Podcast

We got a notice a few years ago about the possibility of the cemetery relocating where my great grandmother and aunt were both buried.

I remember thinking that it was really weird and almost thought it would be illegal to do so, but nope. Cemeteries CAN indeed be relocated just like any other business, only they are required to give advanced notice about it and take care of a bunch of legal stuff.

Well we started getting more notices about this as the months got closer to the proposed “transfer date” until the final notices arrived. We were scheduled to go witness the removal and reburial, and we decided to do another ceremony for my aunt and great grandmother.

Not many people were going to go, it was going to be me, my mother and some other distant relatives that were called about the ceremony and wanted to be present to honor them once more.

My aunt’s grave was dug up through assisted heavy machines that pulled her casket right up, placed on a truck, literally a pick up truck with a camper on it.

My great grandmother’s grave was a little different. It was in a very old part of the cemetery, and the dirt was more like rock.

This one was dug up with drills and men with shovels. When the casket was finally brought up, they were supposed to place it inside of a bigger type of cement casket for protection during transport. As they lifted it up, since it was so old, the top fell off and the rest of the box fell straight down, revealing my great grandmother’s dried up corpse.

I wasn’t really shocked, the thing looked like it was going to break anyway. What bothered me was what we discovered next.

Her dress was on backwards. Wait, no. She was facing down.

Her arms under her body, her hands under her face. Deep scratch marks all around the inside of her casket. That’s when we all realized, she had been buried alive.

I’m never taking an Uber ever again in my life.

My friends asked me to meet them over at a bar we used to go to often back in the college days. My house is about ten minutes away from downtown up in the hills toward the valley, and I don’t have a car.

I don’t like taking taxis or Ubers up to my house since the long stretch of driveway is dark, and I’ve always been paranoid about strangers knowing where I live.

I had taken the bus earlier in the day and planned to hang out at my aunt’s house until 9pm, doing work and whatnot on the computer, yes, on a Saturday night, before meeting up with my friends. I figured one of them would be able to drive me home.

After a fun night of dancing and drinking, my friends started going home, and I didn’t know their designated driver very well so I didn’t want to ask her to drive me to my house. I figured I would just suck it up and take an Uber.

Almost everyone had left, it was just me and my other friend waiting outside. I looked at the app and it showed that the driver was nearby, when an older man in a car rolled down his window and said “Uber?” that was it, here we go, I thought.

I got in the backseat and said goodbye to my friend.

Then I got the alert from the Uber app letting me know that the driver was waiting for me. I looked at the man and he grinned at me. I asked him to pull over and to let me out, but he just laughed and told me to shut up. He used more colorful language than that, by the way.

In a panic, I tried to open up the door, but the child safety was on. My phone started ringing. It was my friend, but I couldn’t answer right now.

The man was asking me to calm down as he seemed to be pulling out something, maybe a weapon, from his glove compartment. I wasn’t about to wait to find out.

He made a quick left and I hit my shoulder against the car door. If he was to make another left after this, he’d be taking me to the alleys and up toward the woods. I’d be done, I remember thinking.

I unbuckled my seat, scooted over to the middle, leaned back, and kicked at the window. It took three or four hard kicks to finally break. The man was swerving and saying that it was okay, that he was going to let me go. But I didn’t believe this freak.

I reached out to open the door from the outside, cutting part of my forearm on the broken glass, when I saw a car flashing its headlights behind me. I finally got the door open, the man stopped the car with a sudden jolt, and I practically jumped out as he started to take off again. I heard the tire’s squeak as he made a hard turn to the right on the next corner.

The car who was behind us stopped. I was freaking out. I know these guys plan these things out. They act in teams.

Then, I heard a familiar voice in the distance. It was my friend. She was yelling out my name in a complete panic. She ran up to me and gave me a hug. I accidentally stained her little white dress she liked so much.

An Uber driver had pulled up to her and mentioned my name. My friend put two and two together quickly, and told the guy, a nerdy skinny-looking dude, that I had been kidnapped and she needed his help. That’s how they ended up tailing the car I was in. Who knows what would’ve happened if they hadn’t.

We called the police and everything, but they still haven’t found the man.

I received a call from my grandma late one night, she told me that someone was trying to break into her home. She told me she had already called the police and that they were on their way over, but she didn’t think they were coming. She had called the police one too many times. I could understand that.

I was always embarrassed when my mom would make me go to the store with her because she would almost always make a scene about a coupon not working, or about how the price of an item was not labeled properly and she demanded a discount.

Her neighbors never really liked her either.

But the police did show up, and they actually caught a glimpse of someone running away from her back porch. When they inspected it, they saw that it was indeed an attempted forced entry.

I got there just as my grandmother was finishing up making her report with the police officers. She looked up toward me and smiled. When I got close to her, I noticed that she seemed very proud of herself, almost as if she was happy that she finally called the police for something that was actually worth it.

She doesn’t know much about technology, but I recommended that she gets one of those security doorbell cameras, and that her cell phone would alert her when someone showed up at the door. She barely carries her cell phone around, but she agreed to it. The next day, I went over and installed the camera I picked up at the hardware store, I also reinforced all of her doors and windows.

I decided to link up the doorbell camera with my phone too, so that I would receive alerts as well.

At home, I tested the connection and yes, it worked. I could see passing cars, and pairs of bright eyes from the cats that would hang out around the front yard.

It was around midnight when I received an alert.

“Someone’s at your door”

I opened up the app and looked at the snapshot. It was an old woman, smiling at the door. She had long, dark tangled hair. I clicked to view the live camera.

There she was. I was trying to get a good look.

Suddenly, I got a phone call. It was grandma.

She had gotten an alert too, but there was nobody at the door, she said. She said to wait a minute, and put me on hold. My grandma still uses her home phone, which she keeps connected in her kitchen. She must have accidentally hung up, because the call ended suddenly and my cell phone went back to the live stream of the security camera.

The woman was looking right at me, with a creepy smile. She wasn’t blinking.

Then, the porch light turned on. The woman turned around and ducked by the porch steps. I could see the back of my grandma’s head stick out the front door as she stepped out to the porch.

I could see the stranger’s eyes looking right at the camera. She was grinning now.

My grandma turned around just as the other woman stood up and walked behind her. I pressed the microphone button and shouted for the stranger to leave the property. My grandma became startled and ran toward the door and quickly shut it. The other woman froze. With the lights on now, I could see her face better.

She was wearing a long black dress, and her nose was small. Her evil smile never left her. I must have taken a hundred screenshots by this point so that I could show the police, even though the footage was already being recorded.

My phone rang again. It was my grandma. She told me that she heard me and that there was no one else by the front door. I asked her if she had seen the live video on her cell phone and she said yes, she had, but there was nobody there.

I told her that someone HAD indeed been there, and for her to double check her doors. I thought about sharing the screenshots with her, but aside from her not being able to open them, I really didn’t want to scare her. I made plans to drive to her house the next morning.

I fell asleep around 4am, waiting for another alert from her house, but nothing ever showed up. Before work the next morning, I went to her house. She was up at 5am sharp every morning anyway.

She saw me from her kitchen window and came up to me asking if I wanted to eat breakfast, but it was way too early for me, and without any small talk, I asked her again if she hadn’t seen anybody in the camera just to double check. I asked her what she tapped on her cell phone to be sure that she was doing it right. She was able to open up the app and view the live feed right there in front of me. Some glitch, maybe?

I told her I had seen someone there, and tried to play back the footage on her cell phone, but the camera hadn’t caught any motion except for her turning on the light and stepping out into the porch the night before.

That’s when I showed her the screenshots. Then the footage. There was an old woman smiling at her front door.

My grandma’s face froze.

That woman, she explained, was her old roommate from when after grandpa died. She was even wearing the same black dress.

The same dress she was buried in.

I live by myself in an old house. It was the cheapest thing I could afford after my divorce. The roof leaks in the living room area whenever it rains, and the bathroom lets out an old sewer smell every once in a while when the toilet bubbles. Other than that, it’s been fine.

Less than a month after moving in, the new neighbor at the time invited me to a barbecue at his house, and the whole family seemed nice. They kept asking me about my house and what I thought about it. I told them about the issues, but they seemed very interested in that house. When I asked them if they’ve ever been inside, the neighbor and his wife were more than interested in the offer they assumed I was making, and pretty much invited themselves to go check it out right then and there.

I was definitely not ready to have visitors over. I’m a messy person by nature, and I had old Chinese food take out boxes and empty ketchup packets all over my couch. I didn’t even have a coffee table or a television yet. Too late to tell them, I guess.

