Episode 135: Nightmare Possession

[00:00:00] Odd Trails is a true paranormal podcast. If you have a story to share, send it to stories at oddtrails.com. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:58] Terrifying Experience in Muskoga, Ontario by QuietPop7233 I'm one of those people who tear up a bit when talking about something truly terrifying. I'm tearing up while I'm remembering this experience right now.

[00:01:16] I had a close and dear friend years ago. We went to high school together and instantly became close as we enjoyed the same everything, movies, games, activities, and so on. This friend had a beautiful cottage in Muskoga, which was about an hour from the area we lived

[00:01:35] in. They would talk about it a bunch, saying how awesome it was to go there for the summer, as it was right on the river and perfect for swimming and paddleboarding. They also said it was kind of haunted, just passing comments about how it was spooky,

[00:01:53] how they'd hear things at night, and how it was probably home to a ghost. They always said this jokingly like it was no big deal, so we would usually laugh at the idea that their beautiful, newly built cottage was actually a ghost house.

[00:02:10] Fast forward a couple of years, and they invited me to their cottage in October. The family was going up there, and my friend asked if I could go with them.

[00:02:19] I was very excited to go because I had never been to Muskoga, and I knew how beautiful it could be, especially in the fall, and also how often my friend mentioned the fun that they would have

[00:02:30] at the cottage. I want to preface what comes next with the fact that I have never had any paranormal things happen to me, ever. I don't disbelieve in the paranormal and never have,

[00:02:45] but I've never been in a position where I'd feel like, okay, this is paranormal. At least not until this event. We get to where the cottage is located in this small community. As soon as we

[00:02:58] entered, I got this weird feeling like this shadow had been cast over us. It was a beautiful sunny day with good vibes up until we crossed that bridge that led to the community. The weather

[00:03:12] turned overcast, but it wasn't that. There was just a heavy and weird energy. We were driving along the riverside for some time. I told my friend about the energy feeling to which they

[00:03:25] replied, oh, I know it's weird, right? Like heavy. Things lightened up however when we arrived at the cottage. This place was absolutely beautiful. It was built brand new with three floors, a big deck

[00:03:41] on the second floor and tons of windows that went from floor to ceiling. It overlooked the river and it had a forest trail at the back. The trail was too thick with brush and wood to even try

[00:03:53] navigating, so we spent a lot of our time out by the water and on the big deck just chilling. We would sometimes drive to the nearest town for some outings and at night we dedicated our time

[00:04:05] to beating the call of duty world at war campaign split screen. It was absolutely a blast. We then went for a long walk during the day and saw some interesting points. A big dam and beyond that,

[00:04:19] a strange and small graveyard that was situated on a slight hill at the very tip of the community. All of the graves were old and some of them were unmarked. Others, you couldn't even make out what

[00:04:34] the stones had written on them. It was eerie, but nothing out of the ordinary happened for the first two nights that we spent there. On the third and last night, the dad had to head home early for

[00:04:48] some work stuff, so it was just my friend, their mom and myself hanging out for the night. The mom was sleeping in the loft way up on the third floor and we made the basement floor our home for the

[00:04:59] weekend. We decided to watch a movie and eat snacks, but when that was finished, I suggested that we go out for a night walk since it was a clear night with a big moon out and I love going

[00:05:12] for night strolls. Plus, we hadn't really been out and about after dark. The place was beautiful at night. My friend was against it. They said that the place was spooky enough during the day, let

[00:05:24] alone at night. I managed to convince them and out we went. We were walking on a road that went along the river towards the dam and the end of the community where the graveyard was. We made it

[00:05:39] about a quarter of the way there when my friends stopped dead in their tracks. I looked back to see what was up and they were just standing there. They looked defensive. I asked what was up and

[00:05:51] they said, we need to go back like now. This feels weird. I don't like it at all. I asked why they were scared. Like did they hear an animal or something? As soon as I asked that, we heard a deep

[00:06:08] and loud cracking or snapping of wood in the dense forest above us. It was on a rocky ridge that was beside the road opposite side of the river. I looked up to where we heard it and it felt like

[00:06:23] everything hushed, crickets and all the other nighttime sounds seemed to have stopped. My friend quietly said my name. I looked back at them and suddenly the bushes and the shrubs underneath the

