Creepy Encounter, The Lodge, The Hotel, The Drums, The Ride Home, The Storm by They're Not Shadows

[00:00:00] Listener discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Scary Time, the podcast that helps you find new, emerging and undiscovered scary and paranormal podcasts. I'm Greg, the host and curator of Scary Time. Today's episode is from They're Not Shadows.

[00:00:18] They're Not Shadows covers spooky stories of the paranormal, the supernatural and the unexplained. If you liked today's episode, make sure to check out the episode description for links to subscribe. Alright, let's get this show started. Begin.

[00:00:35] We have some good stories today, so I think we'll get straight into it with this creepy encounter. A couple of holidays ago, my roommate and I visited my mum. I know this guy really well and we're great friends.

[00:01:13] We stayed in my room, which has a window that looks into the living room. We did the usual thing, stayed up talking and listening to music. And at about 1.30am, we turned in. I had my two dogs sleeping with us at our feet.

[00:01:37] For some reason, I wasn't able to sleep. I felt weird, but I chalked it up to being awake late and travelling. At around 2am, my oldest dog suddenly sat up, stiffened and stared out the window that looked into the living room. I noticed the body position right away.

[00:02:07] It's what he does when he's frightened or sees someone new, except he wasn't barking like he usually does. He was stiff but shaking and that worried me. My other dog got up and looked through the window too. Her ears went up and she froze, almost like a statue.

[00:02:37] Then my roommate got up and went to the window. Within the dark, I could see his eyes become wider than I'd ever seen before. I asked, What is it? What are you looking at? And he was only able to make a scared mutter.

[00:03:02] I asked again but louder and with more urgency. What is it? He looked at me and said, You don't want to know. Is someone in the house? Do I call 911? It was then that I remembered setting the alarm to the house.

[00:03:23] It has motion sensors and door and window alarms. Then my roommate said something that gave me chills. It's not human. I freaked out and ran to the window and with my eyes shut, I pulled the blinds down. Then I turned the light on.

[00:03:55] I asked him what he saw and he told me there was a pale old man staring through the window at us and he said he looked evil. I asked him to describe this man and he gave me a perfect description of my dead grandfather.

[00:04:22] My roommate had never seen my grandfather and there were no photographs of him around. After about 30 minutes, we decided to open the blinds. There was no one there but we couldn't sleep for the rest of the night.

[00:04:47] I wouldn't say my grandfather was good, but I wouldn't say he was bad either. He made many mistakes in his life and a lot of his goals went unaccomplished. He was good to me but other family members have different stories.

[00:05:10] He died suddenly in his sleep, a day after his own father died. I think if it's not an impersonator spirit, he might not have known he was dead and followed us around. He believed in God but he did not go to church.

[00:05:32] My roommate said, when spirits get stuck on this earth they become confused and angry. This could be the case for my grandfather. When I was 18, I was in a traffic accident. I was hit by another car.

[00:06:21] I spun around and my car ended up side on, on and off ramp facing oncoming traffic. As I was sitting there, I heard a voice in my head very calmly say, Hey kid, when I count down from eight you're going to have exactly eight seconds before

[00:06:43] an 18 wheeler hits you. Do you understand? I didn't have to be told twice. Eight. My car in gear. Seven. And got out of there. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. And the second I did. One. Two. An 18 wheeler truck roared through the exact spot my car had been.

[00:07:17] My friends say it was just imagination or shock or something. But I'm sure I was saved by something not of this world. This next one is titled The Lodge. This happened a few years ago when I was 18.

[00:07:50] I was riding my motorcycle through Oregon and as it was getting late, I was looking for a place to stay. On the side of the road, I saw a sign that read Green Hills Hunting Lodge and decided that was where I'd spend the night.

[00:08:14] I rode up a winding hilly road that seemed to take an hour to climb. But eventually I arrived. Inside, I was greeted by a woman who said, You can choose any room. There's an abundance of vacancy. Strange terminology, I thought, but I didn't think too much of it.

