today we have another special bonus video for you it'll be a collection of five more fan favorite nightmare inducing stories and don't worry if you've heard or seen these before because we have totally re-edited all of them so the viewing experience will be all new but before we get into those stories if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you've come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload once a week so if that's of interest to you please sneak into the like button house and reverse all their toilet paper roles so instead of feeding out from the top they feed out from underneath like a serial killer also please subscribe to our Channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads okay let's get into today's stories [Music] in 2004 Mitch was in his final semester at a college in Louisiana when he met another senior a wonderful young lady named Kayla from the instant he saw her he knew he was in love she played hard to get at first but after several months he won her over after graduation the pair stayed in Louisiana and moved in together while they got their careers off the ground 2 years later the pair got married and almost immediately Kayla got pregnant at the time Mitch's career was really starting to take off which allowed Kayla about to stay at home and take some time off by the time their daughter was born Mitch was making so much money that Kayla decided to just stay home and be a full-time mom a couple years later Kayla got pregnant again and by the time their daughter was 2 years old they had their son Mitch adored his children every morning before he went to work he would sneak into their room and he would watch them sleep and then in the evenings they would have these big family sit down meals and then play games together until bedtime Mitch's life was perfect shortly after his son's birth Mitch was lounging on the couch in his TV room when he noticed out of the corner of his eye the red lamp in the corner of the room it just looked funny it was almost like the light itself was blurry but when he looked a little bit closer at it the entire lamp looked blurry and so Mitch looked around the room and nothing else was blurry he rubbed his eyes and looked back over at this lamp and it was still blurry he turned the TV off and walked over to the lamp and even though he was right in front of it the lamp was still blurry and Mitch didn't have bad eyesight and so he's thinking is there something wrong with me am I having a stroke do I have an aneurysm is there some sort of illness here that's making me see this lamp blurry when it's really not but Mitch told himself he was healthy and that whatever this was it was an anomaly and nothing to worry about and so he went back over to the couch turned the TV back on and tried to ignore the lamp but as he was watching TV out of his peripheral vision he couldn't help but notice this weird blurry lamp and so finally he turned the TV off again and he turned to look at this lamp and now in addition to being blurry it appeared to be upside down now Mitch was genuinely concerned that there was something wrong with him because again nothing else in the entire room was blurry or upside down it was just this lamp and so a few minutes later his wife and his kids came home and Mitch decided he would not tell them about this lamp he didn't want to alarm them he figures he will get to the bottom of this blurry lamp and then he will tell his wife and kids and so that night the family has a sit down meal and then afterwards they play some games together and then everybody goes upstairs and goes to sleep but after everyone had gone to sleep Mitch was just laying in bed thinking about this lamp and so finally he snuck out of his bed and went downstairs to the TV room and he sat on the couch and he just stared at this lamp and for hours and hours he just fixated himself on this lamp watching it kind of morph around and turn upside down and get blurrier and blurrier by the second the next day Kayla found Mitch lying on the couch passed out and she asked him if he was okay and again Mitch didn't tell her about this lamp that was was still blurry he just told her that he wasn't feeling well and he was not going to go to work that day but Mitch didn't go to work for three more days he just sat on the couch and stared at this lamp and Kayla obviously picked up on this strange behavior and kept poking and prodding to get more information about what was going on but Mitch never told her the truth about this lamp he just kept telling her he felt sick she urged him to go see a doctor but Mitch told her it would be fine he'd get better and then over time as this lamp continued to morph and get bigger and get stranger and stranger Mitch suddenly was unable to respond to his wife he became totally unresponsive and so obviously his wife became desperate and called the doctor and as she's on the phone with the doctor trying to get advice about what to do Mitch realizes the lamp is now growing in Leaps and Bounds and before long the lamp is the entire size of the room and all he can see is the red color of this lamp and then Mitch starts to hear these voices these screams coming from somewhere in the distance and then he feels this blinding pain in his head and then he opens his eyes and he looks up and he sees he's laying on the sidewalk next to one of the buildings at his college in Louisiana and surrounding him is this crowd of people with wide eyes that are staring at him Mitch had no idea what was going on and so he naturally just began scanning the crowd looking for Kayla and his kids to try to figure out you know how he got here but before he could ask any questions and before he could find his wife and kids a police officer ran through the crowd picked him up and ran him over to his police car put him in the back and then began driving away and so while Mitch is in the back of this police car he turns to the officer and he says what's going on and the officer would tell him he was attacked by a huge college football player he got hit in the head and he fell backwards and he hit his head again and he fell unconscious Mitch asked the officer where his wife and kids were and the cop said he had no idea and that's when it clicked for Mitch the lamp wasn't real neither was his wife neither was his daughter neither was his son neither was his life for the past 10 years it was all a hallucination while he was unconscious after getting attacked Mitch was brought to the hospital where he would make a full physical recovery but after being released he was horribly depressed and he had to get intense therapy to basically grieve for the loss of his family that never existed these days Mitch says he can barely remember what his family even looked like but periodically in his dreams he will catch a glimpse of his son in his peripheral vision and his son is perpetually 5 years old and he's trying to talk to his father but Mitch can never understand what he [Music] says in 2006 a 20-year-old woman named Sarah started having some very strange dreams about a woman named Aurora she had a very striking face with sharp features and long black hair now her dreams varied sometimes Sarah was in a crowd of people or she was at her office or she was just alone in a room but in all of her dreams Aurora would always show up either she would interact with Aurora and they would speak but Sarah could never remember what they actually spoke about or Aurora would just be in the crowd or in the background just watching Sarah now she had these dreams enough that eventually Sarah began to think I'm must know someone named Aurora I must have come across this person and now they're just kind of manifesting in my brain at night when I'm sleeping and so she began going through her older posts on social media to