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When I was 13, my mother and I stopped at her friend's house to pick up something. I sat in the living room while she talked to her friend in the kitchen. While sitting there on the couch, a lady walked into the room and sat in a chair across the room. She said hello and asked my name. I smiled and spoke back. She asked me how old I was and, well, we chatted for about 5 minutes. 

She told me that Marcy (the lady we were visiting) always lost her jewelry around the house when she was a little girl. Up until the age of 14. She said that she found all of it and put it in a box that was under the back right leg of the chair she was sitting in. She said I should tell Marcy where it was because she forgot to do it and it would make her happy. She then got up and walked towards the kitchen. She stopped and asked me if I wanted some cookies and I said yes. A few minutes later I heard her say, "Come and get your cookies, dear." I got up and went into the kitchen and saw my mother and Marcy there. I didn't see any cookies, but I saw a door that lead down stairs to the basement, so I looked down the stairs.  

My mother asked me what was wrong and I said I was looking for the cookies. Marcy then said, "Oh, I'll get you some cookies." I told her that the lady already got them and they gave me a weird look. I told them about the lady and my mother said I must have went to sleep and dreamed about it. They gave me my cookies and some milk and sent me away. 

Marcy walked through the room and took my empty glass and plate from me. I asked her if she knew where her lost jewelry was.  

She smiled and said, "What jewelry?"  

I told her what the lady told me and she looked scared. She got upset and told my mother, and my mother got upset with me. Marcy said that there was no one else in the house. They were standing over me telling me to stop making stuff up, so I got up and checked the floor board under the chair. I pulled out a box and opened it. I said, "See, this is what you lost." I handed Marcy the box. She was still crying when we left. 

Later she called my mother and asked that she never bring me to her house again. She also told my mother that there were another plate of cookies on the kitchen table and she knows that she gave me the only plate she put out.

Story source.

Image source. 

FATHER

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When I was about 4, I was sitting alone in the living room playing with marbles. One of them rolled under the couch, and I stuck my hand as far under as I could to find it. I couldn't find it, so I withdrew my hand... and a black, withered, feminine hand reached out from under the couch after me. I remember it clearly. I sat there, too young to really know how batshit insane this was, but I remember thinking to myself "this is not right." I sat there dumbfounded and watched it; it groped around, then withdrew. Then it emerged again, pushing some plastic wrappers at me, as if it was trying to give them to me. When I didn't take them, it withdrew again, taking the trash with it, and was gone.

I got up very calmly and walked to my mother in the kitchen, at the other side of the house, and told her, "Mommy, a hand just reached out from under the couch." She got an odd look on her face, of course, but I was a very quiet, obedient kid who did not tell stories. She told me that was impossible and walked back to the living room with me, and even reached her hands under the couch to show me there was nothing there. Later, my dad came home and lifted the couch, and all that was under there was my marbles, and some random trash.

For years, I discounted this as just a vivid dream I had had when I was a child; obviously I didn't believe it really happened. But years later, when I was like 18, I mentioned it to my mother in recollection. She surprised me by saying that, no, it actually happened; she remembered me coming to her that afternoon and telling her about the hand under the couch. She said it had disturbed her greatly, and was the reason they had thrown the couch out soon after, because she had bought the couch second hand, and the seller told her that an elderly black lady had died on it.

Story and image source unknown.

HELLO, MOLLY

Attention: 

Please read this sentence aloud: 

"Hello, Molly." 

If you read it aloud as I instructed, you should be safe. 

If you read it in your head… 

Molly is now safe, too. 

Inside your head.

HOLY SHIT!

SEVEN STEPS

There was an apartment that had one room where no one stayed for very long. Everyone left within one week of renting it. The room was on the first floor in the corner of the building and you could reach it by climbing a flight of stairs with seven steps. The landlord felt uncomfortable about the whole affair and it bothered him a lot, but one day he got a tenant who stayed well over a week. That made the landlord happy, but just to make sure everything was alright, he went to the room to check on the tenant. But no one responded to the landlord's knockings. The landlord felt something was amiss and he rang up the police. When the police arrived they broke into the room together. Inside, they found the tenant's dead body.  The cause of the death was unclear and to find out what had happened the police then went around asking for information. They managed to talk to some of the previous tenants of the room but none of them was willing to talk about the room. However in the end they managed to get one person talking. His story went like this: 

Every night a child's voice was heard. On the first night after the tenant moved in, the voice said: "Oooone step Iiii've cliiiimbed..."  

