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Today's podcast features three camping horror stories.
The audio from all of these stories has been pulled from our youtube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
The links to the original youtube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called Sleep Well and it's about a teen solo hiker who has a terrifying encounter out in the wild.
The second story you'll hear is called.
It Started With a Whistle, and it's a story that sounds like an urban legend, but it actually happened.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called Thorns, and it's about a woman whose very strange dream becomes a reality.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious Delivered in Story format, Then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do.
And we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please sneak under the Amazon Music follow buttons chair and tie their shoelaces together.
Okay, let's get into our first story called Sleep Well.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.
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In April of 2020, a 17 year old named Sam, who was an avid outdoorsman, decided to go on a one night hike in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.
The mountain's name has a bunch of supposed origins, but the one that's generally accepted is people are afraid of the Superstition Mountains because of all the mysterious deaths that have occurred there.
And so, because people would avoid these mountains in fear of mysterious death, it became these superstitious mountains.
But Sam was not superstitious and regularly came out here to go hiking, in particular on this eight mile loop that went through a canyon.
And so this one night overnight, he planned on doing was going to be on that eight mile loop where he'd do four miles in camp out and then four miles back, and he planned to do it with a friend, but his friend at the last minute cancelled and so sam teetered on not even doing it but ultimately decided okay, i'll just do it by myself because i'm very familiar with this area.
On the day he was supposed to go do this hike, he had planned on getting there early in the day to have maximum lighting, but due to some unforeseen circumstances and traffic and bad road conditions, he didn't get to the trailhead until 545 PM that night.
Sam knew it was a bad idea to start this hike so late because he was gonna run out of daylight.
He probably was not gonna make it four miles to the point where he planned on camping out.
But he figured.
With his good health and fitness he could probably quickly make his way to the two or even three mile mark.
And there were some suitable campsites there.
And so he decided he would kind of risk it and just try to go as fast as he could and use the daylight he had to reach a suitable campsite.
But he wasn't able to move as fast as he thought he could.
And soon the sun was down and it's totally dark and he's got his flashlight, but that only is able to shine like 10 feet in front of him.
And then at one point he nearly falls off of this rock and he knows had he fallen he would have gotten really badly hurt.
And he's 15 miles away from the nearest help.
And he's in a bad cell phone service area.
The roads getting out here are treacherous, no one knows exactly where he is, and it dawns on him that you've made a pretty bad choice and you should stop right now and make camp here and not try to risk it any further.
And so, as it happened, where he was there was this forest right nearby and he could see there was a clearing about 30 feet off the path when he shined his light.
And so he walked into that clearing and he found it was a great spot to make camp.
And in fact, on the edge of this clearing was the remnants of a fire pit.
It was very old, but it at least showed someone had camped out right here and they seemed to have made it just fine.
So suddenly he was feeling pretty smart and he felt pretty good about where he was staying for the night.
Now, Sam intentionally did not bring a tent.
He liked to sleep on a sleeping pad with a sleeping bag over that, and then he would string up a tarp over the top of him in case it rained.
And since this clearing was surrounded by a bunch of pine trees, he was able to string up his tarp over the top, and it was perfect.
And pretty soon he had a fire going.
And then he cracked open a can of beans and he began eating his dinner.
And as he was eating, he started to get a sense that something was off, something was not right.
He began scanning the tree line as if he was going to find something out of the ordinary, but his visibility was incredibly limited because he was sitting right up against a fire.
And if you've ever sat next to a fire in a dark forest, your visibility is like five feet in a circle around the fire.
You really cannot see beyond that.
And his vision was also limited by all the pine trees that encircled his clearing.
So he really could only see what was immediately around him, nothing else.
And he starts thinking, that's got to be it.
Maybe I'm just nervous because I have no visibility.
But as he's rationalizing this kind of bad gut feeling, a rock the size of a marble comes soaring into the campsite and lands at his feet.
And he looks down at the rock and immediately he connects that to that sense of dread he had.
And he's looking around a little more aggressively now, but again, his vision is very, very limited.
