“THE MALEVOLENT MEN IN BLACK” and More Disturbing True Stories! #WeirdDarkness

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IN THIS EPISODE: The mysterious Men in Black have been around long before Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones put on the black suits and sunglasses. The encounters with these strange men have been taking place for decades. Sometimes unnerving, often bizarre, and almost always chilling for those they approach. (The Sinister Men In Black) *** Legend has it that a four-legged fiend with glowing eyes and a blood-curdling howl stalks the area of Devon, England. The mystery creature was seen only yards away from a party of schoolchildren, the animal has a thick, shaggy coat, rounded ears and large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh. Is it man’s best friend – or a hell hound? (Phantom Hound) *** Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. One of the strangest is places disappearing. It might happen on a hiking trail, or in the forest, or alongside gravel roads in rural counties… but then some happen in the most surprising of places – for example, in the center of New York City. (Places That No LongerExist) *** Weirdo family member Chris Francis has a dark story to tell – literally dark. As in black-hole dark. (Black Hole In The Basement)

SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…
“The Sinister Men in Black” by Erik at Paranormal Scholar: http://bit.ly/2Vgdzxp
“Phantom Hound” by Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: http://bit.ly/2OnKvTf
“Places That No Longer Exist” by Donn Saylor for Graveyard Shift: http://bit.ly/333CG9u
“Black Hole Basement” by Weirdo family member Chris Francis
Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate: https://weirddarkness.com//syndicate
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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=====

In 1982, Steven Spielberg was invited to the White House to privately screen his new film, E.T., for President Ronald Reagan and his guests, which included astronauts such as Neil Armstrong. After the movie finished, Reagan stood up and thanked Spielberg for the film, then looked around the screening room and said, “And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.” Whether or not Reagan’s comment was made in jest is unknown, however he was certainly not afraid to have his name linked with the concept of aliens, having publicly recounted two personal UFO sightings, and made public speculations on how a “threat from outer space” would unify all nations. Such anecdotes and remarks from those in high positions of power have helped fuel the belief that governments have been concealing information from the public for decades in regards to extraterrestrial encounters. Part of this belief is the idea of men in black – shadowy figures dressed in black who deliver veiled threats to those who dare to discuss publicly the existence of UFOs and aliens. Eyewitnesses describe men in black as dressing in all-black suits and black hats, with their behavior ranging from unmistakably odd to menacing. Speculation as to who these bizarre figures are ranges also, from theories of an ominous web of government-backed agencies charged with keeping extraterrestrial secrets out of the hands of ordinary citizens, to extraterrestrials themselves, intent on observing those with connections to alien activity.

I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness.

SHOW OPEN=====

Welcome Weirdos. 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…

Legend has it that a four-legged fiend with glowing eyes and a blood-curdling howl stalks the area of Devon, England. The mystery creature was seen only yards away from a party of schoolchildren, the animal has a thick, shaggy coat, rounded ears and large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh. Is it man’s best friend – or a hell hound? (Phantom Hound)

Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. One of the strangest is places disappearing. It might happen on a hiking trail, or in the forest, or alongside gravel roads in rural counties… but then some happen in the most surprising of places – for example, in the center of New York City. (Places That No Longer Exist)

Weirdo family member Chris Francis has a dark story to tell – literally dark. As in black-hole dark. (Black Hole In The Basement)

But first… the mysterious Men in Black have been around long before Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones put on the black suits and sunglasses. The encounters with these strange men have been taking place for decades. Sometimes unnerving, often bizarre, and almost always chilling for those they approach. We begin there. (The Sinister Men In Black)

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

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

STORY: MEN IN BLACK=====

*****“Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected to the Air Force in any way. We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a Federal offense. We would sure like to catch one – unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases, but we are still trying.” – Colonel Freeman, of the U.S. Air Force*****

The following cases describe men in black encounters, from the bizarre to the chilling.

Wytheville UFO Sightings

In early October, 1987, Danny Gordon, a radio journalist in his the small town of Wytheville, Virginia reported a sighting of an unidentified flying object by police officers. After broadcasting the segment, reports of similar UFO sightings flooded in.

Three months after the initial sightings and Wythe County now had more than 1,500 reports of UFOs. Something inexplicable was clearly going on. Confounded by the number of sightings, Danny and his friend Roger Hall decided to investigate further, even managing to capture the sky anomalies on camera several times.

However, Danny’s investigations unwittingly came at a cost. In the weeks that followed he received several anonymous phone calls warning him to leave the UFO sightings alone, because “the CIA and the Federal government were very much interested in Wythe County UFOs”. His house was also broken into.

Months later, after having gone public with his research, Danny supposedly received a phone call from a man who identified himself as a retired military intelligence officer. He asked Danny to record their conversation, then proceeded to warn him that his investigations might cost him his life, or the lives of his family. The man claimed that, because of his research, his son had been targeted.

***“What I’m telling you, is they will try to hit you if they think it’s advisable for their purposes to keep you from further investigating this thing, and then most likely it’d be done through skin contact chemicals It’s be something on the door knob of your car, or on the steering wheel. They could also come up with something, or do something to your children.” – extract from the transcript of the recorded conversation***

Chilled, but still determined to understand the mass sightings, Danny continued his work.

Less than one month later, two strange men in black arrived at his home, supposedly journalists wishing to write an article about Danny and the UFOs for their newspaper. The men stayed for about forty-five minutes: one interviewing Danny, and the other wandering around the house taking photos.

As they left, they said they would send Danny a copy of the article when it was published. When it did not arrived, Danny contacted the newspaper they claimed to work for, however, it had no record of the journalists, stating that the two men did not work for them.

***“So, who they were I don’t know, but they were in my house, saw my pictures, saw my negatives, talked to my family, took pictures, and then left, and they were not with the newspaper.” – Danny Gordon***

It was sometime afterwards that Danny realised some of his negatives of his UFO photos were missing, presumably stolen.

Eventually, Danny stopped his research, as his family life and health began to fall apart. A stress-induced heart-attack was the final straw. Whatever the cause of the mass sightings in Wythe County, which totalled 3,000 reports by the time Danny left the county, the cost of uncovering the truth was just too high for Danny and his family.

The Robertsons’ Case

A certain photograph is said to be a notorious “man in black”. It was taken outside the apartment of UFO researchers John and Mary Robertson by Tim Green Beckley. Tim, a friend and fellow UFO researcher, had come to their apartment after they told him they were being stalked by a strange man in black.

