Episode 171: The Field and the Deer

[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. Forget facts. Forget logic. Forget everything that seems real. You just trust. Believe.

[00:00:57] My Dog is a Spooky Detector by Victoria. I think we all have a general understanding that animals can see and sense things we can't. My husband and I have three dogs, but only one of them is relevant to this story. Atlas is, well, not the smartest. And that's okay. I love him all the same. He's more intuitive than intelligent.

[00:01:23] But he also randomly decides he's afraid of the hardwood floor. Sometimes I joke that he ended up on the orange cat brain cell rotation, even though he's a solid black, 85-pound shepherd-lab mix. We've had Atlas since he was eight weeks old, and now he's seven. In all that time, I've only heard him howl four times.

[00:01:49] Once was at sirens, but oddly, that's the only time he's ever howled at them, despite how often we hear them in our area. But that's not the spooky part. The second and third times he howled were similar. My husband was away on a work trip, and I was home alone. It was summer. Humid, hot, and normally deafening with cicadas.

[00:02:14] But both times Atlas howled, I stepped outside to complete silence. Not just quiet. It was a suffocating, unnatural absence of sound. The kind that makes the back of your neck prickle. As if some deep instinct is reminding you, you're not the only predator around. I didn't hesitate. I yanked all three dogs back inside.

[00:02:42] I even used the ice maker to lure one in, because she loves ice, and I was not whistling for her. The fourth time Atlas howled was the first time my husband ever heard him do it. It was about 10pm. I was in our bedroom, playing video games with my headset on, when my husband poked his head in. You hear Atlas making all that noise? I pulled off my headset.

[00:03:10] No, what noise? He was out on the porch, howling away, my husband chuckled. I stared at him, paused my game. Get all three of them inside, close the dog door, and don't let them out unless they absolutely have to go. And if they do, go with them, but just watch. There's something out there, and I'm not messing with it.

[00:03:39] Now my husband is a skeptic. He has doubts about the paranormal, but he also won't whistle at night, just in case. He gave me an odd look as I explained Atlas' past howling incidents, but he didn't argue. About an hour later, he came back into the room. This time, he looked way less amused. What happened? What happened? I asked.

[00:04:08] Well, Atlas started demanding to go out, so I grabbed my gun and went with him. There was a dude in the street. We live in a circle-style neighborhood, meaning we can see most of the street from our back porch. Seeing people walking at night isn't too strange. Some of our neighbors go out after sundown to escape the heat. So I asked, what do you mean, a dude?

[00:04:37] Just some guy, standing dead center in the middle of the street. I think he was looking this way. I turned on the back porch light before going out. Did you see his face? No, I couldn't see him at all. Just his shape. Then he went into the woods between the two houses across the street. I felt my stomach tighten.

[00:05:02] The woods behind those houses are dense, thick enough that you can barely see through them, even in the daylight. That wasn't human, I muttered. You're sure it's gone? He shrugged. I watched until I couldn't see him anymore. I kept pressing him. Nothing? No details? Not even his clothes? Nothing. He only saw a shadow.

[00:05:32] A figure. No face. No skin. No movement beyond walking into the trees. Before that night, my husband always thought I was being paranoid about warding off cryptids. After Atlas howled that night, he doesn't question it anymore. Atlas is our spooky detector. When he howls, we bust out the salt and prayers. I don't know what he warned us about.

[00:06:02] I don't know what my husband saw. And I don't want to know. But I'll always listen.

[00:06:08] The Field and the deer by Brittany.

[00:06:34] This story happened about 20 years ago, and I haven't lived in the area for much of that time. So this isn't current personal info. But I think the location is relevant to the creepy feelings, and of course, I encourage others to look up the references that I bring up.

[00:07:21] I grew up in Long Island, New York. Of course, there were random disappearances, some of which ended up being the Long Island Ripper, a case that recently got an alleged perpetrator. I didn't realize this at the time, but the place my friends and I went to was in the same category as all of these unsettling events.

[00:07:43] To be clear, I have no idea if this was supernatural or not, but the history I'll explain creeps me out either way. Every St. Patrick's Day, my mother, her friends, their kids, and any of my friends who wanted to tag along would go out to Montauk for the big parade. Montauk is gorgeous. The sunset is allegedly famous.