look in pictures of her and of her friends to see if there was a woman with striking features and long black hair that was this Aurora person in Her Dream but after looking through hundreds and hundreds of pictures she couldn't find any indication that she had met this person at least not according to her social media and so Sarah began just going on Google and typing in Aurora long black hair striking features has anybody dreamed about this to see if there were people talking about having this type of dream on the internet but she had no luck eventually after about three or four months of having these strange dreams that Aurora was in Aurora stopped showing up in Sarah's dreams it was like it suddenly was all over and so very quickly Sarah just kind of forgot about it a few years later on Halloween night 2009 Sarah and a friend pulled off the highway into a gas station they had been out with some friends celebrating Halloween and now they were making their way back home Sarah pulled in to an empty spot right in front of the convenience store and after they were parked Sarah and her friend got out they went inside they got some snacks and drinks and then they came back outside and climbed back into Sarah's car a few moments later Sarah had turned her car on she had backed out and she had driven past all of the gas station pumps and she was making making her way towards the single Lane strip of road that merged out onto the highway it was how anybody who got into this gas station got back out onto the highway and so as she's getting closer to the entrance of this short merge Road her phone suddenly Rings what happens next occurred over a span of just a few seconds so it might seem like this is over several minutes but this all happened pretty much simultaneously so she's pulling up to the entrance of this merge Road her cell phone rings and because because there was no one behind her it was not a busy night Sarah decides to just stop her car put it in park so she can safely take this phone call and so she stops her car pretty much right in front of the entrance to this merge Road and she picks up her phone she looks at the number and she doesn't recognize it but she picks it up anyways and she says hello there was silence on her phone and as Sarah is saying hello is anybody there another car from the gas station pulls up right behind Sarah's car and they start honking their horn immediately they are in a huge rush and so Sarah who's totally embarrassed that she's blocking traffic she hangs at the phone she puts it down she puts her car back and drive and she hits the gas but this driver behind her is apparently in such a rush they're so impatient that they actually swerved around her driving on the dirt off to the side of the road just to get around her and then they sped off down the merge road back onto the highway and literally seconds later another car that was already on the highway a silver Honda Civic lost control and smashed into this car that had just passed Sarah's car so there's this huge car accident literally right in front of Sarah and her friend who have now stopped the car they're right at the end of the merge Road looking at this horrible accident that they narrowly escaped Sarah put her car back in park she picked up her phone and she called the police when the police showed up a few moments later they took down Sarah and her friends version of events and then a little while later after the ambulances had left and after the two cars had been pulled off of the highway one of the police officers pulled Sarah aside and told her that the driver of the Honda Civic and the driver of the car that had swerved around her had both been killed in the accident shocked the only thing Sarah could think to do was to call back that number she didn't recognize that had effectively stopped her from getting onto the highway and maybe even stopped her from being hit by that Honda Civic and so she wanted to talk to the person and thank them for saving her life but when she called the number back the person did not pick up however it went to her voicemail and it said hi you've reached Aurora leave your name and number after the beep Sarah could not believe it she said she had never felt Goosebumps like that in her entire life the next day Sarah tried calling the number again and this time the woman Aurora answered the phone the two got to talking and Sarah explained her crazy dreams and now this crazy car crash thing and how it's all connected and Aurora would tell Sarah like that's amazing this is a crazy story you're telling me except I didn't call you last night I have no idea how you got my phone number and so at the end of this phone call the two women really had not reached any sort of explanation for how this came to be how they came to be talking but they ultimately just said okay hey you know thanks and uh best of luck to you and then they hung up after the call was over Sarah found herself just kind of sitting there not really sure how to react to What had just happened it was such a totally bizarre thing that she had just been through over the past 24 hours and then if you include the dream this has been a multi-year long thing and so on a whim Sarah just opens up her Facebook account and she plugs in Aurora's full name because Aurora had given her her full name on this phone call they had just had and when she looked at her phone when the results came in Sarah nearly fainted right at the top of the results page was this woman Aurora's Facebook account and her profile picture showed her face and when Sarah looked at her face it was the exact same face she had seen so many times in her dreams it was the same Aurora with the Striking features and long black hair the woman in her dreams was the woman who called her and saved her life [Music] in 2006 73-year-old Sherman seore was the definition of a man's man he had spent the bulk of his adult life doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world mining for coal in West Virginia and while he was a coal miner he apparently had lost track of the amount of times he had nearly been killed from M shaft collapse and gas leaks later on in life after his kids had all grown up he had retired from coal mining and become an ordained Baptist Minister and despite his harrowing backstory and Burly intimidating appearance he was known to be incredibly gentle and very calming to his parishioners he was also known to be an incredibly devoted grandfather to the point where if there was a chance to spend time with his grandkids he would basically throw all of his responsibilities out the window to do that but in January of that year something changed in Sherman he went from being this pillar in the community to being a deranged paranoid lunatic it all started on the afternoon of January 19th Sherman and his wife Ruby were sitting in their home alone on the couch just kind of doing their own things when suddenly out of the blue Sherman just starts screaming as if he sees something in front of him that's terrifying him and his scream startled Ruby so that she started screaming and so she looks at her husband and he's still just looking straight out ahead he's terrified of something in front of him and so Ruby looks from him to where he's looking and there's nothing there and so she turns back to her husband and she's like what's going on what are you screaming for what are you so scared of but Sherman wasn't able to speak after he stopped screaming he just continued to look straight out as if whatever had terrified him had him in this trance where he couldn't look away and so his eyes are wide his mouth is open his face is going white he's starting to sweat and Ruby's starting to panic she has no idea what's happening with him and So eventually she just holds on to him and says come back to me