transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Right now at The Home Depot, shop Spring Black Friday Savings and get up to 40% off plus up to $500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully even in tighter spaces in your kitchen and laundry that saves you time. Like an all-in-one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 68 minutes. Shop Spring Black Friday Savings plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at The Home Depot. Offer about April 9th through April 29th, or you can purchase only C-Store Online for details.

Speaker 2:
[00:31] Experience a membership that backs your business journey with American Express Business Platinum. When you pay with membership rewards points for all or part of an eligible flight booked with a qualifying airline through Amex Travel, you can get 35% of those points back, up to 1 million points back per calendar year. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com/businessdashplatinum.

Speaker 3:
[01:00] Pepsi prebiotic cola in original and cherry vanilla. That Pepsi tastes you low with no artificial sweeteners and three grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi prebiotic cola. Unbelievably Pepsi.

Speaker 4:
[01:15] G'day mates, it's Be Busta here. And before the episode begins, I would just like to let you know that Be Scared, which is produced along with Studio71, features scary stories from around the globe on a weekly basis that aim to fuel your nightmares with a smile. And if you enjoy the podcast, it would be great if you could hit that subscribe button and drop a review. Thanks for listening, guys. And without further ado, let's begin. This happened a few years back when I first moved to a small town in northern Minnesota for work. I didn't know anyone there yet, so for the first few weeks, I spent most of my time either working or sitting around the same couple local spots, just trying to get a feel for the place. One afternoon, I was sitting at dinner off the highway and this older lady at the counter randomly started talking to me. I guess that she figured that I was new because I asked the waitress where the nearest grocery store was. She ended up giving me a bunch of advice about the area too. Where not to drive in the winter, which gas station overcharged, stuff like that. Pretty normal conversation, really. But then, out of nowhere, she asked where I lived. I told her roughly which road my rental house was on and she immediately got really serious, like her tone completely changed. She pointed toward the north side of town and said something along the lines of stay away from the forest along County Road 12. I kind of laughed at this because I assumed that she meant wildlife or something. There are bears and wolves around that part of Minnesota after all, but she sort of shook her head and said, No, I mean it. Don't stop near those trees. That place isn't right. My husband literally disappeared out there. She said it in a really eerie and sort of calm way, which honestly made it more uncomfortable. Apparently, though, her husband had gone missing years earlier after pulling over on the highway next to that exact stretch of forest. According to her, he stopped because he thought that someone needed help, and his truck was later found parked with the driver door open and the hazards flashing. He was eventually found dead several miles into the woods. I didn't ask any more questions after that. I just kind of nodded and I finished my food. At the time, I figured that it was probably just a tragic situation mixed with local rumors or something like that. Small towns are full of stories like that after all. Still, though, I remembered what she said because that road was actually part of my commute to work. For the first couple of weeks, nothing unusual happened too. It was just a normal rural highway, really. Two lanes, no streetlights, forest running along one side of the long stretch there. But then one night, something weird actually did happen out there. So I worked late that evening, and by the time that I left the office, it was already dark. The drive back to my place, it took about 25 minutes, and about halfway through it, I reached that same wooded area the woman had mentioned. Up ahead, I noticed flashing hazard lights on the side of the road. At first, I assumed it was just someone with car trouble. Happens all the time in the winter up there. As I got closer, I could see the vehicle clearly. It was an older station wagon pulled halfway onto the gravel shoulder. It was beige color with fake wood paneling on the sides. The driver's door was open and the interior light was on. No one was visible in the seat. Because the door was open though and the hazards were going, I figured that maybe someone collapsed or needed help, so I pulled over a little ways behind it and turned my hazards on. I grabbed a flashlight from my glove box and I walked over there. The car, it looked almost weirdly too clean for how old it was. No rust, windows spotless, tires were really fine and it didn't look like a broken down car at all in fact. I leaned down and shined the flashlight into the front seat, nobody inside. I walked around the car thinking that maybe the driver had gotten out and walked toward the trees for some reason or something. I called out a few times, asking if anyone needed help, but again, there was nothing. No sound at all in fact, except for the car's blinking hazard lights and the wind through the trees that night. I even checked the back seat and the trunk area through the window, but still nothing. At that point, I must admit that I started to feel a little bit uneasy here. Not in a sort of supernatural way or anything, but just in this sort of, wow, this situation is a bit weird kind of way. The forest line though was right there, maybe 15 feet away from the road. It was extremely dark past those first row of trees though. In fact, my flashlight barely reached past the brush and I shined the light inside for a few seconds and yelled again, asking if somebody was out there and if they needed help, but still nothing. Eventually, I figured the best thing to do was to report it, so I walked back to my car and called the county non-emergency line. I left a message explaining that there was an abandoned vehicle with its hazards on along County Road 12. I also wrote down the license plate while I was sitting there and then I drove home. Now, about 10 minutes after I got inside, my phone rang. It was someone from the sheriff's office returning the call. I explained the situation again and when I finished describing the car, the dispatcher paused for a second and then asked me to repeat the license plate number, so I did. There was another pause, then the dispatcher said something really strange. She told me that they'd received calls describing that exact same vehicle in that exact location multiple times over the past few decades. Same color, same model, same license plate. Honestly, at first, I thought that she was joking. I told her that I had literally just been standing next to it, in fact. She responded by saying that apparently officers had checked that same area many times after similar reports and had never found a vehicle there when they arrived. Then she told me something else that made the whole situation way worse. So apparently the husband of a woman who used to live in town had gone missing near that same stretch of road many years ago. His truck had been found parked with the hazards on and the door opened in almost the exact