Military Guy

i have been seeing “things” since i was 5 (im 33). if i count every one ill be probably over several dozens. some times are just mild things, like seeing a man in a crowd, lacking any color and wearing clothes from at least a century ago.

other times are more disturbing. for example, this happened to me about 15 years ago (this is the condensed version btw, i already wrote a more detailed account in /r/Thetruthishere) :

meet a cute girl on a rpg reunion, connected instantly and after the reunion was over i offered to scort her to her home.
we arribe to her home, she invites me for coffee, as her parents are sleeping already upstairs.
we chat a good while, then we start to make out. we were on a couch on her living room.
i look behind her and there is a guy sitting on a chair by the dinning table, not more than 12 feet away from us.
he looked like 60 years old, wearing out of date clothes (brown pants, military stile sweater), something very common in the 60s-70s here, but not unheard of today either. he was just sitting there watching us.

i knew that her parents were overprotective, so my first thought whas “fuck, busted by her father”.
i whisper that her father was behind her, she turns around, looks in the general direction where the guy was and tells me “there is no one there”.
i m still seeing the guy sitting there, and while im getting a creepy feeling from the begining, i start to believe that im getting pranked or something like that, so i insist that there is some one there, but this time im getting a little irritated.
she turns around again, starts looking around, and ask me where, i tell her “right there on that chair”. im still seeing him at this time. now she looks intrigued and asks me how is he dressed like. as soon as i describe the clothes, she yells “MOOOOOOOOOM” and scares the shit out of me.
now im not seeing him any more.
but now im seeing her ex military dad and her school teacher mom rush down stairs on their underware thinking that im raping her daugther.

after stoppping her dad from gutting me alive, she asks me to tell her mom what i saw. when im halfway, she (her mother i mean) stops me and finishes the description, including details i didn’t give before, like the shoes.
turns out that the mother, another daugther and her brother have seen that guy every other day for years. just sitting on different places of the house watching them. even following them with his eyes and head when they move around the room.

her mom was very sensitive also, like me, and had dozens of similar experiences. i have talked a lot with her over the years (i still visit her and her family).

im not the kind of “i want to believe” guy, in fact if i had not have this experiences by myself i wont believe any of this, so i can understand skepticism around this.
im not religious btw.

- Posted by misterfk; Reddit

Greys In The Congo

I was in Africa (Congo) during the mid 90’s with the U.S. military giving support to the US embassy because Zaire was having a rebellion (it became the republic of Congo). One night I was out by the fence and one of the Marine guards told me in passing they had been watching some weird shit out in the “jungle” area outside our fence line. I borrowed one of their NVGs (Night Vision Goggles) and after looking out there beyond what you could see with the normal light I could see some strange “people” moving around out there. Short, very very skinny with VERY large heads. One looked our way and the “person” had HUGE eyes (with NVGs everything is green but the light is very magnified so the eyes were easy to see because they reflected light different that the rest of the face”. They never got any closer so we couldn’t hear them and since it was outside our fence line we didn’t go see who or what they were. Scared the shit out of me that night.

-  Posted by Razorwire_Dave; Reddit

The Soldiers

Just spent 4 hours reading these….Have to share. My ex husband and I had just bought our first house right before our third child was born. It was an old farmhouse that was a mile away from General Brown’s (War of 1812) home during the War. It was built on the land that his soldiers camped on. When we asked about previous owners we were told that there had been “many” since it was built in 1875. No one had lived there for more than five years before selling. Thought it was odd, but no one elaborated, so we moved in.

Strange things happened all the time. Lights flickering, dryer starting for no reason, toilet paper unraveling itself, kids “jolly jumper” jumping by itself, kids talking to those men who have boo boos. If I told them to stop it, they did. (the ghosts, not the kids) Night before my scheduled c-section my parents came to stay with me. The slept in the woodstove room by the stairs leading to our bedrooms. My mother asked me the next day about the soldiers. She said they looked wartorn and had marched through the wall of the woodstove room up the stairs. General Brown’s soldiers coming back to camp after a battle???

I finally got the nerve to ask the farmer who lived in Gen Brown’s old house why no one stayed there long before moving. He said that bad luck always happened to those who lived there. Loss of jobs, divorce, etc…After living there my ex started to become a complete jerk, lost a few jobs, started cheating, treating me very badly–physically and emotionally. One night I heard a man’s voice telling me to leave–it was best.

I decided it was time to leave my ex and I moved 2 weeks later. The night after I moved my stuff out of the house and unplugged all appliances in house (ex moved out one week before I did) the house caught on fire–deemed an electrical shortage–and burned to the ground. Maybe my soldiers were stopping the damage to any other families. BTW ex has returned to normal self, doing well at job, he is the man I once married. Was it the house??? I guess I’ll never know.

- Posted by Shell3; Allnurses

As they passed underneath the ship, the entire vessel shuddered

Growing up,my dad was the Captain for the merchant marines; he was hired by a private firm to captain a large shipping vessel. This was where i spent the first 5 years of my life, going from ship to ship, depending on where my father was assigned. Once, very vividly i remember an overcast day. My father, being the ship’s captain has his own private deck overlooking the Ocean, where I was. It was dusk and the sun was a magnificent fiery orange as it was setting. I was watching when all of a sudden 3 orbs, in the formation of an isosceles triangle and about 20 yards under water zip under the ship toward the horizon. They were traveling very, very quickly as they moved through the ocean. The color of the orbs was almost white, but could best be described as a very, very bright blue. As they passed underneath the ship, the entire vessel shuddered, but very slightly. I looked up to my dad for reassurance or an explanation, but he just stared at the direction in which the orbs traveled, and said something in Italian to the chief engineer. I don’t understand Italian, so I can’t recount what was said, but i understood the ominous tone.

