This encounter took place in a small town on the coast of northern California. A friend and I decided that we wanted to grow a garden on his property. The trail to get there was half a mile through some thick pine forest and huckleberry bushes. The garden itself was trellised on the hillside with a small man made pine that we used to water the plants. My friend and I would ride our dirt bikes to check on it daily. One day in midsummer, we decided to camp there with
another friend. My two friends pitched a tent, but being outdoorsy, I made a shelter underneath a fallen tree. I used the branches to close off the back of the sides, and I had a large branch for a door. Also had a blanket. Knowing it would get chili that night. Before going to bed, I had the thought to leave my writing boots on to protect against any would be critters trying to get frisky. Mountain lions and the occasional bear are a thing, although they are rare, Better safe
than sorry, I thought, keeping my feet. Toward the opening of the shelter, we talked about our day and what we had planned for the garden. The three of us fell asleep. I woke up some time later to something heavy walking right next to my shelter. It shook the ground when it walked, as if it wanted to make a point and say that it was the biggest thing around. My immediate thought was that a big bear was rooting around the camp. That is until I noticed it was
walking on two legs. As if that wasn't alarming enough, it started looking into my shelter. I froze stiff, and I could hear it breathing and sniffing as it made its way inside through the door that I had made. I had a big branch pulled in to block the door, but this thing didn't seem to care. I had a three three rifle laying next to me, but the thought of protecting myself with it never crossed my mind. I
was too stunned to move or think straight. The sniffing and probing went on for what felt like hours, and just when I thought it would finally back out and leave me be, I felt its giant hand grab my leg and tug on it, as if trying to see if I was a piece of wood or something else, and when it grabbed me, I screamed like a pack of stuck pigs. I must have scared it as bad as it scared me, because it let out a high pitched, horror stricken scream, and it took off toward the woods,
ripping the top off my buddy's tint along the way. Well, we were terrified. All three of us had heard and seen it. We stayed as quiet and as still as we could until the first light showed over the mountains, and then we got to our bikes. No sooner had I gotten to my bike and got it moving when a baseball sized rock hit me in the side of the head and it knocked me off my bike. My buddy behind me stop and helped me back up, and we hotailed it out of there and we never went
back to that area again. Hey, welcome to the podcast. My name is Cameron Buckner. This is the Dixie Cryptid YouTube podcast, also known as the what If It's True Podcast. On any podcast app that you're using, just do a search for Dixie Cryptid or what If It's True podcast on your Apple podcast app Spotify. Any podcast app you're using should be right at the top and you can follow along. I'm gonna tell you something about the audio only podcast. People complain about the ads that run in
my videos on YouTube. I have nothing to do with it. That I do have a little control. There is a little button when I upload a video that I can place ads, but they YouTube never uses it. I spent four or five years doing that, just placing my own ads. But the ads if I place three in a one hour long video, they're still going to put six. But here's what I want to tell you. If you go to the podcast app, if you look me up on the podcast app, you may have one ad interrupt your
listening experience. On a podcast app, there are not near as many ads on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker. You can listen on on the Spreaker app. S p R e A K e R. You can download all these apps for free. Starting account doesn't cost you anything. Look up all the podcasts you want to listen to look mine up first, and you won't get interrupted with ads. I don't know why people don't use it. I use it all the time now. I watch a lot of YouTube,
but I only watch that for visual stuff. This podcast is an audio podcast. The stuff you see running on the screen is just stuff I have to put in there simply because YouTube is a visual platform. Anyway, I just want to drop that. What do they call them hacks? That's an ad hack. Go to Apple podcast or Spotify, or I use Podbean the pod Bean app. It seems to work really well, but it really doesn't matter. These podcasts are streamed anywhere. So anyway, enough of that, onto
the story. I think I've got six or seven in this podcast. I certainly hope you guys enjoy it. So all right, here we go. When my son was four, we went Noword to visit my aunt and uncle. At the time, they lived on a beautiful property spanning eighty are not too far from Huntsville, Ontario. My uncle was born and raised in rural Quebec, and he grew up in the woods among the wildlife. Later, as a young man, he lived and worked in logging camps in Ontario and Quebec.
