Ghosts of War: Haunting Encounters in Afghanistan and Iraq
Ghosts of Russian soldiers, red eyed creatures made from smoke. These are real life horror stories from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's who saw the unexplainable. . Have your own story to share? Contact us.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I’m your host, Kaelyn moore.
If you’re new, we release episodes every Thursday
Before we jump in I wanted to mention that I have something really special planned for you all in April. I’ll be releasing a scripted, fictional podcast called the Timekeeper every Thursday starting April 6th. That will be on it’s own feed, not this one. If you’re listening on apple podcasts, you should be able to click the heart starts pounding Icon to take you to it, if you listen somewhere else you can search directly for it, or click the link in the show description to take you there.
It stars
Judah Lewis from The Babysitter and Christmas Chronicles
Chandler Kinney from Pretty Little Liars, Original Sin
Arjun Athalye from Are You Afraid of the dark
Heart Starts Pounding will be pausing while that’s being released, but Make sure you keep up with me on insta and tik tok for a daily dose of horror. we’ll be back on a weekly basis starting in May 4th with some episodes I’m so excited to share with you. Thanks guys.
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Last week, we heard from a listener who was stationed in Afghanistan when he saw the ghost of a Russian Soldier through his thermal lens. If you haven’t heard that story, I really recommend you go back and listen to it. It absolutely shook me when I first heard it, and it’ll add some context to what you’re about to hear.
In his story, the listener said something that really stuck with me. He said that other people had complained to higher ups about seeing this ghost as well. But there was just nothing they could do about it. Makes sense, Our military is not taught how to handle paranormal experiences in the field. War is calculated, measured, precise. There’s no room in the margins for anything unexplainable or supernatural. No, those stories tend to get squashed.
But over the years, some of these stories have resurfaced, and they’ve been passed around like folklore to each other and on the internet. It’s not typical battle lore, not fabled tales from war like the Trojan Horse, no, it’s first hand accounts of soldiers seeing the strange and unexplainable while serving. Time hasn’t yet fully distorted these tales into legend. I wanted to look more into soldiers in the middle east who things that left them chilled. I mean, these are people coming face to face with enemy fire, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world. And they still couldn’t explain what they saw
What I found was a deep, disturbing history of bizarre sightings in the middle east by US Soldiers. Today, I’m going to tell you some of those stories. You’ll see that many of them have elements that are too similar to shake off. Like this one compared to the story that was told to me last week. This was posted three years ago on reddit by user SpiritedSoul. They write (make more scary)
I have only told this story to three people outside the old military buddies who have similar stories to this experience. First I need to set the scene.
Tucked in a mountain valley in Baghlan, Afghanistan is a place called Russian Hill (tapa gurghan is the best phonetic spelling of the local name). We just called it Tapa. Tapa is the only hill in this entire valley and that is not by mistake; it is a burial mound that has existed since the time of Alexander the Great. Generations of locals have been buried here; this also includes the dead Russians from the failed invasion back in the 80’s. Now what did the American special operations do when they came to this valley? Level off the top and stick a combat outpost on it.
So this is where my story begins; I was a regular army paratrooper attached to the special operations team that built the outpost. One of the roles of the regular army guys was to watch the radios at night. We would always get weird babble on them at night but that could be written off as interference (though years as a radio operator for my team lead me to think otherwise).
I had radio watch duty one night. ~2:45am - 3:00am my shift ends and I walk down the hill to our little bathroom area. I’m doing my business in this lil cinderblock Hut with a hole when I hear walking up the hill next to me. I at first think nothing of it, probably just one of the local guards coming up for a shift change. But being the middle of the night and me in a combat zone I do listen and pay attention. I can hear the sound of gear rattling. Which I know for a fact that our locals don’t wear gear with Meta ich buckles or boots for that matter, I’ve been on patrol with them multiple times and they hang around the outpost I know what they sound like when they move. This was not that, this was the heavy set boot steps of a soldier in combat gear.
Now not wanting to die on the throne and the fact that I was one of very few Americans at this outpost I decided I probably needed to know who was going up the hill. So I crack the door and peak outside and holy hell bananas there IS someone on the hill. It’s happened to be mostly a full moon and I had some decent ambient light. They were carrying an AK so not an American. They also had on a uniform and not the typical afghan garb. Not one of our afghan local police?
At this point they are close to the top of the hill and this person is not someone from the outpost. I grab my rifle and pop out the door and I run up the hill after them. I get to the top and not a single person was around.