same spot. His body was discovered days later, several miles inside of the forest. The dispatcher didn't elaborate much after that, and she told me that if I ever saw the vehicle again, not to stop and to just keep driving. And that was the end of the call. I tried not to think about it too much after that. I figured that there had to be some sort of normal explanation for it after all. But a few months later, I started carpooling with a coworker named Jason, who also lived near my area. And one morning, while we were driving past that same section of road, I casually asked him if he had ever heard anything about a car showing up there at night. He immediately said, you mean the Engel story? I hadn't mentioned any names yet, which caught my attention. Jason told me the story had been floating around town for years apparently, and according to him, a man named Robert Engel disappeared near the forest in the late 1970s. His pick up had been found exactly the way that the older woman described. Hazards flashing, drivers door open, interior light on. Search teams eventually found him dead miles into the woods. The official ruling was suicide, but apparently his wife never really believed that explanation. Jason said after the husband died, that the police kept getting calls about a standard station wagon parked along the same road. Every time the officers went to check it out, nothing was there, too. Eventually they traced many of the calls back to the widow's house. People assumed that she must have become unstable after losing her husband. And that's basically where the story ended, well, for most people in town anyway. I didn't tell Jason that I had actually stopped out there for that car myself, I just sort of sat there listening while he talked. But the weirdest part came later that night when we were driving home. So we passed that same stretch of road again, and Jason sort of randomly added something that he had forgotten earlier. You see, apparently years before Robert Angle disappeared, he himself had once reported seeing an abandoned station wagon parked there. Same color, same wood paneling, same license plate. Jason laughed about it like it was just one of those small town ghost stories. But I certainly didn't laugh at that moment. Because the car that I saw that night, well, it matched that exact description. Same color, same wood sides, same plate. And when I stopped, my own car ended up sitting behind it with the hazards on and the driver's door open while I walked around looking for, well, someone out there. Which, according to the story, was exactly how Robert Engel's truck was found before he walked into the woods and, well, died. I haven't stopped on that road since then. And if I ever see hazard lights up ahead on that stretch again, I am definitely not stopping and will just be driving straight past it. This happened back in 2004, when I was 25, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was sharing the place with my then-girlfriend, and it was one of those old buildings with creaky floors and peeling paint. The hallway outside of our apartment, it was dimly lit at night, which always gave the place a bit of a weird vibe, but I tried not to think too much of it. Now, I usually sleep with the lights off, and I kept my bedroom door open like I always did, never really locked it either, and I mean, it was just me and her, so why even bother, right? That night, I woke up at around 2.30 in the morning to use the bathroom at some stage. Nothing unusual, just the normal half asleep sort of shuffle across the creaking floors. After finishing, I went back to bed and I tried to settle back in. I was lying on my left side facing the door, and I was just drifting back towards sleep when I noticed something. At first, I thought it was a trick of the shadows from the streetlight filtering through the blinds, but then I realized it wasn't a shadow. It was a figure in the doorway. It looked human as well, but wrong, wrong in every way. It was hunched over with long matted hair hanging past its shoulders like it hadn't washed in years. Its skin was pale, almost gray, and there was something grossly bulky about the way that it moved, like it was too big for its frame. The face was mostly obscured, but I swear that I could see a twisted smile. Its eyes, they weren't bright or glowing or anything, but just sort of empty, like it wasn't really alive. I instantly froze. My heart practically jumped out of my chest. My girlfriend was sleeping right next to me, and I didn't want to wake her. I wanted to scream, but my voice felt sort of suddenly trapped. I slowly turned toward her, hoping that maybe I had misseen something, but when I looked back in the doorway, it was standing at the side of the bed now, its bulky shoulder just above the mattress. I tried to ignore it, told myself that I must just be seeing things. But the weird thing is that suddenly the air in the room felt, I don't know, like heavier, like a pressure in my chest, and I couldn't breathe properly. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone, just nothing. Empty doorway, normal bedroom, my girlfriend still asleep. I instantly got up to go and check the door on the hallway, but nothing. No sound, no sign that anyone had even been there. The rest of the apartment was quiet, just the faint hum of the fridge now. I didn't sleep for the rest of that night. I stayed sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the doorway, listening to every little sound that I could. The next morning, I told my girlfriend something weird happened, but I couldn't really explain it. I couldn't make it sound real without sounding insane, I think, and so she shrugged thinking that I was just spooked by shadows or the old building creaks or whatever. After that night, things escalated slightly over the next week, though. I would wake up hearing like heavy breathing in the room, or the floor creaking like somebody was pacing around, but the apartment was empty. I mean, I checked multiple times. One night, I even woke to the sound of scratching at the closet door. Another night, I felt a hand brush my arm while I was lying in bed, but when I looked again, there was nothing. I stopped leaving the bedroom door open after that, always locked it, even during the day. I started keeping a baseball bat near my bed, too, if that would even help, but eventually I moved out of that apartment about three months later, but I've never forgotten that, well, thing really is the best way to describe it. Even now, if I see a shadowy shape in a doorway at night, my stomach instantly drops. I've even scared myself a few times that way, checking the new place, but thankfully nothing's been there yet. I've never really told too many people about this, because, well, look, I know how crazy it sounds, and who knows, maybe it was just a hallucination or sleep paralysis or something. But all I can say is that everything felt real. The room didn't change, the shadows matched the furniture. I mean, I think I was awake. I could move after a moment. I could still feel the pressure in the air when I think about it, though. And it's like it was standing there, just sort of waiting for something to happen. I have done a little bit of research on this, and I don't know if it was a hag or some kind of a spirit or just my mind going crazy. But I will never leave a door open at night again. That much is for sure. As anyone else here ever experienced something like this, that felt so real that it just could not have been a dream.