[00:08:52] It was all on the ground level and I chose Room 31. Inside the room was new, but it had been designed to give the appearance of an old log cabin. And even though the bed was incredibly comfortable, something felt off.

[00:09:21] I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was something just odd about the place. I woke up the next morning and straight away, I noticed that the new looking brown wood had become a tired looking gray.

[00:09:43] It wasn't a trick of the light, the wood actually looked older. I got my things together to leave. And when I left my room, the corridor looked different too. I quickly discovered I had to go downstairs to get to the exit.

[00:10:09] I hadn't gone up any stairs to get to my room because there were no stairs. It was all ground level. Anyway, I went downstairs and walked to the front desk to return my key. No one came out.

[00:10:38] I knew I had to get out of there, so I just left the key and made a dash out the door and into the parking lot, which strangely was empty except for my motorcycle. Just before I rode off, I looked back at the lodge

[00:11:01] and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. It was a broken down, dirty old, abandoned three-story building. It looked like it was about to be condemned. I rode off and back down that hill as fast as I could. It haunts me to this day.

[00:11:55] I'm not sure what that was, a time slip or a haunted building like this one. I had just started at a new job, working as a night porter at an 18th century hotel in the northern English countryside.

[00:12:27] Late one night, a woman came down to reception as white as a sheet. She had her suitcase with her and she said she couldn't spend another minute in that room. I inquired why and she said she could hear children laughing all through the night.

[00:12:51] And at one point, she woke to find a little girl standing at the foot of her bed holding a candle. She knew she had locked the door before getting into bed and I knew there were no children staying at the hotel.

[00:13:13] I mentioned it to the manager the following morning. He told me it was a regular occurrence. Before it was a hotel, it was a boarding school for girls. Over a hundred years ago, when I was 18, I dated a girl my parents did not approve of

[00:14:30] and because of this, I ended up moving out and living in my car. Her house was in a very rural area, so I would park my car near a field, walk across it and then through the woods to her house.

[00:14:50] I'd hang out with her for a while, then go back and sleep in my car. This went on for several weeks. I never felt scared traversing the woods or the field at night as my girlfriend's dogs would follow me the whole way and then return home.

[00:15:14] But then came the night when I reached my car and I noticed the dogs had not followed me. I could make out the faint sound of drums in the distance to the north. As I stood by my car listening, the realization hit me.

[00:15:42] Located about a mile or so to the north was a cult that I'd heard about when I was younger. I don't know what they were into exactly, but talk in my school had been of animal sacrifices and other creepy goings on.

[00:16:05] My mind immediately seized upon the source of the drums. It was the cult having some kind of ritual and the sound was carrying through the woods. I got in my car and tried to get some sleep. A few hours later, I awoke to the sound of growling

[00:16:40] and something hitting the underside of my car. I have no clue what it was, maybe dogs or coyotes. But after that, I was much more on edge crossing the woods and the field at night and I heard the drums almost every night after that.

[00:17:11] Then one night as I was getting ready for bed, I looked through the windshield and saw the silhouette of someone standing in the field. I was a little startled and assumed it was my girlfriend's stepfather who'd followed me.

[00:17:34] Thinking the jig was up, I turned on my headlights to light up the field. But when I did, the field was empty. I was so shocked I drove away and spent the night in the parking lot of a country church.

[00:18:05] It wasn't long before I ended the relationship with the girl. About a year later, I began attending a church about 30 miles away. I found out that the youth pastor actually lived about a mile north of where I had those experiences.