I walk over to the building where the radio guard is and knock on the door. My buddy answers and asks what’s up. I checked to see if anyone else was up or came in there and he said that no one has came out of the barracks.
The next day while eating lunch we joked about it and one of the special ops guys who had been there longer told us it was the resident Russian ghost. Claimed he started appearing after they used dirt from the hill to fill our sand bags for the wall. Turns out they found some bones while doing it. He even told us that he had been face to face with it and even drew his side arm. All the other guys kinda chimed in about their own creepy stories of the place.
A lone, russian soldier, caught in a perpetual loop of combat, forever walking up an outpost in the desert of Afghanistan. It sounds like legend, like a story soldiers tell at night to scare one another. But we know that other soldiers were reporting seeing ghostly russian soldiers in other areas.
hearing that story, the first thing I thought of was the shocking similarities to the most documented haunting in afghanistan.. This tale transcended legend and became wildly reported on, being featured in british newspapers as well as the new york times.
the most famous account of Paranormal activity of soldiers in afghanistan comes from Observation Post Rock in 2009, when 8 Marines were stationed there for 2 months.
It was 2009, and America had just deployed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. In the midst of the fighting and chaos of the war, 8 marines were given a mission. They were to go to Observation Post Rock and keep watch over the area for 60 days.
Observation Post Rock, or OP rock, was a small hill that served as a watch out for enemy soldiers. Teams would be stationed there to keep 24 hour surveillance and report any suspicious activity or advancement of enemy soldiers back to their base using radios.
There was currently a team of British soldiers there keeping watch, and customarily, when a new team arrives to an outpost, the team departing will give them a lay of the land. But as the 8 marines pulled up the dusty backroad through the desert, they saw the British soldiers were eager to leave. The marines reported that the British team leaving the post looked disheveled and anxious, as if they had experienced an attack. There was no formal greeting, no breakdown of the area. Nothing. The only word of advice given to the new team that arrived was, “if you pick something up. Put it back” it was said with the same gravitas a Sergeant would use giving a command in battle, yet, this warning seemed to be about the amenities at the post.
What they could possibly pick up, they didn’t know. As they searched the post that first day, they realized there wasn’t much there. OP Rock was much smaller than other observation posts. It was mostly few tents, some big sandbags to hide behind, and a series of trenches. But, this was home for the next two months, so they were going to have to get used to it.
Observation posts are typically targets for enemy fire, so it’s important that whoever is stationed there has the ability to hide and protect themselves . The trenches were there to provide some of that protection, but the marines quickly realized they were just not deep enough. When standing normally, their heads would peer over the top of the trench, visible to whoever was firing. If they were going to make it work, the trenches would have to be deeper.
So they got to work digging. This was June, and the afghan sun can be brutal that time of year. So maybe at first they thought they were suffering from heat stroke when they dug the shovel in and heard a crack. Through the soft dirt they could tell they had hit something solid and fragile.
One of the Lance Corporals reached down to grab whatever they had hit. It felt smooth and had rounded edges. It was cool to the touch compared to the blistering heat around them. But when he pulled it out of the ground, the marines all looked on in horror.
It was a human femur. Perfectly intact. The men decided they had to keep digging to see what else was buried underneath their new home, and to their terror, they found multiple full skeletons, as well as russian artifacts like stakes for tents. The new york times reported that these skeletons were not just from the Russian soldiers that were there in the 80’s. No, some were potentially centuries old.
What the soldiers didn't know, was that OP rock had a history. A history that even locals in the area got nervous talking about. According to locals, the outpost used to be a burial site before the 1740s, after which it became a fort. Legend has it that 40 communist police officers were executed on the rock in 1980.
The area was considered holy by locals, after a soviet bomb hit the area but did not explode. They would share stories of enemy tanks being swallowed whole by the earth. Whatever was going on there was unkind to invaders.
Maybe this is what the British soldiers meant by, if you pick something up, put it back. But it was too late. But The marines weren’t thinking of that, they were thinking of their safety, and they needed the trench to be deeper. so they continued digging.
And whatever they disturbed made itself known immediately.
The first night, one of the men, Corporal Lena was preparing for the overnight watch. Each night, one of them would stay awake to monitor the area while the others slept. While he was the lone man awake, he heard the radios started glitching. There was a crackle, and then something that Lena described as a whisper. Not in any recognizable language, but at times, it almost sounded russian. The radios were the only lifeline that the marines had to base. It was what they would use to let base know if anything was headed towards them, but it also was the only way they had to tell base if they were being ambushed, so it was crucial that the radios were in perfect working condition. So Lena takes out the batteries and reboots the radios, but they’re still making the weird noises.