Speaker 5:
[17:29] This is a Bose moment. You've been there before. Somebody's apartment, small talk that's going nowhere, plastic cup that's almost empty. It's not great. Then someone hits play on a Bose speaker. Heads nod, feet tap, one person dances, then everyone does. Awkward becomes electric. When Bose sound fills the room, you don't just hear the music, you feel it. Your life deserves music. Your music deserves Bose. Find your perfect product at bose.com.

Speaker 4:
[17:58] Now at McDonald's, wake up to a $4 breakfast meal deal.

Speaker 2:
[18:02] Wake up to a sausage McMuffin or a sausage biscuit.

Speaker 6:
[18:04] To hash browns and wake up to a hot coffee.

Speaker 7:
[18:07] Get your $4 breakfast meal deal.

Speaker 6:
[18:10] Limit time only.

Speaker 7:
[18:11] Prices and participation may vary.

Speaker 2:
[18:12] Prices may be higher for delivery.

Speaker 4:
[18:20] I'm really not sure how to say this, but I need help making sense of something that happened in my home a few months ago. So we live in Nevada in a two-story house. The layout is kind of awkward, living room and kitchen at the front, and then a narrow hallway leading to the bedrooms, a small playroom near the backyard, and the garage at the far end. There's a baby gate separating the playroom from the kitchen and the dining area, and all our doors make a distinct sort of thunk sound when opened or closed. On the night that this happened as well, a couple of the windows were open because it was unusually warm for this time of year. Now, Saturday night, my kids went to bed at around 8.15. They're six and nine and bedtime has been a bit chaotic lately. They kept getting up and asking for water, stuffed animals or just talking and whatnot. You know how kids are, right? But by 9.15, we thought that they were finally asleep and my husband and I settled down to watch some TV in the living room. Around 10.05, we both heard a door slam, sharp and distinct, and I jumped up to go and check and it was the bedroom door. When I went to look inside, the six-year-old was gone. At first, I thought that she had wandered into the bathroom or maybe the play room, but she wasn't there. We literally tore through that house too, under the beds, behind couches, inside of closets, the garage, even the backyard as well. I was calling her name, Ellie, it's time to come out now. And normally she comes out when I say that, but there was nothing. By 10.35, panic was setting in and I called 911 while my husband ran up and down the street looking for her everywhere. Our older daughter was still asleep, so I thought at least. When the police arrived, they checked the house and the yard thoroughly, but still nothing. Even the canine unit was called and the dog usually picks up sense immediately, but tonight it acted normal, like there was no scent. It was almost midnight when one of the officers looked into the hallway and said, wait, who's there? It was Ellie, just standing in the playroom doorway, calm as if nothing had happened. My husband and I immediately froze. The weird part was that none of us saw her walk past the living room or down the hallway or anything, and our dog, who always barks or jumps when someone moves nearby, didn't react at all. We obviously asked her where she had been all this time, and here's the part that really still haunts me. She said in her little six-year-old voice, I went with the nice people. They let me look at the lights. They wanted to see me too, but I came back when they said that it was time. And that was it. Nothing about hiding or about being scared or anything, just that line. My husband and I exchanged looks, and we asked who the nice people were, and she just smiled like it was normal and then just ran to bed. I've read about sleepwalking and disassociative states and even hallucinations in children, but nothing explains how she disappeared, like literally disappeared from that house for nearly two hours, how the dog did react and how she could describe seeing something that she shouldn't have. She never said anything more and hasn't repeated it since then, but we moved the baby gate to block off the playroom completely and I check every night that the doors are locked now, windows are closed and both kids are accounted for. And I know a lot of people will say kids have wild imaginations or she was