They stepped in and walked around, looking at the corner of the ceiling and the wall, a particular spot that had some stains running down the wall that I never bothered to clean since I moved in.

The neighbor’s wife was entering the hallway as her husband and I awkwardly stood in the living room without much to say. Suddenly she screamed and fell to the ground, desperately trying to crawl toward us, but something was pulling her back. Her husband ran toward her, helped her up, and yelled at me to help with her missing shoe a few steps down the hall.

I didn’t know what to say. I went out to the front porch to see what was happening. I never found her shoe.

The woman had already ran back to her house, and the neighbor was making his way to his house too. I decided not to go back to the barbecue, but I also didn’t want to go back inside.

It was around 11pm when my cell phone’s battery started dying and I decided to go back inside, when I heard the voice of someone calling out my name. It was another neighbor, from two houses down.

He told me that pretty much everyone knew of what had happened, and he felt it was right to give me an explanation. The whole neighborhood was aware of the house’s story already. The house had seen many new owners come in and leave. Mainly young couples.

As it turns out, the house was the home of several gruesome events back in the 70s, where a man murdered two women and hid their bodies in the attic for weeks before the smell of the corpses brought the attention of the neighbors. He too was divorced. Good man.

He was getting ready to kill his next victim, but she managed to escape and tell the police. He ran away, but was later found dead, floating in a lake. Nobody knows how he ended in there.

The story didn’t scare me for some reason, and I could tell that the neighbor felt uncomfortable at my nonexistent reaction to the story.

Oh well. I feel at home.

I rarely leave this house now. I don’t think I can leave. I don’t want to. I feel like a different person when I’m here.

It has been almost a year since the neighbor’s barbecue. He never invited me again. It’s that woman’s fault. I have an undeniable hate toward her. I don’t like seeing her when she gets home from work, I don’t like her hair, her face, or the tapping her heels make when she walks up her steps and onto her porch.

I don’t like to see her breathing.

It has been several times when I wake up and see a figure moving away from my bed in the shadows. It happens at least once a week since I moved into this place. It seemed nice on the inside, something designed by an interior decorator, even though the outside is old and musky.

I wasn’t expecting to like the new apartment, since it is in a neighborhood full of retirees and people who have nothing better to do than to sit in front of their porches and pick food out of their teeth, but its warm and has everything I need.

I’m on a work assignment for three months. I paid for those three months upfront, since the owner offered me a deal, though she told me that cleaning services were included, but they haven’t showed up yet.

I know about the missing cleaners because something strange happened to me, the very first memorable moment about this place. I had just gotten back from work and when I heard someone moving things around in my room. I saw a stuffed teddy bear right outside the hall and a small heap of dirt, gum wrappers, and other small pieces of trash right by the door.

I figured the cleaning people had gotten there before me and let themselves in, but when I got to the room to say hello, nobody was there. I called the owner’s cell phone and left a message about the cleaners, but she called me back to say that they weren’t going to be able to clean up my place, but that I would be reimbursed. It was odd.

Still confused, I picked up the black bear and put it on my kitchen counter. It was an old raggedy thing, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to throw it out, but figured that it might belong to someone, to one of the owners perhaps, and just kind of set it in plain sight.

That night I heard noises in the kitchen late into the night, like something metallic falling from the counters, like forks or knives. I turned on my lights and went straight for the kitchen. Nothing was on the floor, nothing seemed out of place.

Creeped out, I went back to my room and sat on my bed for a while.

That’s the night when the moving shadow started showing up. At first, it must have been a dream, since I clearly saw somebody, a little girl, floating away from the foot of my bed and toward the bedroom door. I had been woken up by the cries of a cat when I saw the figure. Oh, how I hate cats. They sound like real babies when they cry.

Every week or so after that, I wake up due to a random tap or knock, and my eyes adjust in the dark to catch the dark figure moving away from me, from my side of the bed.

It’s only recently, last week actually, that I got a clear view of what the figure is. It’s a little girl, and she stands there, with a creepy smile, way too big for her face, leaning slowly toward me. One night, trying not to act too scared, hoping she would go away, I rolled over to the side, toward the window and shut my eyes.

Curiosity got the best of me and slowly, I opened them again. And there she was, as if she knew to wait for me. Her pale skin and purple lips in the shape of a broad smile, her dark pupils staring right at me. I could smell her now, the stench was that of rotting meat.

I rolled over to the other side and off the bed, and reached for the light switch. I turned around. She was gone.

I told my coworkers the story, and even though most laughed at first, two days ago every single one of them that I told mentioned that they too started seeing the little girl with the creepy smile. That she just stares. All of the descriptions match.

The coworker that I hang out with the most believes it to be the hidden girl of the objects, which is a legend among the old folk in town. She can make objects appear before showing up herself. They say that she warns you, sometimes with whispers and sometimes with knocks. She wakes you up over a period of weeks before appearing. He sent me a link to a blog post about it, it was published back in 2002, where the author writes in detail every single time the little girl appeared while she slept. She even had a hand drawn image of… it.

The thing is, I had read about this before, from some random Japanese forum I visit sometimes, except she was called the teeth girl, I figured they must have done a poor job translating the story when I read it. It wasn’t very interesting. But this new post shared something else. It came with a warning. On the site, it says: “Share with the affected only.”

With the affected? Only? My coworker told me about a theory that he has, that the story is the trigger. The story brings her to life again. He told me that whoever hears about her will let her keep on living. But I don’t believe in that.

But it’s night time now, and I’m getting ready for bed. She might show up again tonight. Maybe at the foot of my bed… maybe at the foot of…

My classmates finally asked me where I work. I think they were all wondering this because my pants are always dirty, or because sometimes I come in sweaty to class, or because I come in with random things to hold my hair into a messy ponytail.

I work down the street, actually. There’s a cemetery there.

My job is to dig, sometimes by hand with a shovel, and sometimes with the machines. The job is simple, we get the spot location and dig either a standard-sized grave, an infant plot, or an extra large or double one. The dirt is always soft and black, and I’ve lost some weight since I started digging. It’s actually kind of a good workout.

I’ve never been there for an actual burial, but I have been there with the grieving relatives who sneak in there late into the night, sometimes while I’m digging. We have a team of two or three people, and we get these loud bright generator-powered lights to work when it gets dark. Most of the time, however, I had to be there early in the morning, before dawn.

One night, a coworker warned me about an older man who was sitting by a tree and had been there all night. Apparently his wife had just died. He was asked to leave but he refused. They said he didn’t seem dangerous, but to keep my phone on me in case I needed something. The security guard house was located at the entrance and they did their rounds every two hours or so. I know they skipped out on a few, but there were never any major issues.

Plot in section P4.

Another late night.

I dragged the generator to the foot of the hill, started it up, and got to work. That first instance when your shovel hits the ground was always the hardest. It meant that I still had a long ways to go. Then I needed to start up one more before I could call it a night. It’s best not to think about that sometimes.

I was halfway done when I happened to look up toward the tree on the left side of the hill, and sure enough, I could see a figure of a man sitting down, a hat covering his face.

I kept digging, but after a few minutes, I looked to the left again to look at the tree. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t sneak up behind me, I don’t know. Call it paranoia, but us humans can have evil intentions at times. The dead are dead, they don’t bother me.

I finished up, looked at my post-it for the next plot, section P9, number 7. Just up the path, thankfully. It was close enough for me to not have to move the lights, but just rotate them a little to the left.

I didn’t bring my Bluetooth speakers this time, and even though my phone was on full blast, the empty field of the dead seemed to muffle my music. We weren’t allowed to wear earphones. I looked up and with the light now shining toward the tree, I got a clearer view of the man. The light didn’t seem bother him, neither did my music apparently.

I turned my back to the tree and started digging, but I didn’t feel comfortable that way, so I turned to the other side. I didn’t feel comfortable that way either, looking toward the tree and the man.

While standing there, deciding what to do, I felt someone tap my shoulder. I turned around.

Nobody was there.

I looked toward the tree, but the man was still there.

I felt another tap. It was rougher this time. It hurt a little bit.

I quickly turned around again, but no one was there.

I picked up my phone and called the security booth.

“Yes? What’s up?”

“Something weird is happening.”

“What? A ghost?” they replied, jokingly. I didn’t find it funny at all. Since I didn’t respond, they said, “I’ll be right over, where are you?”

I told him, and hung up. I put my shovel down and started walking toward the light setup a little ways down the path. Two steps in and I felt someone pulling on my hair. I screamed.