[00:08:09] One of my mother's friends owned a room in another famous attraction, the Montauk Manor, and we all went to visit after a long day of shenanigans. My friends and I, still being teenagers, had energy to spare, so we asked if we could rent tennis rackets and just play around in the completely empty court. There were four of us, so we played two-on-two, whacked the ball as hard as we could at each other.

[00:08:35] Most of the balls went over the massive chain-link fence because of our ridiculousness, and I didn't want my mother's friend to get in trouble for us losing them, so I asked my friends to split up and collect them all. I think we had a batch of a specific number, maybe 10 or 20, so we knew how many to look for.

[00:08:57] I took the neighboring field and grumbled in teenage angst about why there would be a tall, wheat-yellow grass field right next to a tennis court, with a 10-foot-tall fence, mind you. I managed to find a lot of the balls that we were looking for right on the edge of the tall grass, so I tossed them behind me onto the asphalt. I figured a bunch had probably rolled into the field, so I went onto the neighboring property to look.

[00:09:24] I was alone, and I can't explain this any better, but I felt compelled to look up from searching the ground and look out to the field. There was a large rock, unsure if it counted as a boulder, but it stuck out from the 5-foot-tall grass right in the middle of the field, maybe 100 to 200 feet away. Although I had seen it before, I was stunned to see a figure sitting on top of this rock.

[00:09:53] I can see this in my mind's eye to this day. It was a very lanky figure, presumably male from the short hair, and either wearing a very tight shirt or nothing on top. Whatever the bottoms were, they looked like some sort of skirt or kilt that stopped around the knees. I really can't describe much more.

[00:10:15] The figure was unnaturally dark, though, as if no light penetrated this strange silhouette, while the sun was still very much up and shining on both of us. I didn't register the darkness at first, because the second I looked up and my eyes locked on this person, the figure quickly slid off of the rock, and I saw the tall grass shaking in my direction. My immediate thought was, that's the farmer's sun, and I should not be in this field.

[00:10:44] So I turned to make a quick exit. I went into the field on a diagonal, so when I turned, it was a new path out as I tried to escape any potential consequences. On this short route back, I skidded to a halt at an extremely disturbing sight. In the gap in the tall grass, there was a dead deer, and right next to it, a very old-looking tennis ball. Not likely one of ours.

[00:11:13] The sight made me freeze, and in that moment, I did a quick scan to try and understand what I was seeing. I eventually focused on something that I couldn't explain. There was a hole in its chest right between its front legs, but there was no blood, no smell, and no flies.

[00:11:36] This is where I lost whatever cool I had and started screaming to my friends to go, run, we needed to get out of here. The panic in my voice apparently convinced them very quickly. Back at the manor door, I explained what I saw. They were questioning why I screamed at them, especially when I had insisted that we go look for the tennis balls. But after explaining the deer, they went pale and silent.

[00:12:05] Chalking it all up to our teenage energy and stupidity, my friends eventually said they needed to see this deer, and I agreed to show them the area. I told them that we could try and find it again, but someone saw me on the property, so we shouldn't really trespass. After a good couple of minutes to calm down, we went back over, but we were still on the manor's asphalt paving, just peering around to see what we could spot.

[00:12:34] Maybe to find the deer in the grass. And my friend actually did. We found out that it was one row away and easily visible if we use our arms to push some grass aside. I looked up again, not compelled, but probably paranoid, to check the rock and make sure that the grass was only moving because of the wind. Then, we stepped back into the field to get a good look at this thing.

[00:13:01] We were all creeped out by the lack of blood despite the cavernous hole being there. There just wasn't any evidence of violence at all. There was nothing on the ground or around this hole on the fur, just a dark, empty space where the fur and other things like tissue should be. After a couple of minutes, somebody said, that's where the heart would be. I remember a coldness coming over me,

[00:13:30] and then suddenly I no longer was interested in what happened here. I felt like everyone else got the same feeling. And while there was a morbid question of, should we grab this tennis ball, we all left without another word to each other. After the shock wore off, and we were walking through the manor and back to my mother's friend's room, we talked about how crazy it was. But that was the last we spoke of it.

