the dolls were sitting up, the lady that the doll represented was available. If the doll was lying on their back, they were entertaining other guests.
As time passed and the rush for gold faded from the area, the bordello eventually faded, too, leaving the building behind to become other things. It was used as barracks in World War II to house soldiers. It also became a Union hall, bakery, and gift shop as well as a laundry and television station, but its history as a bordello would not fade, and it was destined to become a saloon again, only, this time, there would be pizza.
Today it is a historical landmark and operates as a saloon and brothel-themed pizzeria with pizzas with bordello-themed names like the “Busty La Rue” or “Lady Lavoie,” and the employees dress as madams from The Red Onion Saloon’s heyday as well as barmen and musicians in period dress from that time. It is also a working museum where they give tours, and you can view items that were once in the brothel. To me, It sounds like a fun place to visit even without the resident ghost.
The haunting is allegedly the ghost of a woman who has been named Lydia and is thought to have been a prostitute at The Red Onion Saloon during the gold rush. There have been multiple sightings of her, especially in the upstairs area. Though she has been allegedly hostile to men, she does have a fondness for plants in the saloon and waters them. There have been footsteps heard on the second floor, and, if that doesn’t frighten you, she has also appeared as a full-body apparition that ran down the hall when police came to check out a disturbance. She then ran into the madam’s room. When they checked it, no one was in the room. It is often this room where her spirit is seen walking around and watering plants that are no longer there. There is often a strong smell of perfume and cold spots. Unfortunately, it is not known whether she died in The Red Onion Saloon, but one of the former madams was believed to be named Lydia, and perhaps it is her spirit that lingers.
So, if you want to do some ghost hunting of your own, The Red Onion Saloon operates from April to October. Get a drink, a pizza, and, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see her.

STORY: EGBERTING=====
Living under a bridge is horrible. It’s cold and it’s dank; and there’s only so much fishing a troll can do before a troll is bored and sick of eating cold dank fish. Back in the day there was a point to us – guardians of the bridge we were. My father before me, his mother before him – she had a terrific reputation and nearly caused a riot in the village as she wouldn’t let anyone across, there was no bargaining with her. That takes all the fun out of it in my eyes, if you eat everybody then there’s no-one left to tell the story, is there? Father was a bit too soft on them though, he was what you’d call a progressive, he would bargain their best cow out of them or two dozen loaves of bread and a barrel of ale. He’d given up humans, see; he was the first humanitarian of his generation and that caused a fair old row, I can tell you. “Us trolls have always eaten people, what’s the point of them otherwise, it’s easy pickings, build a bridge and they will come,” etc.
Dad said it was more fun to just mess with them for a bit, then get them to bring nice things to eat, or a comfy chair to sit in. He said come on, Egbert, it wasn’t the dark ages any more and we should expand our horizons. That was the golden age of trolls really; when I did my apprenticeship it was just a little saunter up from our cosy pad as soon as we heard the footsteps, a spot of “who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?” followed by a bit of scaremongering and a plea-bargain and a nice dinner or something shiny to put in the display cabinet. Win all round and nobody gets eaten. But then the motor car happened, didn’t it? Dad used to joke about that, tinned humans, he said, but he wasn’t laughing when he got hit by one, no he wasn’t laughing one bit, he was far too dead. So then it was just me, and as the years went past all our finery got shabby and muddy and sort of merged into the riverbank and I can’t even see the horizon from down here, so looks like dad wasn’t as forward thinking as they said, or maybe times have just changed and there’s no point to us any more. Nothing to do all day but listen to the cars rattle overhead, bother a few fish and contemplate the futility of existence. Trolls live a long time, you know, if technology doesn’t catch up with them first.