I tried to turn around and punch and kick at whatever was behind me, desperately trying to get away, but there was nothing there. I started running, cold sweat dripping down my forehead and my hair, now undone, sticking to my neck. I went past the lights and down the path, hoping to find the guard along the way.

I made it all the way to the security booth, but the guard’s golf cart was gone. The door was locked. I was planning on running all the way out into the parking lot, wondering how I would explain myself, when I saw the small headlights of the security guard approaching. I could hear him talking loudly on his phone. He was on with the local police.

It turns out that he went around the hill toward where I told him I was, but couldn’t find me. He got off his cart to ask the man by the tree if he had seen me, but the man didn’t respond. He got closer, repeating his question even louder, but the man wouldn’t budge.

In a last attempt, the guard tapped the man on the shoulder and the man toppled over. He was dead. He was dead the whole time.

—

I didn’t think much of the events of that night until I walked up to the tree with one of my coworkers a few days later. Maybe because I hadn’t gone there because I didn’t want to freak myself out. They couldn’t believe it, and we walked up to check out the scene as I told them my story of that night.

Then, something caught my eye. At the base of the tree was something familiar. It was a yellow plastic bracelet. It was mine. I was using it to hold up my hair that night.

One evening, while sitting in my car, I saw that many of friends were commenting on my Frank’s Facebook wall. Saying things like rest in peace, and words of goodbyes. My friend was dead.

I couldn’t get myself to comment on his wall, but I did message back and forth with his mom and his brother. My best friends have reached out to me to hang out and talk about the whole thing, but I’m not ready.

I was supposed to meet him that day. We were supposed to hang out, but I chose to stay in. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go out, I felt tired and got a headache trying to come up with an excuse not to go.

Now, looking at the last conversation I had with him, I just see his “whatever man, I’ll text you later”. That was his last message to me.

We were supposed to check out the new coffee shop by our high school. They were hosting an open mic night. It was supposed to be a good night, but instead he called up one of his other friends, and got in a car accident and died.

Two nights after he passed, the events started.

My phone would ring at 3am, a phone call from an abnormally long number. I picked up the first couple of times, but all I could hear was static. Once I stopped answering, I started getting random text messages from those similar numbers, but with jumbled up text characters. Like the kind you see on a corrupted computer file.

This went on for three weeks before things got scarier.

One night, I felt someone tug on my sleeve and heard my name being whispered while I was trying to sleep and my phone started ringing once again. It all happened so fast, that I thought I must have still been asleep.

Half awake, I answered it, and I heard my name being whispered. This must be some type of prank, I remember thinking. When I hung up, I kept my eyes open toward the ceiling, barely illuminated by the light coming from the window, when I heard the soft calling sound when you’re the one calling someone and are waiting for them to answer.

I was dialing some number by accident. When I checked who it was, it said I was calling Frank. Instinctively, I tapped on the button to see my call history. I was shocked to see that I had two phone calls with him in the past five minutes. One outgoing, which was my accidental dial, and one incoming, which I had apparently answered earlier. A 14 second phone call. The one where he whispered my name.

I opened up my Facebook Messenger app and tapped on his name. I stared at our last conversation on there. We were talking about some girl he was seeing. His last message on the app was him saying how I was right and that he wasn’t going to call her back. But then…

The three dots appeared. Frank Rosen is typing… then stopped. Then typing again.. I put my phone down and turned on my lights. I wanted him to send the message. Frank, I’m sorry buddy. I wanted him to know that I was going to miss him, even though we never told that to each other, ever.

He stopped typing.

“Frank, I’ll miss you man. Rest in peace.” I typed and hit send.

Since then, I haven’t been woken up by any more calls or messages.

I started writing down my dreams after looking up a dream that I had in a book that would tell you the meanings behind your dreams. I remember that met an old lady, who would come up to me, open up her coin purse, and give a dollar. Sometimes it would be in quarters, sometimes it would be a dollar bill, but I remembered counting it and it was always exactly one dollar.

It happened so often that I started looking up the meaning of the coins, the meaning of money, and the meaning of old people in my dreams. They mentioned positivity and wisdom, but it surely didn’t feel like that. The old lady had no eyes and no teeth, and her purple hand and black veins would be cold as ice when she would place the money in my hand and close it for me into a fist. That feeling still gives me the creeps.

When I told my friend about it, she said that I should start writing these down. To which I replied that it would be of no use since I would forget most of the dream right away. She convinced me to try it anyway, so I grabbed a cheap paper notebook and put it next to my bed. I fell asleep listening to my window fan.

I woke up suddenly, with the noise of cars and honking still in my head from the dreams slowly fading away when I wrote down the following entry:

My taxi driver dropped me off to pick up some flowers to take for his dead brother, I couldn’t say no to the pit stop even though I was in a hurry. He gave me a $20 dollar bill and asked me to pick them up from the flower shop. No parking. Old woman gave me the change. $1. I got to my apartment and he left for cemetery.

Who knew I could remember these things? It’s like a whole other world that makes no sense.

The second morning, I wrote a shorter entry:

I’m sitting waiting for my mom at the laundromat. Playing with a toy gun that shoots rubber bands. It broke and I was trying to fix it. Old lady comes by and says “well aren’t you a good boy?” and gives me a dollar, she closes my hand. Another woman comes in yelling frantically. Her baby has been taken from her car and she was panicking.

And so I kept writing every morning, sometimes in the dark, writing as fast as possible before forgetting what the dream was, and yes, the old lady would always be there.

After about a month, I noticed that the dreams had recurring characters. Sometimes the woman yelling for her baby would run into me as I was leaving for work, or the same taxi driver would pick me up from a meeting. Sometimes I would enter the same flower shop, but in a city I didn’t recognize.

Even in some of the weirder dreams, with impossible scenarios or with my parents driving me somewhere as a child, I would notice the same places. My entries became more detailed, sometimes two or three pages long. I got into the habit of recording them on my cell phone and then passing them onto paper right away.

I became obsessed. These dreams were trying to tell me something, of this place I didn’t know. My friend suggests that I stop writing. Whenever I see a yellow cab, I look for the driver’s face to see if I recognize him.

But I can’t stop writing.

The unknown city in my dreams is familiar now, and I know the names of the streets now. I see the same deliverymen, and the same old lady over and over again. I’m afraid that I’ve created a different world for myself when I sleep. Like I’m living in someone else’s life.

Where is this place and who are these people? What do they want?

I’m afraid that I’ve gotten into something not many people have experienced. I’m forced to turn off my cell phone and wifi at night while I sleep after the most bizarre incident happened about six months ago. You just… never know who is listening, or maybe you don’t want to know what you can’t hear.

There is an application for iPhone that can tell you about your sleep quality. I believe you can also integrate it with your Apple Watch, but I don’t have one, so I just use the phone app itself and rely on the information it gathers. Everything was fine and I was tracking my sleep patterns, until I noticed that the app itself was requesting access to my microphone.

I found it odd, but then the app explained that it doesn’t save recordings and it doesn’t send them anywhere, so I agreed and went to sleep.

In the morning, there was a new notification saying that I snored, and I was curious enough to check them. Sure enough, there I was, at 1:20am, some snoring. I never knew that I snored, but it was good to know.

There’s something eerie about listening to yourself sleep. I kept on with the app as usual. Normally you have to set it right before you go to sleep, and it wakes you up to an alarm at an optimal time, supposedly to prevent you from waking up feeling tired.

One morning, I woke up earlier than usual. Way earlier, actually. At 4:45am. I wasn’t feeling tired, so I went to the bathroom, then for a drink of water and got back to my room. It was still dark out. That’s when I noticed the app had several recordings caught overnight. More snoring.

Curious, I clicked on the first one, at 2:14am, and there I was… breathing loudly. But then, I gasped. In my sleep. I couldn’t believe it, so I replayed the 15 second recording only to hear another voice in there. The voice was a woman’s voice saying “all alone”. I replayed the audio more than 10 times before moving onto the second one.

“Not like that” “All alone”

It kept replaying, over and over. The next recording said the same thing, but the last of the recordings was what really got me. It was… singing.

It was a lullaby. I could hear it faintly, like the wind.

The Backstory For This Episode

Never record yourself while you sleep if you’re not ready to see yourself unconscious, or in a semi-conscious state. We behave differently under varying circumstances, and I guarantee you that you do not behave the way that you expect to. When I was a kid, I used to wake up to the sound of my own voice, mentioning names and warning others to watch out for the “woman with the hat”.