He wondered what it was but nothing else happened and so he just ignored it. But the next day he heard the same voice say: "Twooo steps Iiii've cliiiiimbed..."  

On the third day it said: "Threee steps Iiii've cliiiiiimbed..."  

And so it went on the same way, on the fourth, the fifth and the sixth day. The voice was clearly getting closer. There were only seven steps on the stairs. All previous tenants ran away fearing what might happen if it reached the seventh step.  

And it appears the only person who knows the answer to that is the dead tenant.

 

Image source.

CREEP

So a few years back I was visiting some friends in a nearby city. The night went well; it was good to catch up with them again, as I hadn't seen them for a while. As the hours wore by, we began to walk towards one of their houses.

Which would be when we heard a blood-curdling scream coming from a side-street. Now, normally in a strange city, I wouldn't investigate this - but we were in a vaguely suburban area, it was relatively well lit, and there were a few of us. So, the girls in the group stayed on the main road, and the guys went to take a closer look.

The screaming did not stop. It sounded like it was coming from a nearby house, and it sounded like the screams of a woman. Maybe a child, perhaps. The lights in this house were on, and as we approached it I vaguely considered calling the police.

But the scream was not coming from the house; it was coming from the garden in front of it. In the gloom I could not see anything distinct, but I could now tell that the scream was coming from the branches of a tree. Something inside that tree was rustling violently, although thanks to the darkness I could not tell what. I exchanged glances with my friends, we paused, and suddenly the shaking - and screaming - stopped.

Silence for a moment. My friends and I exhaled.

And then something moved through the trees, rapidly, and before we could react it was gone. Glances exchanged again, but we were quickly satisfied that whatever it was had left. We walked back to the girls, and continued the evening as planned.

The next morning, I walked back past that same street.

On the road, there was a fresh chalk outline of a body.

Creep source.

Image source.

BLACK-EYED KIDS

The parking garage in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, looked safe enough when David Jenkins pulled downtown on a winter’s day in 2008. Jenkins drove forty minutes from his home in nearby York, Pennsylvania, into this city of about 500,000 people to meet a friend he hadn’t seen in a year. He didn’t know evil would greet him when the sun went down.

Jenkins wound his way through the crowded garage and found a parking spot on the third floor. Then he walked to his friend’s apartment building. “We hung out and played PS2, bullshitted over old times, had a few beers,” Jenkins said. “I left at about 12:30 a.m. and went back to the garage for my car.”

Jenkins walked through the cold, now-deserted garage, climbed into his car and started the engine, letting it warm before he started home. As he leaned down to slip an “old school hip-hop” CD into the stereo, he discovered he wasn’t alone.

“A tapping on my window scared the shit out of me,” he said. Jenkins snapped his head toward the window and saw two people staring at him through the glass. “They seemingly came out of nowhere.”

Jenkins immediately turned up the volume. “I know this sounds stupid, but I thought maybe if these were thugs they’d think when they heard that music that I was hard, or something, and maybe be more apprehensive about mugging me, if that was the intent,” he said.

Instead of anyone threatening, he found two pale boys about twelve years old standing in the cold, staring at him through the glass. One boy was taller than the other, and both were skinny. They looked out of place. “The first thing that struck me as odd was their attire,” Jenkins said. “It was ‘80s clothing, only it looked brand new.”

One boy wore a new Montreal Expos baseball cap with a logo the team used between 1969 and 1991. The Expos haven’t existed since 2004. The Vision Street Wear skater hoodies they wore were popular in the 1980s. “What they were wearing just didn’t seem to fit with the time period,” Jenkins said.

The fear of the boys drawing a gun rushed through Jenkins mind. His door was unlocked. Hoping the boys didn’t notice, he rolled his window down a crack, and simply said, “yeah?”

The shorter boy Jenkins dubbed The Ringleader spoke first. “Excuse me,” he said in a voice much older and mature than what should have come out of that mouth. “We’ve had a slight mishap, and I was hoping you could help us out.”