What began as an interest in UFOs turned into something more sinister around 1968, when John and Mary began to experience bizarre activity. After returning home on an evening, it looked as though someone had been in their apartment, rummaging through their UFO files.

Startlingly, one day whilst home alone, Mary noticed a strange man in black standing rigidly by the doorway of the building next to their apartment. He had an unsettling look on his face and seemed emotionally detached. After witnessing the strange man for four days, Mary was unnerved and told her husband. After showing John where the man in black had been, he too started noticing the strange figure hanging around outside their apartment. The man was described as looking “dark and swarthy, always possessing a nerve-jangling expression”.

Around the same time, Mary and John also noticed that there were strange clicking noise on their phone lines, as if they were being tapped.

The couple became very troubled by the persistent presence of this stalker, believing him to be surveying the building and examining everyone who entered and left. With their UFO files clearly disturbed, they also claimed that the mysterious man had entered their home to make copies of their research.

After the photograph was taken, the man in black was never seen again.

“Jack Smith” and the Men in Black

In 2014, a man in his 50s, acting under the alias Jack Smith, spoke out about being menaced by men in black for most of his life. It an encounter with men in black that year, in New Orleans, Louisiana, that had prompted him to finally speak out about his traumatic experiences. He claimed that such encounters were the result of being abducted by aliens multiple times as a child.

It was Sunday 13th April, 2014, and Jack was meeting with his friend, Jane (also an alias), for sightseeing and lunch in New Orleans. Whilst waiting for a street car to arrive at the French Quarter’s Bienville Street station, Jack and Jane noticed that they were being watched by a pair of strange-looking men.

During an exclusive interview with UFOGrid.com, Jane described the men as looking like “identical twins”.

*****“They were slim, and much taller than the average person. They were dressed in identical black suits, white shirts, skinny black ties, fedoras, and black sunglasses. They were pale, they were stiff, and they moved eerily in unison. They had oblong faces with a thin line for a mouth.” – Jane*****

Jane’s first response was that the men were dressed for a performance, as their clothes seemed inappropriate for the hot weather. As minutes passed the two men in black continued to watch Jack and Jane. This tense encounter lasted for some time, before the street car finally arrived and Jack and Jane were able to get away. As for the two men, they left the station, walking away from the street car – despite having waited for at least twenty minutes – and got into a black car across the street.

Jack was able to film the encounter on his cell phone, something which he had never been able to do before. This was also the first time he had seen men in black in the company of someone he trusted. He explained his relief at someone having seen them with him.

Despite having filmed the strange men, all attempts to share the video have been unsuccessful, with files mysteriously vanishing. Jack has, however, been able to share still images of the men in black he and Jane encountered that day.

Maury Island Incident

On 21st June 1947, during the same month of the infamous Roswell incident, two unofficial harbour patrolman, Harold Dahl and his son, were salvaging wood from the Puget Sound in Washington state when they noticed something strange in the sky.

High above them were five saucer-shaped aircraft, made from reflective material, circling around a sixth unidentified flying object of the same description. Slowly, the sixth object descended over the men’s boat, and stopped an estimated 500 feet above the water. Fearing that the saucer was about to crash into them, Dahl and his son moved their boat onto the shore of nearby Maury Island.

Once safely on shore, Dahl took several photographs of the six unidentified flying objects. As he did this, one of the aircraft, which had been circling above, had begun to descend. It hovered over the sixth object, which the men had moved to avoid, for several minutes, until, all of a sudden, a loud thud was heard and and thousands of pieces of lightweight, white and dark material sprayed out from the craft. Most of the debris landed in the water, however a piece of hot black material burned Dahl’s son’s arm and another hit and killed their dog.

Dahl rushed his son to the hospital for treatment, and told his supervisor, Fred Crisman, about what had happened. Crisman did not believe Dahl, and since the negatives of the photographs Dahl had taken had been damaged during the incident, there was no visual proof to convince him. Regardless, Crisman went to the shores of Maury Island to collect samples of the material Dahl described. The material was found to be metallic, some white and lightweight, and the rest looking like lava rock. Whilst collectiing samples, Crisman claimed that he too witnessed a UFO.

Dahl claimed that, the morning after seeing the UFOs, a man dressed in a black suit appeared at his doorstep. The stranger suggested they go eat breakfast together, so Dahl drove his own car, following the other man’s new black Buick to a restaurant.

While they ate, the stranger asked no questions. Instead, he gave a detailed account of what had happened to Dahl the previous day. It was then that the man in black told Dahl not to disclose anything of what he had seen, or bad things would happen to him and his family.

Far from heeding the strange man’s warning, Dahl spoke out about the incident, and told UFO investigators all that had happened, even sending them samples of the material he and Crisman had collected. Yet, just as the man in black had warned, this placed his family in danger. Dahl claimed that, after he spoke out, his son disappeared. He was supposedly found one week later in Montana waiting tables, with no recollection of how he got there.

Continuing to discuss his sighting publicly, Dahl entered communications with UFO researchers and two USAF officials, who wished to question him further. After the two air force investigators died mysteriously in a place crash, the FBI entered the scene. Dahl and Crisman were ordered to drop their story, and admit it to be a hoax, at the risk of facing legal prosecution for fraud. Not wanting any more trouble, Dahl agreed, but was careful with his wording. He would not admit that his sighting was a hoax, but instead assured the FBI that “if questioned by authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter.”

Understandably, the Maury Island Incident has stirred up much controversy over the years. Many believe the FBI’s conclusion of it being a hoax, with others certain that it was a cover up of extraterrestrial activity, pointing to the ominous appearance of the man in black the day after the original incident and the bizarre disappearance of Dahl’s son.

MIBs and the Rendlesham Forest Incident

Described as the United Kingdom’s equivalent of Roswell, the Rendlesham Forest incident occured in December 1980, when American air force personnel allegedly saw a UFO visit RAF Woodbridge, an airbase in Suffolk, England

In the decades since the supposed incident, the area has attracted the attention of many UFO enthusiasts, who claim that the UK government has suppressed information relating to the 1980 sightings. And indeed, there is some truth in their claims, with information relating to the incident forced into the public domain in 2002. One of the released documents was a memorandum written by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, the base’s deputy commander, to the Ministry of Defence. In the memo, Halt described how three USAF patrolmen “reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest”, which was “metallic” and “triangular in shape”.