sleepwalking or something, but I'm telling you, this was not normal. And I mean, we and the police looked absolutely everywhere and we just could not find her. So if anyone has any logical explanation for how a child can disappear from a locked, monitored house for almost two hours with the police searching and canines on the job and everything without leaving footprints or triggering a dog, I would really genuinely like to hear it. I live in Washington in an older two-story house from the 1940s. My wife, me and our eight-year-old daughter live here. The bedrooms, they're all upstairs, and ours has a small walk-in closet on the far wall. The floorboards in that room creak in certain spots, but usually there's nothing more than just a normal house-settling sort of sound. The windows are old and single-paned, so sound from the outside is muffled, but you can definitely hear it. Now, a few nights ago, my wife told me that she thought that she heard a woman crying, soft, broken, almost a whimper coming from the closet in our room. She said that it woke her up, but by the time that she turned on the light, nothing was there. Our daughter also mentioned hearing it once, but she was too scared to go near the closet. Last night, I was sitting in the room, saying some personal prayers before bed. I was standing by the closet, and clearly heard the same sound. It wasn't soft or distant or anything, too. It felt like it was right next to me, in fact. The crying didn't sound human exactly, I would say. There was almost a mechanical or stuttered sort of quality to it, like a recording played slightly off speed. It was just one short broken cry and then nothing. I kept praying and tried to ignore it, and after I finished, I paced the area where I had heard it, stepping on all the floorboards to see if any of them might have made a similar noise or something, but nothing matched. I even tapped lightly along the walls and the corners. My wife was downstairs watching TV, so I know that it wasn't her. The neighbors live far enough away that a cry really couldn't sound that close. I even went a step further. I checked the closet itself. All the clothes were hanging normally, nothing on the floor, no shadows, no movement. I opened and closed the door several times, tried knocking on the walls, even shined my phone flashlight along the edges, but I couldn't find a thing. After that, I sat in the room for a while, though, just thinking about what the heck could that be? I've read about sleep hallucinations or the brain making sounds out of randomness or whatever, but, I mean, I was awake and praying. I wasn't tired or groggy and the sound was extremely distinct. It's the kind of thing that you don't mistake for anything else, really, too. Earlier today, though, I inspected the exterior near our bedroom window. There's no footprints, no signs of anybody outside, nothing. I also checked security footage from the front and the backyards, but there was nobody around. Here's the part that really freaked me out, though. So I went downstairs and asked my daughter if she had noticed anything strange lately. She hesitated and then quietly said, sometimes the lady in the closet cries at me. She shows me the lights and the shiny things. She doesn't like when I come back too soon, but then she lets me go. I asked her what she meant by all this, and she just sort of shrugged, smiling faintly like it was normal. She didn't seem afraid, I guess, but it was something in her tone that just didn't make sense, almost like she was describing being somewhere else, somewhere not in our house or something. I really haven't slept well since then too. Every time that I go near that closet, I feel watched now, even though there's no evidence of anything even there. My wife and I, we both started leaving the closet door open, but even then sometimes I hear quiet creaks or soft cries when it's just me in the room. I'm planning to set up a camera inside the bedroom tonight, focused on that closet. I'm not sure what I'll find, but I need some kind of record because, well, this just doesn't seem to be going away, and I don't want my daughter to grow up thinking that this is normal. So, has anyone else ever experienced something like this? And if you have, then what did you do about it? Honestly, I just don't even know what to think anymore.