He ended up contacting base to ask if they were sending out or receiving any signals, but they confirmed that they weren't. That whole night, the crackles and the whispers continued.
But that was nothing compared to two weeks later, when another marine, Lance Corporal Hoyt was on watch. When you’re on watch The safety of the group is your responsibility. So here it was just corporal hoyt, seven sleeping marines behind him, and the vast open, emptiness of the Afghanistan desert.
All of a sudden, hoyt feels eyes on him, as if someone is watching his every move. He doesnt want to tip off an enemy soldiers, so he slowly slowly brings up his gun to his face to see if he could get anything on his thermals.
The report says that at this point The other marines were awoken by a blood curdling scream. But it wasn’t Hoyts.
They all jump up, expecting an ambush, but all they find is a shaken Hoyt and a barking Ugly Betty. He had seen something out in the desert. The figure of a man running behind a bush about 200 meters away.. The scream had come from out in the distance in the mans direction.
So Corporal Lena raised his thermal lens, but there was nothing out there. No matter where they looked, it was all the same temperature meaning no life. Once they determined the man was no longer out there and there was no threat posed, they decided they’d hunt for tracks the next day to see where the man came from and where he went.
But the next day, there was no trace that anyone had ever been there. The men needed to make sure that the perimeter was secure, so they set off to find bullet casings, boot prints, anything that indicated the man Hoyt saw had been there. But there was no indication.
The marines were shaken by this, but it seems like they still didn’t think there was anything paranormal going on. They’re out there hunting for a threat hidden in the mountains, so every strange thing that happens is being processed through the lens of “someone out there wants to kill me” ghosts were the last thing on their mind.
One of the youngest marines there, lance Corporal Zolnik, started feeling differently one night when he was on watch out, however.
Zolnik remembers how warm it was that night. It’s the desert in the summer, and while its cooler than the daytime, in all of your gear the nights are still pretty warm. That’s why it was so strange when all of a sudden, a pocket of cold air hit him. It wasn’t just a body chill, he started shivering from how cold the air around him became. Zolnik says he didn’t think much of the change in temperature, the other men had also been complaining of that since they’d been there.
But then, quietly behind him, he hears whispering. And his descriptions of the whispers sound similar to Lena’s description of what came over the radios. Soft at first, not even sounding like language. But every couple of words he could make out something that sounded faintly russian.
And worse than the paranormal, Zolnik feared that he was losing his mind. It’s no surprise that combat is extremely stressful, and that stress can play cruel tricks on your mind. Zolnik worried that the affects of war had caught up with him.
But before he could think too much about it, he hears footsteps above him, like someone is running around on the wooden slabs of the shack that they’re. He runs up to see what’s happening, he needs to make sure it’s not the taliban. But when he gets up to where he heard the sounds coming from, there’s no one there.
So he goes back down. And maybe in an attempt to prove to himself that he wasn’t loosing his mind, he raises his thermal lens to his face to see if he could see anyone out in the vast openness.
And he does. There’s a man with a heat signature, standing in front of his thermal lens.
the man has his fists balled and up by his face. Zolnik is freaking out, but before he shoots he needs to make sure that its not one of his own men, so he brings down his thermal lens. But the man is gone, there’s no one out there when he looks out.
Zolnik was so disturbed by this event that he requested to transfer. Combat fatigue is real and can have disastrous consequences, and he figured his mind was slipping away from the stress.
And that would be believable if he were the only one having these experiences, but he wasn’t. And they didn’t stop after he left. They only got worse
Corporal Lena was out on patrol one night when Ugly Betty started barking. Really losing her mind at something in the distance. So Lena brings up his binoculars and he could faintly see the outline of something that looked like a person in the distance. Now, already they all thought that there was someone out in the bush that they couldn’t see, so Lena is on high alert. he pulls his binoculars down to get a better look, but the figure is gone, he can’t see it anymore. That was strange, he thought. But betty is still Cujo barking out into the empty desert, so he brings his binoculars back up
And the figure is now 100 meters closer, staring directly at him.
He’s terrified, so he rips his binoculars away, and the figure is gone. He’s trying to figure out what he saw when he feels the double tap on his back.