come back to me and German at some point would he kind of broke out of his trance and he looked at his wife and he just says you can't leave me or they'll kill me Ruby has never seen Behavior like this in her husband ever this is a completely different person she's interacting with and so she has no idea what to do and so instead she just kind of holds on to Sherman and prays that he doesn't start acting like that again but that didn't happen all day long periodically he would just start screaming about something that Ruby couldn't see now Ruby did consider calling 911 and getting Medics out there but his behavior was so unusual and he was normally such a rock who was so competent who was so healthy that she didn't want to she felt like he would just kind of get through this that if they can just get through today and get into tomorrow that he would be better and so she just all day was comforting him and just dealing with these episodes and then finally they got into bed that night and Ruby's thinking thank goodness we're going to wake up tomorrow and things will be better but when she woke up the next morning it was very obvious Sherman had not slept at all he was looking straight up at the ceiling he looked worse than the day before it was obvious that he was not back to normal and so Ruby called the rest of the family and had them come over to figure out what they were going to do but when Sherman found out his family was coming to his house he told Ruby they can't come inside he was afraid they and others were conspiring to bury him alive the only person he could be around was Ruby and his whole family had no idea what to do little did they know there was actually a very specific reason he was acting the way he was a few months before January 19th which was the day Sherman turned into this different person a few months earlier he began complaining of severe abdominal pains and so he and his wife Ruby and his daughter they went to the hospital and the doctor after examining him and running some tests determined that most likely his pain was coming from his gallbladder but the only way to be sure would be to do some exploratory surgery and literally look inside of sh 's gut and look at his gallbladder and see if that was the problem and so the doctor asked Sherman you know are you prepared to do an exploratory surgery or would you like to just kind of wait it out and see what happens with this pain and so Sherman talked it over with his wife and his family and they made the decision that the pain was just too much and so they would go forward with the surgery and so on the morning of January 19th so again this is the day that Sherman basically loses his mind he goes into the hospital completely normal he goes in with his wife he goes in with his daughter and he makes his way over to the surgery wing of the hospital he says bye to his family and he's put on a stretcher bed and he's wheeled in and prepped for surgery and then brought into the operating room and while he was in the operating room laying on his stretcher bed flat on his back looking straight up at all these bright lights above him he just struck up some chitchat with the nurses and doctors who were in the room prepping the room for surgery and they were also putting the IV into his arm then at some point one of the nurses lowered the oxygen mask onto Sherman's face so the anesthesiologist could administer the two drug cocktail that would knock him out for the surgery Sherman was scheduled to get something known as general anesthesia for this operation where basically he would be completely out he wouldn't feel anything they'd do the surgery and then he would wake up in recovery and so once this mask was on Sherman's face the anesthesiologist began pumping him full of the drugs that would make him be knocked out for the surgery however the anesthesiologist only administered one of the two drugs necessary for general anesthesia he administered the paralyzing drug but he did not administer the actual anesthetic that would knock him out and most importantly would get rid of all of his pain and so as this mask is on his face and Sherman believes he's being given the proper dosage of drugs the nurse who was nearby told Sherman to go ahead and start counting backwards in his head from 10 knowing full well that Sherman would pass out before he reached zero and Sherman knew this too he had been in surgery before and so he happily began counting in his head 10 9 8 he started to feel something 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 boom he was out except he wasn't when he reached zero in his head counting down he realized he had not passed out he began taking mental stock of what was going on and he realized he could completely feel his body but when he tried to move his body he couldn't he was completely paralyzed when he tried to make a sound he couldn't because his vocal cords were also paralyzed the only thing he could move were his eyes he could move them left and right however they had taped his eyes shut so he can't see anything and so Sherman is thinking to himself okay you know I've been given the drugs maybe they're slow acting any minute now I'm going to drift off to sleep and this will just be a distant memory but after a few seconds he's hearing the doctors and nurses in the room he can't see them but he hears them they seem to be moving towards doing this operation and he's still awake and so Sherman becomes frantic and starts flicking his eyes left and right as fast as he possibly can and the rapid eye movement loosened the tape on both of his eyelids and it created a tiny slit that he could actually look through and what he saw terrified him the surgeon was walking over next to him he was getting his gloves on and then the surgeon says scalpel and the nurse hands him this chrome metallic blade and the surgeon takes the blade and begins cutting into Sherman's midsection Sherman felt everything but Sherman couldn't do anything about it all he could do was rapidly flick his eyes left and right right in hopes one of them would see that he was awake that he was feeling this but no one was paying attention to his face so they didn't see his eyes moving around and so the surgeon continued to cut into his midsection until he had cut out a fairly significantly sized hole at which point the surgeon hands the scalpel to the nurse and says clamps at which point the nurse hands him what looks like a torture device and the surgeon proceeds to use these clamps to pin segments of Sherman's skin that has just been cut open to his body to basically keep the hole open and then the surgeon began tugging on the outsides of this hole in Sherman's midsection making sure it was big enough that he could actually get a good look into his body and every little tug is sending lightning bolts of pain into Sherman's body but again all he can do is flick his eyes left and right and no one's paying attention scope the surgeon called out for and the nurse handed him a camera that he jammed into Sherman's gut and then the surgeon said suction and the nurse got what looked like a vacuum and pressed it inside of this open wound and began sucking out fluids from his body the pain Sherman was experiencing is unimaginable every second felt like an eternity forceps the surgeon called and the nurse handed him these metal prongs that he put inside of this hole in Sherman's body and he used them to dislodge his gallbladder so he could get a better look at it by this point Sherman wanted to die he was no longer flicking his eyes left and right he was just looking straight out hoping someone would finally see him and someone did one of the nurses standing next to the surgeon looked up at Sherman's face and saw Sherman looking back terrified at the nurse at which point the nurse yelled out stop he's