Speaker 8:
[27:23] Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong.

Speaker 7:
[27:30] Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Speaker 9:
[27:33] Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

Speaker 6:
[27:36] Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade.

Speaker 8:
[27:40] Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right.

Speaker 6:
[27:50] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere?

Speaker 5:
[27:55] Anywhere.

Speaker 6:
[27:56] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris?

Speaker 9:
[27:58] Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 6:
[28:00] Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad and Tulum?

Speaker 5:
[28:04] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 6:
[28:06] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 7:
[28:12] When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now.

Speaker 9:
[28:20] LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? While we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.

Speaker 4:
[28:57] I'm 56 now, but this happened when I was about 31, back in the summer of like 2001 or something. I was living in a small rental on the outskirts of Florida, in a quiet neighborhood surrounded by woods and empty lots. Everyone tells me that I shouldn't believe it, but I cannot shake it, and I know what I saw. It was late afternoon, around 7 p.m. The sun just dipping behind the trees, so the room was lit by this weird greenish-gold glow. My husband and I were both napping, and I was on the left side of the bed curled up facing the wall. Suddenly I felt this weight in the air, like someone was standing right there. My eyes opened slowly, and there it was. A small gray figure, barely over three feet tall, standing at the foot of the bed. Its head was enormous in proportion to its body. The eyes were black, huge and unblinking. No mouth, no nose that I could see, just eyes that felt like they were staring right through me. I was frozen, I couldn't move, I couldn't scream, and my mind screamed at my body to react, but it just wouldn't. I tried to reach for my husband, to wake him, and after what felt like a full minute of paralysis, I finally could move enough to whisper his name. The figure though was now gone. No sound, no flash of light, nothing but the normal shadows in the room. What made it different from dreams or sleep paralysis though was the room itself. Everything was exactly how it had been. The furniture, the light through the blinds, even the slight hum of the fridge. It was all exactly the same. I wasn't somewhere else, I was in my own room, seeing something that shouldn't exist. After that night, strange things started happening too. Lights would flicker randomly even when bulbs were fine and my cats, normally fearless, would hiss at empty corners of the bedroom. I kept waking up feeling like I wasn't alone too, even though my husband was right there. Once, I woke to a faint tapping on the window, like tiny claws on the glass but nothing was outside. A few months later, I rented a small storage unit to clear out some old furniture. One night, I stayed late organizing some boxes. The lights were pretty harsh there, fluorescent and flickered intermittently from time to time. That's when I saw a shadow move in the corner of the unit. I instantly froze. My heart pounding, a small humanoid silhouette darted behind a stack of crates and I convinced myself at the time that it must have been a trick of the light or my eyes or something, but the shape was wrong. Too small and too disproportionate. I started keeping a journal of everything unusual that I experienced. Doors left ajar when I knew that I had closed them. Strange noises in the yard at night, tiny steps and rustling like something moving just beyond the tree line. Once my husband swore that he even saw a small figure in the living room that disappeared when he flipped the light on one night. The worst incident though, that happened in 2003. So I was home alone one evening doing some dishes. The kitchen window overlooked the backyard which ended at the woods behind the house. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something small dart between the trees. It paused and looked toward the window and I could see those eyes again. I dropped the dish towel and ran to lock the door. It wasn't gone when I checked, but just standing at the edge of the tree line, motionless, like completely still too, like a statue, just watching. I never tried to approach it. I didn't call anyone. I didn't want to. I kept a low profile, kept the lights on at night, and stopped going out after sunset. The presence, it never attacked me or anything. It never even spoke to me, but it was always there, just watching. Even now, I get triggered by anything with large black eyes, movies, photos, cartoons. It sets off the same sort of panic that I felt that first night. What haunts me, though, isn't the creature itself. It's the certainty that something exists that we cannot explain, that saw me in my own bedroom and didn't need to make a sound, and that left me with the knowledge that I was completely powerless in that moment. I've thought about trying to investigate, but honestly, I don't want to. I've seen enough and I just want to live my life normally and pretend like I didn't see it, even though I know that I never will. So I grew up in southern Scotland, and there's a stretch of thick woodland just outside of the village that we used to