[00:18:31] In fact, the pastor lived on the road where the cult was located. I asked her if she ever experienced anything paranormal from the cult. She said the cult had been gone for over a decade. However, she did experience something. When she first moved there,

[00:18:55] she also heard the drums and her young daughters told her they'd seen shadow people running around the trees that encircled their property. She then told me she'd done some research on the history of the area and learned it had been frequented by Native American tribes

[00:19:19] due to a freshwater spring nearby. Some time later, I dated a girl who lived about two miles south of where I had my experience. When I brought up what happened to me there and the youth pastor's explanation of her experiences at her home,

[00:19:43] my girlfriend freaked out. She told me that her mother would sometimes take a bottle of alcohol out into the empty woods late at night only to come back hours later drunk and insisting she'd been dancing with the Indians. We broke up not long after but one night

[00:20:11] she called me. Hello? You have to come over, please. She was terrified and said she was being attacked by an invisible entity that was shoving her around her bedroom. I drove over and she asked me to stay until she fell asleep.

[00:20:45] As I sat while she was in the bed, a shadow form appeared in her room and floated up to the corner of the ceiling. It was emanating darkness like it was somehow glowing black. I started praying, our Lord in heaven please protect us from this evil

[00:21:11] and after a few seconds it vanished. My girlfriend woke up. Something was here. I could feel it. It's been over 20 years since I had those experiences and I'm happy to say I haven't had any since. Time now to welcome our new Patreon supporters, Barry and Kristen.

[00:22:16] Thank you. I appreciate everyone who supports the show and it does make it easier to say no thank you to the people who want to advertise on the show. This next one is titled The Ride Home. This is my friend's story as he's too scared

[00:22:41] to write it down. He was riding home from work late one night on his motorcycle. It was a very cold winter's night with the light rain falling. He was taking a shortcut along a dark road. Ahead of him illuminated only in the motorbike's headlight

[00:23:17] he saw a woman standing on the side of the road. She was waving at him to stop. He slowed down to see if she needed help but when he got close he became afraid for some reason. He didn't know why but she looked wrong so he sped up

[00:23:42] and kept going. About a minute later he felt a tap on his shoulder and almost ran off the road. Why didn't you stop for me? Right in his ear. He was utterly terrified but somehow

[00:24:14] managed to ride the rest of the way home. After that night he became sick and remained mentally disturbed for some months. We have one more story a dark and stormy night story. I'll see you next week. This happened back in the 70s but has stuck with me

[00:25:02] to this day. I was 10 years old and my mum, my dad, my sister and I were living with my grandmother in a 100-year-old farm in upstate New York. My parents and my sister had bedrooms upstairs while my grandmother and I had rooms on the

[00:25:28] ground floor. One night an electrical storm rolled through the Hudson Valley and I was raised from a sound slip. The lightning brightened my room like a strobe light. The thunder rolled and the wind picked up and with the wind came this other sound.

[00:26:06] It made goosebumps race over my body. It was a howling, a wailing that couldn't have come from human lips. No animal I knew could make that sound and the howler seemed to be right outside my window.

[00:26:42] I was terrified. I jumped out of bed and raced to my grandmother's room. She was already sitting up in bed. I climbed in next to her and pulled up the covers. She assured me it was just the wind. I knew it wasn't the wind

[00:27:16] and I knew she knew it wasn't the wind. The howling came around the house. It got closer. It had to be on the front porch right outside grandma's window, just a few feet away from us.

[00:27:50] Grandma put her arm around me and I buried my face in her shoulder. After what seemed like an eternity, the sound began to move away, fading into the distance as the storm hurried its way down the valley

[00:28:31] and somehow I managed to fall asleep. Early the next morning, I woke to sunlight streaming through the window. Grandma was already up. I climbed out of bed and looked out the window. I saw my grandmother outside with a mop

[00:29:01] in a bucket cleaning the porch. I hurried outside and saw what she was cleaning. There were muddy footprints all over the floor, or tiny footprints, the kind that would be made by a toddler with goosebumps again.

[00:29:45] I asked grandma what made the footprints but she didn't answer. She just kept cleaning. Thanks again for listening to Scary Time by Indie Drop-In Network. If you would like to nominate a scary or paranormal podcast to be featured,

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