Their property was a nature lover's dream. Deer routinely wandered into their backyard, along with bears and other wildlife, and a host of other birds and smaller wildlife. It was one of my favorite places to be on this visit. It was winter, and we were sitting around in their living room as the woodstove chugged out heat, and the conversation worked its way around to strange things my uncle had seen and heard in the forest in his lifetime. He began telling a story about a deer hunting trip
that he took part in many years prior. Near North Bay, Ontario. He and his hunting partner had come up dry since it was getting dark, they were heading back to the warmth of their lodging and a hot meal. As it was, though, they got somewhat off the beaten path and ended up taking the scenic route. It was dark by that point and they were cold and miserable, when all of a sudden they heard the sound emanating from the woods. They
could only be described as an angry monkey scream. My uncle and his buddy froze solid when it went off again, only louder. By this point, they were starting to mentally take inventory of what animals could have made that sound, but they came up empty. They stood there for a minute, facing out into the dark woods. The ensuing silence was every bit as scary as the noise they had just heard. They decided not to wait around for an encore and instead to double time it back to their cabin, where
not one more word was said about this incident. Now, my uncle never once mentioned the word sosquatch or even and heinted at it. But given his location at the time and the sheer ferocity of the sound, and the fact that it froze him, a seasoned hunter in his tracks, I would not discount sosquatch. In August of twenty eighteen, I took my son to visit my aunt and uncle again on their property. While we were there, we had a great time exploring the woods and walking down to
the beautiful beach about a mile away. But in typical fashion, my internal clock went into overdrive and the first day there I found myself awake at four am. Well, I figured, rather than lying beds doing about being awake, I'd go downstairs and do some painting until everyone woke up. This house did not have air conditioning, so they routinely left
windows open to create a cross breeze. Between that and the shade from the huge trees all around, the house was always at an nice temperature, even when it was sticky out. And there I was in the dining room table with my watercolors in front of me, beside a huge open window, listening to the birds in the forest as they began to wake and go about their daily routine. Outside it was washed with a silvery blue pre dawn light,
and except for the birds, everything was quiet. I was painting away happily, when all of a sudden I noticed that even the birds had stilled. I felt little of it, and I kept on painting until in the distance I heard the distinct sound of wood hitting hard against another piece of wood. My head shot upright and I listened. There were three knocks, and then a pause, and then a couple more, and then a short, distant, lyrical whood sound that started low and went higher towards the end.
No freaking way, I thought to myself. I immediately realized my son would be furious with me if I didn't capture the sounds, so I reached for my cell phone and turned on the video. Even though there was another faint moan in the distance. When I played back the recording, the only audible sound was that of my rather excited breathing. I told my son at breakfast what I'd heard, but he thought I was kidding with him to this day, I'll never be convinced that what I heard that morning
in the twilight was not a sisquatch. The wood knocking was intentional, and the whooping sound was like nothing I'd ever heard before or since. Keep doing your good work. Your non judgmental approach and fantastic accent make you one of the best on YouTube. And my son and I love your channel. Sign Nancy, that was a really nice compliment. Not many people compliment my accent, but I can't change it, and I just roll with it. And there's plenty of people that talk like me. So we go through life
not understanding each other. Hay yack, Get all right. Thank you Nancy for the story. This was great. Thank you. My encounter occurred in the summer of nineteen seventy five. I was thirteen years old at the time. My cousin Jim, and I decided to go camping near my home, located in the southeastern corner of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, in an area of woods that is known as Colonel Francis Bady Park. This section of the country was remote
in the nineteen seventies, with sparse development. The woods comprising several hundred acres included a beautiful section where several large creeks converged with a mature section of hardwoods and pines. There's a high tension power line extending through the eastern corner of this track, which I now realized may have been the pathway for our visitor. The land was bordered by planet fields on two sides and a road on the other two sides in some development. Essentially, it was
an oasis of hardwoods surrounded by fields. By the age of thirteen, I was already an accomplished camper, having camped in the wilderness areas for week long stretches with my father since I was six. I was accustomed to being in the woods at night, having taken several frog gigging trips with my father to remote ponds throughout Union County, where we would spend hours tromping around the darkness up to my chest and water. It was not unusual for
us to encounter snakes, deer, raccoons, and other wildlife. Jim and I hiked about two miles and made camp in a clear area of hardwoods just above a waterfall in the creek in the center of the track. Accompanying us was my dog, Alicia. She was a German shepherd who was fiercely loyal and followed me everywhere. Back then, there were no leash laws, and she patrolled my family's seven acre home site religiously, chasing off all manner of animals.