And so for the next 15 minutes, Sam is really aggressively scanning the tree line and listening really intently and he doesn't hear anything.
He doesn't see any more rocks get thrown.
And so he begins to rationalize and convince himself that there's nothing wrong here.
That feeling I have, oh, don't worry about that.
He starts telling himself, you know, I must have kicked a rock.
That's what it is.
Or maybe a rock fell off a tree.
But either way, it's something totally explainable and you got nothing to worry about.
And after a little while he convinced himself and he got into a sleeping bag under his tarp and he went to sleep.
A couple of hours later, Sam wakes up and he has that same sense of dread.
And now it's back with a vengeance.
And he can't hear anything.
He can't see anything, but he's definitely feeling like something is wrong.
And at that moment, as he's listening really intently and looking really carefully, he hears the sound of rustling leaves.
It sounds like someone walking through leaves about 30 or 40 meters away from his campsite.
And initially he can't tell if this person or animal is walking towards his campsite or away.
But over the next 30 seconds or so the sounds start to fade and he convinces himself that okay, they've left and everything's fine.
But just in case he wanted to grab his flashlight and shine it in that direction.
And so he reaches next to him where he had left it, when he had gone to bed a couple hours earlier, and he can't find his flashlight.
He's looking around for it and he can't find it.
And he's like, man, that's weird.
I had it right here, right next to my body and it's not here anymore.
And that's when the alarm bells start going off in his head, because the only way this flashlight moves is if he moved it.
And if it's not here, how did it move?
And so he jumps out of the sleeping bag, he ducks out from under the tarp and he's looking around on the ground in the immediate vicinity of where he was sleeping to find this flashlight.
And as he's looking out of the corner of his eye, he sees some light and he turns his head, and in the same direction that he had heard those footsteps, those rustling leaves, when he was still laying down.
He sees his flashlight laying on the ground about 10 meters away, which means someone or something had been less than a foot away from him to get this flashlight that was right next to him, while he was fast asleep and totally helpless and had moved it all the way over there.
And immediately, Sam thinks to himself, that's a trap.
They are trying to lure me away from my campsite.
Suddenly, he felt so scared he wanted to vomit.
But he knew in order to survive this situation, he needed to keep his wits about him.
So he puts his boots on and he grabs his knife and he knows he's not leaving this campsite.
In fact, he's gonna build the biggest fire he can.
He's gonna stoke that fire as big as he can get it and he's not gonna go anywhere near that flashlight.
For the next several hours.
Sam just stood in the middle of his campsite holding his knife, preparing to confront whatever the heck is out in the woods.
And over those several hours he would hear footsteps approach his campsite, turn around and leave.
Every time the fire got lower he noticed they would come closer and closer and closer, and when he would stoke the fire they wouldn't come as close.
But at about 3 am he ran out of firewood.
So unless he went into the woods to get more, he'd be out, and he's certainly not going into the woods, that's the whole point is to avoid the woods where this thing is.
And so, as the fire died down, Sam prepared himself mentally for whatever happened next, because he knew that with that fire gone, this thing was comfortable coming all the way in, coming all the way up right next to him to get the flashlight.
And so finally, he hears the footsteps approaching.
And before this, the closest they had come was maybe about 15 meters away.
They were far enough away it didn't feel intimate.
It was terrifying, but he had some distance.
This time they walk right up to Bob, three meters away, but they intentionally come behind the thickest group of trees so he can't see them.
And it's still dark outside and he's in that bubble of light near the fire so he's blind to whatever's on the other side of those trees.
But he knows they're there and they've stopped And for two hours this poor kid is standing in the middle of this campsite facing in the direction of whatever is behind the trees.
Probably his imagination is going crazy at this point with what could be behind those trees just waiting for whatever happened next.
But ultimately, the only thing that would happen is the sun would eventually come up and right before it actually popped over the horizon, this thing on the other side finally moved.
It turned around and ran away, and it did not come back.
And so when the sun finally did come up, Sam didn't just charge out of there, because he's still thinking there could be a trap.