[00:06:35] ridge on the side of the road exploded as if some huge thing jumped in them and thrashed around. This made us bolt. I remember just saying run as I followed behind my friend. We ran non-stop

[00:06:51] straight to the basement door of the cottage. We were in there in minutes but it felt like seconds. We ran straight to the basement bedroom and hopped in bed. I remember saying it was likely a coyote or

[00:07:04] a raccoon or something like that but as soon as I said those words, a creaking sound came from above us in the living area of the first floor. The creaking soon turned into slow heavy footsteps

[00:07:17] back and forth, loud as if somebody were wearing boots or something. I remember my friend through tears saying, does that sound like a coyote to you? I can't even describe the absolute feeling

[00:07:33] of dread that washed over me. There was something up there. It was taunting us. We lay there in complete silence for what felt like hours. We were in bed at around 3am after our walk

[00:07:47] which turned into a run but the footsteps didn't stop for another hour or so. I remember finally falling asleep at 6am. When I woke up, the first thing I did was ask the mom if she had been awake

[00:08:01] last night at around 3. She hadn't. She hadn't even gotten up once to use the bathroom, she said. Even if she did, we would have heard the door open and then the footsteps down the loft stairs.

[00:08:16] Everything was open concept on the first floor so it was easy to hear things going on. We backed up and left. My friend's parents sold the cottage a couple of years later

[00:08:26] and I don't think any of them went back once after that weekend. I was curious about the area afterward so I did some googling and I learned that there was once a sawmill or something like

[00:08:37] that and then there was a tragic accident. The owner's son had a very bad accident at the mill, something tragic. I wanted to say that could be a factor here but who knows. All I know is that

[00:08:50] that night I heard heavy, clear and loud footsteps pacing around above us on the first floor. That was my first and only paranormal experience and I'll never forget it. Mysteries in Missouri by Daniel

[00:09:31] These are a bunch of stories from growing up. Maybe they're all related, maybe they're not, but I included everything interesting I can remember in the order they happened. I hope you

[00:09:43] enjoy. This all happened in Morgan County, Missouri about 20 years ago. I grew up on a 15-acre plot of land. There were mostly hills but there was a small valley where we built our house. One day

[00:09:59] my brother and I were walking around the long dirt road near our property that heads toward the main highway. Halfway down that road and off to the right is an old abandoned two-story cabin

[00:10:12] that we sometimes liked to explore but had never been inside. The doors and windows were locked but this time we decided to climb up and try the second-story windows we were able to access.

[00:10:27] One of them was unlocked. We both climbed through and as soon as we hopped in, we noticed an old picture of a dog lying on the floor. I swear it looked like its eyes were glowing.

[00:10:42] It freaked me out a bit but I thought maybe I was just seeing things so we kept exploring. As we walked out of that room there were a few more pictures of that dog at the top of the stairs.

[00:10:56] There wasn't much else in the cabin, just a bed, dresser and random pictures of a dog. We walked out of the cabin through the front door and walked down towards a creek that ran across

[00:11:09] the valley floor. When we were getting down the hill towards the creek, we came across this small pile of rubbish. Broken chairs, an old beat-up sofa, a few tires and some bags of old clothes

[00:11:24] and other junk. As we were checking out all this stuff, we noticed something about the limestone wall nearby. There were four distinct notches evenly spaced apart, almost like little cuppy holes. We walked up to see what they were. Inside each hole was a statue of a man.

[00:11:48] They appeared to have been carefully carved out of a dark rock and were each about a foot tall, with different poses. They weren't polished or sanded down to perfection or anything, but they were impressive. They looked like old antiques. The limestone reminded me of a shrine

[00:12:08] of some sort or like some makeshift place of worship. The first statue was broken above the feet so I couldn't tell what the man was doing. He was standing upright in the second one,

[00:12:22] but he had the head of an eagle. In the third statue, he was holding a walking stick. In the fourth one, he was kneeling down and he had the walking stick forcefully shoved under his jaw. His head was moved upright and his mouth was carved into a scream,

[00:12:43] apparently a never-ending one. My brother and I, being 14 and 15, did what any teenagers would do. We took the cool, mysterious statues back to our house, except the broken one. A week or so later, my family and I all went into town, except for one of my older brothers.