She was accustomed to the wildlife in our area, and it was common for her to wake us up after cornering a possum or a raccoon on our patio late at night. After exploring the area all day, we settled in for the night with a knight's fire. Sometime late in the evening, we were both awakened by my dog. Lesha was making a weird combination of noises, sort of a mix of whining and growling. She came in the tent, pacing and cowering between us. She had never done anything
like that before, and it baffled me. She couldnot be consoled. Lesha would bark incessantly at strangers, dogs or wildlife, or she would chase them off without hesitation. But I had never seen her behave the way that she did that night, nor did I see her act that way again after. As we sat awake pondering what was causing her reaction. There were noises out in the woods. The first one that got our attention was a tree falling. We heard distinctive cracks and then the sound of a massive tree
hitting the ground. It was a familiar sound to me because we would push over rotten pine trees and kill pine beetles for the fun. This usually required at least several boys to slowly push a tree at its base until it began to sway, and then push into each sway until the momentum caused it to break near the base and fall. It wasn't an easy feet but we would get it done. Dead or rotten tree fall and
living tree fall has distinctively different sounds. When the dead tree falls, the cracking is dry and quick, there is no resistance. But when a healthy tree falls, you hear the moisture in the wood protesting. You hear the tearing of the bark and the trunk resisting as the fiber split. Several of us would never have been able to push over a living tree, no matter how hard we tried. The tree we heard was green, it was alive. The sound of hitting the ground was heavy and dense with
moisture and shook the earth under our tent. When I heard it break in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, I got a shiver. I knew that whatever had made this happen was something big, and my dog was afraid of it. I shared my concern with Jim, and we began to hear distinctive footfalls in the dry leaves. The foot falls were heavy and they sounded like a person slowly walking. The footsteps grew fainter.
We heard another living tree fall, and then silence. It took some time for my dog to settle down, but she never barked or chased after whatever it was. We did not go to sleep at all after that, and we couldn't wait for daylight to get out of the woods. I still live in this area and frequently travel through that section of woods. Because it has now been converted into a public park, I have continued to camp and hunt in and around this area for as long as
I can remember. That particular area was, for many years prior to the park's establishment, my favorite deer hunting area due to the abundance of the animals. The northern section is surrounded by farmland and the entire track is intersected by several creeks which now form a big lake. In all my time in the woods, I have never encountered anything that would explain what we heard that night. I recently became interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon, and I've been
researching accounts in folklore. This unusual childhood experience remains vivid, and it is now quite evident to me that sosquatch explains everything we heard. It is, in my opinion, the only creature that would have had that kind of effect on my German shepherd, and the only creature that would have had the ability to push over a massive, green living tree. I grew up in a small town outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. My father and I lived in an old log cabin situated in the middle of the woods.