awake he's awake and the surgeon practically faints and he looks over at the anesthesiologist and he calls him get over here and fix this and so the anesthesiologist comes running over from the side of the room he gets up next to Sherman and begins pumping him full of painkillers and as he's doing this he has this moment of Clarity he remembers he didn't give him the anesthetic and so as these new painkillers that have just been introduced begin to take their effect Sherman's eyes go from being terrified to glazed over and he does pass off to sleep and so now he's out and he can't feel anything but now the anesthesiologist and the medical team realize they have a very big problem this patient just experienced 16 minutes of surgery and felt all of it and at the end of it when he wakes up he's going to remember it and he's probably going to file a lawsuit against the hospital and so a decision was made it's unclear if the anesthesiologist acted alone or if the entire team was in on this but regardless the anesthesiologist administered an additional drug after giving all these painkillers this additional drug was called midazolam but it's better known as the Amnesia drug and like its nickname implies anyone who gets it will forget what has just happened to them and so the idea was by giving him this Amnesia drug he won't remember the trauma he had suffered through during the surgery and so wouldn't file a lawsuit and so after he was given this drug the medical team they went back to doing the surgery they completed it they got him back out to recovery and then when Sherman woke up in recovery he did not remember what had happened to him inside of the operating room at least not consciously those horrible 16 minutes had been implanted on Sherman's subconscious basically his body recognized that he had experienced extreme trauma however the Amnesia drug wiped away the memory of how he received that trauma so there's this big disconnect in his memory and so when Sherman came too in the recovery room he immediately sensed something was horribly horribly wrong he was scared he was anxious he had this incredible sense of dread but he had no memory to tie these feelings to and so as Sherman is sitting in recovery he must have tried to kind of hide the way he was feeling because he didn't even remotely understand it he had been completely happy and normal going into the surgery and now a couple of hours later he's a complete mess and so he leaves the hospital that day on January 19th he goes back to his house and he sits on the couch with his wife and as he's sitting there suddenly these horrible feelings he's having they become too much and he basically has a panic attack and he starts screaming out and he's terrified of something but he doesn't know what it is and then over the next couple of days he began having these flashbacks where he would access the actual 16 minutes of torture he went through but when he would see someone cutting into him and opening his chest up and sucking things out of it he didn't think that happened to me and that's why I feel this way instead he thought it was just this horrible nightmare that he couldn't escape from and so his family did eventually start getting doctors and psychologists and all these people involved to figure out what was wrong with him but before they could figure it out the whole situation had just become too terrible for Sherman and so on February 2nd just two weeks after he came out of that surgery he would take his own life his family was unbelievably heartbroken it didn't seem real that this had happened and so they would continue to dig and dig and figure out what went wrong and they would finally get their hands on the medical report from the gallbladder exploratory surgery on January 19th and after giving it to another doctor to look over this doctor discovered that Sherman had in fact experienced 16 15 minutes of something known as anesthesia awareness where you are awake or feel a portion of your surgery and shockingly this happens to 20,000 people a year however Sherman's case forgetting the Amnesia drug just literally what he went through 16 full minutes of this really intensive surgery that he felt that is an absolute Rarity that does not happen very often Sherman's family would go on to sue the hospital and they would be awarded an undisclosed amount of money from the hospital in [Music] 2008 in October of 2005 a 21-year-old named Nathan was back home in El Grove California visiting his mother at her apartment for a couple of days her apartment was part of this really safe complex it was gated there's lots of lights and cameras so anything that went bump in the night was just going to be you know your noisy neighbors or something on the last night of Nathan's stay he was laying in his bed in the guest room listening to the hum of the Street Lamp that was outside and the Crickets and the the passing by of cars when he drifted off to sleep at about 2: a.m. Nathan woke up or so he thought he couldn't move his body he could only move his eyes and even though he had never experienced sleep paralysis before he instinctively understood this is probably that he noticed the room was completely silent there was no more crickets no more hum of the light outside no more traffic just total silence and then he started flashing his eyes around the room cuz he couldn't move his head or his body and he started taking stock of the room the bed he was in was positioned as far away from the door as he could in the back right corner from where he was laying if he looked to his right in that corner was this big armoa and then moving left from the armoa as he scanned the room you'd come to the door which is on the opposite side of where his bed was and then if he kept scanning left he would reach the foot of his bed and just beyond the foot of his bed was a table and a chair but because he was laying flat he he couldn't really look down and actually see the table and chair and so with all of his strength he managed to raise his head just enough that he had a line of sight to that section of his room the only section he has not looked at yet and he sees the table and chair and he sees in the corner is this dark figure that's standing there looking at him he's completely Frozen with fear his thought is there's an intruder in the house how did they get in here what are they doing in here and he managed to keep his head up just long enough to get a decent look at this dark figure and he determined it was most likely a woman with a Shaw covering her face and before his head fell back to the pillow he saw her suddenly Crouch down on the ground out of view and then Nathan's head fell back and now he knows there's just some stranger in his room and he can't lift his head up anymore and he's looking around with his eyes he sees the aroa he sees the door he can't see that table and chair and then he hears the sound of someone slithering along the ground out of view and he can hear her breathing as she's getting closer and closer to the edge of the bed and he's laying there terrified he's so scared can't even make a sound and he's telling himself this has to be a dream wake up wake up wake up and he's laying there and this woman she stands up and she leans out over his bed and she looks at him and her face is pale and her eyes are sunk way back in her head then she begins to slowly crawl on top of him and Nathan's sitting here looking at this woman he wants to close his eyes but he can't and he just feels his chest being pressed down he can hear the sounds of the Springs compressing all around him as this woman positions herself on his chest and then he finally manages to let out a scream and then suddenly he's awake the woman's gone and he sits up and he's looking around there's nobody in his room The Familiar hum