The request froze Jenkins in his seat. “Those were the exact words too,” he said. “‘Slight mishap.’” Jenkins knew a twelve-year-old boy in a parking garage in Pennsylvania after midnight would have never said that. “I was nervous as hell,” he said.

The boy said their ride left them and they were now stuck in that part of town, and needed a lift home. “It seemed an innocent enough request,” Jenkins said. “But my BS alarm was going off. Something just felt really eerie about the whole thing. I mean two kids that young in a parking garage at that hour? It just wasn’t right.”

The fact the boys were in the garage also frightened Jenkins. He hadn’t seen the boys when he walked to his car, and when he got in suddenly they were there. The Ringleader’s request also made him nervous. “It just seemed shady,” Jenkins said. “I asked where exactly they lived, and that I was heading back to York. That ‘other end’ of Lancaster was in the opposite direction.”

Jenkins told the boys no. The Ringleader didn’t like that. “He said he’d give me gas money, and pulled out his wallet and took out a crisp $20 bill and held it up,” Jenkins said. “It was an old style one. An old style $20 should not be that crisp, looking fresh from the bank.”

As the strangeness of the encounter grew more in Jenkins’ mind, he started to ask questions. “Everything about this just felt very wrong,” he said. “I asked where exactly they lived.”

The Ringleader again said, “on the other side of town.”

“I asked where, specifically, on the other side of town,” Jenkins said. “I wanted the name of the township, the name of the school district, the name of the street. An exact address.”

The Ringleader balked; the other boy began to look nervous. “They couldn’t give me an answer,” Jenkins said. “This really creeped me out because it was now apparent that they really had no intention of getting a ride anywhere. They just wanted to get into my car.”

Then Jenkins saw something that kept him awake for the next two days. “I noticed something else – completely jet black eyes,” he said. The sight terrified him. Jenkins looked away from the children, trying to keep them from seeing the fear on his face.

The second child spoke to him. “Please,” he said. “Can we please get in the car? It’s really cold out here. I’ll tell you where to go once we get in.”

Panic consumed Jenkins.

“Please,” the smaller boy demanded.

“At this point it was fight or flight,” Jenkins said. “And I certainly wasn’t getting out of the car.”

He put the car in gear and told the kids “no” through the crack in the window. “Please, don’t go,” the Ringleader said, desperation creeping into his voice. “We’ll be stuck out here.”

“Sorry,” Jenkins said and started to pull away from these black-eyed children.

The tenor of the Ringleader’s voice changed. “Now, perhaps realizing their fate was sealed, they no longer held back,” Jenkins said. “The talkative shorter one’s voice changed now. No longer like that of a desperate little boy, it had a nasty snarl to it.”

The Ringleader started cursing at Jenkins as the car pulled away from them. Before Jenkins drove onto the ramp down to the lower level, he chanced a look in the rearview mirror. Terror stabbed at him anew, but it had nothing to do with the strange eyes of the boys. His fear came from something more human. “There was no trace of them,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘oh wow, they vanished,’ I was thinking, ‘shit, they’re gonna try to head me off at the next level down.’”

Worried the boys might run in front of his car at every turn, he hurried to the ground floor and shot onto the street. The black-eyed boys weren’t there. Three blocks away, his heart pounding in his chest, he stopped for a red light. “I kept looking back, scanning for them,” Jenkins said, but the strange boys weren’t behind him.

He sat in his car, still shivering from fear; the light stayed red. “It seemed like it was taking an unnaturally long time to change,” he said. “In fact I think now that those intersections are even supposed to be flashing red and yellow lights at that time of night.”

The minutes crawled by, and the light refused to change. Then he saw the black-eyed boys standing on a street corner he’d looked at not ten seconds before. “Sure enough, there they are,” Jenkins said. “I’d been looking around everywhere the entire time and didn’t see them coming. There’s just no way they could’ve gotten right on top of me without me seeing them coming.”

The Ringleader made eye contact with Jenkins and snarled. The second boy looked apprehensive “Even apologetic,” Jenkins said. “Like a good cop/bad cop routine or something.”