He waited until it was totally full sunlight and then he packed up everything he had and he practically sprinted back to the parking lot, back into his car and he drove non-stop for 20 miles until he got to a gas station where he could park and collect himself.
And when he got there he got out of his car and he went in and he got a drink and when he came out he noticed someone had written something on the dust on the back window of his car and he walks over and it just says sleep well.
Question mark Sam is confident whoever was stalking him at his campsite is the same person or group of people that wrote this message on his car.
And now Sam just wonders, what would have happened if I retrieved that flashlight?
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Our next story is called It Started With a Whistle.
In 2017, 27-year-old Lydia Makarchuk left her home country of Ukraine and moved to Bracknell, which is a town just outside of London.
Shortly after moving into her new apartment, Lydia went out and got a job as an accountant at a local hotel.
And then after that, Lydia pretty much swore off her social life and instead just focused exclusively on working hard and saving money.
The one reprieve she got from work was going to church on Sundays.
Two years later, Lydia was at her church enjoying the coffee hour that always followed the Sunday sermon when another member of her church who she didn't really speak to, this 41-year-old man named Norbert Varga, approached her and kind of awkwardly complimented her shoes.
And she was so flattered by this that it opened up a friendly conversation between the two of them.
And during this conversation, Lydia was presently surprised to find out that Norbert was an expat too.
An expat is someone who lives outside of their native country.
Norbert had moved to the UK in 2018, so that's one year after Lydia had moved to the UK, and he came from Hungary, which shares a border with Ukraine.
And, just like Lydia, when he got to the UK he kind of put all his energy into his work and trying to save money.
He was a radio technician and a photographer.
And so the two spend the rest of this coffee hour chatting and enjoying each other's company.
And then afterwards, when they left the church and they both got home, they both found themselves thinking about the other.
There was clearly an attraction there, and so the following sunday they both very eagerly rushed back to church in order to spend more time together.
And, sure enough, during that coffee hour they spent the whole time together just chatting it up, and then afterwards they exchanged phone numbers and made plans to get together outside of church.
They were going to go on a date, and so the rest, as they say, is history.
Two years after Norbert complimented Lydia's shoes, they got married in Bracknell.
And while the wedding was great, unfortunately none of Lydia's family members, who were all in Ukraine none of them could attend the actual wedding.
And so the newlywed couple decided the way they would handle, that is, their honeymoon would be spent in Ukraine.
That way Lydia's family could celebrate their wedding as well.
For a variety reasons, this honeymoon trip to Ukraine kept getting pushed back.
But finally, in September of 2021, everything lined up, everyone was available.
And so Norbert and Lydia rushed to the airport and they hopped on a flight.
And during this flight to Ukraine, Lydia remembers being so excited specifically about her husband finally getting a chance to spend some time with her 29-year-old younger brother, Miroslav.
Lydia was very close with her brother, and so it mattered to her greatly that he and her husband had a good relationship.
But to that point, because of the great physical distance between the uk and ukraine, the two had really not had that much interaction, and so they really didn't know each other very well, And so this trip was really important to Lydia.
And Miroslav.
He really picked up on that because he put together this camping trip for the end of their stay in Ukraine, where he knew he'd be able to step aside with Norbert and chat with him and get to know him a little bit.
And so that was kind of like the failsafe where if he and Norbert did not get a chance to speak all week because they were visiting with so many people, they would have a chance to at the end of the week on this camping trip.
So, after a few hours of flying, Lydia and Norbert touchdown in Ukraine and they make their way to Lydia's family's house where they're going to be staying for the week.
And that night and for the next several days the couple was swamped with several family reunions and meetups with old friends that hadn't seen Lydia in years.
And so Norbert and Miroslav were not getting any time to themselves.
And Lydia really knew that.
And so she and Norbert began looking forward to this camping trip, because that not only represented a kind of peaceful break from the chaos of all these reunions, but it also did represent the one chance they knew Miroslav and Norbert would get to interact with each other.
And so finally, september 15th, the end of the week, it came and it was time to go on this camping trip.