of the light and the Crickets and the traffic outside they all return and his mom comes running in the room and she's like hey are you okay I heard screaming in here he said oh no I I had a I had a bad dream I'm fine now I had a terrible dream but I'm fine now and his mom's like okay uh all right you need anything and he's like nope so she comes over she gives him a hug and a kiss she goes back to bed and he would go downstairs flip on a Disney movie actually Aladdin and he would fall asleep with a Disney movie on and with lights on and there was no more sleep paralysis that night the next day Nathan got up and he headed back to his house and he really he couldn't shake the experience he had never had sleep paralysis before but it was just so much more terrifying than he ever would have imagined and he's just thinking to himself I can't believe there are people that put up with this on any sort of regular basis but you know after a couple of days and getting home and not experiencing any sleep paralysis you know time went on and he just kind of forgot about it a few months later in March of 2006 Nathan is at this big family party in Chico California big outdoor barbecue all of his family's there and at some point his sister shows up his sister was not supposed to be attending this party so it was a it was a great surprise he hasn't seen her in a while and he immediately pulls her aside to catch up with her and so for the first hour of their conversation they're just chatting about their lives and what they're up to towards the end of their conversation Nathan suddenly felt compelled to share his sleep paralysis experience with his sister and the reason he wanted to was because he knew that she knew that he was actually a skeptic and so she would believe him if he's telling her this is what happened she would believe that that's what he saw and so he starts by saying you know I had the weirdest experience at Mom's apartment just a couple of months ago I'm pretty sure it was sleep paralysis and his sister immediately butts in and she goes wait a minute I had sleep paralysis for the first time in my life Life 2 weeks ago at Mom's apartment it was horrible I was in the guest room and then I saw this this woman and she was like standing on me I thought I was going to die it was horrible that's exactly what happened to me I was laying in the guest room and I couldn't move and then I saw a woman in the corner and she she stood on my chest they proceeded to go over all the details of each of their stories and they discovered that they had had almost the exact same experience and at the end of it they wanted to have a rational explanation for how they both could just somehow have their only sleep paralysis experience in the same room in roughly the same timeline and experience the exact same events they were trying to you know come up with a with a rational explanation for that but it was just too much of a coincidence But ultimately neither of them were really prepared to start discussing what else it could be so they decided to just kind of laugh it off and say man that's pretty weird and they moved on after the party was over Nathan would go back to his house and he would tell his wife about this crazy coincidence he and his sister had had and his wife would say yeah that that's wild but after that Nathan just did not want to think about it or talk about it and so he kind of just you know pushed it out of his mental space and did forget about it he moved on 5 months later in August of 2006 Nathan's mom would move out of that apartment building and she would move into a two-story house still in elg Grove California shortly after she moved in she asked Nathan if he would come spend a couple nights with her and Nathan said sure in order to better understand what happens to Nathan over the course of his stay at his mother's new house you need to understand a basic layout of her house so when you walk through her double doors to your left is going to be a formal living room in the center of the house is a hallway that shoots straight back to the kitchen and then to your right right when you walk in there's a wall and on that wall is the stairs leading up to the second floor if you take those stairs to the second floor you reach a landing where there's a window that looks back into the backyard and immediately to your right there is a single door and that's the master bedroom where Nathan's mom would sleep from The Landing if you turned left there' be another door that's a mirror image of the master bedroom door and this door is the guest room that's where Nathan was going to stay and then to the left of the guest room was a hall that went to the front of the house but that's irrelevant to the story if you went inside the guest room the bed was located in the back right corner so the same layout as the guest room in the apartment building where the person laying in the bed so Nathan his feet would be closest to the door and from Nathan's perspective in the bed the only other piece of furniture in this new new house guest room was a table that was from his perspective on the right hand wall centered on the wall and on the table was a TV so that's the only things in the room the first night Nathan was at this new house was totally uneventful the second night not so much he was up in the guest room laying on the bed watching TV the lights are off it's just the TV on and at some point he dozes off he wakes up a short time later and he can't move it's the same sensation he had when he was staying with his mom at her apartment and he begins to panic because the last time he felt this way a strange veiled woman stood on his chest and made it feel like he was dying and so immediately he's trying to move his body he can't and so using his eyes he starts looking around the room praying this woman is not in the room with him and so he looks to the right to that corner which he can see there's no one there from this corner he starts scanning across the room he sees the TV it's still on he keeps scanning and he sees the door and it's open and he's able to just barely make out the space at the foot of the bed he can actually see to the corner and this woman she's not in here and so initially he feels incredibly relieved that she's not in the room with him but then he finds himself focusing on the open door into the dark hallway and he's thinking to himself please please do not come walking through that door and so he stares at the open door just hoping he breaks out of the sleep paralysis when he notices something about the TV it's flickering and so he averts his gaze to the TV and he realizes what he's looking at on TV does not look familiar it does not look looked like a a TV show it looks like CCTV camera footage like it looks like a security camera footage and he realizes the footage he's looking at is the inside of his mother's kitchen downstairs he recognized the way it was laid out that's his mother's house that's downstairs and he's staring at the footage thinking why is this footage playing on the TV and I don't think there's a camera down there when he notices on the camera the woman with the veil walks into the middle of the frame and she looks up at the camera right as the camera turns off and then the room is completely dark there's no more ambient light in the room the hallway is dark and he's left paralyzed knowing this woman is downstairs in the kitchen and as he's laying there he hears her start running through the house and it sounds like an animal is barreling into things as she's running through the bottom floor and she stops at the foot of the stairs and he's thinking to himself I know where she's going she's coming up to my room and so as he's laying there he feels his heart racing and he's staring at the open door he knows she's going to