He used to always cut trees for heat in the winter, and on the weekends I would help him load the truck and whatnot. Our white German shepherd named Duke was my favorite companion. He was beautiful and in the winter he would come busting out of the woods on either side of the trail and look like a majestic wolf. He was my best friend. One day, my father, Duke and I were walking the creek after a day of swimming, when we came up on a set of tracks that's
about ten years years old at that time now. I asked my father if they were dukes. He said, no, they weren't. They were from a feeline, probably a big bobcat or something of that nature. Well, put it out of my mind and we continued on. I'm not sure how much longer this was, since when you're a kid, time really does fly. But Duke and I were outside of the log cabin, playing in the yard as kids do, when all of a sudden, Duke got so close to
me that I couldn't walk without tripping over him. That's when I looked up at our long gravel driveway and I saw what made those tracks. It was a massive eight foot long black cat slinking its way from us up the long gravel driveway. I know things seemed larger when you're a kid, but this thing really was big. I never saw its face, just its long, slender body and its tail whipping left to right. I know a cat when I see one, just like everyone else in
the world does. It had the grace and agility and stealth of an assassin. My German shepherd was a good size, maybe eighty pounds, but this cat dwarfed him. That's what I realized. Duke had saved my life. If I had been out there alone, that cat would have easily killed me. If you search the internet for black panthers living in North America, the answers you will get or that they flied out don't exist here. But I know what I saw. Maybe it was a pet that got too big to
keep and was set loose. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, people had a thing for exotic pets intended to let them loose when they got too big. All I know is that I saw a monster panther that day, and my German Shepherd saved my life. I'll never forget that day. I'll never forget that cat or my dog, Duke. Thank you for reading this. Signing off. In two thousand and ten, I lived in an old house with a couple of acres and a swamp nearby. It was in southeast Georgia
and Bullock County, about an hour northwest of Savannah. There's a ditch between my property and my grandmother's property that's four feet deep. Red swamp maple grows on both sides of it, and you wouldn't know it was there unless you're paying attention when you're passing it from the road. It runs in a tee from the front of the property back to the swamp behind the house, and then into a vernal pond that dries up every summer. It hadn't rained, so the ditch was dry as a bone.
Our family reunion was held at my grandmother's property every April and has been held every year there for sixty five years. My brother and I and our families were always last to call it a night. It was getting late when we heard a strange sound outside. One of my brothers said it could have been a screech owl. We left it at that and said our goodbyes, and I headed for bed. I had become disabled the year before,
and I used a wheelchair. I could stand, but I couldn't walk for because the cartilage in both of my hips had worn out. I had learned that sleeping on the couch was easier to get out of than getting out of my bed, so I'd taken to sleeping in the living room. I never left any lights on because the windows faced east and west, and the yard light lit up the interior of the house enough for me to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. There were three windows in the living room, each three
feet wide and five feet long. These were old windows that my dad had removed and rebuilt, and were made of that thin old glass that looks like it's melting. The window that faced west was five feet off the ground. That night, it was just me and my pug, Blinky, who was then eight years old. He was a good little watch dog, and he sounded like he was ten feet tall when he went on alert, even though he only weighed twelve pounds. I just laid on the couch
and blink. He laid down on the floor beside me. I was almost asleep when all of a sudden, an ungodly scream came from the ditch. It sounded like the one my brothers and I had heard earlier, but it was closer and louder and wilder this time. I started to sit up when Blinky sailed up to my chest, knocking my breath out of me and banging like he was a huge dog. He barked for a good five minutes.
His fur was bristling like I'd never seen before. He wouldn't let me sit up, and he kept jumping onto my chest every time I moved him down to my legs. I found my big flashlight, which I kept between the couch and the cushions, and I shined it out into the swamp maples, shining it back and forth and then up and down the tree. Blinky finally got off me and I was able to sit up. I turned off
the flashlight, using my furniture as a support. I went into the bathroom with Blinky following me, looking through the window in the bathroom outside, but I couldn't see anything. I was still afraid. That night, Blinkie and I slept in my master closet with the interior door shut tight and lock. I've heard a black panther before. There's one in the Pennsylvania Zoo that screamed right at me, so I knew what I heard wasn't a panther. We had bobcats and foxes on the farm, and it wasn't either
of them. We don't have porcupines and raccoons and possums don't scream like what I heard that night. I don't know what Blinky and I heard, but I've never been so scared in all my life. Blinky passed away in my arms in twenty sixteen at thirteen years old, and I moved to the Arizona Desert last year. There are no trees here, and that means that there's nowhere for any large animals or mystery creatures to hide, or so I'm told. Now, I just have to be aware of rattlesnakes, tarantulas,
and bark scorpions. Oh that was a great story, but I'm so sad about your pug, Blinkie. We have a little pug. Her name is Lily. Oh my gosh, I love that dog. She's a stinky little thing and she's a snorty snorter. You know how pugs are. They're just little footballs and their faces are all alienike. Have you ever looked in a pug's mouth. They have the weirdest skull structure of any dog I've ever seen. But it's one of the oldest breeds in human history that I think.