[00:13:57] Until I googled Long Island Haunted Places years later. On the site, the Montauk Manor was listed. And that cold feeling washed over me again. I read about how the place was built upon countless Native American graves, how rituals were often done on the old and new grounds, and how shadow people were often seen in the manor's hallways. We didn't see the latter,

[00:14:25] but the rest of it made me question a lot of what I saw on that cold March day. I immediately messaged the two friends that were with me. Do you remember that time? They were absolutely baffled at the news, which was validating for me. It's become a cool niche legend for us, but at the same time, none of us have ever gone back.

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[00:16:41] The Apartment Next Door by Sarah I had been living in my apartment for about seven years before anything strange started happening. It was a three-story building with 16 units per floor. I wasn't particularly close with my neighbors, but we exchanged pleasantries in passing. The apartment next door belonged to an elderly woman.

[00:17:06] She was sweet, quiet, and well into her old age. One night, at around 11 p.m., I was lying in bed, watching something on my phone, when suddenly... Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! There were five loud, deliberate knocks right above my head coming from the wall. I knew my bathroom shared a wall with my elderly neighbor's bedroom.

[00:17:35] The walls in my building were thick. I rarely ever heard much from next door, except for the occasional faint sneeze in the middle of the night, and only if my room was dead silent. So, when I heard the knocking, it startled me. I figured my neighbor must have been disturbed by the sound of my phone and was knocking to get me to turn it down. Feeling bad, I shut it off and went to sleep.

[00:18:02] A few days later, though, it happened again. Five loud, insistent knocks. This time, it woke me up from dead sleep. I turned to check the time. 3 a.m. Lying there in the dark, I wondered why my neighbor would knock at this hour if I wasn't making any noise. I stayed still, listening for any other sounds, but the apartment next door was silent.

[00:18:33] Eventually, I fell back asleep. A night or two later, it happened again. I was jolted awake by the same five knocks. The next morning, over coffee, I started wondering if something was wrong with my neighbor. Maybe she was developing dementia, or maybe she needed help. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen her in weeks.

[00:19:00] I was still thinking about this when I left for work. Just as I stepped into the hallway, I ran into another neighbor from our floor. Did you hear the news about your neighbor? She asked. I told her I hadn't. She said my neighbor had moved out weeks ago into an assisted living facility. I didn't say anything about the knocking, but I left for work, trying to process the fact that the apartment next door

[00:19:30] had been empty for the past few weeks. Later that week, I went out to dinner with someone I had recently started seeing. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I brought up the knocking. He patiently listened, but told me there was probably a logical explanation. Pipes, building noises, maybe even mice in the walls. I shook my head. I've lived there for seven years.

[00:19:59] I know this building sounds. This was something different. The knocking continued, not every night, but on most nights. Always the same, five loud, insistent knocks. Usually once per night, sometimes twice. During the day, I joked about it with friends and coworkers, calling it my ghost. Some asked if I had tried to communicate with it.

[00:20:29] I considered it, but whenever the knocks woke me up in the middle of the night, my body froze, my heart racing. I could never bring myself to speak. One night, the person I'd been seeing stayed over. Before falling asleep, he joked, maybe I'll get to hear your ghost. That night, for the first time in weeks, the knocking didn't happen. In the morning,

[00:20:58] I sighed and said, too bad you didn't get to hear it. He turned at me, pale. Oh, I heard it. I sat up. Why didn't you wake me up? I was too scared to move, he said. He admitted there was no way it was pipes or mice or the building settling. Soon after that, he stopped returning my texts.

[00:21:27] The knocking continued for a few more weeks before slowly fading. Eventually, it stopped altogether. The apartment next door remained vacant. A year later, it started again. My uncle was in hospice, dying from cancer. After he passed, the knocking returned. For a while. Then, as before, it stopped.

[00:21:57] A couple of years later, I moved into a house. For the first three nights, my downstairs TV turned on by itself in the middle of the night. That really freaked me out. Then, a few months after moving in, I heard it again. Five knocks. Loud. Insistent. Right above my head. This time, my bedroom wall wasn't connected to another apartment.