[00:13:09] He didn't feel like going anywhere, so he just hung out for a bit and at one point took a walk down the dirt road by our house, something my family often does. He was gone for maybe half an

[00:13:23] hour but noticed something extremely alarming when he returned home. Every single light in the house was turned on. Every door, inside and out, was flung wide open. He immediately went to my dad's

[00:13:40] gun cabinet and took out his shotgun. He walked through the entire house, which was quite big since I had eight siblings. Three stories, eight bedrooms, and four bathrooms. He made it through

[00:13:56] the house and closed all the doors and turned the lights off, shouting out the whole time that he was armed, scared, and legally able to defend his home with deadly force. Finding no one inside,

[00:14:11] he walked back outside and went around the property line, gun in hand. He called out further warnings to anyone who might be around. Our nearest neighbors lived a couple miles away, at the end of the dirt road by our property and across the highway.

[00:14:30] After finding no one near our property, he headed back to the house. But as he rounded a small hill, something made his heart sink and he stopped in his tracks. All the lights were turned back on

[00:14:46] and the doors were once again flung wide open. He sat at the end of our property with the gun until we got home. Outside our front door, we had a small log pile for our fireplaces

[00:15:02] and a hammock strung between a few trees. My siblings and I often hung out there, hanging out in the hammock on multiple occasions. We would look off into the woods and see what appeared to be a white, cloud-like form of a dog's tail.

[00:15:20] It always appeared behind the same tree, about 30 feet off into the woods. Only the tail was ever seen though, right behind that same tree. We never saw the actual dog or whatever this thing was. We saw this apparition all the time though. We talked about it often.

[00:15:42] It was almost like it was beckoning us to follow it. But whenever one of us tried approaching the tree, nothing would be there. I was in that same hammock with four of my siblings one night,

[00:15:55] when all of a sudden everything around us fell dead silent. We had several animals on the property, not to mention the insects, birds and other critters. Our property was never this quiet. We then heard, about 20 or 30 feet away, the sound of someone jogging, panting.

[00:16:23] We also heard branches and leaves snapping and rustling as our eyes followed the noises. There was no one there, just the sounds of somebody or something running. There wasn't any thick brush around and the front lights were on.

[00:16:42] Something was definitely there and it was close enough to where we for sure should have seen it. My sister was standing against a tree and the rest of us boys were in the hammock. This invisible figure then ran directly between us.

[00:16:59] It continued past us and took off into the woods, while we could still hear it panting as branches snapped beneath it. After we stopped hearing it run off into the distance, all the usual animal sounds came back

[00:17:18] at once. We screamed and ran inside and confirmed our shared experience. On another night, I was playing hide and seek with my siblings, one of the many things we would do to pass time. I was outside, hiding in the vegetation, when everything suddenly became

[00:17:38] eerily silent again. About five feet behind me, I quickly hear the sound of steps and a loud panting noise. I turned around but couldn't see anything, but the panting continued and got closer

[00:17:57] to me. It grew louder until it was directly over my right shoulder, basically right in my ear. I got up and ran across a small walking path over to my brothers and was terrified.

[00:18:12] Two of my brothers were hiding in the bushes and asked what happened. When I started to explain, they both freaked out and said they heard something breathing heavily in their ears too. When we left the area together, all the animals and critters started back up with their natural

[00:18:31] sounds. The silence, invisible steps, and loud breathing happened to me personally about four times. So, a little bit about my sister. Her room was on the third floor. Also on the third floor

[00:18:49] were double doors that led out to a deck. At this time, the doors were always locked as the deck was not built yet. My sister would often look out of her room to see a soldier with a musket walking

[00:19:03] back and forth in front of the double doors outside the house. She said he would just pace back and forth in the open air where the deck was going to be built. He would show up randomly

[00:19:18] and she was the only person to ever see him. She has seen him about 30 or 40 times, starting when she was about 15. Every time she saw the soldier pacing back and forth, she knew something else was going to happen because every night she saw the soldier,

[00:19:39] a woman would appear at the end of the hallway near the stairs. She wore a dress that seemed similar to the era of how the soldier was dressed, which we think may have been from around the Civil War.

[00:19:54] My sister could see through the woman to the back of the hallway. She wouldn't ever say anything but would walk down the hallway towards her room. She would walk to her bed and look down at my

[00:20:08] sister. This lady never scared her though, she said she felt a motherly, protective presence from her. Even when her bedroom door was closed, she could feel the presence of this lady when she approached.

