Listener Tales: Terrifying True Ghost Stories

Spine tingling, bone chilling and downright mysterious hauntings. Listeners share their own heart pounding tales about a headless cowboy, two separate ghost sighting in the military, and a girl who believes she may have gotten a sign from her deceased sister. Have your own story to share? Contact us.

Sources

Photos Referenced: https://www.instagram.com/p/CqIzMWNpIPC/

TRANSCRIPT

I'm going to lead you through some real life haunting tales today, submitted by listeners. Some are chilling, some are heartbreaking, but as always, listeners' discretion is advised.

It's that feeling. When the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong, it's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing, it's when your heart starts to sound.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore If you're joining us again, welcome back. I actually heard from a bunch of you guys this week. In Instagram, over email, even on that new Spotify feature that lets you comment on episodes. I do a lot of research for these episodes, so I love discussing them with you all afterwards. Someone even said they wanted to write a paper on something I talked about in the last episode, so I sent her the source for that bit of info, which I thought that was really cool.

I also wanted to announce that starting April 6th, I will be releasing a four-part horror audio drama called The Timekeeper. The trailer is up now in the Timekeeper feed if you would like to listen. It starts due to Lewis, Chandler Kinney and Arjuna Ahtalye. We'll be pausing Heart Starts Pounding during the release of The Timekeeper, but we'll be back on a weekly schedule in May.

I want to start by talking about that viral Reddit haunting from earlier this month. In the beginning of March, a Reddit user named failed Talkshow host, posted a photo to the Ghost Subreddit titled, After years of hearing noises from the kitchen, I caught this with Samsung's night vision. Upon first glance, the photo looks unremarkable. It's a voyeuristic shot of a kitchen at night, taken from far enough away that the hallway next to the kitchen is also in frame. But the kitchen is enclosed, so while the front of it is semi-lit thanks to the night vision, the farther back into the kitchen you look, the darker it gets. Making the back area past the fridge of black liminal space. And that's when your eye picks up on something. What should be the shadowy corner of the kitchen has a somewhat soft rounded edge. Maybe something is in the way of the corner, but the more you look, the more it takes on the shape of a shoulder. And as you trace that line upward, just past where the shoulder would curve into a neck, you can see that there's a space that's just a hair lighter than the space around it, as if the faintest bit of light is being reflected. And then you see it, a full-grown man lurking next to the fridge. And to confirm it, someone posted a light in the version of the photo where you can see the figure, well over six feet tall, with long hair and a full beard. He's in a black shirt and his face is blurred as if he were in motion when the photo was caught. Admittedly, yes, it does look a touch like he on a Reeves, and that is what one of the most up-voted comments on the post notes.

The post had the ghost subreddit divided for days, and eventually the post was taken down. People just couldn't agree upon whether or not the photo was staged. And if it wasn't staged, they couldn't agree upon if it were a ghost, or just some insane person that was commonly using the post-trust kitchen in the dead of night. That to me is far more terrifying. Listen, I'm all for Keanu Reeves being in my pantry, but if I found this photo captured of my kitchen, I would simply pay a man on the internet to burn my house down. I would do it myself, but I actually think you can get in trouble for that. The supposed haunting got worse. The user posted a new video to the group saying that they had caught the entity in motion. Watching the footage, you can't see much in the total blackness of the kitchen. But about three-fourths of the way through the video, you can see the light of the microwave slightly get covered as if something slowly stepped in front of it. Once again, someone brightened this video and the result was madness. The figure now stood crouched in the kitchen, moving erratically in a way that made no sense. Its face is looking dead into the camera app points, and then turning quickly to look around. The clip ends with whatever this thing is, staring directly into the camera. It's horrifying. I had chills going up and down my body as I watched it. The original poster said that he had lived in this one bedroom flat for three years, and he always thought that the sounds he heard at night were coming from the old building. But one day he decided to set his camera up out of curiosity. He claimed that the footage taken of the ghostman was the only bit of activity in an otherwise unexciting video. Now that he's seen what's in his flat, he's moving out.

I love tales of old hauntings, but there is something so gutterall, so visceral about hearing a firsthand experience from someone today, experiencing something paranormal. That's why I love love, love when you all reach out to me with your stories. Today, I want to share some spine-tingly ones that I've gotten over the last few weeks from listeners. Some were just emailed over, some are told by the person experiencing them, and all of them made me stop in my tracks.