And so, lydia and norbert and miroslav and nine other family members, they all packed up their tents and camping belongings and they loaded up a couple of cars and they drove over to the base of the carpathian mountain range.
This mountain range, which stretches for nearly 1000 miles across Eastern and Central Europe, are very popular amongst tourists because it's stunningly beautiful.
Everything is green and lush, and there are these crystal clear lakes and breathtaking waterfalls and all these amazing animals running around, and there's no mosquitoes.
And they have these really cool hikes that bring you up to these very impressive overlooks.
And so that night, Miroslav had made reservations for this one campsite, this very popular campsite that was up in this clearing, not too far up the mountain.
And it had this great view down to the forest below.
And because it was in a clearing, it had this unobstructed view up to the sky where, in this area, you could look up and just see stars in every direction.
And so when Lydia and the rest of this group arrive in the parking lot of this mountain range, they were all really excited to get up to this campsite and just enjoy being there.
And so they park their cars, they get their gear out, they find the trailhead, and then they begin hiking up the mountain.
And about two hours later, they arrive at this clearing.
They find their campsite, which was marked by the small fire pit underneath a couple of trees.
And so they go over and they set their tents up and some people go out and get some firewood.
And then before long, a fire was made.
And this group of 12 people that had not seen each other in so long.
They just sat down and began enjoying each other's company.
They put tea on, they were swapping stories.
It was really just this wonderful time.
And then, around 8pm, the sun started to set, at which point this huge group just stopped and enjoyed this beautiful sunset.
And then once the sun had gone down, there were two kids that were there on this trip.
And so they were put to bed in their tent.
And then the remaining 10 adults just kind of hung out by the fire and enjoyed each other's company.
And it was actually during this second half of the night that Norbert and Miroslav finally really got a chance to just chat with each other.
So for about an hour they were talking to each other, and Lydia is just watching this happen and she couldn't be happier.
This is like the perfect ending to this trip.
And then around 9 p.m., Norbert stands up.
Lydia sees him stand up and he tells the group he's going to run back to his tent, which was a ways away from the campfire, and he was going to get his camera.
And so Lydia said, okay, no problem.
And she remembers watching him walk off into the distance, because when you're at the campfire, if you're looking away from the campfire, everything is pitch black.
And so she watches him disappear into the darkness, and then she and her brother and everyone else just kind of turn back towards the campfire.
And then all she remembers about what happens next is she heard a whistling sound.
And at first it was very faint, but it started to get very, very loud.
And when it got loud, she tried to kind of figure out where it was.
But before she could, suddenly something hit her in the face, predominantly hit her in the nose.
And as soon as it did, she went blind, she went deaf, and then she felt herself on the ground and she has no idea what's going on.
And all she can remember thinking is, oh my God, something horrible has happened to me.
I might die.
I don't know what's happening, but I might die.
And so she started praying for herself to survive whatever was happening to her.
And then her hearing started to come back just a little bit.
Her vision was still totally blurred.
She could only kind of tell where the fire was because it was bright.
But her hearing, it started to come back.
And that's when she heard moaning coming from somewhere near her.
And so she's thinking okay, whatever horrible thing has happened to me has happened to other people too.
And so instead of just praying for herself, she began praying for everyone who was at this campsite.
And so, as her hearing is getting louder and louder and she's hearing more and more moaning and crying happening all around her, she suddenly hears her husband screaming her name.
Her vision is still gone, but she knows it's him and he lands right behind her and he grabs her and he's just repeating her name over and over and over again.
And then lydia manages to kind of choke out to her husband what happened and there's a pause and then norbert says to her it's bad, it's really bad.
It would turn out their campsite was on a battlefield from World War I and buried underneath the soil right under their fire pit was an unexploded bomb from World War I.
Meaning for over a hundred years.
Countless campers have arrived at this campsite and lit fires on top of this bomb that they couldn't see.
And each fire gradually eroded the outer metal casing of this explosive Until finally, that night in September with Lydia and 11 of her loved ones nearby, their little fire finally was it.
It pushed through that last little bit of the casing and it ignited the bomb and it detonated.