[00:20:24] She would sometimes see her walk through the door and enter her room. Then she would stare at my sister until she was asleep and would be gone by the time she woke up. Here's a quick story about an evil visitor I had.

[00:20:42] One morning I was downstairs in my bedroom reading, something I did every morning after breakfast. As I'm sitting upright in bed reading, I heard my bedroom door open. I looked over to see who it was but the door was still closed. Then immediately,

[00:21:01] a heavy weight pressed down on my chest, so hard and suddenly that it felt like I was slammed into my mattress. I could barely move my arms and head. I heard a creepy, haunting voice

[00:21:17] lash out at me in horrible ways, telling me that I'm going to die and how it was going to kill me. That my life was pitiful and worthless but that it'll be over soon.

[00:21:32] It's obvious that this thing was what was holding me down in bed as it continued stating how awful I was, detailing more and more about how it would kill me. After what felt like 15 minutes,

[00:21:48] this thing said, not right now, not today. And I felt the weight lift off of me. I then heard my door open again but this time I also heard it slam shut.

[00:22:04] After that it was like nothing happened. I tried telling my parents but they thought I just fell back asleep and had a bad dream. I know that's not what happened though. One other time I was

[00:22:18] walking down that all too familiar dirt road about halfway down near that cabin. The air went silent yet again but this time I heard an owl hoot a few seconds later. As soon as I heard the hoot

[00:22:38] there was a blood-curdling scream coming from the area where I found those statues. Then to make things worse, I heard a male voice from that same direction say, Hey Daniel, wait for me. I freaked out and ran down the hill.

[00:22:59] I was heading towards a small low water bridge but after about 20 feet down I stopped and told myself how silly I was being. I've walked this area millions of times there wasn't anything for

[00:23:13] me to freak out about. So I turned around and started walking back in the same direction I ran from. Then I heard the owl hoot again and the same male voice called out but this time his

[00:23:28] voice sounded noticeably closer as he exclaimed, Daniel I said wait up. I ran all the way back to my house as fast as I could. When I got there my brothers David and Chris were on the front porch

[00:23:45] by the hammock. They told me I looked like I saw a ghost. When I told them what happened though their jaws dropped. David and Chris had gone on a walk together the day prior. Chris suddenly became scared and started sprinting back home. David didn't hear anything but followed

[00:24:07] Chris and just kept running because he could tell how scared he was. When they got home Chris told David that he heard an owl followed by a scream. That's when he started running. As he was running

[00:24:23] he heard someone calling out his name telling him to wait up but it wasn't David or anyone else in the family. So on one Sunday our family went to church but my dad stayed home sick. My youngest

[00:24:39] brother Job apparently kept poking his head into the bedroom laughing at my dad then running off. After we all got back home from church my dad sarcastically thanked my mom for leaving the

[00:24:51] little one behind while he was trying to get some rest. We all laughed thinking he was making a joke or something but I could tell he was serious. As we were all trying to assure him that Job was with us

[00:25:07] he snapped a little bit and said guess I'm seeing ghosts. He took it seriously though. He had heard countless stories from us but that experience for him made things a little too real to ignore. Later that afternoon he got the family together without confirming or denying what he

[00:25:29] believed he announced that he was going to say some prayers and bless the home himself. That same day I took those three statues out of my room and walked out into the woods to get rid

[00:25:40] of them. About 40 feet from our house is an old tree stump. The stump itself is about four feet tall but it's hollowed out in the center and the hole goes into the ground by about another four feet.

[00:25:55] I dropped all three statues into the stump hole. Since that day there hasn't been any paranormal activity on the property. Fast forward to the summer of 2022. I went back home for a visit. As I was walking around the property I noticed that same tree stump was still there.

[00:26:18] Of course I looked down into it. The statues weren't there. It wouldn't have been easy to get them out. I then walked with my wife around the creek bed and we went over to the limestone shrine

[00:26:32] area where I initially found the statues. The limestone wall was still there but the crevices where the statues were placed were gone. It all looked weather worn and natural. I have no idea what happened to the shrine or those statues. Nightmare Possession by Gilson from Brazil

[00:27:22] In this dream I was at the market near my girlfriend's house. We were walking through the parking lot when I heard something talking to me. This part wasn't clear in my mind after waking up but I remember fragments. The voice told me

[00:27:39] that reality was more than this and that we could perceive it through three means. The only one I remember was sound and in the dream it was as if I could see sound waves transferring from one space to another. Unfortunately I don't remember the others.