To kick us off, I'm starting with a story that was sent over to me from a woman who was living on a naval base in Guam. She writes,

Hi, I wanted to tell you about my experience while living in Guam. Guam is in Island in Micronesia and part of the Marianas Island chain. It's also a US territory and has a large military presence. The island and its people have largely benefited by the Spanish conquistadors and a Japanese occupation during World War II. I lived on a naval base in military housing for three years, and about one mile from me where the office family housing was located, there was a mass unmarked burial ground for Japanese soldiers from World War II. Every single night for three years, I would wake up between 12 and 3 am and see a man standing in my bedroom looming over my bed, or standing in the corner. He'd run up to me and tried to grab me and I would start screaming. I swear I could feel him touch me. Most nights I would reach for my phone to turn on my flashlight and then he would vanish. My husband never saw him, but he agreed that the house was really creepy. I didn't tell anyone about this experience because I grew up with a mom that subscribed to televangelist preachers, and I didn't want her to start praying over me and tongues on the phone. I also didn't tell anyone initially because I didn't have any friends yet. I had just moved to the island, and then COVID happened and we never really saw anyone, and I was just trapped in this house for a really long time. Finally, after two years of seeing the same shadowy man each night, I started telling the story at a book club. It turned out that my friend who lived two streets over had been experiencing the same things since she moved in. And that was two years before I even moved to the island. She woke up every night between 12 and 3 a.m. and saw the man in the corner of her room. So then I searched the neighborhood Facebook page for keywords, and I found out that so many other people had been experiencing the exact same thing for years. It got to a point where I refused to be in the housing by myself, especially at night.

Another story of multiple people on a naval base experiencing the same haunting, just like in my naval base on a haunted swamp episode. Right now, I'm convinced that if you've served in the military, you've definitely seen ghosts. I was so curious about the popularity of these specific hauntings and gwam that I looked a little deeper, and apparently there is a long, rich history in gwam of soldiers and ghosts. Like the Leo Palace Hotel, where it's said that you can see the ghosts of two World War II soldiers most nights, also from 12 to 3 a.m. Legend has it that as you walk by the giant glistening resort, you won't see anything. But if you're in a car, the moment you pass the area, you'll be able to see two soldiers in uniform in your rear view mirror. They look just like real people, except one soldier has no head. He's just holding a helmet in his hands. The second you turn around for another glance, they're gone. I also found this post from 2009 on a largely defunct page called Yorgostories.com. This was sitting in the back of the internet freezer at risk of never being noticed. The user added a little bit of context to the hauntings in their post. They write,

I was stationed in gwam on the naval base from 2004 to 2006. I've had a few paranormal experiences before, but nothing prepared me for what would happen my last night on the island. I lived in Barrick's nine on the top floor, just down the hall from the kitchen. I had a roommate at the time, but she was always spending the night at her boyfriend's place. I was a police officer, and I got to work with a few of the locals. They mainly worked at our entrance gates, and they were masters at telling us the local ghost stories. Every place has a woman in white, and this place was no exception. Although, this story is not about her. The locals call the island spirits the Tatamonus. According to the islanders, if they like you, they'll sometimes pinch you or play jokes on you. If they don't like you, they make you sick with headaches. I worked with a guy who suffered terrible headaches that doctors just couldn't diagnose. It got so bad, they accidentally killed him with a morphine overdose. Don't believe me, just look at the memorial and the lounge of the Emma's headquarters. His name was Emma 3 Brent. He had died a few months after I had gotten there, and I didn't know him that well. I did, however, take the spirits of the island quite seriously after that. I've always been as respectful as possible, and I think that's the reason I was never hurt. Until this one night. I had always sensed that there was something in my barracks room with me. I wouldn't look at myself in the mirror when I brushed my teeth because I could feel it behind me, and I was afraid I would see it in the mirror. I had a friend who claimed she could see spirits, and she told me that she was a ghost. I had a friend who claimed she could see spirits, and she told me that she could see a shadow-like figure walking around my room through the window outside. I never told anyone that I thought there was something living with me. So, I had my orders for my next duty station, and all my stuff had already been packed up and shipped out. I only had the sheets I was issued, and a suitcase I had to live out of for the next month. I was sleeping, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I was still in a half dreamlike state where I wasn't fully awake or fully asleep. I had woken up because I was talking. I was saying, no, I can't. As if I was refusing an invitation. I was being polite, but I could see a vague shadow by my door. Right before I realized that I was talking to something in my room, I was held down in my bed. I was on my back, and my sheets were pulled up to my collar bones. It felt like something big had placed their hands on either side of my shoulders and pressed down on the top sheet. It scared me so bad that I woke up all the way and the pressure went away too. After I had a moment to process what happened, I came up with a theory. Whatever was in my room knew I was leaving the next day, and I think it was making a last effort to convince me to stay because it liked me there. I had to refuse the offer because I had my orders, and in a very last attempt, it wanted to force me to stay. I don't think it wanted to hurt me. I just think it was tired of having to deal with so many young single sailors who only wanted to be loud and get drunk. I was a quiet and calm guest in its house.