Any road, that was the state of affairs as it was, and like I already said, it was verging on the dismal. So one day, when I was in the middle of my contemplating I only went and heard footsteps. Footsteps! I had half a mind just to ignore them, but the idea of something different to eat was persuading, so I scrambled up the bank and in my best fearsome voice I shouted
“WHO’S THAT TRIP-TRAPPING OVER MY BRIDGE?”
It was a human all right, not one of those goats I’ve heard about, and it just sort of looked at me. I thought maybe I was a bit out of practice with the shouting and suchlike, so I took a deep breath and tried again.
“WHO’S THAT TRIP-TRA…”
“No need to shout,” said the human, “I heard you the first time.”
Now it had been a long time since people had tried to cross the bridge, but I distinctly remember at this point in the proceedings they were gibbering a bit round the edges and offering up their first-born children. This one just folded its arms.
“Are you going to eat me?” it said.
“NO! I mean no,” I said. “We’re not in the dark ages any more.” Truth be told, I was a touch offended. And more than a touch confused.
“What’s the deal then?” said the human.
“Well,” I said, “Being that this isn’t the dark ages no more, as I already said, I’ll cut you a deal. You give me something in exchange for me not eating you.”
“You already said you weren’t going to eat me.”
Damn, this was a clever one. “That’s as may be,” I said, “But I have a reputation to uphold. Most myths are a little bit of truth and a whole lot of hearsay.”
“Fair point,” said the human, and it started rummaging in its bag. “Here, you can have this. I was just about to chuck it in the river anyway.”
“I don’t want your old rubbish,” I said.
“It’s not rubbish,” it said. “Here.” And it held out a flat grey thing with a picture of an apple on it.
“What in the name of the Old Goat is this?”
It sighed. “It’s a laptop. A portable computer. You can use it to talk to anyone in the world, buy anything you want, find out information, watch videos, write stories, play games, take pictures…”
“Sounds like a lot of sorcery to me.” I said, turning it over, “Either that or you’re spinning me a very tall tale. Maybe I’ll just eat you anyway, for old time’s sake. And anyways, if it does half the things you’re telling me it does, why were you going to throw it away? That don’t make no sense to me.”
“Personal reasons,” said the human. “Let’s just say a lot of the people on there aren’t who they say they are. And some are out to make your life a misery.”
“What people?” I peered at the thing and frowned. “I think you’re having me on. So I should probably have to…” But then I remembered my old dad and the motor car. “Or maybe I won’t. Maybe you shows me how this thing works and I don’t eat you at all.”
The human nodded. “Ok, then,” it said.
And so began my training. The human would visit me every other day with a battery full of electrickery to power the thing, then it would show me another magical place to go in the great Web between the worlds of information; the Catalogue of the Uninformed became a favourite place to visit, my first ever contribution was updating the page about trolls. I spent my days reading and learning and soaking up the information like a carpet soaks up river water. Now my horizons were so expanded they went all the way round and joined up with themselves even though I hadn’t hardly left my smelly old bridge. And what a range of opinion! Every single crackpot argument justified and conjecture-trumps-logic without so much as a by-your-leave. I haven’t laughed so much in decades. As for the conspiracy theories – well some people have far too much time on their hands, and they’d be scared if they knew how right they were, but that’s for another day.
So now my days are ever so busy. The human stops by for a bit of a chat, it brings me a nice full battery and I can get on with my work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still learnin’ about the world, but you know what my favourite thing to do is? Get on those websites where every idiot and his wife has an opinion and wind them up; really get them going. You should see them go! Spelling and grammar goes right out of the window, too. It tickles my belly like nothing known. I ain’t been this happy in years. I even made up a name for what I’m doing, I named it after me. A bit vain, I know, but I call it Egberting. I wonder if it will catch on?