[00:27:59] At one point we went to the room where I was sleeping in real life. It's more common for my girlfriend to come to my house than vice versa so dreaming that I'm in her room is significant.

[00:28:13] This part was simple. Now the voice was my girlfriend's. She looked at me and asked, do you want to know another way? There's a spirit here in the room. At that moment said spirit entered me and I laughed in this terrifying way.

[00:28:33] However I woke up laughing in that same manner. I experience sleep paralysis pretty frequently and whenever I wake up from it I can't move but this time I lifted my head a bit and laughed

[00:28:49] almost screaming at the same time. My girlfriend grabbed my head and asked if I was okay. I continued laughing for about five seconds. It was loud suffocating restrained laughter. I'm a very calm person and I never have reactions out of the ordinary especially in dreams.

[00:29:12] I immediately reassured my girlfriend when I returned to myself but I was very afraid and sweaty after that nightmare. I never made noise because of a dream before but this was the first time. Creepy disappearing YouTube video by Cherubels. So this happened last night while

[00:29:51] I was watching some funny video game review videos by Zero Punctuation on YouTube before bed. I had been watching nothing but Zero Punctuation for a while and autoplay kicked in. It would play

[00:30:05] more Zero Punctuation. It was a couple of episodes deep and then autoplay started playing a compilation video of every Zero Punctuation review from 2008 at around 10 p.m. This was almost a three-hour

[00:30:20] long video. I started to doze off an hour later at around 11 p.m. I fell into a pretty light sleep for maybe an hour and a half. Around a quarter to one I started to wake up because I could hear a

[00:30:36] very shrill ringing noise. It was cutting in and out of what sounded like TV static. I opened my eyes and there was a video playing on my laptop. It jolted me awake. Along with the really awful

[00:30:51] high-pitched ringing and static noise, the video showed distorted dark figures moving around a white background. I vividly remember a distorted face circling around a sort of square box thing. It was kind of glitching and making erratic jumps as it moved and every time a glitch or a jump

[00:31:15] happened, it would make a noise like a record skipping or scratching. It reminded me a lot of those horror story videos that are popular on YouTube right now. It scared me to death though.

[00:31:28] I remember instinctively moving my hand in front of the screen like when a jump scare happens in a horror movie. I reached out with my other hand and hit the keyboard and like that another zero

[00:31:41] punctuation video started to play. My heart was pounding. I got up, got some water, walked outside and calmed down. I went back into my bedroom. Zero punctuation was still playing and after another

[00:31:57] hour of watching that, I fell back to sleep. I've been thinking about it all day. I've been trying to rationalize what I saw. First, I thought maybe one of those analog horror videos started playing.

[00:32:11] I don't watch them very often but I have in the past so maybe one started playing in my autoplay recommended videos but when I checked my browser history, no such video was played between the two

[00:32:23] zero punctuation videos. In fact, nothing at all played in between those videos according to my browser history. Second, I thought maybe at the end of the last zero punctuation video there was

[00:32:37] this weird or scary homage to all the horror video games that he likes to play. Again, no dice. It was a review of an older Prince of Persia game and then it ended. Finally, I thought that maybe

[00:32:52] I had been dreaming. This still seems sort of plausible and I know this is probably what everyone thinks. Maybe I dreamed up something paranormal and I mistook it for reality but it seemed so

[00:33:05] goddamn real. Like I distinctly remember every moment from hearing the noise to opening my eyes to shielding my eyes with my hand and then finally hitting the keyboard. I also have never had any history of sleep paralysis or being unable to distinguish

[00:33:23] dreams from reality. Who knows though, maybe after hitting the ripe old age of 31, my mind is starting to falter. I also want to add real quick that when I looked at my browser

[00:33:36] history, I checked the length of the video that I was watching against the next video that started playing. The zero punctuation video that started right after that creepy video. I wanted to see if there was any unaccounted time missing. The compilation video I fell asleep to started at

[00:33:54] 9 57 pm. The video was 2 hours 51 seconds and 16 minutes. That would put the time that it ended at a little over 12 48 am. My browser history says the next video started playing at 12 49 am. That leaves one minute unaccounted for. Now, my browser history in Google Chrome rounds to the nearest

[00:34:17] minute, so this could easily be explained by rounding errors. If anyone knows how to expand your browser history to show seconds, that would be great. If anyone has ever experienced anything similar to this, I'd love to know. Or if anyone has a better explanation for what could have

[00:34:38] happened, I'd be equally interested. I'm usually a huge skeptic when it comes to this kind of stuff, but this is the first time in my life that I'm really at a loss to account for what happened. I've been chasing that creepy YouTube video dragon for years now.