That’s how the man in charge, Sgt Green would get their attention. Lena turns around to tell him that there’s someone out there, but no one is behind him. And when he looks back out into the vast darkness, theres nothing there. Not even when he uses his binoculars again.
After that night, the men slowly started talking to each other. It started with Lena, but then every man on the team confessed that they too had experienced something unexplainable and incredibly strange. But at that point it was almost day 60, they had one more night before they were set to leave.
So that night, they’re all excited that they can finally get out tomorrow. Whatever happened that night wouldn’t matter because they were driving out first thing in the morning. And now they were all expecting the usual, maybe some weird radio static and some whispering, but they felt prepared.
But then the radios go out. Not just glitching, dead. And both of them. So they were not able to communicate with their base, at all.
And then, enemy fire. From everywhere. Corporal lena said that it sounded like someone was standing in the trenches with them, firing directly next to their heads, it was that close. No one could tell exactly where it was coming from, so they were firing everywhere, at everything, just trying to cover themselves and make it stop.
Worst of all, they hear the unsettling whistle of a rocket propelled grenade, designed by the soviets. Not only are they getting fired at from every angle, but by an artillery they were not equipped for.
But then, as quickly as it started, it stopped. All of the gunfire ceased, and no one in the trenches had been hit. Not only that, but there were no stray bullets, or any evidence that they were just being shot at.
The following morning, they said it took all of 5 minutes for them to pack up all of their stuff and head out.
Though their time at the post was officially over, what transpired there haunted the soldiers for the rest of their lives, and a few of the men have suggested that they feel like the post cursed them. Of the 8 men stationed there in 2009, 3 of the marines would go on to die in battle, and SGT Green would become disfigured in an IED attack. They fear that whatever was hunting them at the post may have followed them.
Were they being tormented by a lone enemy soldier, or was it something else?Maybe the echos of the past can still be heard in the region, and maybe the ghosts of soldiers from before are cursed to be permanently stationed where they met their fates. Maybe the land really is sentient like the locals suggest.
These stories are chilling, but theyre at least of our world. Various soldiers that have never met have recounted seeing the same entity in another part of the country, but this time it’s not of our world. It’s something much darker. More After the break.
Years ago, in the heat of the war, there was a soldier who got a call that there was an ambush at the nearby airfield, and they needed everyone out there, STAT. So he jumps in the closest car and heads out to the airfield with a couple other guys. When he gets there, he can see one lone man, crawling over the fence from the outside, trying to get into the airfield. So, what do they do? They all lift up their weapons and fire a single shot each,
One bullet makes contact and the man drops. But as he’s falling, it looks like theres black smoke pouring out of him. One of the guys makes a comment that it looks like it was a suicide bomber, they must have hit his vest and now smoke was pouring out.
But as they kept watching him, more and more smoke poured out, until the black fog surrounded the man and made a human like creature, through the creatures darkness they could see glowing red eyes, glaring back at them. And then it started to laugh.
They raised their weapons in fear, but The man said that the creature took a few steps forward and then dissipated. He was never able to make sense of what happened. He claimed they only spoke about it one time after that and then agreed to never speak about it again.
This red eyed creature shows up in multiple accounts from soldiers who served in different units. Each account is in a different context, but each time, the creature is described similarly. Like this story that was posted to reddit 8 years ago.
I was an Infantryman during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my unit was 1/22 IN 4th ID. We pushed into Baghdad, and then took an airfield just north of the city. Then we headed north, up highway one. The majority of my unit stayed in Tikrit (Saddam’s hometown), my Company kept going north with 3/66 Armor to a huge enemy ammo depot near Baiji. We began operating around that area, and then shortly moved to nearby K2 airfield, and set up a more permanent forward operating base, or FOB
K2 airfield had a residential area that had been abandoned, near the end of the runway. It was on-post housing for the Iraqi air force personnel that ran the base, but they had left way before our arrival. What was strange is that it seems it was abandoned before the invasion. There were pots and pans in the sink, there were clothes on the line, but there was lots of dust all over everything.
Looters had been there (they were everywhere during that time), but they left mostly everything. My unit moved into the end of the airfield, into some bombed out warehouses, and an MP company moved into the biggest houses in the abandoned housing area, we started to call the “ghost town.” The MP’s that took up residence in the ghost town moved out after about a week. I asked one of the very tired looking MP’s why, as everyone was jealous that they lived in actual homes (albeit abandoned, shabby ones), instead of bombed out warehouses, and I was curious about their speedy move. He said that they couldn’t sleep; doors would open and shut all night, they heard footsteps RUNNING up and down the halls at night, and then finally they began to see children’s faces looking in at them through the windows.