They come out of China, but they're the I want to just tell y'all, if anybody's looking for a family pet, a pug is the absolute best family pet you can buy. I love labs. I have a little pit bull mix. We have a hairless Mexican Terrier. He's a great dog. And all of our dogs are good, but that pug she may or may not be my favorite. But if you're looking for just a family pet, a dog that's good with kids, it's a lap dog that's lovable. I mean their faces are shapes so that they just can't
hardly bite you. They're a great dog to raise with a family. So anyway, that's my dog advice for the day. Thank you to the writer for the story. I thought it was good. Thanks. In July of two thousand and nine, I moved to Murphisboro, Tennessee, to begin graduate studies in the biology program at Middle Tennessee State University. It was during the tail end of a recession, and I had been working for a surveyor who could only pay me for three days a week, so I didn't have a
lot of money. I drove around downtown Murphisborough and was overtaken by a nostalgic mood. This quiet, old downtown neighborhood, in the tree lined streets leading up to the old courthouse on the Square was where I had lived ten years prior to this. I ran these old streets in the fall of nineteen ninety nine, with their turning leaves the orange and yellow of the sugar maples leading up to the square. I would be attending Navy Officers Candidate School at the beginning of the next year, and I
wanted to get in shape. A decade later, I had come to take advantage of the educational opportunity my service had afforded me. I saw a four rent sign at an old building on Lydall Street, just a block from the campus. I walked into the open front door. There was an apartment on either side. I walked up the creaky wooden stairs to find two more apartments up top. The door stood wide opened to one of them. It
was dirty. Animal feces was on the floor. A large old window was open, letting in the ninety degree air. While this could have been a sign to run away, to me, it was a sign that the rent might be cheap. I called the number on the sign out front and was told to drive up the street to the owner's law office and sign the rental agreement. I chose apartment three upstairs, across the hall from the one I had walked into on my initial visit. It had
just been repainted and the floors were swept. A small air conditioner did what it could do to cool the large rooms with the old drafty windows, but I didn't mind the heat too much. Air Conditioning in the summer has always given me chills. Some friends helped me move my belongings down from Nashville. Everything I owned at the time could be carried in two loads in the bed
of my Ford Ranger pickup truck. I settled into my new apartment and in a couple of weeks classes began, and I enjoyed being back on college campus, pretty girls, thought provoking conversation, not being on a tight work day schedule. There was a learning curve also as a graduate student, I had earned extra money teaching biology labs. I had forgotten statistics, and my first lab found me teaching students about the tea test, which I did not recall having
ever heard before this lab. Incidentally, it was invented by the head brewmaster at Guinness in the early nineteen hundreds as a way to do a statistical quality control on batches of that fine stout. Some days I would walk back home between classes and take a nap. I've always been a napper, but rarely do I fall into a deep sleep, definitely not enough to enter a dream state. I was surprised to suddenly be awakened by a loud whistle, sharp like when someone puts their thumb and finger in
the edge of their mouth and really blows. I looked outside and saw that the school two doors down was letting out, and cars lined up the street waiting to pick up their children. Other kids were running down the sidewalk. Shortly after this, I was asleep one night when again I was awakened by that whistle. I rose up and the only sound in the room was a steady hum of my fan. I looked out the open window by my bed, but I didn't see anyone walking around in
the darkness. The hair on the back of my neck stood up a little, and I didn't sleep well for the rest of that night. A short time later, I was out in the front yard smoking a cigarette and talking with my neighbor. She, with her husband and daughter, lived in apartment one downstairs. The other two apartments were still empty as IRA call. Now. This doesn't have much to do with the story, but I believe it bears
pointing out that she was a witch. She always wore black, but this, being Murphers Burro goth was always in style. But one day I had seen her and her husband walking across the backyard slowly ceremoniously. Her husband was a normal enough ponytail guy who worked at the bunny bread plant in town. Or maybe it was Pillsbury, I can't remember, it's irrelevant. She carried a round mirror with a candle and a pentagram made from dried weeds on top of it.