One UFO researcher has taken the claims of government conspiracy one step further, claiming that she has personally been a target of the Ministry of Defense’s attempts to hush away the controversial incident. In 1984, Brenda Butler and two co-authors wrote Sky Crash, a book which questioned why UK authorities tried to conceal the incident. In the course of writing the book, and additional research in the years since, she believes that she has attracted the attention of men in black, suited officials who have tried to intimidate her to stop her research.

Speaking at a UFO conference in 2015, to mark thirty-five years since the famous sightings, Brenda described how on one occasion, the MoD tried to make her and a fellow investigator sign a contract to silence them over their findings.

Another time, she was supposedly chased by an “army jeep” down country roads at 80mph. Even so, she returned to the forest that same night and captured strange photographic anomalies on camera. All the while, a police car and police helicopter were observing. As she left she was told not to come back again.

Brenda also revealed that people had also come to her home and stood in her driveway, trying to intimidate her, and that her phones have been tapped in the past. She even stated that her co-authors have received anonymous phone calls, warning them that if they did not stop researching the alleged UFO incident, they may “end up at the bottom of the ocean”.

BREAK=====

Up next, we’ll take a look at the mysterious phenomenon of places vanishing without a trace… and without an explanation. Those stories and more when Weird Darkness returns!

STORY: PLACES THAT NO LONGER EXIST=====

Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. In the following compilation of Reddit stories, people describe places that disappeared, putting the mysteries of the universe on full display. Many of these experiences happened during hikes in remote stretches of forest or in isolated locations along largely untraveled roadsides, but a few of them occurred in surprising places – including the heart of New York City.

If nothing else, these stories prove that people don’t have everything figured out just yet, and there are still riddles to ponder that make this life even more confounding and beautiful. And, in some cases, really scary. Let’s take a deep dive into Reddit narratives about creepy locations that vanished.

From Redditor /u/Sterling_-_Archer:

I was relocating across Texas and, as I normally do, was driving through the night to skip traffic and because it’s more serene that way. I was driving straight through central Texas going northwest, so seeing the hill country change to desert in the full moon was super cool. Anyways, I was driving with my (now ex) wife and we were running low on gas. Luckily, we were pulling into a tiny no-name town and we could see an old gas station come around the bend. This encounter happened at about 2am.

Now, this town only has one road, and this station was right at the edge of town at the end of it. When I say old, I mean very old; the type that you have no option of prepaying, you simply flip up the handle on the machine and you hear the pump inside start struggling to get the gas from the reservoir. It had the old style tick readers too, not a thing electrical on it.

I, being the young man I was, had never seen one before, so I walked into the store to buy the gas before I pumped. The store only had one light in the far back on, and I almost thought it was closed since it was barely brighter inside than it was out in the moonlight. Upon entering, I saw the place was deserted; no customers, no workers, nothing. However, there was an odd tune playing on someone’s radio that I couldn’t place. An old sounding, upbeat piano piece was playing somewhere around the corner inside, and I heard shuffling once I walked closer to the source.

This place made me feel scared. Not the “woah this is creepy” scared, but the “all hairs are on end, something is seriously wrong here but I can’t figure it out” scared. As I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing next to a large radio and… dancing. His dancing, though, was extremely off-putting and seriously didn’t match the tune at all.

Though the radio was cranking out what [sounded] like ragtime, this guy was running his hands up and down his body and pretty much “feeling himself” with his eyes closed in what looked like bliss. He was going far slower than the music and definitely wasn’t on tempo. For some reason, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move. I was in a trance as every part of me screamed to turn and leave.

Finally, I said “excuse me, I just need some gas.”

The guy kept dancing.

I said it a little louder, and he finally slowed down a bit and opened his eyes, and focused on me. But it was like he was looking at a finely cooked steak. He was looking almost through me, and silently walked to the register, not saying anything. I said “uh, just $20 please.” He, again, didn’t say anything and just stood behind the ancient register, so I just figured maybe he didn’t speak the language or was embarrassed I caught him dancing, so I laid the money on the counter and went outside hoping he’d turn on the pump.

I filled up, told my wife about the weird ass scene in there, and turned off the pump[.]

Weird thing is, when we were leaving, I looked back in the window and the guy was still standing there behind the counter. This may sound fine, but my money was still on the counter in front of him. It was like he was a robot who just turned off once I left.

This is where it gets super weird. A couple months later, I was driving back to San Antonio to visit family, and we figured we’d stop at that old gas station to see it in the daytime since it had become somewhat of a running joke between us. We pulled into this tiny town, and… the thing was gone. The lot it sat on at the end of the road wasn’t even there. It was just grass. No rubble, no old pump, no lighting, nothing. It was like somebody picked it up and moved it. It looked like nothing had been there for years.

Still get freaked out thinking about it.

From Redditor /u/taysoren:

I grew up a short distance from the Olmsted power plant in Utah. I’d ride my bike to the canyon where it sits and ride up the bike path. One day I rode to the canyon entrance and was playing around the river. I was probably 10ish at the time. A young boy, probably around 7 years old, came over and started talking to me. We played and talked for a minute and then he asked if I wanted to meet his grandma. Of course, being a kid, I went with him. There are some “homes” near the power plant and I remember walking into the area with him and wondering how I had never noticed them. The grounds were well kept and the large old trees as well. The houses were very old but looked like they were well maintained, and there were old people, everywhere.

Every other person there, other than the boy, was a senior citizen. They all looked happy and were sitting on porches or walking around and talking. I do believe the boy introduced me to his grandma who was sitting on the porch of a two story white building. Then we played by the river that runs along side of the homes. After a while I said goodbye and headed home. I rode my bike to the canyon often so it wasn’t long before I was near there again. No people… none at all. No one had lived there (as far as I know) in a very long time.

From Redditor /u/BattingElk5713:

Once I was walking through the woods with a friend of mine and we were just messing around, telling jokes and climbing on trees. After about a half a mile out we found a small shed. We had no idea who owned it so […] we went inside. It was pretty dark since it was under a couple of huge trees and also early in the morning so we had to turn on our lights on our phones.