The boys started walking toward Jenkins’ car, and the panic again rose in his chest. The light still shown red. “There was nothing coming the other way and I just gunned it through the red light. I was hoping to God there’d be a cop.”

He didn’t encounter one police car on his fear-fueled drive home, running every red stoplight on his way. Once he reached the highway, he began to relax, but nothing went back to normal. “I didn’t sleep for like 48 hours after that, and didn’t sleep without a night light on for quite some time after,” Jenkins said. “When I finally did sleep they were in my dreams. I kept thinking that maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me that night, but after seeing other accounts, there are just too many similarities to write off. These things are very real.”

Source: Jason Offutt.

CREEP

A group of us are sitting in my friend's living room playing Xbox (Halo, nothing scary) and everyone's having a old good time. There's a couple of lamps on, but for the most part the room is dark, save for the screen glare. He lives alone, too, so there's no one about in the house, but he likes to keep the door closed to stop people's cigarettes from stinking out the rest of the place.

All of a sudden the door bursts open. There's no wind, but you could feel a sudden burst of atmosphere. One of the guys starts screaming and falls off the sofa. He then scrambles to his feet and presses himself up against the wall furthest away from the door uttering, "no... no..."

He was shaking quite badly and there were tears running down his face. We were mostly still laughing, thinking he was reacting to the game, but it became quickly apparent something was seriously up - it took about 20 minutes to calm him down after that. When we got him talkative, he says that a headless, limbless female torso was at the door when it opened and in his words, "came towards me. It wanted to kill me."

Creep.

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I've always been big on paranormal stuff. As a matter of fact, I've always been fascinated with anything that's unexplainable. So much that I used to go out looking for the stuff. So all of this time trying to find ghosts and I have failed miserably. That is until my older brother moved into an old, old house with about 4 of his buddies. 

When his friend first bought the house, all of the second floor windows were painted black. Yes, the actual glass was painted black. Well, apparently, a child was murdered there. He was hung in a closet on the second floor. The body of the child was wrapped in plastic (probably because of the smell) while still hanging in the closet. He wasn't found until after the family moved out of the house 4-6 months later, because he was actually hanging between two floors in the house. 

It was a big house with 3 floors, 3 bathrooms, and if I remember correctly, there were 7 bedrooms. When the house was purchased, there were problems with the roof, so they covered it with a tarp until they could get it fixed the year after. 

Since there was a tarp on the roof of the house, on windy nights you could always hear it blowing around. It had a distinct sound - plastic slapping around all over the place... 

Whenever I went to stay there and party with them I would end up sleeping in the living room because the couch had a fold out bed. So, one night, me and a buddy are staying there on the fold out bed. I'm having trouble sleeping because the wind is blowing hard and that damn tarp is making a shitload of noise. Even though it's 3 stories above me I can still hear it. So I pull the blankets off of my head and notice that the hallway light and back porch light are on. First I turn off the hallway light, then I head towards the kitchen since the back porch connects to it... 

So, as I turn into the kitchen on my way to the back porch, all I see is black and all I hear is the tarp slapping against everything. Not just the roof, but everywhere. It's so loud that it's damn near impossible that it could make such loud noise (especially without waking up the 8 other people in the house at the time). I couldn't hear anything else. It was actually ringing in my ears. 

So I started walking through the kitchen, then BAM! I bumped into something in the middle of the kitchen and as soon as I look up, I see something that's plastic. At this point I'm completely calm thinking that they must have purchased some kind of new appliance that has not been hooked up yet, even though I would have obviously noticed it during the party when everyone was awake. 

So, I touch it for a few seconds to get a feel of what I just ran into... As I look up, I notice that it's not an appliance at all. It's a human being. It's a person. He or she is wrapped in plastic in the middle of the kitchen.

 Image source.

Creep source.

CREEP

There have been sightings of the black car near a small town an hour drive to Ottawa, Ontario. We found out out the hard way.

The place is very eerie and quiet. Myself and 2 other friends were driving to Ottawa late night when we decided to stop by for some food and use the restrooms at a nearby small town. To reach the town, you had to drive through a section that had nothing but corn fields left and right.