flying up those stairs and she's going to come through that door and instead of running up the stairs he hears her take one step two step and as she's making her way up the stairs he's just thinking please break out of this trance stop this paralysis wake up wake up and then he sees her head emerge and she turns to look at him from the stairs into the room and once she sees it's him she bolts around and starts charging into the room on all fours like an animal at this point Nathan lets out a primal scream he is scared for his life as this woman is charging towards him and she stops dead in her tracks right in the middle of the room she looks at him turns around and crashes out of the room charges downstairs and then it's silent as soon as she was downstairs Nathan could sit up except it did not feel like the first time he had sleep paralysis at his mom's apartment when he sat up and he had the sensation of of relief you've woken up you were asleep before now you're awake this time it was like he was always awake but now he can sit up he did not have a sense of relief in fact he was worried she was still in the house and as he's sitting up in bed his mother comes running into the room she looks disheveled she's half asleep and she's like was that was that you were you running around the house I could have sworn I heard someone running around the house was that you Nathan's looking at her and he can't even process what he's been through whether that was real whether it was a dream and he's trying to find the words to describe to his mom the dream he had but like he just he can't he can't process what's happening and he just says Mom we have to check the house we have to make sure no one's in the house and so the two of them flip on every light upstairs they're not even talking they're at this point it's survival mode they turn on all the lights upstairs and Nathan leads the way down they're flicking on all the lights and they manag to search the whole house and there's no sign of a Breakin there's no one in their house after the coast was clear and they felt like they were not in immediate danger they went into the kitchen to kind of talk about what just happened and so Nathan's like okay Mom I I just got to tell you everything that I'm thinking right now I I can't really process what just happened I think it was a bad dream but I'm starting to think that it could be something else or I'm just losing my mind so a few months ago I was sleeping in your guest room in your apartment and I had an experience that I'm almost positive was sleep paralysis you know I I was laying there I couldn't move and this figure was in the room and they were standing on me it was terrifying but it it sounded an awful lot like sleep paralysis but then I a couple months after that I talked to my sister and I told her about it and she told me that very recently right before you moved into this house actually she was in that room and she also had basically the exact same experience she had never had sleep paralysis before I had never had sleep paralysis before so we've basically had the exact same horrifying experience in the same room around the same time and then just now tonight I had another sleep paralysis experience with the same woman who was running around the house and you just said you heard her running around the house his mom looked really concerned but she wasn't shocked she says to Nathan I have seen this woman I saw her in my apartment way long time ago but I remember what you're describing that's the experience I had this woman you know showed up in the room and she stood on me and and I it scared the heck out of me but I I didn't tell anyone because I thought it was sleep paralysis and so Nathan and his mom proceeded to spend the next several hours just talking through what this could be how could they all all three of them you know him his mom and his sister how could all of them have had the exact same experience and how could tonight when Nathan had this experience how could his mom have heard those footsteps if that was indeed sleep paralysis because it wasn't Nathan he was in the bedroom and it wasn't his mom she was in her bedroom and she didn't have any pets so who could it be Nathan says he and his family are still totally rattled by this experience and they don't have an answer and this is a family of Skeptics so they're not looking for a reason to call this paranormal they simply don't have the answers Nathan has said that he his mom and his sister have not had any further experiences with the woman in black ever since that last experience Nathan had and they're just hoping it stays that way hold on we got one more very special story to cap off these five stories it is special because this story is going to be included in our brand new graphic novel coming out October 1st and I actually told this story live recently on a YouTube live stream and so if you missed that live telling don't worry because we pulled that story out of the live stream we completely edited it and now you all get to listen to it right here right now [Music] enjoy in July of 2012 there was a woman named Simone who was 22 years old who was living in this beautiful town in southwest Western Germany called rudham amrin and it's this wine making Village and it's it's it's gorgeous there's there's Rolling Green Hills there's Vineyards as far as the eye can see um it's situated right on the Ry River it's like this wonderful place and Simone had grown up in this Village that's where she lived and she loved it there Charmed childhood you know she's 22 now but this summer she was feeling a little a little bit down because she was actually getting ready to leave this Village and start the next chapter of life in New York City uh but instead of dwelling on you know this you know sadness of of moving away from home for the first time she instead was really fixated on what she was going to do that summer her final summer in rudish sham rine and so uh Simone one of one of her favorite memories of her entire life in this Village is in the Summer she would go to the summer camp there was this beautiful little camp in this Forest that was not far from the town and and from the time she was a little kid she went as an attendee to this Camp you know there's all these counselors and there's 200 kids that go to it and they play games and there's you know they put on stage plays and it's just this wonderful wholesome camping experience and uh when she became a teenager she basically was too old to go to this camp and so she did what many of the other former attendees did which is they eventually transitioned to becoming a counselor like a volunteer counselor and so she became a counselor and you know loved it frankly more than being an attendee and for every summer after that she was a a volunteer counselor and and this summer July of 2012 um you know was no different and she was going to be a counselor as well so that was what she was going to do with her final summer before leaving for New York City so in mid July of that year Simone packs up her stuff and she heads off to this Forest to go be a camp counselor and so the logistics of the of this Camp is the attendees the children uh it's a two-e long Camp 200 kids they would get dropped off by their parents in the morning and then in the evening they'd get picked up and go back home but for the counselors they would actually live at the campsite for the two weeks it was like a two week time they were out in the woods together and you know the counselors had kind of created that that tradition if you will uh and they they told you know the staff if you will that uh the reason they were doing that is for efficiency's sake you know we got to you know we'll be there first thing in the morning cuz we're living there and we can set the camp up