They walked to the dilapidated woodshed out back. Hours later, I walked out and found the mirror and pentagram of weeds. It was still setting in that shed when my girlfriend and I moved out to our apartment several years later. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Talking with my neighbor, who was sitting in the arm of a dogwood tree on an overcast November day after general pleasant trees, she asked me if I had ever experienced anything strange in the house. No, not really, I said, why do
you ask? Just wondering, she said. I was about to walk back inside when I said, you know, there is one thing I think it's strange. You get the whistle don't you, she said. Suddenly a shudder ran over me. Yeah, I said, My daughter gets the whistle too. She said she's learned to ignore it. We said about talking some more, and we talked about supposed haunted houses in downtown Murphisboro.
My neighbor told me about one house she had heard about with a child's handprints that couldn't be painted over. She heard that they just kept bleeding back through. Oh that's creepy, I said, and then walked back inside. Either that night or the next, I was sitting on the hardwood floor in my living room working on a project for a class. Not having an overhead light, I had set the lamp in the floor next to me so I could see while I glued leaves and stems to
some thick paper. The light at this low angle cast a room in a new perspective, and looking up, I saw it. In the corner on the wall next to the kitchen door were two small handprints. It appeared to be two right hand prints from a child, and my jaw dropped. I ran down to my neighbor's apartment and got her and her husband to walk up. I didn't tell them what for, I just said you're not going to believe this. My neighbor reacted as expected, with a
string of expletives signifying incredulous surprise. They walked back downstairs, still dumbfound by the prints on the wall. I finished my work for the night and I went to bed, and I rationalized the hand prints as being from a child who had left an indelible mark in a workman's
fresh plaster many years ago. Well time went on, and I would occasionally show the handprints to friends who came over to the house, a curiosity in an old house that would elicit a reaction of creepy surprise, but little more. Also don't remember getting the whistle anymore by this time. A year later, in November of twenty ten, I was taking a course in statistics and had a mild romantic interest in a pretty girl in the class. She came
over one evening before a test to study. Heated up some frozen chicken nuggets, and we sat on my bed studying and watching TV. After a while, we got tired of studying and just talk for a while. I poured her a glass of wine and I had a beer. Around eleven o'clock, she went home. I took her wine glass, and I set it on the counter by the sink,
and I went to bed. I woke up sometime in the night and walked to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and there it was, the wine glass, sat upright on the kitchen floor, eight or ten feet from the sink, in the middle of the doorway where the handprints were. Now. Maybe I was preoccupied with my date that evening, but for whatever reason, I didn't think anything of it. I was just glad the glass hadn't broken.