While we were driving, headlights shone behind us. It was pretty bright. We decided to slow down and let it pass. My friend and I both looked out to see the car (1930s classic Ford). Inside were an elderly couple. As the car passed by us, behind the moonlight, the man looked directly at us: he had no jaw, just the upper jaw and the eyes did not twinkle in the moonlight, as if they were dead eyes, or a matte black. We slowed the fuck down to a crawl, freaked out by what we saw. The driver, being the ass that he is, decided it was a good idea to chase the car down.

He gunned it. We were doing 120kph on this narrow and bumpy road. The next exit was a turnpike a few KM away. There is absolutely NO WAY that car had the speed to match us. There were no houses, no exits, just corn fields. Where it went, we had no idea.

Creep.

Image.

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My story happened almost a year ago. We had recently finished building our new conservatory onto the back of the house. You're able to look straight into it from both the dining room and kitchen, except at night when the curtains in the dining room are pulled over, leaving only the kitchen.

So...I'm an incredibly bad sleeper, which usually means that I stay up at night on the computer long after everyone else has went to bed. Well anyway, it's about 5:20 in the morning and I decided to switch the computer off and hit the hay. Before I did that, however, I decided to get a glass of water from the kitchen. The house was pitch black by this stage.

As I filled my water I turned my head and looked in the conservatory, at which point I noticed there was someone sitting in there. It would have been impossible for someone to get in; I locked the exit and entrance earlier that night. It couldn't have been my reflection in the glass; this guy looked nothing like me. He had short and tidy hair, thick rimmed glasses, buttoned up shirt and was glowing white. The worst thing of all was how he was positioned. He was sitting down on one of the new chairs, back straight, hands on his legs, all the while staring at the locked door, almost as if he was waiting for me to let him in the house.

I sat the water down and ran for my room at the top of the house. I decided I was going to stay up for awhile with the light on and just turn it off when it got bright outside. So, I'm lying in bed when suddenly the light switches itself off.

Story source.

Image source.

SEA OF TREES

Called "the perfect place to die," the Aokigahara forest has the unfortunate distinction as the world's second most popular place to take one's life.

Japanese spiritualists believe that the suicides committed in the forest have permeated Aokigahara's trees, generating paranormal activity and preventing many who enter from escaping the forest's depths. Complicating matters further is the common experience of compasses being rendered useless by the rich deposits of magnetic iron in the area's volcanic soil.

Due to the vastness of the forest, desperate visitors are unlikely to encounter anyone once inside the so-called "Sea of Trees," so the police have mounted signs reading "Your life is a precious gift from your parents," and "Please consult the police before you decide to die!" on trees throughout.

Locals say they can easily spot the three types of visitors to the forest: trekkers interested in scenic vistas of Mount Fuji, the curious hoping for a glimpse of the macabre, and those souls who don’t plan on returning.

The forest workers have it even worse than the police. The workers must carry the bodies down from the forest to the local station, where the bodies are put in a special room used specifically to house suicide corpses. The forest workers then play jan-ken-pon — which English-speakers call rock, paper, scissors — to see who has to sleep in the room with the corpse.

It is believed that if the corpse is left alone, it is very bad luck for the yurei (ghost) of the suicide victims. Their spirits are said to scream through the night, and their bodies will move on their own.

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A SECOND EMILIE

The French teacher said that she was born in Dijon 32 years before she took up her post at Neuwelcke. She was fair skinned, with chestnut hair and blue eyes, and was fairly tall and slim. The pupils described her as having a sweet and lovable nature. The superintendents at her school were entirely satisfied with her work and were impressed by her gaiety, intelligence, and education.

Everything promised well for Emilie Sagee’s career at Neuwelcke - but within a few weeks of her arrival she became the focus of rumour and gossip at the school. It seemed that Emilie could be - literally - in two places at once. If she was reported to be in a particular part of the school, someone would contradict, saying, ‘Oh no, she can’t be there; I just passed her on the stairs' or in some distant corridor. Individual pupils repeated this sort of confusion time and time again, but the teachers dismissed the girls’ stories as silly mistakes.