That whistling that she heard was the sound of the fire finally cutting through that casing and being exposed to the fire.
And then that thing that struck her in the face, that hit her right on the nose, that was almost certainly a piece of the bomb itself.
So shrapnel that was cutting through her face.
And then the moaning she heard was primarily her brother, who was right next.
Lydia would be gravely wounded, but she would survive.
As for her brother and another man who was not named, they would not survive.
The next and final story of today's episode is called Thorns.
In 2012, a 22-year-old woman named Simone was living in a small winemaking village called Rüdesam am Rhein, which is located in southwestern Germany.
This village is strikingly beautiful.
It's full of quaint European homes and there's lots of rolling green hills with vineyards as far as the eye can see, and the village sits right on the banks of the Rhine River.
Simone had grown up in this picturesque village and she had loved it, but this was going to be her last summer, before she left and headed off to New York City to start the next chapter of her life.
And while she was excited about that, she was also kind of sad, because this village and everybody inside of it were the only things she had ever known, and so the idea of leaving them behind just seemed very strange to her.
But instead of focusing on the kind of growing anxiety around her imminent departure from Germany, she focused on what she would be doing that summer while she was still in Germany.
Some of Simone's fondest memories of her childhood were of her time spent at summer camp.
And the summer camp was located in this forest that was not far from her village.
And every summer in July Simone, along with about 200 other kids from her village and from neighboring villages would converge on the campgrounds in the forest for two weeks of playing games and going on scavenger hunts and putting on stage plays and just generally having a really good time.
But when Simone became a teenager and was too old to be a camp attendee, she decided she would volunteer and be a camp counselor.
And she found it was awesome.
She immediately connected with the other camp counselors and she felt all grown up, having a real job, and she loved goofing around with all of the kids.
And so every summer since that first time volunteering, Simone had gone back and volunteered again.
And this summer was no different.
So in mid-July of that year, Simone packed up her things and she headed off to the forest.
The way this camp worked was the 200 plus kids that were attending the camp.
They would get dropped off in the mornings each day by their parents and they'd play and run around all day.
And then in the late afternoon, their parents would come back and pick them up.
So none of the kids were sleeping over at the camp during these two weeks.
However, the 30 plus counselors, they would just stay at the camp for the full two weeks.
They would just sleep in tents out in the forest.
Technically, the reason they did this was to make sure they had enough time in the morning to prep the campgrounds for the kids and then also in the evenings to have enough time to clean up and kind of have it ready for the next day.
But in reality Simone and the other counselors all knew that the camping out in the forest was the best part of the volunteer experience.
After all, the kids went home for the night, All of the counselors would finish up all of their duties and then rush off into the forest, where their tents were and where there was a fire pit.
And they would have some beers and wine because the legal drinking age in Germany is actually 16.
So all these counselors are having a couple of drinks and then before long they'd be laughing and telling stories and just generally having a great time.
So that July in 2012, Simone and the other counselors arrived at the campgrounds a day early and they caught up with each other and they prepared the campground.
And then the next morning, all the kids showed up and everything went off without a hitch.
And then that afternoon, after all the kids had been picked up by their parents, Simone and the other counselors rushed to finish up all their duties and then headed off into the woods to enjoy their first night hanging out together.
After a couple of beers had been passed around the campfire, Everybody was in good spirits and laughing and telling stories.
But pretty quickly people started to fade and get tired because it was their first day back at camp and it had been a long tiring day.
And so people very gradually began retiring to their tents to go to bed.
And eventually Simone too had crawled into her tent and gotten onto her cot to try to sleep herself.
But she found that night it was so hot she couldn't be in her tent.
It was stifling inside of there.
And so she decides she's just going to sleep out in the open where it's a little bit cooler.
And so she picks up her fold up cot and she brings it out into the open and she sees there are several other counselors who have done the same thing.
And so she puts her cot down next to one of her good friends who's already asleep in her cot.
And then Simone climbs into her cot.
She gets under her covers and she tries to fall asleep.
But for the next hour, Simone just tosses and turns.
She can't get comfortable.