Though there are things that are called “sleep studies” that are meant to help you analyze various medical conditions and are completely normal, it is something very different when a professional is analyzing this versus you analyzing seven to nine hours of dark footage, with the known creep factor. Several documented stories have been told over the years, some passed down, and some shown with hard evidence (video footage). Just how creepy can this get? Let’s find out.

What Happens When You Record Yourself Sleeping

For some, nothing occurs. You twist and turn at night, you may snore for a little bit, and you may hum or sleep-talk. These things are somewhat normal, but during the research for the previous story, I found a few more disturbing cases.

Sleep walking is known to happen to around 3.1% of the population, according to a Sleep Foundation article, so it is something paranormal necessarily, but waking up and standing while fixated on the wall or a window for a period of time may actually be something else.

In this case, a woman in her twenties decided to put a camera, plugged in to her computer with external storage, and set on the night-vision setting (the green-ish footage you see for night recording on TV and Youtube), before going to sleep because she was finding things moved around when she would wake up in the morning. Things like her cell phone would be unplugged and on top of her television, her curtains were wide open, and other things like that.

What she discovered was that in the middle of the night, around 2 or 3am, she would move the blankets from on top of her, sit on the edge of her bed and stare at the wall, then go back to sleep. Then she would wake up again, walk over to the window, open up the curtains, and stare out the window while making some hand gestures that she has no explanation for.

She went to get help from a sleep doctor, but she was happy that it wasn’t anything ghost or haunt related.

Another case that I read about was the woman who would wake up with bruises and scratches. She set a camera at the end of her bed, and went to sleep. This case, however, had a much more sinister explanation, or lack thereof.

As it turns out, the camera caught, over the span of three nights, a scream right before shutting off inexplicably, right around the same time at 3am. There was no explanation of the scratches or bruises, but the scream was not Susan’s (the woman with the issue), but rather a much deeper voice. She still suffers from this and is seeking an explanation.

What is it about 3am?

3am is known as the time that pure evil makes itself known, according to paranormal experts. Some say that the time is mocking the death of Jesus, who died at 3pm in the afternoon.

Should you record yourself sleeping at 3am? You should not record yourself sleeping at 3am if you fear that something paranormal is happening. You may not like what you see.

Should You Record Yourself Sleeping?

There is nothing inherently wrong with recording yourself sleeping, and it might satisfy your curious mind. Keep in mind that your subconscious and unconscious minds may do things that you are not aware that you are capable of doing, such as sleep walking, sleep talking, sitting up on your bed without an explanation, or doing odd things like staring at your partner or at the wall.

There is something mysterious about the realm of sleep that attracts us. In this state, our conscious mind does not pass along judgement and we may discover things about ourselves that we do not normally allow our minds to even see.

But are you ready to see items move next to you, your blankets pulled from the edge of your bed, or a shadow figure sliding out from under your bed and standing next to you while you sleep?

Just kidding.

Or am I?

A few months ago, I helped my mom’s friend Martha move to a new house around exit 78. She said she was happy to finally be moving out of town and joining the life in rural America. Our town wasn’t too big to begin with, but whatever.

We made two trips back and forth, moving boxes and small furniture. When it started getting dark, she pointed out some lights that appeared to be yellow headlights off into the distance. She told me that the strange lights would sometimes blink, turning on and off, on and off, many times as she passed by. Then they would turn off and not light up again. They were not blinking when we passed by.

We unloaded my truck and put the boxes in her living room, but then we agreed to make our next trip the following day instead. It was getting late and she was tired. On my way back, looking off into the distance, I noticed the lights. On and off, on and off. They were the high beams blinking. That crazy lady was right, I thought. And kept driving.

I told her about it the next morning after we finally finished moving her in. She suggested we go check it out, saying that it was part of the fun of being out in the country. I was curious so we both hopped into my truck and headed down the road. The dirt trails were rough, but we could both see a large metal structure off into the distance, like where cattle is kept. There is no way this place was operational, but we kept driving.

As we got closer, we saw what seemed like a junk yard, with old cars and broken down fencing. See, this belonged to the McCabe people. They’re long gone now, Martha said. I remember the McCabes story on the news, they were involved in gangs and illegal activities a long time ago. Kind of famous in our small town. I still remember the story.

There was a piece on the news released in the 80s about a missing man by the name of James who was thought to have been murdered. He was a family man and it turns out that he was a close friend of my parents. They even wanted him to be my godfather back when I was born.

They looked for his body in the hills and in the forest, but after many years, the searches stopped and the family was forced to live with all of those questions. He used to unload trucks for grocery stores, and he was actually supposed to be working the day he was last seen.

He was instructed to empty out one of the older trucks, a trailer with empty boxes and old cement blocks. The owner had been trying to get rid of it for quite some time, and was happy to finally have a buyer. James had actually introduced them two, saying that they knew each other from some past businesses they had worked on together.

The trailer was driven off the lot, but on the way to the buyer’s yard about ten miles down the road, it shut down. Feeling tricked, the buyer, a close friend to the McCabe’s got two of his buddies to take him back to the seller’s business and demand his money back.

There was an altercation there and the buyer took out a gun and shot the seller along with James, dragging their bodies onto a car and throwing them off on the side of a road. The seller’s body was found a couple of days later, but the body James was never found. Or so the story used to go.

We were ready to leave the junkyard after making a couple of circles around the property when suddenly, clear as day, we heard some short, sporadic deep honking.

I was scared, since nobody should be there and there was zero chance that any of the cars there would be in working order, but the honking became longer and harder to ignore. We both looked at each other, waiting for the other to say something.

I was going to find out what that was. I got out of the truck, and Martha followed behind me. We went around the structure, coming closer to the honking, when we spotted a small truck with a trailer off a few yards away. Then the noise stopped.

We looked at each other again. Honestly, I was glad someone was there with me.

As I inched closer to the truck and into the driver side’s door, I heard the honking begin again and then fade and then stop. When I turned my back on the truck, it made clicking sounds. Some type of animal must be hiding under the hood.

Suddenly, I heard the back door of the truck swing open. It was Martha, being the crazy woman that she’s always been, poking her nose in everywhere.

After the second door swung open, she screamed. Inside the truck, by the door, was a dried up corpse. All curled up.

Reports later found that it was the body of James. A block had struck him in the head. He had regained consciousness after the matter but was unable to open the gate from the inside. All that was left of him after thirty years, was a shriveled up body… that, and the will to someday be found again.

I don’t really know how to use this, but somebody told me about you and I would like my story told. The neighborhood kids opened up a Twitter account for me, but I forget how to send a Twitter, and my photos won’t show up. They were nice enough to let me borrow a cell phone that can send them, with a color screen, and can take photos too. The whole thing is really quite impressive.

My normal phone has been ringing every single night at around 2am, for the past month. I always answer, since it would be rude not to –plus, it could be someone I know in an emergency.

The first couple of times, they didn’t say anything. Even though I said hello? over and over.

Around the fifth call, they finally said something: Deborah, my name. It was the voice of a woman.

Not long after that, she started saying full sentences to me, but would ignore all of my questions and hang up suddenly. I’ve come to expect these phone calls now, even though I’ve tried ignoring them after a call last week. It worked for a while but now, the phone keeps ringing until I answer it. I don’t have an answering machine anymore.

The things she has told me are things that nobody else would know about me. Nobody that’s still alive, that is.

I grew up in a small town a couple of states over, and back then I was a bit of a troublemaker. Mostly petty theft and some vandalism charges followed me around. There was one event, though, that made me change my life for good.

One of my best friends at the time had just gotten a car and we would drive off into the woods with some drinks and take along whoever wanted to come with us for the night almost every Friday night. A man we had met through my friend’s job was coming with us one a particular evening, and he invited one of his friends. His friend seemed like a nice gentleman, and frankly, I found him to my liking.

We went toward one of the viewpoints that was usually empty around this time one night, and parked the car. I was in the driver’s seat. As the night went by and our radio played loudly, we kept laughing and talking about work and somehow the topic of prison came up. I had only been in holding cells, but all of the others had crime stories. They were going around until they got to the coworker’s friend, who whispered something I couldn’t hear.

I asked what he had said, and I watched his lips as he said the word “murder”.

He said it with a menacing look in his eye, and I was scared. He started laughing, and we all started following along nervously. Then he took out a knife from his pocket and said to my friend “there’s nothing to be afraid of, love”.