call the Hollow. Me and a few friends had a little den in there when we were kids, nothing fancy, just a few logs leaned together, some rope and a tarp, really. For years, too, weird stuff started showing up there. I'm not talking random objects, too, I mean blankets, jackets, sleeping bags, stuff that didn't make sense. The first time that had happened was 2019 as well. I was about 14 and there were two old blankets laid over some scrap metal near a clump of birch trees and, being curious or maybe stupid, I don't know, I lifted them, expecting maybe a marker for something buried. There was nothing. The ground looked completely normal, in fact. I shrugged it off a bit weirded out and I went back to climbing trees and messing around. A few weeks later though, I noticed one blanket was gone and two jackets had appeared now. I didn't see anyone and the jackets weren't muddy or worn. They looked almost new, in fact. Weird, but I didn't stick around. For months, it stayed like that too. Sometimes empty, sometimes with bottles or cans scattered around. We'd see the usual trash from people walking nearby near the country road there, but the jackets and the blankets always seemed deliberately placed. Then, in spring of 2021, it got weirder. Me and a friend, Callum, we went back there and there was an old bike leaning against a tree. It wasn't a kid's bike too. It was a decent adult bike. It rusted a little bit, but in solid shape, I would say. A dark green jacket was draped over the handlebars, and I checked the pocket and inside were two small muscle shells. Way close to the coast here. Some loose change. A couple of coins from Scotland and a few English pennies. A tiny scrap from a glue tube, it seemed. The kind that you get in DIY packs. On the back in pen was a series of numbers as well. Lots of decimals, a time, 1540, I think it said. And the name of a small town in Cornwall. At the time, I thought that it might be coordinates, but it didn't make sense. We never took photos and eventually I lost that scrap years ago. After that, though, the place went quiet for a while. Then in December of 2024, walking past, I found collapsed tents, sleeping bags, three jackets and a couple of old blankets. It looked like somebody had set up camp and then maybe had left or something. I thought that I would investigate properly later, but I never did because it felt off, I guess. Fast forward to last week, though, I finally went back alone and everything was gone. Literally nothing except one blue coat draped over a branch, a couple of empty beer bottles and a pack of amber leaf rolling tobacco, empty. I didn't check the coat pockets this time, but here's what really freaks me out. If someone is living there, I should have seen them by now, surely. I mean, I've walked around that woodland at all hours since I was 10. No footprints, no tents, no fires, no signs of anyone, just objects appearing and disappearing all over the place. And they seem to rotate as well, like one day there's a jacket there, the next day it's somewhere else and blankets show up, vanish and come back somewhere new, and then the jackets are back again. It really just doesn't add up. Where are they getting these things from and who are they? And why leave them out for us like this to see? There's no path that they're using. I mean, I've mapped the entire area now, two-mile radius, checked every corner, and I cannot find any evidence of repeated visits or anybody else out there. It's almost like the objects just sort of, well, appear on their own. The thing is, is that sometimes I do catch glimpses of shadows at the edge of the trees there when I'm walking past. Not fully formed and just flashes, but nothing that I can really identify, and sometimes there's a sort of faint smell, too. Almost like rotten meat or something, right where a blanket or a jacket appears, too. I don't know what it is. My friends stopped going a few years back saying that it was creepy, and honestly, I cannot argue with that. I've thought about staying late one night to try and see it, but the woods feel different after dark there. Silent in a way that's really sort of unnatural. Even sharing this now, I can feel my heart sort of picking up a bit. I've tried logic, I mean, someone collecting old clothes and moving them around, maybe, but why leave the muscle shells, the coin change and the strange pen markings there? Why rotate the objects like a puzzle that really, I'm the only one who's going to notice it. I don't have answers, and I've walked past that hollow dozens of times since I saw the blue coat, and I still check basically every week. Sometimes I swear that I see movement in the corner of my eye, but every time that I turn, there's nothing ever there. If anyone has an explanation for how this is possible, I would love to hear it. Again, I've been coming to this place for years now, almost every week, and I still have not seen a soul there. Or if you've seen something like this, stuff appearing and disappearing in the woods like this, with no trace of anyone living there, well, it would at least be nice to know that I'm not losing it alone. G'day mates, it's Be Busta here. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Be Scared podcast. And please, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode too. Also, it would be much appreciated if you could share this new podcast with your friends and family and on social media too. Thanks again for listening guys, and I'll see you mates in the next one.