Listener Stories: Ghost Children, Haunted Campgrounds, and More

A ghost who steals, ghostly wailing being heard in the night. These are terrifying stories from listeners.

 Have your own story to share? Contact us.

SOURCES

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/179

https://www.britannica.com/place/Algeria/Colonial-rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_irae

TRANSCRIPT

I never believed in ghosts until I lived in a haunted house in college.

It’s 11pm on a Friday, and I’m chatting with a stranger at a bar in Marfa, Texas when he tells me this. The subject of what we did had just come up and so I told him about heart starts pounding, a little nervous that he may judge me for having my own podcast. “Oh they let anyone have a podcast now”. I could already hear the snide remark in my head. 

But instead, his eyes go wide. I unlocked something in his memory, and he tells me he never believed in ghosts until he thought he experienced a haunting. seeing if I’ll invite him to tell the rest of his story. 

And this, right here, is my favorite part of making this podcast. It’s when I tell strangers about the podcast and they respond with some bone chilling tale of something they can’t explain. I’ve had people tell me about shadow people who haunted their hotel room, ghostly images of their deceased loved ones that apparate in the darkness, and strange warnings that they’re grandparents gave right before they died.

This stranger proceeded to tell me the following story. 

A few years ago, he tells me, he lived in a house in Savannah, Georgia during grad school. A big, southern gothic house that he lived in with a few other students. The house had some quirks, like how once a week a group of people would stand outside to look at it for about 10 minutes, and then continue on walking. That was strange. 

But one night, things got a lot stranger.

 He’ssitting on the couch in the living room, chatting with a roommate. It’s just them in the big, creaky house when, behind a closed door that opened into a long, dark hallway. He hears footsteps. Slow, heavy footsteps. 

The two of them stop talking, and listen to the sound of the footsteps coming towards them from the hallway where the bedrooms were. None of their other roommates were home But they’re getting louder, and closer.

Right as they get to the door,  they stop.  Whoever is in the house is just on the other side of the old wooden door. The guy and his roommate are still paused, waiting for someone to come in. 

That’s when They hear the sound of a hand grab the handle and rattle it.

 But the door doesn’t open. No one comes through. 

Hello? He calls out, but he’s met with silence. Finally, the roommate just gets up, that’s it, I’m just going to see who it is. As she opens the door, she's met with an empty, dark hallway. No one was there.

He told me he still doesn’t know if he believes in ghosts, but, he did eventually find out what the group of people who stood outside of the house was. A local ghost tour group. Apparently, the house was one of the main stops on the weekly Savannah tour. 

It’s stories like these that really get to me. When someone tells me they can’t explain what happened and I can really tell how terrified or confused or excited they are. So that’s what I want to share with you today, stories, from listeners, about the unexplainable and terrifying. And as always, Listener discretion is advised.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of Horrors, Hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.

Welcome to our community for the darkly curious, I’m so happy to have you. Halloween is almost upon us and I cannot wait to see all of your halloween costumes this year. I’m debating whether or not I should go mainstream and be Barbie this year. I do have a perfect replica outfit for 1993’s glitter hair barbie, don’t ask me why, and I may bust that out

If you’d like to get deeper into the community, you can check out some bonus content on patreon. I recently gave away a copy of Killers of The Flower Moon on Patreon, and this months bonus episode is going to be Celebrity Ghost stories. So come on and join us over on patreon. You can also get some extra shorter form content on the shows instagram and tik tok, both at heart starts pounding. 

If you’re really craving more spooks this halloween, we also have The Timekeeper, a four part audio drama starring Judah Lewis streaming wherever you get your podcasts. This was a podcast I produced earlier this year about a group of kids who start playing a cursed game. It’s a really thrilling and spooky YA tale, it’s a little stephen king, a little fear street, a little stranger things. You can listen to The Timekeeper wherever you get your podcasts 

I also want to take a moment to shout out my friends at the Psychopedia Pod, Tank Sinatra and Investigator Slater. They’re a true crime podcast hosted by Tank Sinatra, who you may know from his popular meme account and Investigator slater who is an actual investigator and works professionally in the true crime space. It’s whip smart and victim focused, which I personally love. I was just listening to their Lucy Letby episode about the neonatal serial killer nurse who was just caught in the UK. check them out and if you like them, tell them heart starts pounding sent you.