He grabbed my friend by the arm and she screamed. Let her go! I yelled, and my friend’s coworker reached for the knife. My friend screamed in pain as he stabbed her over and over. I started the car and set it in drive when the man threw himself toward the driver’s seat. I didn’t know what to do, I opened the door and forced myself out only to watch the car slowly moving forward, until it rolled off the cliff and down into the rocky hills. The car sped up and I heard screams, but suddenly there was a loud crash and all of the screaming ceased. All I could see was smoke in the distance. All of them perished that night. A body had been thrown out the windshield and landed twenty feet away.

It has been a long time since then, so I’ve left out many details that I can’t remember. I never told anybody about these events, and the story of the killer in the car lived only in my hometown but soon became forgotten.

The phone calls said things about that night. Like the Lucas brand beer we used to drink. Or “turn up that thing, thing, thing”, a drunken phrase my best friend used to say. Sometimes I think it’s my friend who has been calling me from beyond the grave. All of the word choices seem to be hers.

But now I just don’t know. Last night the phone rang again. I said said “what?” and I heard the familiar voice as she took a deep breath. The woman’s voice grew deeper as she said hello. She said “There’s nothing to be afraid of, love.”

I had a winter job as a driver helper for UPS back when I was 19 to make some extra cash near the end of the year. It was an easy gig, though physically demanding. My job was to run packages to the houses, get people to sign or scan the boxes, and run back to the truck.

The managers were not cool. I’ve had a lot of random jobs here and there, but the managers were straight up rude there. One particular manager called me at 4:00am once to tell me that I needed to be at work in half an hour if I still wanted to stay in. It made no sense. Another manager yelled at me for something that someone else had messed up.

The sun used to set earlier in the day, I remember the creepy apartment complexes I had to deliver to. Sometimes, the UPS driver would stack up a cart and would have me walk around two complexes delivering packages while he did the following blocks. They were old apartments out at the end of a lonely street.

One Thursday evening, the truck driver I was working with and I met up with another driver behind a Wendy’s restaurant to split some packages. Basically, the other guy was new and delivering by himself. He needed help or he wouldn’t be able to get back home until 9pm. Apparently it’s something common that UPS drivers do to help each other out.

As they kept passing boxes onto our truck, I heard my driver say “Ah, come on man! Again?” I later found out that the truck loaders had been messing up and gave some of our packages to the other guy, so those boxes would be way off of the other driver’s route. No wonder the guy had such a hard time. He was supposed to sort his own packages too, so he was partly to blame.

After around 10 minutes, the truck was mostly empty but we had a pile of around 40 boxes left to deliver when I thought we were all done. My driver said we would follow the same plan, that he would drop me off at the group of apartments at the end of that one street, and he would zig zag through the other blocks to deliver the rest. He would then come back to pick me up.

Those old apartments had overgrown bushes and dead trees, the trash cans reeked of poop and urine, and the people who lived there would walk around in silence. I would normally just see them walk to the trashcans or to the laundry room. They would always avoid me or they would step out toward the trees to let me pass.

No hello, no good evenings.

The driver dropped the dolly and stacked up the boxes in order for me, gave me the scanner, and asked me to start at the far end. It had something to do with how he sorted it. He apologized, but was in a hurry, so I didn’t say anything. Normally you would distribute as you go deeper into the complexes, that way you return with an empty dolly instead of having to carry everything and empty it as you come back.

There were some random ice chests, with I’m assuming had medicine, some tubes, and oddly shaped boxes. With all the potholes in the parking lot, as I was approaching complex C, my dolly’s right wheel got stuck and the whole thing shifted and my boxes fell. All of them.

A man came out from around the corner of the building and asked if I was okay, and he picked up some of the packages. He was pale, bald, and skinny. Something was off about this guy. He was helping me stack them back up, but he was also looking through them. Sometimes even flipping the boxes over to find the label. I asked him if he was expecting a package and he grabbed one, said, “this is mine” and put it under his arm.

I had finished stacking my now unordered dolly, when he started walking away. I asked him to stop and to let me scan it. He said that I didn’t have to, that it was okay. I said no. But he hurried off and opened up his apartment door, number 3, and shut the door right in front of me while I just stood there, without knowing what to do. Was I supposed to leave my boxes unattended in the parking lot and go talk to the guy?

It was dark out, and only the orange street lights that still worked illuminated the empty parking lot. I figured I would come back to his apartment and ask to scan the box. I need to scan the boxes otherwise customers can claim that it never got delivered and they get their money back. And it would be my fault.

On my way to the end of the whole property, around building H, I called the driver but he didn’t answer his phone. I started scanning, knocking, and handing packages to the people in the apartments. Nobody seemed to have families, and apparently they didn’t like to keep their lights on. Every apartment was dimly lit.

I had two packages left, one for complex C and one for an apartment located at the front, by the gate.

I checked the package, Charles Smith, Apt 3. Either that crazy guy had another package, or he grabbed the wrong one. I went to the apartment and knocked on the door. I heard shuffling inside, and he opened the door quickly. He seemed stressed out and said, yes yes yes, this is it, this is it, yes yes yes. He had a sinister look in his eyes and the strangest smile you can imagine. He reached for the box, which I had already scanned, but I held onto it tightly. I told him that I needed to scan the label on the other box.

“For what?” He asked.

I didn’t want to explain myself, but I did anyway. He really didn’t want to bring out the box. I told him he was stealing and that I would have to report it. That seemed to scare him, but he became nervous and started stuttering even more. He said the address had been messed up, and lots more that I couldn’t really understand. My phone started ringing and I saw that it was the driver I was working with. I answered it there in front of the crazy guy, which he took as an opportunity to shut the door. I tried to explain to the driver what was happening and he told me to give him the building and apartment number.

“Building C.. number 3.”

He said he would be right over.

Still with that box in my hand, I went over to the front building and delivered the last package and waited for the driver. He showed up right away and we both walked over to the apartment. On the way, the driver took my scanner thing and pressed some buttons. He said that there was one last package to deliver. I had already scanned apartment 3’s package, the only one missing was the one that the crazy guy had. He had the package for his neighbor in apartment 4.

I warned the driver that the guy was creepy and had something weird going on inside of his apartment.

When I knocked again, he seemed to be right by the door because he opened it immediately and practically lunged himself toward the box. He wasn’t wearing a shirt now and he was sweaty. It was pretty nasty. I was able to hold onto the box while the driver tried to explain what was happening, basically telling him that he had the wrong box.

He went inside and left his door open. I took a look inside the apartment. There were red lights, like the kind you’d find in an old photo development lab. I kept hearing muffled voices. Suddenly, he came out with a jar, stuck his hands in, and sprayed us with the liquid. I felt it sting my eyes. He started chanting and laughing, turning around to say Jacqueline enough! Jacqueline be quiet! He kept chanting while we took steps back, blocking our faces with our arms.

Then he closed the door, and started laughing hysterically once he got inside. He got the box from me, which was fine since it was his. But he didn’t return the package he stole. The driver said we would just leave a note with his neighbor about the missing package, and that he would report the box as stolen or missing.

We hurried back to the truck, both of us wiping our eyes from what had just happened. The shift was over. The ride back to the parking lot was quiet, both of us were trying to process what had just happened. I signed my time sheet when he dropped me off, and I got into my car.

I went to grab a bite to eat and then straight back to my dorm. The building was mostly empty, except for other students taking winter classes. My roommate was out and with his family. I took out my Carl’s Jr burger, ate it, and sat in front of the TV. Before I knew it, I fell asleep but I was woken up by loud static noise from the TV, but my eyes wouldn’t open all the way. All I could see was the blue light from the screen through my eyelids, and I started to panic. I heard laughter and more static.

What was wrong? Why couldn’t I open my eyes? I wanted to scream but my mouth wouldn’t make a sound either. I felt my face stretch downward. It was the strangest feeling.

I decided it was best to stop fighting it and just try to relax and try to go back to sleep, that everything would be fine. I had countless nightmares in the span of 5 hours that seemed to last forever.

I woke up at 4:30am to a text message from the UPS driver. I was feeling tired, but somewhat normal again.

“Not feeling good. Take the day off. I’ll write down your hours.”

The next day, I got a call from a manager. They said I was being transferred to another UPS driver. I asked why, but he didn’t offer an explanation. Typical managers.

I texted my old UPS driver asking him what happened. He told me that part of his face had gotten paralyzed and that he went to the doctor to get it checked out. He would be back to work in a couple of weeks.

It didn’t click then, but later on I realized that my face had gotten paralyzed. That same night. What had that guy done to us?