When we could see we found a huge collection of pictures, all seemingly having no context. Some pictures of people, some of animals, and some of places. The pictures were from all around the world too. There were even pictures of the Colosseum and the great pyramid. They were all stuck on the wall with one piece of duct tape. But then we started to notice some weirder photos. We saw a photo of Eric Harris (the one from the security camera in the lunchroom) and [one of a] naked man with a bull hat on.

Then we noticed in the corner of the shack was a camera that most likely shot most of these pictures. We didn’t want to steal anything so we left. We told a couple of friends and they were interested and we went back to the shack with them. But instead of finding the shack, we found a chair exactly where the shack was. There was a picture of the shack on the chair and that’s all we could find. I never found out who owned the shack and where it went.

From Redditor /u/PancakeParthenon:

A group of friends and I decided to take a small Saturday afternoon road trip into the backcountry of South Carolina. We figured we’d just drive around, head southwest, and see if we could find some antique shops, cemeteries, abandoned buildings and the like. We pile into my car and start driving. It’s about an hour of nothing, just some light conversation and southern pine forests.

We pass a few horse farms, some quaint old mill towns, and a few gas stations, but nothing interesting yet. 2pm rolls around and we decide we wanted to get something to eat. As a rule, we always like to try local diners and restaurants, so we kept driving until we saw a faded road sign for a town. It was about five miles down the road and we figured that’s good enough.

As we’re driving through the town, we notice there’s no one out. No cars on the roads, no people on the streets, and no real houses. The streets are lined with abandoned and boarded-up warehouses, shops with broken windows, and a few broken down cars from the ’90s. The further we go, the worse it gets. We finally get to a diner that’s right off their main street.

It looks like there’s about ten people eating inside and there’s a few cars in the parking lot. Seems like they’re open. Here’s where it starts to get weird.

We open the door and step in. As soon as we clear the threshold, everyone stares at us. It’s like in movies where the record scratches on the jukebox and everyone looks, except far more uncomfortable. In the middle of the diner is a large table with six people around it, who all turn back to their food and start whisper-talking. The waitress nervously shuffles up to us and quietly asks how many.

My friend Chris takes the lead and says “four” in just a normal speaking voice. Everyone looks at us again and the waitress (who looks barely older than 16) recoils, but takes us to our table. She’s sat us in a basic 4-top near the large table in the middle. She takes our drink orders and leaves.

Once she goes, we all whisper about how weird that was. While we’re talking, the line cook [just stares at us]. We all figure out what we want and wait. We sit in awkward silence for about ten minutes before the waitress comes back.

She takes our orders and disappears into the back of the diner, leaving us alone in the dining room with the people at the other table. It gives us some time to look them over.

They’re a [basic] southern family. [A wife, a husband, three daughters, and] then her.

The other woman was dressed like the younger girls, but looked very much in her forties. She wore a red, paisley patterned dress, with frilled lace at the collar and cuffs. Her hair was long and stringy and covered the bulk of her round face. To the left of her was a doll, seated in a high-chair for babies. The woman would sometimes lean in towards the doll and whisper something, then giggle.

Soon the waitress dropped food off at their table, but set a meal down for the doll too. She commented on how pretty the woman’s daughter was and left. About ten minutes later she came back with our food, silently left it, gave us the side eye, and walked away.

The waitress came back to refill the other table’s water, where she asked everyone how the food was, but asked the doll too. When she asked the doll, she spoke in a baby voice. The woman then picked up the doll, held it in front of her face, and spoke in a little girl’s voice. She was being the doll. […] We shoveled our mediocre food down and my friend Chris just dumped forty dollars on the table and we left.

As we were leaving the town, Chris was looking for any sort of town name. I was checking to make sure we weren’t being followed. This happened about six years ago and we still can’t find that town. No one remembers the name, or the road it was off of, but we remember being there and what the diner looked like.

From Redditor /u/wyckoffh1:

I was going for a drive around my hometown, and I decided to turn into a road I didn’t recognize. This stood out to me, because I live in a small town, and I know its layout by heart. As I followed this winding road, the New England forest thinned, leading to a hilly area. The hills stretched as far as I could see. On top of each hill was a small house, which were all identical. There were no lights in the windows, no cars in the driveways. No trees. Only dead grass and empty houses. After about ten minutes I passed a woman walking her dog. She looked at me like she had seen a ghost, as if she was in total shock that someone had driven by her. I kept driving. The air smelled weird. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was kind of metallic. I drove for another 20 minutes, and eventually saw a road leading to patch of woods, and I followed it. I emerged from where I had entered, and got back onto the roads I was used to.

I have never found that road again, or those houses and hills. I have looked on Google Maps, and searched the area in person, but I have never found anything. The area that I had entered was a marshy forest, with no roads leading in or out, and it was nowhere near large enough to conceal the vast area that I had driven through. To this day, I am bothered by it.

From Redditor /u/tattoovamp:

20 some odd years ago, I took my kids and parents on a driving trip through the Eastern Coast of Canada.

My dad (who was currently driving) decided to take this ‘short cut’ off the main highway down a dirt road.

About 5 minutes down this road, things go eerily quiet. We should be able to hear birds, the trees rustling, cicadas, yet nothing. It was too quiet. Dad starts slowing down.

I am busy looking at the map. I know where we turned off and there was no designated road on our map. I’m worried that I can’t find it.

I look up from the map as I have realized, nobody is talking. Everyone is looking out their windows. There are little stick people and stick designs hanging from the trees. Some are just shapes and others are more intricately made. Dangling, swaying slowly.

Between this and the fact that it was dead quiet, I made an instant decision and told dad to turn around and leave as quickly as possible.

I felt a huge pressure in my ears, like they needed to be popped. Mom had goosebumps and my dad said we were just being silly. He obliged and got us out of there.

From Redditor /u/InfamousCrown:

Many years ago, my family and I moved from California to Nebraska. I was still a young kid, probably 5-6 years old. We were driving through Nevada and shortly after Las Vegas […] we needed to stop and fuel up. We stopped at your typical old school gas station that rings when you pull up to the pump. I don’t remember it that well but my dad told me it looked normal. He got out to stretch while my mom went inside to pay for gas. My mom said that when she walked in, the gas station had quite a few people inside (despite us being the only car there). When she walked up to the counter to pay for gas, everyone turned to her and the lights went out.