And finally I want to give a shoutout to the listener who sent me a photo of Heart Starts Pounding being featured on none other than 24 hour fitness TV. We made it ya’ll, we’re on the tv at the gym. I now can tell my friends I’ve partnered with A24 (hour fitness) Honestly though, finding that out was the best part of my week so THANKY OU.

Alright, let’s get right into it.

I want to start with a story that was recently sent in from a listener in the military. I have a lot of listeners in the military and you guys are always telling me about your scary little encounters. And I can never get enough. I mean, it hits a lot of my favorite things, old historical, often run down buildings, but also  a sense of conspiracy, like they’re not telling us something. It’s the feeling I get when I’m on an airplane and I see the flight attendants calling each other on the plane phone. Like they know something I don’t know, what’s happening. This story comes from Destiny. She writes: 

“So, recently I was listening to one of your episodes about military stories. I was in the Air Force for 4 years, stationed in Montana the whole time. Malmstrom Air Force base is known for housing nuclear weapons and their huge (and I mean HUGE) missile fields. There’s actually documentaries on how haunted the missile field there is. It’s also got a ton of stories about seeing UFOs. I do have one of those stories but I’m going to tell you about some spooky ghost ones I have instead.

One of the Missile Alert Facilities, where we would post out to and stay for a week at a time, was haunted. Each facility has an underground “bunker” of sorts where the commissioning officers would sit. 

These officers have the “keys” that you would turn to actually launch a nuke. Those, and someone else in another area, would all have to be initiated to launch.. in the 60s, when the facilities were being built, the underground would be built and dug out first. So, for a period of time, there would just be massive, deep holes in the ground. 

The story goes, one of the men who was working on building the facility, brought his young daughter to work one day, she was supposedly about 6-7 years old. The father, not paying attention for only a moment, let his daughter get a little too close to that massive hole, and she sadly fell to her death..

But The facility was still built.

Legend has it the Missile Alert Facility was very haunted by her. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a story about her. People said you could hear her laughing and she would also steal jewelry right off you.

Well, my story is this.

I was posted out at the facilities one night, and After my shift, I went to lay down to go to sleep. Right before I drifted off, I felt the foot of my bed move, as if someone had sat there. 

Unmistakably, someone was sitting there, and I could feel them watching me.

Whatever was happening did not feel evil. Just curious. so I kept my heart rate calm and told myself to just go to sleep anyway. 

When I awoke the next day, my wedding ring (which was a set of three rings) was gone. Right off of my finger.  I panicked. I turned the lights on and tore my entire room apart. Looking under the bed, on the bed, shaking out the blankets, lifting up the mattress, looking through my entire bag and the entire room. I looked in the bathroom, the drains, and the shared living area. I even went so far as to accuse the group of people I worked with the night before of stealing it off my finger. I called my leadership! I was so certain that someone had stolen my wedding rings. I cried. I was heartbroken.

Then it hit me. The little girl loves to steal jewelry…

I ran to my room, getting on my knees and begging her to give my wedding rings back. I was crying and pleading. I told her I was sorry for what happened to her and I even told her the story of my husband and I and why these rings, and him, meant so much to me.

Then, I felt it. A whoosh of air right past the side of my body. I didn’t open my eyes. I just kept saying “please, please, please”.

Finally, I opened my eyes. And there, sitting right in front of me, and right under the edge of the bed on the floor, were my 3 wedding rings. Sitting so closely to each other, there was no way they could’ve been there from falling off my hand in my sleep. Not only that, but I had looked under the bed. Several times.

I said thank you a hundred times before grabbing them and putting them back on my finger.

After that, every time I posted to that facility, I could hear her laughing. So faint, it barely registered but I could hear her.

And almost every night, I could feel her sit on the edge of my bed.

My heart truly warms at the memory. It’s so sad the end she had but I almost feel like we were….. friends.

Her energy was so pure and lovely, I felt like she was looking over me, protecting me, when I was there.

I think my theory that every military base, facility, housing unit you name it is haunted still holds true. It doesn't necessarily mean that it’s a demonic haunting, or something evil. Sometimes it’s a little girl that wants your jewelry. But still. Haunted.

But that wasn’t the only story that Destiny had for me. No, she had another story, not a haunting, but  one that lends itself more to the other feeling i was talking about. The “they know something I don’t and that’s really terrifying feeling”. After the break.