The next morning, I got up and made my oat meal, heating up the water in a little red camping cup. After eating, I washed my travel mug for coffee, and I sat on the counter and began washing my spoon and bowl. The travel mug fell off the counter somehow, traveling halfway across the kitchen. It struck me as odd, but then again, things could easily fall off around it edge of an old enameled countertop if placed too close to the edge. So I walked onto class with my
coffee in hand. I think I had to teach labs that day, because I didn't come back until four or four point thirty that afternoon. As I walked up the sidewalk. Levi, who lived downstairs, and our friend Jason were sitting on the points drinking a beer. Over the course of that day, I thought about the wineglass being moved across the kitchen, and to some extent, my coffee mug flying across the counter. I told them what had happened, and was met with
the dude that's weird reactions that I had expected. I sang a few bars of the Twilight's On theme and then suggested that we go up to the booro and get some beers. They agreed that was a good idea. So I walked upstairs to drop off my backpack, and my draw dropped and chills ran all over my body. When I walked in the door, the little red cup that I had heated water that morning was now sitting in the kitchen doorway, exactly where the wine glass had
sat the night before. I ran back downstairs and I got my buddies to come up. We all looked at each other in disbelief, and then we walked back downstairs and went to the bar. I don't recall if it was later that evening or the next, but Levi and I were sitting up in my apartment. It may have been the same evening, because I remember I was a little scared to be there by myself. I sat at my desk, which was right beside the kitchen door, right
across from the handprints. Levi stood in the kitchen doorway. We drank beer and talked about girls and guitars and songwriting, and are usually topics of conversation, but we also talked about the unexplainable events of the last twenty four hours. And that's when I saw it move. A metal yard stick was leaning up in the corner where the handprint and swere five feet from where I sat. I looked in the corner and the yarchstick began to shake vigorously.
I grabbed Levi and pointed to the corner. The yardstick shook for a couple of more seconds, and then it stopped. At this point, the kitchen door, which was always open, slammed on Levi's back and shoulder. We looked at each other because this was just too odd. But as soon as he pushed the door back, it slammed again. I don't recall for sure, but it may have slammed a
third time. We both stood in the doorway, jumping and leaning hard into the door, trying to make it close again, just to see if Levi could have jarred the door causing it to close. We never got it to move. After a while, Levi went downstairs to go to bed because he had to go to Worth. The next morning, I crawled into my bed, but sleep was hard to come by. The Next day, I was talking to a girl who sat next to me in my medicinal plants class, and I told her about the strange events that I
had experienced. She told me that this sounded like a spirit that was about to manifest itself and it could be in a terrifying form. Well, this was not encouraging, since I thought perhaps this was just a friendly ghost. She suggested that I burned sage to clean the house. Without going into a long sidetrack as to why, I'll just say that I already had a bundle of sage in the house. I went home that evening and sat on the front porch with Levi's roommate, who was named Mike.
After a beer, we walked upstairs and we lit the sage. Only the kitchen light was on, and I don't recall why I didn't turn on any of the other lamps. I walked through the apartment with the sage and making up a cleansing ritual as I went. There's nothing but love here, I said, I bring nothing but love, but I live here. I pay rent. You don't belong here. And then Mike interjected, but if you're here, show yourself. No, no,
I never want to see you. I have nothing but love, but you need to go wherever you're supposed to go. I pay the rent here, I continued to say. Afterwards, Mike went back downstairs, and I sat alone in the apartment, and the aroma of the sage strong throughout the rooms. I went to bed that night and slept well. I slept well from then on. There were no other ghostly occurrences. Those events so many years ago left me with a good ghost story to tell. But the event has also
left me with something more. When someone I love passes away and friends and family attempt to comfort us by talking about the afterlife, I tell them, I know we live on past our earthly bodies. Don't say this based on faith. I know it from experience. I learned that ghosts are real on Lytle Street, on those overcasts. November
days many years ago. The building still stands with its quadruplex of apartments, creaky wooden floors and stairs, but it has been completely renovated now with modern windows that keep out cold drafts and modern cabinets and countertops. No one I know lives there any longer, but I would like to stop by one afternoon and strike up a conversation. I want to ask, do you ever hear a strange whistle at night? Okay, I think that's going to do
it for this podcast. I certainly appreciate you finding me out on the podcast network, whether you're listening from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbeam, any podcast app a good five star review if you enjoyed it would be a huge help to me. If you can find that in the app. I can never find it, but some people leave me review and I would appreciate that it helps my podcast grow and helps me keep doing this. Gives me a lot of encouragement.
So thanks for listening, and we'll see you guys on the next one.