I got reassigned and everything went back to normal. My new UPS driver had a different route, but one time, we got some packages by mistake. This guy was quick, so we had more than enough time to deliver to those addresses.

There they were. Packages to the same apartment complex. Charles Smith.. Complex C. Apartment 3. Jacqueline Stewart, Complex C… Apartment 4.

Arriving in a new town and not knowing anybody feels great at first, but then gets lonely. I had arrived in a city full of retirees in the coast of Florida and had nowhere to stay. I was in my early twenties at the time and was there for an internship.

I was staying at a Motel 6 next to a Waffle House while I looked for a place, and while searching craigslist, I found a condo by the beach, very close to where I was going to be working.

I didn’t know much about the place, but it looked nice in the photos and the owners rented it out to me AirBnB style, but before the app existed. I transferred the money via PayPal and I got a key code so that I could access the place. I never met the owners.

It was a nice, one-bedroom condo that was recently remodeled.

There were a few weird things about the place. For example, there would be a loud tapping at almost all hours of the day coming from the bathroom. In the bathroom, there was a large box, with a lock on it. I had 4 keys in my keychain, and tested every single one, but could never open it.

I figured it was just some owner’s storage area, and I shouldn’t be going through other people’s stuff, so I just let it be.

But that tapping sound bothered me, it sounded like roaches or rats in there. The tapping would stop when I got nearby, so I kind of knew that it was some type of live insect or animal crawling under the floors that would detect when I got close. I wasn’t sure if it came from inside the box.

The next door neighbor told me that that the house was owned by an older couple who had a daughter that suffered from drug addiction, but didn’t want to tell me more. I was surprised at the amount of details that the neighbor knew, but she refused to tell me the whole story. I think she wanted me to keep asking, but I let it go.

Nights were weird in the place. I would have nightmares almost once a week, and they were of vivid scenarios where I would step out into the beach, then begin gasping for air as everything turned dark. I would be drowning in my dreams.

I blamed the nightmares on my messed up sleep schedule, since I had to be ready to go to work at 4:45am. I had no car and I was forced to carpool with two other engineers from work at that time. But it wasn’t the sleep schedule. It was the apartment.

One afternoon, as I was sitting in the living room eating a sandwich, the house became silent. The tapping stopped finally. I was genuinely surprised. Then I thought I heard my toilet flush in the bathroom. Someone was in the house.

I went to the bathroom and opened the door, but there was nobody there.

Then I heard someone knock on the kitchen window, and I went straight to the kitchen without hesitation. It wasn’t the first time someone knocked on that window and it really got me angry. I always went to it to see who was there, but I never found anybody. It was a clear knocking, so no, it wasn’t some tree branch tapping against the window or some animal scratching at the door. It was knocking. Knuckle-against-the-glass knocking.

This time, I saw a young woman wearing dark jeans and a white shirt that was way too big for her, running away toward the washing machines that were in a little building outside.

I opened up the door, and ran toward her. I had so many questions. Why would she come by to bother me like that? Who was she? I got to the washing machines but she was no longer there. When I turned around, I saw her go running straight for my kitchen door, turn the doorknob and get inside. My lights were all on, so I saw her run straight toward the living room and into my bedroom from the outside. I ran right behind her, not knowing exactly what I was going to do once I got inside. I should have called the police.

I heard shuffling inside, and then sounds of beating on something, like with a hammer. As I stepped toward the bathroom, I saw her head bent toward the box as she was beating it with plunger, trying to break open the lock. She didn’t even seem to notice I was there. Growing concerned, I grabbed my cell phone from the kitchen table, went outside toward the front door, and called 911. The police officers showed up in what seemed like five minutes, and the girl, who now looked to be in her thirties, with an older-looking face, was now sitting next to the box with the plunger in her hand when we all walked in. I guess she looked younger from behind since she was abnormally small and thin.

She calmly told the police officers that she would get out of there, that this was her parent’s house. Wait. This was the daughter? They asked her to leave, and she kept saying that she needed to get into the box. The police asked me if I could open it and I gave them the keys the landlord gave me telling them that I didn’t have the key to that box.

They tried out all of the keys and none fit the lock. That’s when the woman started having some type of panic attack and started yelling at everybody, but she didn’t resist when they escorted her outside. All of the neighbors had come out to see the commotion, some I had never seen before.

Apparently she was on drugs that night. They asked me if I wanted to press charges and I said no, that she probably didn’t even know what she was doing and she didn’t really cause any damage.

I was sitting in the living room with the door still open, the cops had just left, and I was trying to piece things together, when I heard the neighbor say “knock knock” and I asked her to come in. We started talking and later she asked me what had happened, and if I was okay. I said I was just confused.

She looked down to the floor for a while and then looked me in the eyes. She said that she wanted to tell me the story of what happened, and for me to be respectful of the whole situation.

In May of that year, around two months before I got there, the owner’s daughter went out to the bar on the corner of the main street and my street to get high one night, and walked straight back to the condo I was renting. Exterior cameras caught her taking her baby daughter’s stroller toward the beach, which was one block away, but the cameras didn’t show the stroller, nor the baby, come back to the complex.

The next day, she reported a kidnapping, and the case went on file, missing child alerts were everywhere and she moved out to live with her boyfriend. Apparently someone had stolen the baby from her as they went for a walk. The neighbor started to cry, and I was sitting there trying to process the whole story. She wanted me to understand the woman’s pain of losing a child, and said she was glad that I didn’t press charges. That her drug addiction got the best of her.

I tried to keep up with the conversation, but my mind was elsewhere. I ate some of the cookies that she brought over, but couldn’t really taste them. It was almost 11pm and I would have to be up in around five hours, but I wasn’t tired.

Rebecca, the neighbor, left. I went to take a shower, lost in my own thoughts. I climbed into bed and stared at my ceiling fan. Then the tapping started again.

I dozed off a couple of times, woken up by the nightmares of not being able to breathe, feeling the cold dark water all around me. Gasping for air, I felt the saltwater sting inside my lungs. I coughed the water out, only for them to be filled up by more burning water. My legs went numb. Then my arms.

Another nightmare.

It was 3:30am. It always seemed to be 3:30am when I woke up. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. I fell asleep again.

The dark water. A baby crying. Splashing. Crying. A stroller sinking into the sand. I woke up shaking. It was 4:00am now. The tapping still coming from the box in the bathroom.

I stood up to turn on the light, but the tapping got louder and I went toward the half-opened bathroom door instead. It creaked as I opened it. The smell of death filled the room.

The moonlight from the window lit up most of the bathroom now, including the box. But the tapping wouldn’t stop, but now it became clear what the sound had been all along.

It was the lock.

My dog is normal. He does regular dog things like chase after cats and likes to play with stuffed animals. He does one thing that weirds me out, though.

Every single night, around 9pm, like clockwork, he gets up from doing whatever he’s doing even if he’s sleeping, and stands at the entrance to the hallway, sits down, and stares out toward the end of the hall.

I’ve recorded him several times and normally nothing else had happened besides the staring, but lately things have been getting out of hand.

He likes to do this thing where he flips onto his back and wiggles around barking while he’s playing with us, and he started doing something similar about a month ago where hallway starts, except with angry growling. Not his usual playful barking.

As soon as he sees me grab my keys to go to my car, he begins barking at me. I tried to leave him home last week while everyone else was out of the house, but the barking became too much and I figured something was wrong, so I let him out into the backyard where he finally quieted down. He was by the back door when I came back home.

I watched a video on YouTube once, where a dog refuses to go to his food bowl because he apparently sees something in the kitchen area that he’s afraid of. My dog doesn’t seem afraid now, though. He just sits there, staring down the hall.

It’s almost nine at night now, and I can hear him coming toward the hall. He’ll probably just sit there for about half an hour. I can’t wait for this to stop.

I am the only guard on duty at a hotel during the graveyard shift. Actually, I’m the only employee at night in the whole place.

This hotel used to be a bank back in the day, and it’s one of the oldest structures still standing in this town. This is great for tourists, but not so much for the piping and wiring systems. Aside from all that, there’s always been something weird about this place, though I’ve gotten used to it after ten years. Lately, though, things got out of hand.

Every once in a while, we get backpackers that are traveling long term. That means they smell bad, and they have a lot of friends that stop by, some with unusual beliefs in energies and other things like that. I’ve been known to shut down drum circles on the sidewalk at night, and I’ve gotten rid of a few dream catcher devices that they leave in their rooms.