[00:35:14] I know what you mean. The early internet stuff, the barrier of entry was a little bit higher without all the automation and filters that we have now. Yeah. I don't know if it was just our

[00:35:26] age or how internet culture was at the time, but there is always that level of, oh wow, is this real? Or wondering how people did certain things. Yeah. And then later on, the mystery was

[00:35:39] completely stolen from our traumatized little brains when we learned that most of them were just art projects or even just scenes from movies like those clips from Begotten. Yeah. Yeah. That one was really creepy. Remember that one of that little kid who was getting his eyeball sliced in

[00:35:56] half? It was like some French art film. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I also loved I Feel Fantastic, which I watched like 15 years ago and it really creeped me out, but now it's pretty much just funny. Yeah. No,

[00:36:10] all you really can do is laugh at it at this point. Yeah. I know it's just an animation from 1982, but I was really into Malice in Wonderland. I don't remember where I got it, but I had downloaded

[00:36:23] it to my old gateway family computer and nobody knew what I was talking about at school. I would say, hey, you know Malice in Wonderland? Actually no, there wasn't even the title. They edited out

[00:36:32] the title at that point. Yeah. But I would try to explain the video, which I won't spoil it on here, but everybody thought I was just crazy, which maybe I am, maybe I was, but I found it on YouTube

[00:36:43] like 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more, and the mystery was solved. Yeah. That one was creepy. It's like the seamless AI animation that people make now, but it was actually drawn frame by frame. Remember that Mark Twain claymation thing? Yeah, The Adventures of Mark Twain. I actually

[00:37:02] watched that video today after rereading the story. Oh, that's perfect. And I know exactly what scene you're talking about. It's really good. Yeah. And rated G. I'm glad that one missed my

[00:37:15] childhood. Same. Yeah, no thanks. But yeah, a lot of the mystery that the internet used to offer is now gone. It's sad. The internet was a place to go when you get home on your computer and you

[00:37:27] get to explore, but now it's just our life 24 seven and it's not cool anymore. Yeah. It used to feel like an escape from reality or at least some far removed alternate reality kind of off

[00:37:41] doing its own thing. But now there's like zero separation and doesn't feel special at all anymore. I think the author was able to recreate that early experience really well. It's what makes it so

[00:37:53] believable that shock and the rush of cortisol you get seeing something like that when you aren't expecting it. It's just wild stuff. Yeah. Kind of like that maze video. Do you remember that with

[00:38:04] the jump scare at the end? Yeah, there's a few of those that I don't like those at all. They get me every time I can't do it. Even when I just do it knowing it's going to happen, I still freak out.

[00:38:13] It still scares me so bad. Yeah. Anyways, I don't really have an answer for you. Ja Rubles. There's usually always a way to recover browsing history on your computer outside of the browser

[00:38:25] interface. As long as you haven't done something like C cleaner to wipe the data from your drive, I'd suggest doing some Googling on your own where you dig into your system files to find

[00:38:36] the full history from that night because I'd love to see the video that you're talking about. I'm positive it can be found unless it was manually erased somehow. It can happen. We have our digital forensics team on standby. Just say the word.

[00:38:50] Yeah, definitely. So I am super glad I got to share that story from Missouri by Daniel because I actually caught that one in the wild. Those are the best. I think we do a pretty good

[00:39:03] job, but nothing beats somebody telling their personal story face to face. Yeah, I got the chills when he was telling me this story. It's funny how I came across it. He was just walking

[00:39:15] by my desk one day and he stops in turns and says, so I hear you have a thing for ghost stories. Yeah, boy do I. A mutual friend had told him that I'm the guy to tell apparently.