[00:22:26] It was an outside wall. I was alone. The next night, there was nothing. A few more nights passed, still nothing. Eventually, I stopped worrying about it. It's been three and a half years now, and I haven't heard it since. But I know I didn't imagine it. I had a witness. Someone else heard it too, and it shook him so badly that he wanted nothing

[00:22:56] to do with me after. I don't know what it was, and maybe I never will. But these days, I sleep next to a 45-pound boxer, and I like to think that no ghost wants to mess with her.

[00:23:28] I worked in a cemetery for four years, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt by AngelicRealm888. I've experienced a lot of paranormal stuff throughout my life, and I've shared some of it online. I've seen ghosts, beings of light, and deceased relatives, just to name some of my experiences. People have commented, both personally and on my posts online, that I have some

[00:23:57] psychic abilities or sensitivities, and that I should start to develop them. But I wouldn't even know where to begin with something like that. Oddly enough, I managed a memorial park or cemetery and funeral home between 2007 and 2011. I was handling operations, sales, and customer service. The funny thing is that I never experienced anything paranormal while working on site, and I worked many times

[00:24:27] late until the evening. I was the only person there besides the security guards. The memorial park was developed in 2002 over land that had been a farm before. It was then consecrated or blessed using ceremonies of various faiths which were prerequisites to be able to hold services there. It had three chapels for services and wakes, and of course,

[00:24:56] a space for the mortician to conduct his work. Headstones were not allowed as a policy, only plaques, so all you would see were beautiful gardens and landscapes. All burials were underground except for an area reserved for family mausoleums. Around 500 people were interred there when I started working, and we had services about every two days or so. Some people mentioned eerie feelings

[00:25:25] or hearing noises, but nothing of note. The energy, for lack of a better word, was very heavy, which is understandable for a place with so much sorrow. But the weirdest thing that we had to deal with happened late one night when a driver went to a local hospital to bring over a deceased person. The person woke up on the ride to the park. Understandably, the driver took the week off after that.

[00:25:55] Thus, my confusion when I have gone through some very strange paranormal episodes yet wasn't sensitive or as sensitive as some people suggested to be able to see anything during my tenure there. Or is it that I blocked myself somehow?

[00:26:32] Something is always near by Kayleen. There are a variety of experiences that my family and I have experienced with the unexplained. Just for some background, my mother has a sort of gift. She has a vision of sorts. And while it's not super refined, she is able to predict certain future happenings based on her dreams. She is also known for seeing things around the home. Weird figures,

[00:27:02] big black dogs, small rats. She usually associates them with negative entities. The first event I'll share was told to me by my parents. They were watching a movie in their living room when my mom got up to get a snack in the kitchen. From the kitchen, you can clearly see the TV area, and on the opposite end, there's an archway that frames the staircase. You can go straight up or turn left or right to get from the kitchen

[00:27:31] to the other parts of the house. Anyway, she continues making her snack when all of a sudden, she sees a dark figure peek around the corner of this archway. She described it as being very tall, dark like a silhouette, and its arms were stuck together in a praying mantis fashion. She said it peeked around, saw my dad, and ran to the other side of the house.

[00:28:01] My mom has no knowledge of the different alien types or anything like that, and she thinks that they're all negative entities like some heaven and hell variety. Me, I'm not so sure. The way she described its movement, intelligent, but also almost insect-like, reminds me more of something not entirely human. But whether it was demonic, extraterrestrial, or something else entirely,

[00:28:31] I don't think I want to know. The most recent story I'd like to share happened while I was living in my last apartment. I was dreaming, and in my dream, I was in my bed, just as I would have been in real life. Except there was this ball of energy chaotically bouncing around my room while I just laid there. This isn't the first time I've felt or seen this energy in my dreams, but it always brings fear with it.

[00:29:02] Chaotic is the best way to describe it. It's something purely made of raw, uncontrolled energy. It doesn't seem to notice me, almost as if it's trapped in its own cycle, bouncing unpredictably from one place to another. But despite that, there's this overwhelming feeling that I shouldn't be near it. Suddenly, I woke up in a sweat. It was around 1 a.m.,

[00:29:31] I shook it off and eventually went back to sleep. At around 9 a.m., I received a call from my dad, but since I was still sleeping, I missed it. When I finally woke up around noon, I saw a text from him that simply said, Call me. I gave him a call, and the first thing he asked was, Hey, is everything okay? I said, Yes?