So after Destiny told me about her one haunting, she mentioned that she had another, terrifying tale from the military that had been told to her. She writes:

“Okay so this story was told to me by my squadron chief who had been in the military for 23 years at the time. He told me this story on my very last day in the Air Force. He said to me “I can’t tell you everything but I can tell you I’ve had to sign 5 NDAs in my career”.

So he was stationed in New Mexico and his flight, a group of people, and him were talking about conspiracies about the base and the surrounding area when someone brought up the abandoned “base” or “research center” that was about 30 minutes away from them. This base was built into a mountain so from the sky, you wouldn’t even be able to see it. It was like a long ranch style home basically but 100x bigger. Long, built along the mountain and completely hidden. 

Now, it’s free for people to explore, meaning it’s not blocked off but still it’s such a well kept secret that the public barely even knows about it. So most of the time, it’s just abandoned. 

My squadron chief had the idea to take his flight there one time, not a required activity but just something fun for whoever wanted to join. They went on an off day, about 20 of them.

He said upon arrival, he immediately felt very uneasy. It wasn’t until later that he discovered why.

They explored the dusty iron hallways, finding animal bones and strange rooms that looked like operating rooms in a hospital.

The whole building was very similar to a hospital, but more like a mental hospital than one for physical care.

They went into one room that was just labeled “experiment 3”.

This room was huge and round, with metal walls, floors, and ceilings.

The only thing in the room was a human sized hole in the center. 

They approached it.

At the bottom of the hole, about 30 feet down, was a chair, With empty shackles attached at the feet and the arms 

I asked him, “just a normal size chair?”

“Yes”, he said “just a normal wooden chair” then he went on.

Right before the opening of the hole, there was a sort of plaque with the words “feeding room”…

That was all.

He said “what do you make of that?”

WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT???!??

I was shocked, jaw on the floor. Unfortunately there’s no explanation, just a lot of unanswered questions.

He also told me there were long tubes with sort of pods in them to fit a few humans each. They were labeled “escape pods”.

What were they hiding?? What were they feeding!

And why did they have to have escape pods?!

I forgot to mention also that this “base” was known to the few people outside the inner circle and the workers as a “research lab for creating paint that would make any aircraft invisible to the naked eye and to aircraft scanners”. So they were saying the paint was toxic and people should stay far away.

But what were they really doing in there that they wanted to keep people away from?

I have not stopped thinking about that question since I read this story. What were they feeding? I think about it when I lay down at night, I go over it in my head when I’m in the shower. Was that what the animal bones were for? Was the person in the chair being fed, or being fed to something else?

Its kind of only now that I read it back that I even registered they were researching invisible paint so planes could fly around without us seeing them. Side note I can’t wait to tell Leo that there’s invisible planes in the sky. I think they’re going to have me committed. 

This next story comes from a listener named Karim who sent me an email just titled Something Weird Is Happening in Southern Algeria. That got my brain firing on all cylinders, i could not wait to see what he was talking about. And it didn’t disappoint. Karim writes:

My name is Karim, I'm from Algiers (the capital of Algeria) and I've been a follower, listener and subscriber of yours for a while now. 

I've been debating with myself for weeks whether or not I should contact you and tell you about what I experienced recently. But today, I finally decided to write to you. 

On September 1st, me and my friend Lyna flew to the city of Djanet in the south of the Algerian desert. We are members of a non-profit organization and we help the nomads of the Tuareg tribe as much as we can because they are kinda abandoned by our government. This is our final trip of the year and it was to distribute school furnitures and money to refurbish a local school. 

The nomads live in small groups all around the Tassili n'Ajjer National Park, me and Lyna were assigned to go to a specific group who live in a place called Tadrart Rouge, which is a vast area within the Park. 

There are no roads from the city of Djanet to Tadrart Rouge, so we had a 4x4 drive us into the desert as close as possible, but we had to finish by foot since we had to climb rocky hills and we had to cross a rocky labyrinth in order to arrive there.

A quick note about Tassili n’Ajjer national park. It’s a national park deep in the Saharan dessert, known for it’s large rock formations that seem to appear from nowhere in the vast sea of tan and red sand. Tassili is also known for it’s 10,000 year old cave paintings depicting every day life in the time of hunters and gatherers. Currently it’s inhabited by the Tuareg nomads, who entered the area in the middle ages, but it’s been home to humans for 10 millenia, a birthplace of humanity. Ok back to karim

At around 5pm, we were at the entrance of the big labyrinth that we have to cross to come out from the other side. We obliviously had a guide with us, he's a pro and everything was going fine.