And by that time, everybody else has completely passed out.
So it's just her.
You know, she's counting down the time until she has to get up again to start the next day.
And so she's getting stressed about that.
But eventually she would fall asleep.
However, she would immediately be thrust into one of the most visceral and intense nightmares she had ever had in her entire life.
In her dream she opens her eyes and she looks out in front of her and it's this desert city and there are hundreds of people all in front of her just standing there looking up at her.
And then she notices on her left and on her right are these two men, these big, huge men that are both working on something behind her.
She doesn't really know what it is, but they're obviously busy doing something.
And she kind of glances up at one of them and she notices he's holding something that looks like a wreath, like a holiday wreath you would hang on your door.
And so Simone looks away from the guy with the wreath and just looks back out at this huge sea of people, which is totally bizarre because no one's moving, no one's making any sound.
They're just staring at her.
And then she feels this shooting pain in the top of her head.
The man who was standing on her right was not holding a holiday wreath.
He was holding a crown of thorns.
And now he, along with the guy on the other side of her, were working together to press this crown of thorns into her head.
And so Simone is feeling the thorns being pressed deeper and deeper into her scalp.
And she tries to fight them off, but she realizes she can't move.
She can't even turn her head to look at them.
She can only see them out of her periphery vision.
And then she tries to scream out for help to someone in the crowd to come help her.
But when she opens her mouth, no sound comes out.
And so, as she's sitting there, all she can do is stare straight out ahead of her as the pressure of these thorns are driven deeper and deeper into her skin.
And then at some point, blood begins dripping down in front of her eyes.
And around that point, the pain became so blinding, so awful that it woke her up.
As soon as she woke up, she shot up and she reached for her head to make sure there was no crown of thorns on her.
And as she's doing that, she's thinking, okay, phew, it was just a dream.
That was just a horrible dream.
I'm in this forest.
I'm good.
I'm safe.
And as she's kind of patting on her head, she's realizing her head is wet.
And as she's touching her head, she's realizing it hurts, there's a stinging pain in her head, and then she realizes it's not just a stinging pain, it's a throbbing, intense pain all over her head.
And so, as she's kind of having this realization that her dream is now kind of segued into her real life, she looks out ahead of her and she sees off in the distance.
In the tree line something is running through the woods.
She can't tell who or what it is, but she makes a mental note that there is something someone, running away from them.
But this pain in her head has gotten so intense that she can't focus on anything else.
She can only focus on the pain.
And as she's thinking about how much her head hurts, she screams in pain.
And the girl who was laying next to her that had been asleep.
She wakes up to the sound of the scream, but it's totally pitch black.
She has no idea what's going on with Simone.
And so this girl, she sits up and she's trying to get Simone to tell her what's going on, but Simone has no idea.
She's totally frantic.
She can't really make sense of what's happening.
And so this friend, she reaches down and she picks up a flashlight.
She turns it on and she aims the light at Simone, illuminating her head.
And when this friend sees Simone's head, she starts to scream.
Seconds later, the rest of the counselors that had been sleeping out were awake and they were rushing Simone, who was now shaking and vomiting, over to one of the staff vans.
And then 15 minutes later, they had driven her to the emergency room.
It would turn out, after Simone had finally fallen asleep and she began having that really intense dream about a crown of thorns being dug into her scalp.
Well, in reality, something was digging into her scalp and it was kind of manifesting itself in her dream.
And what was digging into her scalp was the jaws of a fox.
This fox had snuck into the campsite and walked right up behind Simone and just started eating her head.
And amazingly, it did not wake Simone up right away.
And so this fox got 20 or so serious bites out of Simone's head before she shot up and scared it away.
And so almost certainly what Simone saw running away from her in that quick moment was the fox.
Doctors were able to save Simone and stitch her head back together, and they were even able to hide all of the scars in her hairlines.
You can't even see them.
But despite her being physically okay today, psychologically, this was a very traumatizing event.
Not only does she refuse now to go into any forest, whether it's day or night, but she also periodically still gets phantom pains in her scalp that feels like the fox is biting her head all over again.
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