BREAK=====
Up next, it’s our second creepypasta – this one from Weirdo family member Kara Raisch, entitled “Dreamality”… when Weird Darkness returns.

STORY: DREAMALITY=====
I really hope you enjoy reading this and can’t wait to hear back your thoughts.
Kara Raisch
January 16, 2019
Dreamality
I’m not sure how to start telling you this because I’m still trying to make sense of what is going on with me. I can’t even tell if I’m writing this in reality or in a dream. All I know is I have to get it out there. I guess I should start when I started to notice my dreams were becoming reality, and I mean my actual dreams I have when I’m asleep. Including also my nightmares. As a matter of fact I feel I’m hiding right now from alien monsters trying to eat me. I think I’m going crazy but I have done everything I can think of to wake up, and I’m already awake.
I say I feel because I don’t know if I’m hiding in reality or in my assumed nightmare. I can’t fall asleep and I can’t wake up. I don’t know the difference anymore between being asleep or awake but I can tell you that some how in both dimensions I’m extremely exhausted. My eyes hurt and my head is always pounding. I’m only writing this to let everyone know what happened to me and why I did what I did.
I’m going to begin when I was dreaming about continuously falling backwards off the edge of a cliff and just before I am impaled on rocks below, I find myself stumbling backwards again off the edge of the cliff. When I decide to pinch my arm, which is seen in movies to wake yourself up, and it works because I wake up bouncing off my mattress in my bed as if I fell on it.
This wasn’t my first nightmare but it was the first one I had to scream at myself to wake up and pinch my arm in order to get out of my dream. I had a look on my arm where I pinched myself and there was a mark. Trouble is that I pinched myself in my dream so this shouldn’t have been on my arm in reality.
The dream I’m in now is a dream about a game I used to play called parasite eve. If you look up the creatures you’ll see why I’ve locked myself in an office room in the mall. There’s a computer in here that I’m able to use. I’m not going to take the time now to describe these creepy creatures because I don’t have a whole lot of time. Just know that they are extremely scary and not of this world. Whatever world I’m in. If I’m even in a world.
All of this started about a month ago. My first dream that came true was scary because it seemed never ending until I woke myself up. The fact I bounced on my mattress as if I had really fell onto it also scared me. I didn’t focus to much attention on it because I figured there had to be a reasonable explanation for what happened. It was just a dream.
The next few nights didn’t have anything happen because I didn’t dream. But by the third day after my cliff nightmare, I dreamt about being in a long crooked hallway. I was standing straight but the end of the hallway tilted towards the right of me as the doors tilted to the left. It was so tilted that I felt dizzy. The only colors of the hallway were a dark orange and black. I felt like I was in a crazy abstract painting. There was a weird shaped exit sign at the end of the hallway pointing toward the left.
As I stood and studied the hallway and tried to make sense of where I was, I heard a loud growling laughter. It came from the end of the hallway. I was frozen in my spot still staring at the end of the hallway. For whatever reason I knew that if I tried to back up and go behind me, nothing would happen. As if I was fighting to escape but not going anywhere.
The growling laughter was getting closer and then I saw the edge of a dark thin shoulder peek around the corner. As I stared in fear, a creepy tall thin man in a dark suit with a tall top hat came slowly around the corner. He stared back at me with wide deep sunken in eyes. His eyes had no color. They looked like they were just black. He had a very skinny sunken in face. His cheek bones protruded from his face and he had no lips.
As he and I stared he said in a deep, non-human voice, “Now I see you, but you won’t me.” I closed my eyes shut as hard as I could and said, “This is just a bad dream. This is just a bad dream.”
I opened my eyes to see that he was now closer to me. Before he was at the end of the hallway, six doors away. Now he was only four doors away. I tried to move but I couldn’t feel my body. I looked down and my body was there but it wouldn’t listen to my brain and a move. When I looked back up he was now only two doors away. I was panicking. I knew this was only a dream and I had to wake up. I closed my eyes and screamed loudly, “Wake Up! This is only a Dream!”
I opened my eyes and I didn’t see anything. He was gone I thought. Until he said in my ear, ” No it’s real.”
Just then I woke up on my floor in my hallway of my apartment. I was covered in sweat and couldn’t explain how I got there.
The next few dreams went the same way. Just before I’m about to die, I wake up in a weird spot not knowing how I got there. One evening I woke up laying in the parking lot of my work outside of my car on the ground.
I have called therapists and talked to doctors and nothing is found to be wrong with me. They watched me sleep and said I never moved or showed any signs of stress due to dreaming. I’ve done eight sleep studies with doctors and still there’s nothing but I keep getting more and more stuck inside my dreams not knowing where or when I will wake.
The dream I’m in now, I’ve been in for three days. Or what seems to be. I don’t know if in reality I’m actually dead, or if where I am is a different reality. I can’t explain what is happening or why. I’m really scared. I hear the creatures trying to break in the door. The adrenaline is pumping hard inside me that I can barely think straight. I see near the key board on the floor of this office is the knife. I found a worker in here. He had slumped over the screen on this page. I’m not sure why I did it but if he was infected by those creatures, he had to die. I do know that I can’t let them get my body.
I don’t know who or what will see this and I don’t know if it’ll matter. I went from living a normal life to being caged inside my head. These dreams came on slowly and I honestly believe that I have a power that these creatures in this world, dimension or where ever I am want to use the power I possess. I’m going to use that knife again if I have to in order to get out of here.
Please if you’re reading this. Know that you can have this happen to. It’s not just a nightmare anymore. It’s not just a different reality. It’s not just a bad dream. It’s a mixture between them. It’s Dreamality.

SHOW CLOSE=====
Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren@weirddarkness.com. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I’ve narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on TELL YOUR STORY. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true (unless stated otherwise) and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes.

“The Conjure Chest” posted at TheUnexplainedMysteries.com

“The Haunting of Drish House” by Amanda Penn

“Haunted Roads and Spook Lights” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe

“The Strange Return Of Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson” by Derek Faraci for The 13Th Floor

“Did Ida Do It?” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight

“The Red Onion Saloon” by Amanda Penn

The fictional story, “A Brief History of Egberting” was written by Louise Latham for Weird Darkness

And the fictional story, “Dreamality” was written by Kara Raisch for Weird Darkness

WeirdDarkness® – is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright, Weird Darkness.

Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… “With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous escape.” – Proverbs 11:9

And a final thought… “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart

I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.