She ran outside where my dad witnessed everything and helped her into the car and we sped off down the interstate, not caring whether we ran out of gas or not. To this day, my mom says that’s one of her scariest encounters because she can’t explain nor figure out exactly what was going on. And yes, we found a better gas station down the road and made it to Nebraska.

From Redditor /u/Economy_Cactus:

By my hometown there was a hiking trail that people went to very infrequently. It was along the side of the Niagara Escarpment so it had some climbable cliffs, and some very shallow caves that you could crawl around on.

I went with some friends when I was 19/20 and we were crawling around and found a cave that went pretty deep. We had never been in there before, had never even seen it before. So we pushed forward and decided to check it out even though we had no flashlights and this was when cellphones didn’t really have a flashlight function.

We stepped into the cave and it was easily 20-30 degrees cooler than outside. Upon looking around with [what] light we had we noticed it was really clean inside the cave, as in it didn’t have beer cans littered everywhere like all the other small caves did. While in there we got a really eerie feeling [and heard] weird and strange things. Feeling like we were being touched, poked and pulled and not having any way to figure out who was doing it because it was too dark. We were just using lighters to see what was around us.

We were convinced one of us was messing with the others. Although anytime we sparked up a lighter, we were all decently far apart.

We decided to high-tail it out of there after only a few minutes, convinced to come back with flashlights. We came out to see that it was now dusk outside, when we entered it was mid-day. Somehow we had lost roughly 3 hours inside of this cave.

We went back with flashlights the next week. But have never been able to find this cave again

From Redditor /u/Letha0al:

A house that I grew up in in Tennessee had two rooms that I used to play in that don’t exist.

In the downstairs, there was a larger open space that just about ran the length of the house with rooms splitting off of it. There was a bedroom with a sliding glass door to the outside, a mostly unfinished bathroom, another spare bedroom, and a laundry room. However, growing up, I regularly played in another spare bedroom and a storage room down there that don’t exist and my parents could never find.

To the right of the second bedroom was an empty-ish third one. […] There was a large bed and in-wall shelving, but that was about it, unlike the peach room to the left, which my mum used for her storage. Of the two non-existential rooms, I could find this blue room the least often. When we were packing to move, I left a box of my toys in this room and was unable to find the room again to retrieve it.

The storage room would pop up next to the laundry room, where there was absolutely no room for it. It was a large room with multiple stand-alone metal shelves with boxes of junk. I pulled an old sterling silver vanity set out of this room, with a mirror, brush, and comb, which confused the hell out of my folks because they couldn’t know where I got it. I also got an old book in Hebrew out of here: white paper-back, a bit large, with a color-printed front. My folks, again confused, just gave it to a woman at their church who could read it.

From Redditor /u/xilstudio:

Driving in rural areas in New England, near the borders of Vermont and Mass, so I am not sure which one I was in. It was late… Well OK, so late it was actually early. And there was fog, dense dense fog. Like Silent Hill levels of fog. […] I am driving on back roads. First my headlight just up and goes out, cannot use high beams because of fog. I am in the middle of no where, I haven’t seen a house or town in a long time. Car starts making noise, check engine light comes on. So I pull over, nothing much around: field and fog and dark. Creepy as hell. I gamely look at the engine, I can fix electronics, not engines. I tighten all the things I know.

Car now won’t start. So I am in the dark, in the middle of no where, on the side of the road. Because of the natural rules of how things work, my cell phone has no service as well. It is like one big cliche. […] So I recline my seat and decide to take a nap for a couple hours until the sun comes up.

I wake up, the sun is coming up, the fog is going away… and I am in on the main street of a tiny town, parked in front of what looks like the Bates Motel house. Houses everywhere. It was the the creepiest feeling. I was sure [I was] in the woods. There was not a light on in any house all night? There was a service station 50 yards up the road, I walked up to it, talked to the guy (who looked perfectly normal), he walked over to look at the car, asked me to try to start it…. and it did. F*cking thing turned over right away. And… BOTH headlights were working.

I drove on, never got the name of the little village, and I couldn’t find it on a map. I always felt like I was in this big set up for a horror movie that just didn’t pan out.

From Redditor /u/darthbiscuit80:

When I was 14 I was driving home with my family one night through the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nothing but a lot of trees and rock faces lining the road. We came around a curve and face to face with a large tunnel/archway. It was daylight on the other side and there were visible buildings. Big ones. We weren’t going fast and all had time to get a good look at it as we drove by, so I know it wasn’t a hallucination. Also, my father has no imagination and he saw it too. Mind you, we were in the middle of nowhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This was back it ‘94 and portable HD projectors weren’t really a plausible explanation. (Besides, it was clearly a tunnel, or maybe an archway. The perspective moved parallax as we passed.)

We turned around to investigate the area again, but when we did there was nothing there but a rock face. My dad said not to tell anybody about it or they would haul us away. It’s done a good job of sticking in my head for 24 years though.

From Redditor /u/literal9:

My grandparents had a big farm when I was growing up and all of the grandkids would help work it over the summer when we were out of school. Anytime we saw a rabbit we were supposed to get it with the hoe or grab the shotgun. I was around 12 or so when I saw a little rabbit in the beans and I didn’t want my grandfather to see it so I tried to chase it off.

Followed it into the brush on the land and for whatever reason I just kept following it because usually I’d lose sight of them pretty quickly once they hit the brush. Kept following it until I found what was clearly an old barn ruin. These are pretty normal to happen upon where I’m from and they’re fun to look around inside, so I went in. It was weirdly kept up really well with antique tools in great shape and fresh hay. I worried I had crossed into our neighbors’ property so I high-tailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it and he said our land went way far past what I had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time I was gone, so he followed me out there and we couldn’t find it. I checked every summer I worked there and never found it again.

From Redditor /u/Pskipper:

About 15 years ago, driving from Billings, Montana to Boise, Idaho, I hit a weird fog in Craters of the Moon at twilight. It was patchy and stratified, hovering about three feet off the ground and ending maybe six feet up, so I could sort of see above and below but not through it, with brief flashes of the volcanic landscape around me. At some point a truck pulled up behind me and started following way too close […] and with the fog and their high beams I was terrified. I can’t remember how I got away from it, but I must have turned somewhere. Eventually I came around a bend on a back road and Boise was in sight, three hours sooner than I was expecting to reach it on the interstate.

There isn’t a highway or frontage road that can shave three hours off the 10 hour trip, god knows I’ve tried to find it since then. Craters of the Moon and Arco still give me the creeps.