[00:30:00] To which he replied, What happened to you last night around 1 a.m.? Did anything happen? I was shocked and said, Uh, yeah, but why do you ask? It turns out that around that same time, my dad had woken up from a nightmare he couldn't remember, except he woke up screaming. He said that all he knew was that the dream had something to do with me. As he screamed,

[00:30:30] my parents heard a loud crash from across the house in the dog room. They have a camera in there, and when I reviewed the footage, I could see orbs moving erratically, almost chaotically, just like the energy in my dream. I have a theory that whatever I experienced in my dream, my dad experienced in his as well. Like it jumped from me to him. When he screamed,

[00:31:00] it seemed to physically manifest in their house, knocking over a picture frame across the room. A poltergeist, if you will. An entity with a clear purpose, waiting for an outlet, until suddenly it found one. But where did it go after that? And how many times had it been here before?

[00:31:38] Mystery Lights Around Detroit Lake by Riley Stiley. My dad and I went camping up at Gold Butte Lookout. From 11.30pm to 1am, we saw lights zigzagging down the ridges into the valley while looking east toward Mount Jefferson. We also saw more of the lights to our southeast and south. They were large lights that would occasionally change colors

[00:32:07] from a bright white to cream and then to red. They would twinkle in and out of sight and appear about half an hour, more or less, from the previous sighting. Sometimes, there would only be one, but other times, there would be up to three. My dad thought that they were just cars or people on ATVs and that the red was probably brake lights. That could be what they were, but to be honest, I thought that

[00:32:36] if they were cars or ATVs, it would be strange that their lights were visible from the top of the ridge at Gold Butte Lookout. Any roads on that side of the ridge would have been extremely small and I would only assume their lights would have been basically pinpricks. But these lights were a decent size. The way that they moved made me wonder if they were drones. My dad figured that couldn't be the case because it wouldn't make sense.

[00:33:05] He doesn't put up stock in cryptids or the supernatural, but I do. And I wonder if what we saw were UFO crafts or even orbs of light that often get associated with Sasquatch, the Fae, or other paranormal entities. Has anyone else seen these lights around Detroit Lake, Oregon or specifically up on Gold Butte Lookout? Does anyone have any thoughts on what they are?

[00:33:54] This Montauk story was pretty crazy. Like, if you stumbled across like an animal in that kind of state and didn't know the context, you would probably assume it was some kind of hunting accident, right? Well, if you're hunting, I don't know if you could call it an accident, you know what I mean? Like, a surprised Pikachu face. I can't believe this animal was hurt after I pointed a gun at it and tried to kill it. But, I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. And the missing blood, you know,

[00:34:24] that's not a natural death. That's some kind of extraction, like something out of a Linda Moulton Howe book. Hey, the cowgirl of cattle mutilations, as they call her. Do they really? Probably. I mean, I do. Yeah, probably back in her WWE ring girl days. Yeah, it's the lack of blood and almost like surgical, circular hole that just gets me. It's just like what she talks about

[00:34:53] in her books. Yeah, she's 80 something and still going strong. Her YouTube channel feels like this local TV programming from the 90s, but of course in the best way possible. Earth Files, I love it. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, I miss old news segments from when we were kids. I know, I know. Of course, there was Forensic Files and Unsolved Mysteries, but I feel like Dateline NBC back in the day was like the true crime podcast of its time. You know what I mean? I remember being

[00:35:23] 10 or something and thinking how weird it was that I was so entertained by some of the stuff that they'd cover, but it all makes sense now. Yeah, I totally get it. Unsolved Mysteries was probably a little too woo-woo for some people. And Forensic Files might have been a little too on the nose. As they say. Yeah. Yeah, but Dateline was tight. That was, I guess, the beginning. Yeah, for sure. I think you should thank Stone Phillips for inspiring you to start Let's Not Meet, even if you didn't, just out of principle. Okay, okay.