A while ago, I saw a lonely traveling man light a bowl full of leaves on fire through the cameras. When I went up to the roof to tell him that he couldn’t be doing that, he apologized and left me alone in the roof. Crazy people.

He would always give off an odd stare, almost like he wasn’t completely there. Either that, or he was always high. He spoke to very few people. One evening, he went out to eat and never came back. He left his backpack and everything, which the police came by to pick up. There were no reports of any missing people in the area, nothing suspicious.

There was one occasion like that in the past, so it isn’t too big of a deal. What is weird though, is that strange things have been happening to me at night.

I’m not supposed to sleep in the office, but I sleep anyway. I wake up with every single sound, and we have motion sensors in the backyards and hallways. Nothing has ever happened during my watch.

Well, to other people.

I was woken up by someone tugging my arm one night. Then they tugged my leg. In the dark, I reached out to the lamp and realized that I was alone in the office. It must have been a dream.

The following evening, we had around 10 guests in the whole hotel and it was a quiet night, when I heard loud coughing next to my window, which faced an external hallway. I expected it to stop, but they didn’t so I grew concerned that someone was smoking in a no-smoking area by our propane tanks, so I stepped outside and found nobody there. The coughing had stopped.

I told my boss about the occurrences at night, and he agreed to double check the cameras. We couldn’t see much action until I caught a glimpse of what looked to be a dog walking through the exterior hall. He stopped suddenly, and stood up to lean against the office’s window. A dog? Dog’s aren’t allowed anywhere in the hotel.

I decided to get some of my paperwork done well into the night instead of sleeping, they were a bunch of guest sign up sheets that needed to be inputted on the computer.

It was around 3am, when I heard some shuffling outside, and this time I turned around quickly to see someone’s face through the window. They backed away, and ducked under the window trying to remain out of view. I turned on the exterior lights manually, since the sensors didn’t go off this time, and I heard footsteps running away from me through the hall and into the storage areas.

The person was obviously not really trying to hide. Why would they be peeking through the window? There’s really nothing interesting in there. At all.

I grabbed my flashlight and went straight to the back storage areas. As I was walking around, I saw a familiar scene. It was the crazy guy, sitting on the dirt with his legs crossed, a bowl in front of him. Full of leaves. Then he vanished.

I tried explaining this to my coworkers, and they say they believe me, but they also think that I’m making far too big of a deal about this. I know what I saw that night. I’ve sought advice from a priest, but he couldn’t help. Some of my friends have suggested to dig around in that area and maybe I’ll find something, but there’s no way I’d ever be able to explain my reasons to be doing so.

I think I’m going crazy too. The weird events at night have stopped, though. Maybe seeing what I saw was all that was required of me to make it stop.

People always refer to the staff that cleans the office spaces at night as “the night crew”, but I work by myself. I do three floors, 14 common areas, conference rooms, break rooms, and the bathrooms in the middle of the night. Normally I just listen to podcasts or music on my phone.

There’s one floor that I don’t like, and that I’ve never liked. I had actually switched buildings with one of my friends that I partner up with sometimes because I always got a weird feeling about this particular building… well, this particular floor.

The first event I remember was the microwave beeping in the break room, like when someone keeps pushing buttons. Whenever I hear a noise in an office building, I worry a little bit because nobody should be in there at that time. The warehouses are empty, and there’s no security guard inside of the building. They typically only do their rounds from the outside looking around for suspicious activity.

I went over to the microwave, and saw that it’s door was open. I closed it, and it popped open again right in front of me. I figured it was broken, but it did freak me out a little bit. I just left it like that, with the light on and everything.

The next thing I remember from that place was my vacuum cleaner refusing to turn on and having to switch outlets two separate times during my shift. It’s annoying having to manually sweep everything and not being able to vacuum up afterward. I don’t think anyone noticed that I hadn’t vacuumed two rooms that night.

The third thing was by far the creepiest thing I’ve ever witnessed. It was around 4am and the last thing I needed to do was to clean up the bathrooms, collect up all the trash, and take it to the dumpsters out in the back corner of the property.

As I opened up the bathroom doors, I heard a loud growl coming from the inside. It wasn’t even like an animal sound, nor was it human. It was some type of really low, slow, almost crackling growl. I ran back outside the bathroom, I had only taken two steps inside, and stood outside of the door leaning against the wall for so long that the motion detectors turned off the lights. I guess I was standing there, frozen, for longer than I had initially thought.

The growling started up again, with loud noises of doors slamming inside the bathroom. I ran down the hall and down to the first floor. I sat on the stairs like a wimp, not knowing what to do. I needed to get the bags out, at least. I could apologize for the bathroom mess later on, that really didn’t matter to me. But this was the second of the two buildings that I did by myself, and I needed the money.

I don’t know how, but I gathered up the courage to go back up to the second floor, and get into the bathroom. I sprayed the toilets with disinfectant, loosely swept up the floor, and wiped the mirrors. I went back to flush the first of the toilets, but as I did, the others flushed by themselves too. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I quickly walked outside, went downstairs, grabbed my trash bags, and booked it into my car.. trash bags and all. I would dump everything out at home.

This happened around four months ago. I hadn’t been in this building since then, and apparently I haven’t been the only one that has experienced weird things in here. I mostly hear about chairs being moved and doors slamming shut, but never the deep growling.

That’s the building that I have to clean tonight. I’ll be by myself again. Let’s hope nothing happens.

My house is in the middle of nowhere, as some would say. My family moved here less than a year ago and I still don’t have many friends in the area. Everyone in my high school knows each other and it has been especially hard being the new kid, but I’ve made a couple of friends recently that also like making YouTube videos, so we started to hang out together sometimes after school.

It’s weird having to take a school bus to school through long stretches of forest and hills. Our closest neighbor is about a quarter of a mile away. I’m always paranoid ever since I had an allergic reaction and had to be taken to emergency services, I wonder how long it would take the paramedics to get to me.

My room is on the east side of the house, and through my window I get a clear view to our shed and the patch of trees that start way off into the distance. It almost feels like a farm, but my mom is a writer and my dad also works on the computer all day, so we’re not even close to to being farmers.

I started using the backyard’s field to make videos for YouTube, and I recently got into the whole YouTube Live thing. It’s cool, and my internet is very fast, even when I’m far outside of the house, so I have no trouble streaming pretty much anywhere.

One Saturday afternoon, while I was out with my friend Evan near the shed trying to record a DIY video for one of his classes, something strange happened. I was live streaming and had about 10 people watching and asking questions, when someone asked who was living in the shed. I said nobody and I thought it would be cool to show everyone around inside, so I opened up the doors and turned on the light. There were several of my boxes in there, and some sawing equipment that the old owners left there, but that was it. Or so I thought at the time.

The shed is large and has two windows on it, facing the front. I guess it could easily be turned into a studio for video making. I put that on my list of things to work on. I had a lot of time on my hands ever since moving here. Way too much of it.

I realized that I had too much time on my hands later on that evening when I kept thinking about the “who lives in the shed” question. The guy knew that it was a shed. People don’t live in sheds. Why would he even ask?

It was around 1am now when I woke up again. I dreamed that I was being chased. I grabbed my phone and opened up Instagram when a notification popped up from YouTube.

“Yeah, I saw that too. IMHO this guy is crazy and it’s all fake.”

I opened it up and saw that I had a notification on the recorded live video where a guy timestamped minute 24:14, where apparently the window closes, or so he said. I clicked it and watched it. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

The window had been slightly open, about two inches or so, and the only reason I could tell was because someone shut it from the inside. You could see it clearly. What was even more weird was that a bearded face could be seen through the window and you could also see the hand that reached up to lock it.

The video goes on to where I open the door and turn on the light. I watched the 10 seconds of video over and over, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just some boxes, and sawing equipment. There was also some plywood leaning on the wall, but nothing weird.

I showed my dad the video the next day and he agreed that he could see it too. He was shocked. We both went over to the shed and opened up both front doors, they were barn style, so they opened wide.

As all the light flooded into the shed, we could see just boxes, a table, a drill, and plywood. I didn’t want to be in there. My dad stepped in and looked around. He saw a bucket behind the boxes. There were a couple of paper Burger King bags, a plastic cup, and a box of what looked like the ones they serve chicken nuggets in –all in a plastic, 5-gallon bucket. It also reeked of piss in that area.

Who knows how long someone had been staying in there, or how many times I might have casually missed him going in there as I looked out into the fields from my window. My dad called the police and opened up a report. He also installed sensor floodlights and cameras the following week.

So far, we haven’t caught anything.