So if you ever find yourself headed to Guam, and I've heard it's just lovely all ghosts aside, make sure you pay your specs to the Taotao Monas, the ghosts of those who came before you.

Our next ghost story was written in by Jadion. Jadion's mother had an experience growing up, but a little digging proved it to be even more terrifying. Jadion writes,

My mom has told me throughout the years about a ghost she saw when she was a child. The scariest thing for her was that he had no head. Her boy had rested on his shoulders. She said she saw the headless cowboy several times while living in her mother's house in Idaho. Years later, my mom's in her early forties, and she's telling her experiences with the headless cowboy for the first time to her older sister. When my mom mentioned the headless cowboy, my aunt's face turned white like she had seen a ghost. Jadion sent me a link to the article, and I was shocked reading it. The article reads, in 1979, a headless torso wrapped in a burlap sack was found in an Idaho cave, and now, more than 40 years later, the victim has been identified. Joseph Henry Loveless, who murdered his wife with an axe, was last seen before he escaped from jail in 1916 after sawing through the bars using a saw he had hidden in his shoes. In 1991, limbs were discovered in the same cave where the torso was initially found. Researchers and students from Idaho State University searched and excavated the cave in 2015, but Loveless's head was never found. Investigators had little to go off of in 1979. The sheriff at the time believed the remains to be of a gambler from the turn of the century, just based on his clothing. Complicating matters was the fact that Loveless used multiple aliases during the course of his life. The identity of Loveless's murderer remains a mystery.

I’ll include a photo of Loveless on Instagram, but the photo that they included of him in the article is of a man with a stern look wearing a cowboy hat. Was Jadian's mother really seeing the ghost of a dismembered murderous cowboy, and who the hell saw Loveless into pieces? To me, seeing a headless cowboy at night is just so specific, I can't think of anything else it would be. Most people who wake up and see the hat man, see this tall shadowy figure with a wide brim-tot, but he always has a head. And then for her sister to see the same exact man. I know I set up before, but hire a man off the internet to burn the house down. Don't do it yourself, I think you can get in trouble for that.

Our next tale was called in by a listener named Morgan. Morgan's tale is heartbreaking and a hits close to home, but it's one of my favorite types of ghost stories. It's a story of Loveless, but it's also a story of getting a sign that maybe the person is still with you somehow.