[00:35:54] Thanks, Stone. Imagine being a teacher and seeing that name on your roster, Stone, or like Wolf, Wolf Blitzer. I got Stone and Wolf in my class. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Focusing, focusing. We got here somehow. Oh yeah, Linda, Moltenow. Yeah, remember, do you remember when she used to be on Coast to Coast? Oh yeah, totally. I still put those on from time to time and they still creep me out. Yeah, yeah. I think it has something to do with the poor

[00:36:23] audio quality, or at least what people would consider bad today. Yeah. Like, you know, like going back and playing an old Nintendo 64 or PlayStation game. Those rose-tinted glasses. Yeah, they have their charm. I mean, old audio holds up better for sure. Yeah, compared to video, definitely. Yeah. One of these days we'll have to get like an old rotary phone and record our stories onto some tape-recorded answering machine. Daniel Johnston style. Yeah, yeah. So,

[00:36:52] what's the verdict on Britney's story? Are we going with aliens? If I'm going to be honest, yeah, it's gotta be aliens. Yeah, I mean, the being she described didn't behave like a shadow person and the deer mutilation is exactly like all the other incidents where extraterrestrials are, of course, the suspects. You know, I listened to an old episode of Mysterious Universe where they were talking about Preston Nichols and the Montauk Project and, you know, that whole conspiracy there was kind of a mess,

[00:37:22] but it was pretty creepy and disturbing to hear about at the time. But I didn't know there was so much history to the land out there. Yeah, it's not just Camp Hero and the Montauk Project. There's Native American burial sites. Don't at me, by the way, I'm Native. Shadow figures, weird rituals, you know, all the usual stuff, but it doesn't just go away because a Walmart or some new subdivision gets thrown up, you know? When you said don't at me, I'm Native, I thought of like,

[00:37:53] what was it, Bill Murray's shirt in What About Bob? Don't hassle me, I'm local. I'm local, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I love this podcast though because we get to learn about so much history in these stories. And each other. It's a fun way to get sucked into rabbit holes for sure. It feels like a worthy investment because, you know, it's for work. Yeah, I actually have a DVD of a documentary about the Montauk Project from years ago that I honestly had to turn off because it creeped me out so bad.

[00:38:22] Oh man, you gotta dig that up. Eh, I don't really care to revisit it after reading more about Preston Nichols and his perverted sex-periments surrounding the whole Montauk thing. Fair enough, fair enough. Preston Nichols, that name sounds a little suspicious if you ask me. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that has to be a stage name, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, totally fair though. I'm not too familiar with his whole deal. Yeah, it's readily available if you just Google

[00:38:51] the right keywords, which, you know, might bring something that you don't want, but he's not a cool guy and I just don't buy his story. See, I have to watch it now. It's like the Streisand effect. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I guess we can still watch it. We just have to enter it knowing that it's, you know, he's not right in the head and he's super lame, but that might make it even better, you know, seeing through all his bullshit. It might be funny. Yeah, it just sucks because projects like MKUltra

[00:39:20] were super well documented and obviously real, but it'd be so lame if the theories about the Montauk project were fabricated and used MKUltra as some sort of inspiration, I guess, for some grand conspiracy theory, you know? Exactly. I don't know enough about it, but I do kind of want to dig in. Yeah, the MKUltra stuff could be its own special episode if it weren't already done a thousand times. But what hasn't been by now? Totally fair. Yeah,

[00:39:49] we're running out of stuff. But yeah, Brittany's story seemed really genuine and scary unlike Preston Nichols. I agree. I agree. It was super creepy. Yeah, she actually had a story featured on Let's Not Meet as well. Ooh, what was that one about? Um, so there was a lot of creepy stuff going on around her apartment and one night she overheard a group of people talking outside about her drinking habits and things that she was doing in her daily life which basically confirmed her suspicions

[00:40:18] that she was being watched. Whoa. All along. And yeah, and she would see shadows lingering outside her bedroom window at night. Really creepy stuff. There's a lady on Instagram called Tracked by the Feds I think and it's similar stuff. Yeah, no, it's some like scary gang stalking type of thing but it's, I don't know what I think of it but half the comments are hey, this lady's losing her mind and the other half are very like empowering and hey, we hear you and I don't know

[00:40:48] some of it's a little like yeah, somewhat compelling but what did Brittany do about her situation because the Tracked by the Feds girl she, she moved. She just moved. Well, Brittany moved. Oh, hey, a person of action. Bravo, Brittany, bravo. Definitely. Yeah. But moving on, we should probably talk about Sarah's story before we sign off. Five knocks instead of the usual three. Yeah, that's a new one to me.