From Redditor /u/Baelgul:

I was staying at a friend’s place in the financial district in NYC. They were out of town so I was babysitting their cat. At some point in the late evening I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner so I went out to find something fast. Hurricane Sandy had recently come through so many shops and restaurants were still closed and in recovery mode so my search turned up nothing of interest. On my way back to the apartment to order delivery I walked by a place with a woman standing outside and she said “Free pizza.”

Now I’m not one to ever turn away from those words so I turned to her and she repeated the phrase while opening the door to a small pizzeria. I went inside and sure enough there was free pizza. I ended up getting two large slices and headed back home for the night, stopping to give one to the doorman at the apartment complex.

The next day I walked the entirety of the financial district and found absolutely no trace of this pizzeria. To this day I still call it my ghost pizza story.

From Redditor /u/crack-wolf:

I grew up in the middle of nowhere Texas. It’s a small town named Hawley, a little ways outside of Abilene. From what I remember it wasn’t even a one-stoplight town, it was a no-stoplight town. There was one school – pre k through 12th, two diners, and two gas stations. Nothing else but sand/dust and mesquite trees.

Some of my earliest memories are of me and my two older brothers exploring the dry woods around our house. One of my most VIVID memories of my life there is of us coming across a massive lake one day after spending hours out in the woods. We were maybe thirty minutes from our house as the crow flies, but had been exploring since sunrise. When we came across it we all got a bad feeling, and started trying to retrace our steps home immediately. As soon as we got home we told our parents and they told us we were silly. We tried going back and never found it, we moved several years later – but even to this day both of my older brothers have the same memory of us seeing this huge lake in the woods. But even after multiple return trips and an uncountable amount of Google Maps searches, we’ve never been able to find anything that could even be considered a pond – the nearest lake being thirty minutes down the interstate.

From Redditor /u/sichbumba:

10 years ago, my friend and I were bored one night and were driving around. We were on a highway in [New Jersey] about 30 minutes from our houses and through the trees in the middle of no where we see this beautiful freshly paved cement pathway with lampposts every 100 feet just lighting this pathway up. It was beckoning to us… and so we found the nearest exit. We drove around for a while through darkness until the road came to a dead end and the path began. We got out and started walking on this path through the trees and these beautiful wide open fields until eventually it ends at a little small town after a couple miles. At this point its like 2am and a small town like this nothing should be open except for this pizzeria… which is odd… so we go in. It is empty except for the older gentleman behind the counter. We order and start eating… then another older customer walks in.

The gentleman behind the counter and this customer do a double take at each other and then smile. Both of them run around the counter and embrace… “Mario!” “Stefano!” “What has it been 40 years?” They talk the whole time about their childhood and growing up back in Italy. We think what are the chances we would be here… at this moment… seeing friends reunited after 40 years, just plain odd. My friend and I, we finish up and we head back down the brightly lit path and back to the car and call it a night. Ever since that night my friend and I tried to find that brightly lit path, but to no avail. We haven’t seen it since from the highway or driving down that road. In the small town the pizzeria is there, but it closes at 10pm, so no explanation why it would be open at 2am. Just plain odd and something we never could explain, experiencing an unlikely moment to watch friends be reunited after 40 years.

From Redditor /u/hey_there_kitty_cat:

There’s a whole lot of places in rural [New Zealand] that will scare the sh*t out of someone who isn’t used to it. […] If I had to choose one, we were doing a 5 day hike, had pretty good maps and directions. Now there’s a lot of nationally funded huts throughout the island, very well marked. We found this one random hut that was definitely not on the maps, with a bunch of older guys just hammered partying inside. And this was way out of where these guys could’ve just walked up from town to party in for the afternoon. No gear whatsoever, just the craziest looking 60+ guys hammered in this random unmarked cabin. When we came back by later the place was absolutely empty and musty, so they packed up their trash and stuff but it still seemed all gross and dirty. We were all kind of baffled, did we actually meet all these crazy hillbilly old men partying in the middle of nowhere? They obviously weren’t going up there to clean it up, and where the hell did this cabin even come from just in the middle of these mountains? And how did they just randomly hike up there with cases of beer and booze and speakers?

From Redditor /u/doomladen:

I got engaged to my (now) wife some 20 years ago, and I decided to wear a traditional Chinese silk jacket for my wedding. Problem is, at the time I was living in rural Yorkshire, England and these were not easy to find, nor was it yet possible to buy them over the Internet and have them shipped to me.

I spent a few months trying to find places that sold them in big cities nearby but without much success. Then, whilst on a shopping trip into my nearby town, we walked past a shop that only sold these Chinese jackets – nothing else. It was owned by a Chinese couple, which was remarkable as virtually no Chinese people lived in the area and I couldn’t begin to imagine what their target market was. They stocked exactly the jacket I was looking for, in my size, and I bought it on the spot, and wore it to my wedding. Next time I was in town I looked for the shop, but couldn’t find it – presumably it shut down because who else was buying Chinese silk jackets in a town without Chinese people?

BREAK=====

When Weird Darkness returns…

Weirdo family member Chris Francis has a dark story to tell – literally dark. As in black-hole dark. (Black Hole In The Basement)

STORY:  PHANTOM HOUND=====

In the summer of 2007, a falconer named Martin Whitley, of the English county of Devon, obtained a number of photographs of a very curious, black-colored, dog-like animal on the wilds of Dartmoor – where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set his classic Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. As Whitley noted, it was June 9 when the strange affair went down. In his own words: “I was flying a hawk on Dartmoor with some American clients when one of them pointed out this creature. It was walking along a path about 200 yards away from us. It was black and gray and comparable in size to a miniature pony. It had very thick shoulders, a long, thick tail with a blunt end, and small round ears. Its movement appeared feline; then ‘bear-like’ sprang to mind. There was a party climbing on the Tor opposite, making a racket, but this it ignored completely.”

Merrily Harpur, a noted authority on mystery animals in the UK, offered her thoughts on the handful of photos of the creature that one of the Americans with Whitley took: “Martin’s American clients took a series of photos. They show the Dartmoor landscape, the school party on the Tor, and in the middle distance an animal which seems to change shape in each frame, from cat, to bear, to pony, to boar, to various breeds of dog. Indeed, members of the BCIB [the Big Cats in Britain research group] invoked nearly the whole of Crufts [the British version of the United States’ Westminster Kennel Club show] in attempting to give the creature a ‘rational’ explanation, while the proximity of Hound Tor suggested to some a possible kinship to Devon’s spectral Wisht Hounds.”