But naturally the most excitement was caused by the rumours that followed the first appearance of the ‘double’ to a number of witnesses. Emilie Sagee was giving a lesson to Julie von Guldenstubbe and 12 other girls. The subject of the lesson varied slightly with each storyteller: for example, one suggested Emilie was energetically demonstrating a mathematical theorem on the blackboard; Julie said the lesson was French grammar. What was agreed on was that Emilie Sagee was standing with her back to the class. Suddenly, a second ‘Emilie’ materialized at Emilie Sagee’s side. The two were exactly alike and went through the same movements, synchronizing perfectly. The only difference was that the real Emilie had chalk in her hand but the fetch had none; it merely mimed the teachers actions as she wrote on the board. This story caused a great sensation at Neuwelcke, particularly as all 13 pupils in the class agreed precisely in their description of what they had seen.

In the following weeks the fetch was seen on a number of occasions. For instance it appeared at dinner, standing behind Emilie Sagee and imitating her movements as she ate. But, as in the classroom, the double’s hands were empty. On these occasions the schoolgirls were not alone in seeing Emilie’s fetch; the servants also reportedly saw the fetch behind the chair.

One of Julie’s school friends was badly frightened by the fetch. Fraulein Antonie von Wrangel was in a group invited to a local rural festivity and she was getting ready in her room. Emilie was helping her to fasten her dress. There was a mirror behind them and Antonie turned to catch a sight of two identical mademoiselles, each doing up her dress. Startled, she fainted clean away.

However, the fetch did not always mirror Emilie Sagee’s actions. Sometimes, Baroness Julie reported, it would behave quite independently. For example, the real Emilie Sagee would rise from her chair - but the double would remain seated. Antonie von Wrangel and a group of friends looked after Emilie when she was feverish with a cold. The girls took turns to read to her as she lay recovering in bed. Antonie was alone with her when she noticed the colour drain away from Emilie Sagee’s face. She was so pale she seemed about to faint, and Antonie asked if she was feeling worse.

Emilie replied with a weak and trembling voice that she was not, but her frightened look alarmed Antonie. A few moments later Antonie looked up to see the fetch walking about the room in excellent health. This time Antonie did not tell Emilie what she had seen, and when she came downstairs she immediately told the others what she had seen. On that time there was only one witness, but on the next occasion the incident was witnessed by the whole school.

This time all 42 pupils were gathered in the school hall to do their sewing and embroidery. Four french windows opened onto a corridor leading to the large garden in front of the house. The weather was fine and the girls had a clear view of the garden, where Emilie Sagee could be seen picking flowers.

The girls sat round a long table and the teacher sat at one end, supervising their work. After a little while she got up to leave them alone for some reason. Her chair did not remain empty for long however, as suddenly Emilie Sagee appeared in it. The girls turned their eyes to the garden and sure enough, there was Emilie. Although still gathering flowers, her movements were slow and languid as though - as the girls later remarked - she had suddenly been overcome with fatigue and tiredness. All the while her fetch sat silent and motionless. Although afraid, the girls were getting used to the strange phenomena and two of the boldest among them decided to take a closer look at the fetch. They approached the chair, determined to touch the apparition. Stretching out their hands they encountered a slight resistance in the air surrounding it, such as a film of muslin or crepe-de-chine might offer. One brave girl tried to pass between the chair and the table - and stepped right through the figure in the chair. Emilie’s double did not react, however, remaining seated until, a short time later, it slowly disappeared. As before the girls turned to the garden to watch Emilie Sagee again gathering flowers with her usual animation.

All 42 girls agreed on what they had witnessed and some questioned their teacher soon after. They asked how she had felt in the garden and if she had experienced anything special. Emilie answered that she had noticed the other teacher leaving the girls unattended. Emilie had had a clear view of the empty chair and recalled wishing the teacher had not left her pupils alone to waste their time and probably get up to mischief. She had wished, she added, that she could have been sitting there to keep an eye on the girls so they would get on with their work.

LITTLE GREEN MEN

On May 24th, 1964, Jim Templeton, a fireman from Carlisle in North England, snapped some pictures of his young daughter out to the marches overlooking the Solway Firth. Although it was an uneventful outing, Templeton and his family noticed an odd "aura" to the area there - as if there was an electric charge in the air before a storm. No storm came, but Templeton did observe that some nearby cows seems overly upset and spooked. A few days later, after the film was developed, Templeton was shocked to discover that a strange man appeared in one of the photos of his daughter even though they had been alone on the marshes. The man appeared to be wearing a space suit like an astronaut! Kodak offered a reward for anyone able to give a rational explanation for the space man picture, but no one was able to. Experts concluded that the picture was not the result of a double exposure, nor was it the result of tampering with the negative.