So to give you a little background, me and my sister, we were the only ones of our parents, and we grew up in Granapas, Michigan. In our younger years, we were extremely close. We were just two peas in a pot, we were always together. And then after my parents divorced, she had a very, very, very hard time with my parents divorced, and she internalized a lot, and so she kind of became bitter, and she was kind of a hard person to be around. She had kind of fallen into drug addiction. The past, I would say, three or four years of her life, we were very strained. My family kind of enabled her, and I was able to kind of pull back. I was like, you know, I don't want to be that person, and so we kind of stopped talking up until she had passed away. We didn't talk for a long time, and then the night I had gotten the call, it was a Friday night, so I always knew if I got into a phone call from my mom, late at night, it was something bad. She had told me that my sister Megan, she had apparently overdosed, and they didn't know how long she had been down, but they had been trying to resuscitate her for about 30 or 40 minutes, and I wasn't looking good. So I had set out on the couch, and the way my house is, we have a very open house plan, so if you're sitting on my couch, you can kind of see into our kitchen. And I was just sitting there, and I had taken a moment to myself, I wasn't hysterical, I wasn't crying at that point, I was just sitting there trying to just digest what I had been told, and what I knew was going to happen, I had seen something out of the corner of my eye, the walk past my fridge, and I'm like, that's so weird. And I didn't think anything of it, and then I would say about maybe an hour later, my mom had called my boyfriend back, and had told him that my sister passed away. After that, we all kind of gathered at my grandmother's house, where my dad, my aunt, my uncle, they were all there. And we were trying to gather our thoughts and just kind of, you know, plan, what our next move was going to be. And we stayed there, and it was very late at night. It was, we stayed there until about maybe two in the morning, and then we had come home, and I was just trying to decompress, and I went and set back on our couch, kind of set in the same place, and I had seen something walk past our fridge again, on the corner of my eye. Now, it was just very weird and unexplainable, and again, I had never thought anything of it. After that, I didn't really talk about it. I didn't tell anybody other than my mom, so she kind of knew when she was like, oh, I'm sure it was your sister. And she's very religious, so, you know, being a skeptic, I'm like, yeah, okay. It's kind of just, you know, put it in the back of my brain, didn't think about it. We had always joked that if reincarnation was real, that my sister would come back as a black cat, because when she had moved out of my mom's house and lived with her boyfriend, they had like 10 or 15 black cats. So, Morgan thinks that she may have seen her sister. Maybe. But she thinks that if she were to really see her, it'd be in the form of a black cat. She's joking, but there's part of her that maybe believes it. Not too long after her sister, Meghan passed away, Morgan starts to notice that her grandmother's health is starting to fail. I had this feeling, and I kind of had this with my sister too. That something was wrong, and everybody kind of around me was kind of not blowing me off, but was like, you know, it's probably this. And I'm just like, no, there's like something wrong with my grandmother losing my sister was extremely hard on her. I think she probably took it worse than all of us. A couple of months later, after I had noticed that something was wrong with her, she ended up having a hip replacement. And then after her hip replacement, she went downhill, extremely fast. She was very with magic, and so that just was not like her. Eventually, she ended up going to the emergency room, and she ended up finding out that she had cancer for the second time. A week after, she had found out she had cancer, and she discharged from the hospital, she passed away. The day my grandmother had passed away. My whole family was there, and I had walked outside, because I was emotional at that point, and I didn't want anybody to really see how much I was breaking down. And I went and sat on their back porch, and this little kitty came sprinting towards me. He was extremely loud, but he was just a frail little black cat. And I'm like, okay, that's weird. And so I was just sitting there pet in the cat, and you know, me, and my family were always at my grandma's house. So we knew the stray's in the neighborhood, and so I'm like, you know, I've never seen this cat before. I eventually went back inside. You know, we were just talking, and I had looked out the kitchen window. The cat was just inscessantly staring inside and meowing. I'm like, what is up with this cat? It was so strange. And I had went back outside. And I was putting it, and I was, you know, trying to, then I was trying to like, chew it away to go, you know, wherever it came from. I had walked outside for the last time, and it had been a couple hours that this cat was lingering. And mind you, I didn't give it any food, didn't give it any water, nothing. And the last time I had walked outside, somehow this cat got inside and darted towards the room that my grandmother was in. And she was sleeping at this point, but she was kind of sedated. They had given her a bunch of medication to kind of make her comfortable. It almost jumped on the bed, so I don't know if she was aware of the situation. I don't know. You know, a lot of people say that if someone's passing, they can still kind of hear the commotion going around. My first thought in a lot of our minds was, oh, it's my sister. And I had made a little comments myself, and like, oh, that was my again. And we had noticed that she had been hanging on. We don't know why, but for some reason she was just hanging on, but after that she had just, she passed a couple hours later. And it was just very weird, and my grandma had made comments to me when it was just me and her, and she, and I'll never forget this. It was very emotional. She had turned to me. And she had said, she had the biggest smile on her face, and she said, I'm so lucky, and I said, why are you so lucky? And she's like, I'm gonna be the first one that gets to see my again again. Just makes you think, you know, I can't say for sure. Like, oh, that was my sister, but it just, you know, like I said, it just makes you think. So, and I have never seen it since. And I have asked my grandpa, I'm like, have you seen this cat sense? And he said, no, and I have asked my mom and my aunt, and like, you know, if you guys seen the cat, and it hasn't been seen sense. And that is also another weird thing. Like, it was like, the cat was there, and then it was gone.

So many parts of that story really get to me. I also have a sibling that's obsessed with black cats, and I get emotional listening to it. It's not necessarily bone-chilling, but it does make me wonder. And it also plays into some of the superstitions people have about black cats. 16th century Italians actually believed that if a black cat jumped on the bed of an ill person, the person would soon die. Personally, I think black cats have an un-earned bad reputation, but this cat seemed to know what was going on. I like to believe that it was her sister.

Now, as I mentioned before in our first story, if you've served in the military, I'm just going to assume you've seen a ghost and less you tell me otherwise. And this story just further proves my theory. I listened to this voice memo in the dead of night one night when I couldn't sleep. It's from a man who needed to share what he saw, and it kept me up for the next few hours. I knew I had to share it with you all. This story comes from a listener who was serving in Afghanistan when something incredibly strange happened.