and you know when the kids go home for the day we're all going to be there anyways so it's easier to clean up the camp you know there's all these reasons they had for it but the truth was the reason the counselors like to stay at this camp and live there is because after the kids would go home at night all the counselors would Retreat to their tents which they stayed in for these two weeks they put these tents out in the forest so the camp is like in a clearing and then basically just into the tree line they would set up their tents and the counselors would would live out there for the two weeks but once the kids were gone they would just go out to their little campsite and put a little campfire together and the drinking age was 16 years old or it is 16 years old in Germany and so they just like party basically not like not like crazy but they had like a good time out in the woods um so that was the real allore of the the the counselor side of of being at this Camp so Simone uh mid mid July she heads out to the camp she gets there a day ahead of when Camp starts and she connects with all of the the counselors she hadn't seen for so long and they set up the camp and then that night they did not go out into the woods and have a party they just set up their tents out in the tree line and then the next day is day one of the actual camp and the kids come along they get dropped off by their their parents and they have this wonderful first day of camp you know doing the doing their thing doing Camp stuff and then in the evening after the kids all left Simone and the other you know dozen or so counselors after doing all their chice to wrap up for the day they excitedly grabbed you know their beer and wine and rushed out to the tents uh in the forest to have their first kind of like party night and so they get out to the to the tents and they're all you know having a good time swapping stories you know just enjoying summer and in virtue of it being the first day uh you know a lot of the counselors were pretty exhausted you know it was a full effort that first day and so no one was really up for staying up super late they wanted to crash and just go to bed uh Simone kind of wanted to stay awake and so she was one of the last people to finally retire into into her tent um but she did eventually you know it's well past midnight you know you got to picture where this is happening too they're far enough away from the actual Campground they're like well into the tree line that there's no light Beyond whatever they have on them so you know if you sleep in these Woods it's like Darkness right so it's well past midnight Simone finally is like one of the last people to climb into her tent and they all slept on these CS that they would put inside of their tent so they're elevated off the ground and so Simone gets into her tent and she gets on her cot and um it's just so hot it was just really hot this time of the year and she just felt like it was stifling in her tent and so she decided she would pull her cot out of her tent and just basically set it just in the woods like imagine if you wandered off into the woods with a cot put it down and lied on top of it that's what she was doing she's in the middle of the forest completely exposed and she's going to try to sleep it's a little bit cooler out there she wasn't the only one doing this some of the other counselors had also struggled to fall asleep because of the heat so there was at least a few other people that had had had their CS outside of their tent and so Simone she puts her cot next to or near another counselor who's already asleep Simone gets in her cot you know and she's she's trying to fall asleep but she's still struggling to fall asleep you know it's she could only really hear the sounds of the other counselors that were kind of snoring and you know sleeping away uh but she couldn't sleep and she had this growing sense of dread as she was laying again in total dark darkness in the woods exposed in this cot I can imagine it being a little bit stressful but eventually she falls asleep I'm going to show you an image that we were going to prep and put on the screen but I'm going to show you literally in the book once she falls asleep Simone is thrust into a visceral nightmare one that she she remembered every detail of this nightmare so in Her Dream okay she she comes to in her dream and she looks out and she sees this postapocalyptic Skyline it it's like a desert city with all these buildings that have now basically fallen into disrepair they're they're crumbling over it looks like you know a nuclear bomb has gone off and we're in the nuclear Holocaust and like you know humanity is being wiped out and so she's looking off into the distance and she sees this skyline of just broken down buildings and it's just you know sand everywhere where in between her and these buildings so in the foreground are all these people that are just standing there shoulder to shoulder maybe like a couple hundred feet away from her their their clothes are are in tatters you know they look like some of them are are naked but they're just like barely wearing any of these clothes and they're standing there shoulder-to-shoulder just staring at uh Simone it's hard to to detail this and hold this but there you go that's the visual for the the skyline and so they're all uh they're all staring in at Simone and so she she she instinctively is is fearful of these people but they're not moving towards her they're not doing anything they're just kind of standing there like zombies and so she's kind of taking stock of the scene and she didn't know why it was scary but it was you know she's like this is a nightmare right as she's looking at these people and as she's taking in the skyline she takes stock of the fact that on either side of her are these two huge men that she doesn't know how or they're not physically laying hands on her but she can tell they are the reason that she can't move from the spot she's in she's kind of rooted to the spot the guy on her left is not doing anything he's just standing there but the guy on her right is kind of turned to the side like he's doing something with his hands but you can't quite see what it is and so you know Simone she's kind of looking over as best as she can at this guy trying to figure out what he's doing she's seeing these people and this this horrible Skyline and then at some point the guy on her right turns back around and in his hand he's holding what looks like a wreath like a holiday wreath would hang on your door you know during Christmas time let's say and so Simone sees this wreath doesn't really know what to make of it you know it's this weird you know nightmare she's having but the guy without saying anything who's next to Simone he raises the wreath the wreath over her head right he's holding it above her head and at this point the other guy on the left side of Simone he grabs the other side of this wreath so there's four hands holding this wreath above Simone's head okay I don't know if I'm in frame so I'm go straight on with the camera so they're holding this wreath and they begin to lower it towards Simone's head and as they do Simone can tell all these people they're looking a little bit more intently in the direction of Simone really taking into account what's going to happen here and as soon as this wreath touches Simone's head she feels this blinding pain like an excruciating pain all around the crown of her head and she realizes at this exact moment that this is not just some wreath it's a crown of thorns and the Thorns are digging into her head and these two huge men pulling it down on her head as hard as they possibly can and she's she wants to scream but she can't make any noise she wants to run she can't and so she's just stuck there feeling this excruciating