The mystery didn't end there. Templeton reported that shortly after the picture became public, he was harassed by men in dark suits who asked him odd questions about the weather conditions on the marsh, bird behaviors, and what Templeton was doing out there on the first place. They then tried to make him admit that he had faked the picture and, when Templeton refused to, they became angry and left.

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Three years ago I went to a national chess tourney with some friends. We stopped off at a restaurant, and there was this older man there who claimed he was traveling cross-country, meeting famous people and the like. So the friends I'm traveling with - their Dad tells me to go interview him for the trip. I had brought along a video camera, you see, to document the trip and the tourney. So I went over to him and sat down and offered him an interview about his travels. He seemed jovial at first, but when I brought up cameras he became alarmed as hell, and very unsettled. I had to promise him not to record him in any way. I was a bit put off, but I agreed. So I decided to try my best to remember the conversation after we had it and I would jot it down later.

So for the first half of the conversation everything went pretty all right. He told me stories of his travels on the road, close calls in towns, people trying to mug him, close calls hitchhiking with people who turn out not so normal (ironic really), and places he'd been. He also liked talking up religion a lot. So then he starts talking about one time he camped outside of a town in Minnesota. He tells me how he stops at this diner, and this girl there starts hitting on him. The story got really weird, and long story short, it turned into him trying to run away from this girl after she found him at his campsite and tried to rape him. But I chocked it up as a tale he told to spice up the conversation because he enjoyed my company, and I let it go. 

But then he hit me with a zinger. He told me that he predicted what the girl was going to do. He told me he could predict things because he had power. He started talking about the Bible, God, and the second coming a lot. Then he got in my face and said he thought he could trust me. So he asked me if I wanted to know who he really was. I started getting really unsure about this whole thing, but I said sure. 

He took his hands and placed them on the table, laying them flat. On his palms were holes going straight through, from one side to the other. His feet had them too. He said he was marked as the Second Coming, and he was traveling the country bringing the truth and healing and helping others, and operating a website out of his van. He said he had not yet risen to power, but he would, and when he had met his quota, he would bring Heaven back to Earth. 

All I could think was "Holy shit, holy shit, this guy stabbed nails through his hands and feet. Please don't kill me, Mister. I've got so much to give." A friend of mine came over to tell me we were leaving at that point, and he also saw the "stigmata" on the guys hands. He just stared at it, like "Holy shit, does this guy think he's really Jesus Christ"? The guy told me his website. I looked it up later. It doesn't exist. I swear there was a van outside with a satellite dish though. I almost said there wasn't but then I remembered there was. He told us to be careful on our trip as bad storms would be coming and they would rain on the good and the wicked alike. Sure enough, on our way back days later, we ran through some pretty heavy, tornadic thunderstorms.

I'll never forget that shit as long as I live. I sat right across from a man who stabbed himself in the hands and feet with nails.

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DAY EIGHT: TRICK-R-TREAT

"Samhain, also known as All Hallows' Eve, also known as Halloween. Pre-dating Christianity, the Celtic holiday was celebrated on the one night between autumn and winter when the barrier between the living and the dead was thinnest, and often involved rituals that included human sacrifice."

LEVITY

Word on the street is Soylent Green is made of people.

(Probably more of that left-wing propaganda.)

CREEP

I was young, perhaps six, but definitely less than ten. Even at the age of six, I slept in a crib because my family was poor and my father was slowly building me a shoddy bed frame at the time. I remember trying to sleep and my hand was poking out of the bars of the crib. And I was half asleep - in that weird state where you're aware that you've dozed off. Then I felt and heard what could have been the most terrifying thing imaginable. I felt something grabbing my index finger on the hand poking out of the bars. And I heard a conversation between whatever it was that was holding my finger and its friend. They said something to the effect of, "See, how nice it looks and feels? It's growing." And I heard cackling. And while this was happening I made certain to keep my eyes shut and I held my breath. Then I felt my finger released from the grip of whatever it was.

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