Junk yards have a certain odd feeling to them. They’re like a graveyard of cars that have been in car crashes, repossessed, or plain abandoned by their owners.

It’s sad.

I was carrying the toolbox for my dad as we looked for the big SUVs to take a small assembly from the dashboard in a junk yard one afternoon. Along the way, I liked to peek into the car’s glove compartments and the sections where the cup holders are. I’ve gotten lucky and have found several quarters before.

After looking through a few cars, I found one that had a child’s seat in the back. In the seat, there was a rattle, plus some wrappers of what seemed to be some gum. I blinked for a second and heard a little girl giggling in the backseat, followed by some terrified screams. I pulled myself out of the car as fast as I could.

Oh, I probably should’ve mentioned that I see things sometimes. I have an overactive imagination and I’ve woken up in the middle of the night seeing large spiders coming down toward my face from the ceiling, weird creatures sitting on my chest, and I see shapes in mirrors when I pass by.

It’s just my imagination. That’s what everyone tells me.

I went on to the car next to that one, and I saw what I rarely see in junk yards. As I was coming closer to peek into the window, I noticed…

“Hey, I’ll be right over here, give me the toolbox.”

My dad called out, from about ten feet away.

“Okay,” I replied “I’m coming”

I went over and gave him the toolbox, still thinking about what I had seen in the car. It doesn’t happen often, but I still look for the moments when it comes up. Sometimes it’s in unexpected places, like on a sidewalk, or on the center dividers on the freeway, since it stands out splashed on the white paint.

It’s blood. Something happened in that car.

I opened the door, it was a minivan, so it had the sliding door that creaked all the way until it got stuck on the end hook. Yes, the passenger side windows all had a big streak of blood, and tiny cracks on the glass with what looked like human teeth.

I was staring at the glass when I heard a soft creaking sound. Then a gasp. I didn’t want to look toward the backseat of the car, but I couldn’t help it.

Slowly, I turned my head as I felt my face turn cold with fear. There was a woman there. Her face covered in blood.

Her mouth was missing some teeth. She looked like she was getting ready to speak as she stared blankly into my eyes. I couldn’t move. Her mouth grew wider.

And…

I have a tough time falling asleep in places that are not my bedroom. When I go on vacations, it takes me a few days to get used to the new places. Sleeping on buses or airplanes? Forget about it.

This time, I had spent the night in an uncomfortable hotel by the center of town when I went to visit my girlfriend’s family out of state. They’re all very nice people, and I feel bad whenever I have to be around a group after not getting much sleep because all I can think of doing is going to my bed and calling it quits.

I wanted to grab a coffee, but my girlfriend was being weird about me drinking too much of it, so skipped out on the iced coffee from McDonald’s. It was around 3pm anyway, so I probably made the right call. Otherwise I’d end up twisting and turning all night again.

We got to her grandparent’s house, and I was greeted with a plate of bread and, yes, coffee. I gladly said yes to the coffee, but after taking a sip, I realized it was sweetened. I take my coffee black because those sugar crashes are the worst.

To not be rude, I took a piece of bread also, and my girlfriend’s grandma was there to make sure that I ate it so that she could offer another one. I was able to keep the conversation for almost 15 minutes before my eyes began to shut and someone, I don’t remember who, asked me if I was tired. I said yes, and that I hadn’t gotten much sleep. They’re older people, so they’re used to taking naps, I guess.

They asked me to go up to the bed in the unit that they have in the backyard, to which I said yes, I literally had no more strength in me to get picky about where I slept. The guesthouse has two stories, and the room was on the second one. Every single step I took tired me out even more, but I finally made it and fell flat on the bed without even taking off my shoes.

I was woken up by high-pitched laughter. Like an excited little kid running around. I turned my head toward the door and looked at the light from the window across from me. It was almost sunset. But then I saw somebody. The silhouette was not of some little kid, but rather, a short older man, covered in mud.

He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything.

This was not normal. It couldn’t be real. What was more confusing, however, was that I didn’t feel fear, I wasn’t freaking out, though I did feel sick to my stomach. Almost like wanting to throw up.

The man disappeared sometime during the confusion when I scrambled for my cell phone. I’m not sure why I wanted it. I kept looking out for the man, starting to freak out finally.

While staring across from the bed, I fell asleep again. I had a weird dream that I was being chased through a patch of trees, and then something grabbed my arm. That’s when I woke up again.

My girlfriend had opened the door and was standing by the door frame, telling me that they were going to have dinner, and for me to come downstairs. I said okay, grabbed my cell phone, and rubbed my eyes. It was 7pm.

My face was a bit pale when I stepped into the dining room, and my girlfriend asked me off to the side what was wrong. I briefly told her I had seen something weird in the room upstairs. A man staring at me.

It soon became a topic of conversation around the table, the family telling me of their own weird experiences in that room, and how some of them refuse to use it.

What they didn’t know was that I went downstairs and to the bathroom first, to wash my hands and face. Apparently my hands were so dirty that I dirtied up the bar of soap. I was about to rinse it, when I noticed a dark patch on my left arm. I could almost peel it off, it was a crusty, weird looking blob stuck to my arm. It came right off, and then fell apart in the sink.

It had dried up. It was mud.

I’m a truck driver. Most of my trips take me all around California, but I mainly do loads and unloads between the north and south parts of the state. The desert at night is a peaceful setting, and I’ve gotten to know all of the exits along the 5 freeway.

It was a long night. I was going to be early to my destination and I would be forced to wait in line to unload. Whatever. It was better to wait outside of a warehouse instead of being parked along an old truck stop with dirty showers and clogged toilets. I think they were out of service this one night.

This particular truck stop has a history, you see. I had been told in the break rooms of different offices before, that this place, near Rosemary exit, is haunted. After so many hours on the road and lack of proper sleep, our imaginations tend to get the better of us.

Maybe knowing that made the whole thing a little more uneasy, but I really didn’t like the bathroom situation. At least that’s what I told myself.

If you’ve never been inside of a truck before, there’s usually two bunks, a small area where you can eat or read a book, regular outlets, and the driver and passenger seats. When you’re sleeping on one of the bunks, you have easy access to a window that you can open up to get some air. I was in the bottom bunk when it happened.

I was trying to fall asleep when I heard something hit the side of the truck. Like when someone’s trying to wake you up to get you to move so they have room to move their trucks around. It happens often.

I opened up the window and looked outside, but couldn’t see anybody. Then I heard the knocking again, this time on the other side of the truck. I moved up toward the seats to get a closer look at my mirrors, just in case I could catch a glimpse at something, but the sides of the truck were empty. Those mirrors give you a clear view all around except for the back part of the trailer, where the trailer doors are.

Then I heard a squeak. There two other trailers parked quite a distance away, and I was sure it was neither of them.

They’re trying to open up my trailer.

I grabbed my baseball bat and flashlight, opened the door to the passenger’s side, and aimed the flashlight at the bottom of the trailer to try to find a pair of legs or someone walking around, but there was nobody there. I stepped down and went around to the back. My door was properly shut.

Confused, I went back to the truck, locked both doors, and started up my engine. I wasn’t going to stay there any longer. I guess I would be three hours early to the warehouse.

I was coming down from one of the long curvy roads through the hills just before getting to the long stretch of desert when I saw something behind the truck. They were flashing red and blue lights. I was getting pulled over. I was going way under the speed limit, since my trailer was loaded and I hadn’t even stepped on the gas, since I was still moving with the momentum I gained from the hills. Maybe that was the problem.

Two police officers came toward the passenger door and asked me to open it. I did and then went back to turn off my engine. They asked me if everything was okay. I asked them what the problem was. They asked me if I was by myself in the truck, and I said yes. That’s when they looked at each other and one of them, the taller one, asked if I could let him take a look around and for me to step down. I said sure, having nothing to hide, I came down, and he went up the steps saying “Police. Hello?”

I told the other officer that I was by myself, but he kept staring at me. I was more confused than anything, since they weren’t being very clear with me. I asked the officer to tell me what they were doing, and that they couldn’t go around doing this kind of thing to people, especially if they’re just trying to work. It was freezing outside too.

Just as the other officer stepped down, the one I was talking to told me to give them a minute. The taller officer explained that the truck was empty, that he checked everything out. I was getting angry at the whole situation, I didn’t understand what was going on.

That’s when they told me their reason. I wish they hadn’t.

The police cruiser was parked on the side of the road when I passed by, slower than usual. As I was driving by, both officers were caught by surprise when they saw a woman waving frantically at them.

From the passenger seat of my truck.