pain and blood is pouring down her face and it's it's unreal it feels it feels real it literally feels real to her and so in the dream this goes on for several seconds until finally it's like it's so much that she wakes up she's out of the dream and so Simone she's she takes stock of the fact that she's in this dark Forest which must have been you know disconcerting at first but she looks around she's in her C she's surrounded by The Counselor she can't really see anything but she's like H okay it was just a bad dream but instinctively like we all do when we sometimes have maybe not dreams like this I hope not but similar horrible dreams you kind of check just to make sure you really are not dreaming and so she reached up and touched her head to make sure she was not in fact wearing a crown of thorns and she touched her head and there was no crown of thorns and so she's relieved but but when she brought her hand back down she can't see her hand it's too dark but she felt like there was something on it something sticky and at the same time as she's noticing that there's something sticky on her head she begins to feel this pain bubbling up on around her head that was very similar to the pain she felt in her dream and so as this pain is ratcheting up and up and up she catches out of the out of the corner of her eye again it's very dark but maybe out of the Moonlight or something she could either hear something or barely see something running around in the tree line near her kind of scurrying off away from her she has no idea what it is but she can't even focus on it because now the pain the real pain not the phantom pain in Her Dream but the actual pain into her head is so blinding she can only focus on that and it finally gets to the point where she starts to panic she doesn't know what's going on she's realizing this is blood that's what I've touched my head there's blood on my head and so she begins to scream so she's screaming and the girl who's next to her the other counselor wakes up because the girl's screaming right next to her the counselor sits up she sees Simone screaming she's like what's going on what's going on she can't see Simone it's too dark and so the this other counselor fumbles for a flashlight grabs a flashlight turns around and shines it on Simone's face and the second Simone is illuminated and this counselor can see her the other counselor begins to scream at what she sees on Simone's head and so for the next 15 minutes it is absolute chaos in the forest as people are screaming they're trying to figure out what's going on the other counsel are waking up nobody knows what's going on and in the course of those 15 minutes the other counselors grab Simone they put her into one of the the vehicles they had at the camp and by this point Simone is vomiting she's still bleeding from her head and they rushed her to the hospital I wish I could pull right now and say what do you think happened but I'll tell you what happened when Simone was having that dream the dream where she sees the city skyline and she doesn't know what's going on and then suddenly she felt the Thorns being driven into her head well the pain she was feeling in her dream of something driving into her head was synced up with actual pain she was feeling in real life there was something digging into her head but for some reason her body her brain didn't process the pain in real life the way you would think you would like wake up cuz something's happening to you instead the thing that was happening in real life to Simone's head kind of manifested itself in this dream so we basically believe Simone was already having a nightmare she's in this post-apocalyptic landscape and then something in real life began happening to her head and it entered her dream that was the crown of thorns well the real thing that was happening was a fox had snuck into the camp or was living in the forest wandered up to Simone and began eating her scalp and it sat there and ate her head and took at least 20 solid bites out of her head before the pain in real life that had manifested in Her Dream got so extreme that Simone bolted upright and her sitting upright scared the fox off and almost certainly that is the thing she saw scurrying off into the forest and she was rushed to the hospital uh she would be saved uh and they actually were able to suture her scalp all back together again and they hid the scars in her in her hairline um but I spoke to Simone so I I mentioned there was a a connection to our community she might even be listening to this to be honest uh Simone posted this story on our subreddit it was about her and this experience you know she she described this whole story and how after it happened she was so traumatized that she not only could not go back in that Forest ever again but she couldn't go into any forests anymore I mean it's like true PTSD and she said she still has Phantom Pain you know where the fox bit her head and she also said that because it was a fox she had to go through this in insane like rabies protocol uh rabies is a lethal you know disease you can get from from animals that have it it's it's treatable but she had all these shots she had to get I mean it was this horrible experience but she lived and she's she's one of our our our amazing members of the strange dark and mysterious Community um and so yeah that story is a wild one and it's one of the stories in our graphic novel here just to show that image again pretty cool huh pretty good go to cam too see if you can zoom in on that again that's the I can't can't show too much but here's what you get to see pretty good stuff pretty cool hey everybody if you haven't heard yet we announced some really big news recently we are putting out a book and it's amazing it's called Mr Ballin presents strange dark and mysterious the graphic stories and it's an amazing graphic novel we have been working on for over a year and it's our very first book so we're all very proud of this we think it's going to be so amazing so in this book there are nine stories five of which are of the old variety so you've heard them on YouTube and they've been remastered and put into this book and then you have four fulllength brand new stories which are amazing that have also been put inside of this book and the way we made those four new stories is to have them replicate the feel of YouTube in fact I would say this whole book is like the written version of our YouTube channel it's totally a throwback to our OG fans who found us on YouTube this is the book for you it's going to be so good the book's not coming out until my birthday birthday October 1st but you can pre-order it right now by going to book.bin studios.com and also after you pre-order be sure to follow me on social media and all the other places that we put out content because we're going to be teasing stuff about this book before release things like you know sneak peeks into the book and some pieces of artwork and some behindth scenes stuff so there's a lot of stuff going on but it all starts with pre-ordering that book so again go to book.bin studios.com and pre-order order our first ever official book it's going to be great enjoy so that's going to do it if you're looking for more strange dark and mysterious content remember we have a whole slew of strange dark and mysterious podcasts under the Ballin Studios umbrella there is the Mr Ballin podcast Mr ballin's medical Mysteries run full Bedtime Stories and our newest edition wartime stories which everybody's raving about and so these are all free podcasts with hundreds of hours of content that you can listen to to right now all you have to do is search for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform and boom there they are all the podcasts you can start your bench thank you so much until next time see you