So this was back in 2006. I was in the Hindu Kush Mountains. And the elevation there was about 56 to about 5,900. Like elevation somewhere around there. I've seen a little of this. This was February, so there was tons of snow, tons of rock, and it was freezing cold. I was a part of a eight-man recon way back long time ago. And basically my job was to go on identify targets for just teacher intelligence. And all the other kind of crazy stuff that the military does. So we had dug in for the night after patrolling all day and up into the mountains. And we set up a 360-permeter and kind of starting to survey our areas. And whatnot, whatever sectors of fire. And we actually started to hear Russian radio traffic over, you know, that radio is basically, and Russians were not there. They did not exist back whenever we were there. Like I mean, they used to be there a long time ago. But for our time back in 2006, there were no Russian soldiers, boots on ground in Afghanistan. So we ended up hearing these booms out in the distance in this Russian radio traffic over top of our normal, like, comms, channels, like over our radio channels. So from there, we were trying to actually raise our headquarters more or less and trying to tell them like, hey, like we have Russian soldiers out here. Or some of these peak-enrushin on the radio, like, you know, all the other stuff. But some of the Afghans there do speak Russian. Actually a lot of them do because of whenever they had to come over and invade it and whatnot, and they were trying to conquer, Afghan-stained, and stuff. A lot of the Afghan villages picked up the dialect of Russian. So at first, we were like, oh, these actually could be like villagers just talking to each other, but there were booms going off like in the distance. And whatnot, but the booms kept getting closer and closer and closer. They were almost on top of us. Like, they were in the valley for below us. Like, these loud explosions. And I'm a part of an eight-man recontimate this point. And everybody was looking around, like, kind of scared. Like, are we not seeing this giant firefight that's going on around us? You know, like, what's going on? And we ended up basically trying to get a whole of the overhead quarters. Trying to tell them what's going on. And a bunch of my guys are starting to look through their scopes and look through thermals and look through night vision and all that other stuff. I remember raising my rifle with my thermal optic on top of it and seeing a lone soldier out in front of us at about 100 yards, maybe 125 yards or so. So with thermals, it gives off a heat signature, kind of like predator's vision rate. He was actually colder than the environment around him. And granted, this is February in the mountains of Hindu Kush. It is about zero degrees, maybe even colder than that. And he had all the Russian gear, all the Russian equipment, AK, etc. He had everything. But he did not have, you know, like, I didn't have, like, visual wake up with my eyes on him. I had him through a thermal scope. So I blew up my rifle and told my guys I was like, hey, I got a guy out here. You know, like, he's here, you know, he's right in front of us, etc. And they all started raising their rifles and like, we don't see anything. We don't see anything. I don't know where he's at. You know, whatever. I was like, he's a literally right in front of me. Like, how are you not seeing this? So when I raised my rifle back up, he was gone. And then all radio traffic ceased. And it was over with. Like, there was no more booms in the distance. There was no more any form of like radio traffic or anything like that. And all of our car, our comms, like our radio is they all sort of to work again where we can actually get in touch with our base. But I really freak this out because one thing that, like, I guess with F. Gannis stand is that our, this story that I'm telling you now is not something that's kind of like unheard of in a one time thing. This is something that many people have experienced. Long story short, being an upkin extract good out of there. Like a day later, and we told our command, like basically what happened and all the other stuff that goes with it. And they ended up kind of telling, like pulling us inside and being like, hey, like you're not the first person to experience something like this. Like a couple of teams before you guys have experienced this kind of thing. Like, and they were straight up honest with us, so like, look, man, this is the graveyard of Empire or some more or less because, I mean, there were, Alex, the under the grave was there, and he was there, like 350 BC. So like, Afghanistan is just this weird pocket of the world that Empire's go to die, and that's a makes sense that spirits are everywhere, all throughout those mountains and all throughout those cities.

Once again, the same strange phenomenon was seen by multiple people, reported to the same officer and remained unexplained. And even if the Russian radio signals were really just interference, how do you explain the cold man? This was something that I wanted to look into more since the listener said he had heard other people had experienced this, and you guys, when I say the stories are terrifying, they're terrifying. So much so that next week's episode is going to be fully dedicated to them. It'll be scary stories from the military, specifically focusing on the entities that were seen in Afghanistan during the war. I'm so excited, but I'm also so scared. Meet me here next week, you won't want to miss it.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. If you've been enjoying the podcast, you can sign up for bonus content on Patreon or make a one-time donation on BIMIA Coffee, both are linked in the show description. Have a heart pounding story you'd like to share on the podcast, email Heart Starts Pounding at Gmail.com. Until next time.