[00:41:17] Three just wasn't enough, I guess. Also, she sent a picture of her dog so we had to feature her story. We had to. Dog tax is always welcome to currency. Victoria sent one of Atlas too. Yeah, that's right. She did. They should probably post them in our Discord. I'm just saying we have a dedicated pets channel. Yeah, you heard them. Yeah. So what do you make of the five knocks? What am I, the residential knocking expert? Well, my voice cracked there. Woof.

[00:41:47] Yeah, it's your calling. You're the residential knocking expert. All right. All right. Well, in that case, in my professional opinion, I think the spirit was just being extra. Literally. Yeah. Yeah, literally. Yeah. Knocking ghosts have always creeped me out. Like, if they were to repeat a pattern back to you or something, oh man. Yeah, or what about finishing a pattern? Like, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, then the ghost just goes two bits, like, yeah. Yeah,

[00:42:16] didn't we talk about that? We did talk about that. The Roger Rabbit thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, keep me out of that drum circle. I don't like that. Like, what do you even do with that? A random noise here and there, fine, but five knocks every time? I think, to me, that's something sending a message. Yeah, and the fact that it followed them. I mean, the first apartment, then the house, that's not just bad plumbing. Yeah, yeah, that's some dedication, I would say. And I don't buy a whole lot

[00:42:45] of the whole house settling theories. I mean, you know, an intentional pattern when you hear one, like the three loud bangs, of course, we knew this was going to come up. When I heard those, they were deafening and consecutive, very intentional, but somehow it didn't wake up the neighbors who I shared a bedroom wall with. Ew, that's gross. It really was, especially if you knew them. Oh, God. Yeah, like, the great, actually, you know, they weren't the greatest people. That's what made it so gross. I'm not judging their exterior appearance or anything like that.

[00:43:14] It's just knowing them, knowing people makes, in any way, moving on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like how that guy she was seeing heard it once and then decided to ghost her. Oh, I see what she did there. That was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I have no idea how I came up with that one. Yeah, so clever, so clever. I think what really tied it together for me was how she heard those same five knocks years later on a wall that doesn't connect to anything, as she made a point to mention

[00:43:44] how it didn't connect to anything. Yeah, yeah, you're right, actually. You know, there's one thing when there's an apartment next door but an exterior wall, and I don't remember if she specified what floor her bedroom was on, but either way, there's nothing on the other side of that. Man, nothing living at least. Yeah. Yeah, even if it was on the lower floor, there's, I don't know, I think there's still too much of a coincidence there to be just a coincidence. Yeah, and the fact that it showed up

[00:44:14] when her uncle was just passing. Yeah, yeah. It makes me wonder if this thing was attached to her the whole time or if it was just waiting around for something. I don't know. It's kind of a weird one. Yeah, if it was just attached to her, why did it stop? Like, what made it decide to finally move on? I just don't understand ghosts. Yeah, I don't know. I guess we can assume that her dog scared it off. You know what? I like that theory. Nice, nice.

[00:44:44] Let's go with that one. Yeah. And if we see Zach Bagans walking around with a 45-pound boxer on one of his next ghost hunts, Winnow is a devoted listener. Got the idea from Sarah. I'm sure he is. Yeah. Forget the salt and the sage. Just get a dog, people. Yeah. Yeah, just do it. Well, anyways, thanks everybody for listening. Send your stories in to stories at oddtrails.com to hear them on the show and sign up for our Patreon for ad-free versions of all of our episodes. You can do that at patreon.com forward slash oddtrails. Check out the new episodes

[00:45:14] of my other podcasts, Let's Not Meet, Cryptic Encounters, and the Old Time Radio Cast. See you guys next week. Everybody, stay safe. Peace out. And the ghouls disturbed.