Martin Whitley may not have known what the beast was, but he was certain it was not just a dog. On this matter he expanded: “I have worked with dogs all my life and it was definitely not canine. I have also seen a collie-sized black cat in the area, about ten years ago, and it was not that – this was a lot bigger.”

Jon Downes, of the Center for Fortean Zoology, took a more skeptical approach and suspected that the animal was indeed a large dog, and that the seeming ability of the creature to shape-shift resulted from nothing stranger than the technical limitations of the camera that was used to capture the shots. The dog angle was also championed by the UK’s Daily Mailnewspaper. Its staff spoke with a local woman, Lucinda Reid, who believed that what had been photographed was actually her pet Newfoundland dog, Troy! Certainly, Troy, like all Newfoundland’s, was a formidable and sizable animal. As evidence, he weighed in at just under 170 pounds.

Reid told the Daily Mail: “I was in stitches when I read that someone thought Troy was the Beast of Dartmoor. I spotted it was him right away – you can tell by the shape and the way he is walking. We go up to that spot on Dartmoor all the time. It is only ten minutes away from our home and Troy loves to run about there. A lot of people don’t have a clue what he is, because he’s so big. Troy frightens the life out of everyone because of his size and he doesn’t look like a dog from a distance. He sometimes disappears off round the rocks on his own, and that’s when he must have been photographed. But Troy is certainly nothing to be afraid of; he’s a big softie. So, if anyone else sees him on the more, there’s no need to panic.”

Not everyone was quite so sure that Troy was the cause of the sensational story. Aside from the fact that the animal in the photos does appear to change shape, there is the matter of the location where the picture was taken. It’s extremely close to a place known locally as Bowerman’s Nose. It’s a granite outcrop on the north slopes of Hayne down and only about a mile from a place called – wait for it – Hound Tor. And there is a very weird legend attached to the tor and how it got its name.

According to ancient, local folklore, roughly one thousand years ago there lived on the wilds of Dartmoor a man named Bowerman. He was a skilled hunter and someone who knew the old, mysterious landscape very well. On one particular day, while out hare-hunting, his pack of hunting dogs stumbled upon something else: a secret coven of witches, hidden deep within a series of previously unknown caves on the moorland. Bowerman’s dogs raced around the caves in chaotic fashion, knocking over a huge cauldron that was a significant part of an ancient ritual the witches were about to perform. Bowerman managed to take control of his dogs and fled the area. The witches, however, were determined to have their cold, deadly revenge.

One of the crone-like coven shape-shifted into a hare, and coldly lured Bowerman and his dogs into marshy ground that quickly swallowed up one and all. The witches were not done with Bowerman and his pack, however. They hauled their dead bodies out of the marsh and turned them to stone. So the old legend goes, a line of rocks at the peak of Hound Tor is comprised of the dogs-turned-to-stone, while an outcrop called Bowerman’s nose, is all that remains of the dogs’ master. And still the story continues.

The very same area of landscape is the home of what are known as the Wisht Hounds – briefly referred to above by Merrily Harpur. Like the monster-dog in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of Baskervilles (which was actually based, in part, on the old legends), the Wisht Hounds were huge, black, deadly dogs of a paranormal kind that sported blazing red eyes. They preyed upon the bodies and souls of the unfortunate people who dared to intrude upon their territory. On top of that, not at all far away is Buckfastleigh, which, in the 17th century, was the home of Squire Richard Cabell – the inspiration for evil Sir Hugo Baskerville in Conan-Doyle’s much-loved novel. Local lore tells of how, on the night Cabell died, a vicious pack of savage, black hounds was seen racing across the moonlit moor.

Taking into consideration the sheer number of strange and centuries-old stories of supernatural hounds in the very same area where Martin Whitley’s friends photographed, well, something, it’s no wonder that the idea it was Troy the Newfoundland is met with much skepticism by monster-hunters. While the matter was never resolved to the satisfaction of everyone, it did provide Troy with brief, nationwide fame!

WEIRDO STORY=====

From Weirdo family member, Chris Francis…

I was 18 years old and as every young man trying to make it in the world, had moved from my mothers house outside Orillia Ontario to an apartment in Toronto. I was determined to show I could make it on my own after high school so I got two jobs and worked myself to the bone. Needless to say I didn’t quite have what it took yet to make it on my own. A year later I sucked up my pride and moved home with my tail between my legs. my mother and sister and newborn baby brother had moved to a new place now just off the main street in downtown Orillia.. It was a century home, two story red brick house with high sloped roof tops and a sun room. This house was renovated inside but it still kept its original facade. the house was very large and originally had two stairwells leading upstairs, the house was split into a duplex with tenants living in the back half of the house, so the back stairwell went down a few steps to a 15 foot long corridor then was promptly walled off. The rear tenants only had a main floor one bedroom apartment with only rear yard access. Our half was a 3 bedroom, one bathroom all situated on the second floor, the main floor had the living room, kitchen, and sun room. From the living room was the basement door which was adjacent to the sun room and had the main staircase above it. All the rooms were spoken for between my mother Karen, little sister Diane, and 1 year old baby brother Jacob, so I had but one place to go, the sun room. it wasn’t insulated so it was winter and I had to sleep on the couch in the living room and being I moved back in march I had a few couch bound nights to go. One thing that was odd the moment I entered the house my sister Diane took me aside and said “I know you’ll believe me. No one else does, but there is something wrong with this house”. not one to bat an eye at a little mystery I said “what’s going on?” she began to explain how she cant go in the basement alone because she feels like someone is watching her. so being the brash and brave 6’7″ 340lb big brother I said with a sigh to try and hide my obvious intrigue “alright… lets go check it out”. as we walk down the narrow stairs to the basement I see that there is part of the foundation much older than the original house, it was made of old field stone and mortar,it even had what was left of a doorway and windows, clear evidence that another much older house sat on this lot previously. There were two overhead pull string lights one on the stairs and one above the washer and dryer. The odd thing I noticed right away is that there was more than enough light to illuminate the entire basement brightly. But for some reason not past the threshold of the old foundation. it was like a black hole. no light could penetrate it even after I grabbed grabbed a flashlight. a very oppressive feeling seemed to emanate from there. It was at that point I had my fill not to seem frightened I said “meh its just old stones” and we went back upstairs. My sister was right it felt like the entire time we had our backs to that foundation it felt like someone was right behind us all the way up to the door.
unfortunately this was only a part of bigger issues to come.