[00:39:29] And I'm really glad he did because it was one of the better stories anybody has ever told me in person or otherwise. Plus, Daniel is just such a genuine person. I don't doubt for a second that

[00:39:40] the story is as true as he remembers it. Yeah, even if a story is more on the mild side, it's still more exciting if you hear it from somebody that you know. It removes some of the

[00:39:52] doubt if you trust the person and can ask questions on the spot. Yeah, definitely. We sat there for probably about an hour just chatting away about the story. We'll probably do it again

[00:40:05] after he listens to the episode. Looking forward to it. Yeah, so much happened. It's awesome. I don't even know where to start from. What do you think was the creepiest or most unnerving?

[00:40:18] I mean, all of it was pretty crazy. I guess I want to know where the statues came from. Yeah, and what sort of thing got attached to them and of course where they went.

[00:40:30] You know, I wonder if taking only three statues caused some sort of rift in the paranormal universe. Oh yeah, see I bet that stuff would have happened even if he took the broken statue

[00:40:43] with him because he still disturbed something that he probably shouldn't have. But that is a good point. Basically four siblings were up for adoption and he only took three of them. Yeah, and like our dads would say, if it's not a complete set, it's garbage.

[00:41:02] All or nothing. Yeah. Gotta throw the whole socket wrench set away for missing just one. Yeah, even though one of the statues was broken, I still think he could have thrown something off its axis more than it probably already was.

[00:41:17] True, yeah. They could have been conduits or something. Yeah, no clue. I get it though. He was only a teenager and I don't think I would have immediately thought of something paranormal either. Yeah, it wasn't until reading more

[00:41:30] about haunted dolls of all things that I started taking that stuff into consideration. Which is funny because anything could be haunted, but if it has a face the chances are apparently a lot higher. Yeah, anything with a face on it or somewhere you can die.

[00:41:48] The doll thing is interesting because yeah, it's cliche, but I also look at it like this. Especially with older dolls, a parent or grandparent could have poured their heart into making it for a kid. It becomes their favorite doll and after the person dies,

[00:42:04] they attach themselves to the doll because where else? How convenient. They have a body they can chill out in and continue to spend time with this person that they love. Yeah, it's definitely convenient. Plus, if we're being fair, I think haunted dolls are

[00:42:18] more marketable than haunted water faucets. Yeah, true, true. Always a better backstory too. With all due respect to the plumbers and pipe fitters listening. Yeah, but back to the statues. It's crazy how they were just gone after he threw them into that stump hole.

[00:42:40] Yeah, and it was like 8 feet deep and on his family's property. It's not like somebody in a public park stumbled by a convenient location looking for a geocaching spot or something. Yeah, did he ask his family about them?

[00:42:55] He did, and everybody swears that they didn't see or touch them. Plus, only his brother knew about them and he was adamant about not messing with them. Oh, okay. Really weird. Yeah. Like you were saying, I don't think somebody could have just stumbled upon them. Seeing some

[00:43:14] statues at the bottom of a dark 8 foot hole and having what you need to remove them? Yeah, definitely something goofy. Maybe a portal opened up as he threw in each one? Yeah, yeah. That was his sole mission. Really good story Daniel. I hope that the visitors on

[00:43:33] your property are at least resting in peace. And I hope that what I'm assuming was probably just a straight up demon stays away from him. Yeah, yeah. That was the other thing that got me.

[00:43:46] He was wide awake, but it's like he had a sleep paralysis demon and it was able to barge in without any problems. Has that happened to him before or since? No, and he's familiar with paranormal stuff too. And he knew all about sleep paralysis when I

[00:44:03] started talking to him about it and mentioning how similar I thought it was. He swears he was wide awake like any other morning just reading a book and it happened out of nowhere. He didn't

[00:44:13] doze off. He was fully alert and aware of everything from beginning to end. But no, it hasn't happened before or since. That was his only experience with anything like that. Wow, that's crazy.

[00:44:25] Yeah. Great stories this week, everyone. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a story to share, make sure you send it to stories at oddtrails.com to hear it on the show. We read

[00:44:36] everything that we get. All of the stories you did hear this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. If you want to get access to ad-free versions of

[00:44:45] all of our episodes at a higher bitrate, make sure you go to patreon.com forward slash odd trails to sign up and support the show today. And finally, make sure to check out the new episodes

[00:44:56] of my other podcasts like Let's Not Meet and the Old Time Radiocast at crypticcountypodcasts.com. Everybody, thanks for listening and stay safe. Peace out. Don't let the ghosts and the ghouls disturb you, darling.