We walked for almost an hour while observing the beauty of nature as well as the stunning cave paintings that decorate the walls of that region. But we couldn't help but have that feeling of being watched constantly. 

A little bit before 6:30pm, we were finally getting to the end of the labyrinth, the sun was starting to set and we wanted to get to the nomad camp before it was pitch black. We exit into a large flat area and we could see the camp still far away, maybe 15 more minutes of walking.

As we're advancing, our guide suddenly changes his behavior. He was really chatty and in a good mood throughout the whole trip, but something switched and it was as if he saw a ghost. Me and Lyna don't think about it that much, then we both clearly hear an awful wail behind us. 

We're not sure if it came from inside the labyrinth or from above it. We were creeped out but we rationalized and said it was an eagle. 

Much later after we arrived at the camp, we did what we had to do and distributed the things we had. it was getting late and we were setting up our beds inside a little tent that a nomad lady was kind enough to give us for the night. 

The tent was at the edge of the camp, not in the middle. At around 11pm, we hear the wailing sound again,

Lyna and I are frozen by fear, but this time it was coming from different directions at once. It kept going for more than 3 minutes before it stopped.

When it stopped, we burst out of the tent thinking everyone was gonna be out of their tents wondering what that noise was, but there was nobody. Everyone was asleep. 

During the night, we heard it again, but we also heard other sounds.  laughs, sounds of traditional music instruments, the sounds of swords, small explosions, people running/walking, indistinct voices. We kept peeking from the tent and it was always the same thing, complete darkness. Complete emptiness, just the desert. 

In the morning, the first thing we did was tell our guide about this. He said he heard stories about this place but he wasn't sure what to believe. The reason why his mood changed the day before is because he felt the energy change, and he smelled "leather" in the air, which is something that his mother told him to keep in mind. She told him that the smell of leather in that area means that "those who left are there to visit"

When we asked the people of that camp, they said that they know about these events. They've been hearing them for hundreds of years and they simply live with them, one older lady said that it's the spirits of all the people who lost their lives during the French colonization. She said that sometimes, they find messages written in the sand outside their tents in the morning, saying things like "Thank you for keeping us company" or "Please never leave Tadrart"

Was what Karim was hearing echos of Algerias violent past? Algeria has had waves of violent invasions throughout history. The french, the ottomans, even going all the way back to the Romans. A quick story about the Tuarergs- The french started to occupy the area in 1830, and in 1881, a french solider named Paul Flatters lead an expedition to explore the area of the Tuaregs. But the Tuareg people knew what Paul and the french were up to and they were having none of it. Paul didn’t know it, but the Tuaregs had been following him and his men for days as they approached their territory, and by the time the 93 men in Flatters expedition made it to Bir el-Garama, and area just south of Tassili N’ajjer 600 Tuaregs were there to ambush them. 

Flatters men who survived, which were not many, had to escape into the Saraha on foot, eventually resorting to cannibalism to make it back alive. When france learned about the tragedy, they called for more efforts to colonize the area and harsher punishments of the Tuareg people. 

It’s estimated that around ⅓ of the indigenous Algerian population was killed during the most violent years of french rule in the mid 1800’s. Maybe what Karim was hearing was a reminder. A reminder of exactly why he needed to be in the area giving them aid. 

Our last story comes from Sapphire Sandalo. Sapphire hosts her own creepy story podcast, Stories with Sapphire. And she had a spooky tale of her own. A time when she was trying to communicate with the dead, and may have opened a door she wasn’t expecting.

The song is actually older than what Sapphire remembered. Dius Ire, is a medieval funeral song, written sometime in the 1200’s. And you’ve definitely heard it.

It’s in the shining, but it also plays when Mufassa dies in the lion king, it plays when Luke Skywalker realizes his aunt and uncle were killed. It’s become cultural shorthand for devastation, a marker of death. And to hear that being hummed from above your bed. That’s terrifying. 

Well, my dear listeners, thank you for turning into this weeks episode of heart starts pounding and sorry so many of you have been tormented by spirits I guess? I personally love it, so keep the stories coming. 

This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons, you will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter.

Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts Pounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.