The first night as I lay asleep on the couch I half opened my eyes to see the basement door slowly open and the stairway light come on. A moment later I heard both of our family rottweilers Roxy and Goliath, who usually slept upstairs but had bunked with me on the couch that night begin to growl and immediately the light went out and the door shut quite quickly that’s how snapped too, originally I discounted it as a dream but it nagged at me for a while because when I knew I was awake both dogs were staring towards the basement door intently ears flat to the sides of their head, a clear sign they weren’t happy. This seemed to happen on an almost nightly basis for the next few weeks. door opens, light comes on, dogs growl, the door slams shut.
Then the night came when something changed, the door opened the light came on then I heard someone climb the stairs, they were old and they creaked like nobody’s business it was obvious someone was going up.. not down so it couldn’t have been my Mom or Diane. Then Jacob screamed, hes a heavy sleeper and not one to cry for no reason, he was a very well behaved baby. but he screamed and it was a terrified shriek. then all of the sudden I could hear something bounding down the stairs then BAM the basement door slammed so hard it shook the floor. my mom and sister come running down the hall to see what was wrong. I ran upstairs as well to find a terrified Jacob and my mother trying to sooth him. That was the last episode for over a month.

Finally spring temperatures brought a small move in the house. I moved into the sun room. Which was nice because it had curtains on every window including the ones facing into the living room, so I could have some semblance of privacy. I had my bed, my computer and personal belongings in there with me, it was as much of a bedroom as I was going to get for a while. It was nice because I had taken up a job at the hot deli at the local supermarket and after a closing shift I could come in through the outer sun room door and not disturb the rest of the house. The sun room was a much later addition to the house. It was built on its own footings and only attached to the red brick. The original outer wall, windows and door were still in place. Some how this afforded me some sanctuary from the events happening in the house when they began picking up again. I had a view from the outside so to speak. The sun room door was off set from the basement door by about 4 feet. Directly across from the basement door were the windows into the sun room. The curtains were on my side of the window and not the living room which was somehow comforting to know.

Then I had the encounter with the shadow in the window. It was a mild late April night and I was just home from a closing shift, I had logged on to the internet to check emails and chat with friends when out of the corner of my eye I saw the basement door light come on. It was 11:00 at night no one was doing laundry and I heard no one come down the noisy stairs. “here we go” I thought and kept a close eye on the windows in front of the basement door to see if I could see anything come up the stairs. Just as I finished the thought, I saw a shadow rise against the curtain. It stood approximately 6 feet tall. It stood there for a few moments which felt like minutes. It seemed to be trying to peer through the glass at me, then suddenly it turned and made its way into the living room. I was stunned. I had no idea what to do. Do I go out there and confront what ever it was? Then.. the stairs! It was going up the stairs. This time I wasn’t creaking softly. It was trudging up there! It was mad. You could hear it in its footsteps then with a violent sound I heard a door upstairs slam shut. Then I heard it again and again slamming harder and harder, I thought for sure a door would be off its hinges. Then the shadow passed my window.. paused again and slammed the basement door. This time the dogs were in hot pursuit barking and snapping at the basement door. I rushed upstairs to see what happened and there was my mother standing in the door to her room scared to death. That morning my mother opened up to me about the feelings she got in the house. “I hate that basement and I cant go in that back stairwell, I just can’t the feeling of dread is too much”. So for the first time I went and really walked down that stairwell and along the corridor to the where the landlord had walled it off for the second unit. And she was right. I couldn’t spend 5 minutes in there without becoming legitimately terrified. I did some researching and found that salt could keep spirits from crossing a barrier. So I left the work that night with two big bags of it. I went to the top of the second stairwell and poured a big thick line of salt from wall to wall. I was going to do the same with the basement but with the laundry being down there I thought against it. Boy that was a mistake. That night all we could hear was pounding and stomping from the corridor and the basement door and light were going crazy almost every hour.
All we did was piss it off.

What ever it was began taking its frustrations out on my sister, she was so terrified that she would have me sleep in her room next to her bed because she felt what ever this thing was didn’t want anything to do with me. It was almost like this entity was throwing temper tantrums when ever I involved myself in its dealings. Eventually I began calling it on and daring it to do something. Only to get its response dealt someone else besides me. Be it scratching baby Jacob’s arm or pushing my mother out of her bed. So I decided it was time to look further into the houses past, the newer part ( I say newer but it was still over 100 years old) had nothing really interesting besides the fact ownership changed hands a lot. And for all my digging I couldn’t find any information on the original structure that helped prop up the new house. The only thing I could find was that the back corridor was a servants staircase and it lead right down to the basement. The landlord had sealed it off from the rear unit and it wasn’t visible at all, speaking to the neighbours, they were a timid older couple and they thought we were the causes for all the commotion. Their only experiences were they could hear muttering and other loud sounds coming from the basement which they were directly above the old foundation.

Luckily by that summer the landlord had sold the house, forcing all of us to move as they were turning it into a retirement home and were going to eliminate both units to do so. We eventually settled for a nice cookie cutter townhouse in a complex. I’ve never been so happy to move in my life. I remember the last time I looked at that house was when we pulled out of the driveway and I looked through the sun room windows, which now was barren with no curtains and seeing a 6 foot tall bald man in a grey coat standing at the basement door staring right at me with a scowl on his face. Who he was or why he was so mad will remain a mystery to us I guess and I’m OK with that.

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 like “Retro Radio – Old Time Radio in the Dark”, “Micro Terrors; Scary Stories for Kids”, “The Church of the Undead”, and more. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can 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 Sinister Men in Black” by Erik at Paranormal Scholar

“Phantom Hound” by Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe

“Places That No Longer Exist” by Donn Saylor for Graveyard Shift

“Black Hole Basement” by Weirdo family member Chris Francis

WeirdDarkness® – is a registered trademark. Copyright, Weird Darkness.

Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… “Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud, but humility comes before honor.” – Proverbs 18:12

And a final thought… “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.” ― George R.R. Martin

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

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