The US Army does not function with consideration to ghosts, and for them to get their chain of command to move their whole company out of the ghost town, there must have been some tangible events that effected their operational readiness.
Their move meant that now our residence was the new perimeter of our FOB closest to the ghost town, so we took up nighttime security every night around our warehouse. We would each do an hour shift, and we had a watch going all night long. We had thermal sights, and night vision, and we would sit out there scanning the desert for enemy activity. During our watch, we could all hear children laughing and playing, all night long. It sounded like a playground was active in the ghost town, but we verified with our thermal sights, it was empty. We often had pebbles thrown at us. We would sit out there, alone or in pairs, and listen to the laughter while getting hit by rocks. Nothing big, but they would bounce off your face, your helmet, your vest. The whole time scanning with thermals and night vision, nobody there, listening to the laughter. This happened night after night; we all talked about it with each other, nobody was happy about it, but we sucked it up.
In 2004, we had a change of command, and upon hearing about the situation, our new commanding officer said “There is no supernatural activity in this “ghost town”, only enemy activity.” This was partially true because we had been attacked with sniper fire and rpg’s from that direction multiple times. His decision was to set up a nightly patrol and set up ambushes in the ghost town, every night. We were already busy, looking for WMD’s during the day, raiding Saddam’s Baathists during the night. We had been doing 18-36 hour patrols, QRF, convoy security, more patrols, show of force, ambushes; the works! And now this.
So it began. My squad had done the new patrol a few times, and it always seemed extra dark when walking though the ghost town. There was an old British fort left over from their colonial days, with firing ports and towers. Streets with sidewalks, and pretty decent houses, all empty. While on patrol, we could still hear the kids playing, but it seemed just as faint as when we were on perimeter guard. We would get on a roof, lay there on ambush and just listen. To the wind, the kids, and that’s it.
One night, we were patrolling through the ghost town, in a modified wedge formation. One of our soldiers said “What the hell!”, then screamed “what the hell is that!!!” He pointed his weapon to the middle of our formation, then dropped his weapon, and ran. He ran alone in the dark, unarmed in the middle of a combat zone, away from everyone. Those of us that looked where he pointed, saw it. Those of us that looked at the fleeing soldier, heard it.
Walking with us was a solid shadow, with roughly the shape of a person. Tall, with really long arms, skinny legs, and a very narrow torso. It turned it’s head back and forth as if surprised to be discovered. It bent down, and then it leaped. It landed in a crouch on top of a nearby chainlink fence still facing us, and moving it’s head to look at us. It’s eyes then quickly flashed red, and then it jumped backwards off the fence and disappeared into the night. We caught up with the soldier, our squad leader was super pissed. He got roughed up a bit, as he had absolutely lost it, screaming and crying.
This soldier was solid. I’ve personally seen him shoot an enemy, at close range. We’d all been through a lot, and we were both confident and competent. What we saw that night was not the scariest thing we had been through that deployment, engaging the enemy on the regular was. But the enemy made sense, this creature didn’t.It was by far the most disturbing thing I’ve ever witnessed , as it seemed to have a purpose keeping pace with us. From that point on, whenever it was our turn to patrol ghost town, our squad leader would lead us to just the edge and we would wait, not going in. I’m sure we all still appreciate that to this day.
Whatever that was doesn’t feel like a ghost and it certainly doesn’t feel human. Some locals suggested that these were Djinns, creatures from the Quran that were forged in the smokeless flame of a fire, while angels were forged in the light. American Soldiers may compare them to demons, but they’re more nuanced than that.
Some will say these are just tall tales from the battlefield, legends forged by over exaggeration and combat exhaustion. But when multiple people are coming home and complaining about a red eyed creature, it makes you wonder.
What is it doing out there, and is it specifically targeting invading forces?
So, dear listeners, what do you think it was hiding in the desert? Are these just the battle legends of our day? Is it combat fatigue mixed with rogue enemy soldiers, or it really something darker? Something ancient, sentient, and vengeful?
This has been another episode of heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Join us back here on May 6th, but in the meantime, enjoy The Timekeeper starting next Thursday. Have a scary story you’d like to share on the podcast, or even a recommendation of something to cover? check out heartstartspounding.com our new fancy website. Until next time