It is one of the most vivid memories I have, i never really spoke of it to my Dad since we aren’t close, but the one time I did he grew instantly distant of our conversation and tried in a petty attempt to change the subject. I got the idea and i acquiesced. When i asked my mom she told me that there are many things my dad experienced during his time in the oceans, and most of them he doesn’t care to recount.

This is the first time i have related this story outside of my family. I never have because I knew no one would believe me and possibly think less of me, this could also be the reason my dad never did the same either.

Well, thanks to this thread and the curiosity of you guys I grew the courage to actually call my dad. After the usual pleasantries i inquired as to the event.

Here is the incredibly odd part: He didn’t immediately recollect it. Not due to the fact that it was uncircumstantial, but due to the fact of the sheer AMOUNT of inexplicable encounters. When i went into greater detail, he remembered. He said that id indeed did happen and that it was larger than i had remembered, and that he had encounter the same “vessel” not only that time, but 3 other times.

- Posted by turbojeebus; Reddit

A Passenger Jet About To Crash In Mid Air

I lived in an upscale apartment complex with my wife and brother about 10 years ago.

We had some friends over one night and were all smoking cigarettes and socializing out on the porch. We lived in an upstairs apartment and had a great view of the mountain range about 5 miles to the west of our complex. I remember the sun had already set, but it wasn’t totally dark out.

The international airport of our city was about 20 miles north of our complex so if you were on our porch looking out to the west at the mountain range that ran north-south, you could watch the passenger jets approaching the airport, maybe one every 5 minutes would pass by. And I could see the flashing lights of the jets very clearly.

So on this night i was the only one of seven people on our porch that was looking out west, the other six including my wife and brother were facing east looking at me or facing north. So none of the others saw what I did, they only witnessed my jaw hitting the floor when everything went down.

So, all of a sudden there was a flash in the sky that looked like lightning had struck somewhere to the southwest of our complex and out of my sight. I thought there must be rain coming. Then two more times it happened. I didn’t realize till much later that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I remember the sun had already set, but it wasn’t totally dark out. It had been a very clear evening. So clear that I could see the lights on these planes that were 3-4 miles west of us.

After these flashes happened, another passenger jet enters my view, just like the few before it, but then the jet itself flashes white and then starts to turn and descend as if one of its engines had just gone out. And this is when everyone starts to ask me, “What is it?” And just as I started to realize that I was witnessing a passenger jet falling to crash and kill all those aboard, the fucking jet stops dead in mid air and glows bright green!!!!

Not a second after it started glowing green it shot so fast in a straight line over the west mountains that it was gone before anyone else on the deck could turn around to see what I was so freaked about.

There are military proving grounds about 100 miles west of those apartments, so I always thought that there was some advanced technology that the military had that we’ll here about in 20 years or so.

Definitely a flying object that I could not identify.

And I was sober that night.

Do any of you have any possible explanations?

- Posted by NUCCADr ; Reddit

Saw a lot of weird shit over 2 deployments in Afghanistan

Saw a lot of weird shit over 2 deployments in Afghanistan… Best one was the “ghosts” that first showed up couple hundred yards outside the hesco barriers.

First time (a little after dusk):

Random PVT: “Hey there’s a dude out there” Me: “Where?” Random PVT: “Right FUCKING there. See?” Me: “You’re high, I don’t see shit.” Random PVT (stabbing an outstretched finger into the desert): “RIGHT THERE. LOOK. SEE HIM? THAT’S A FUCKING GUY.”

Now I don’t have the greatest vision in the world, but I vaguely see a dark blob in the direction he’s pointing.

Me: “You sure? Looks like a fucking shadow.” Random PVT: “SGT WE GOT A FUCKING GUY OUT HERE” SGT: “What’s he doing?” Random PVT: “Just standing there” SGT: “Where’d he come from?” Random PVT: “dunno he just popped up” (SGT comes over to have a look) SGT: “who’s this mother fucker?” PVT: “I dunno, I was talking to (Me) and looked back and he’s just standing there.”

So we watch this “person” for about 3hrs, who just stands there, motionless, with its back to us. You could put optics on it and see it was a person, adult male, average height and build. Best part: we “borrowed” a thermal monocular and this fucker doesn’t register in it. ZERO FUCKING HEAT SIGNATURE. Then randomly, just poof, gone. Random PVT spends next 6 weeks telling everyone about the ghost we saw.

Fast forward about 6months, out on some BS patrol and driver calls out 2 guys couple hundred yards standing on top this little berm (my asshole puckers waiting for the IED to kick off). Same scenario, two guys, backs to us, frozen. LT puts eyes on ‘em and calls it in. We dismount, LT calls over terp asks if he knows what’s up (genius). Terp gives blank stare and shrugs. LT decides we should go have a look-see and do some hearts-and-minds shit. I stay in the truck (which feels like 140 fucking degrees), 20min goes by LT comes back with weird look on his face and says “we’re outta here.”

Later that day I asked another guy WTF happened, he says they get within 50yds of aforementioned “persons” and, presto, gone. I ask “what do you mean, gone?” and he just looks at me with this blank stare and says “gone. they were there, and then they weren’t. weird huh?”

Lots of other weird shit, mostly at night. Voices, wailing, screaming, whispering, phantoms in NVGs. I chalk most of it up to lack of sleep and high stress environment. Those “persons” though, hard to explain a mass hallucination like that though.

- Posted by 788190; Reddit

Stories Told At Sea

background, I am a warfare officer in the Australian Navy and I drive warships. The easiest way to describe my job is the person who pilots the ship for 4 hour shifts, and when the Captain walks onto the bridge, he often takes control of the ship off me, if he requests it. As such, I often have a team of about 3-4 on the bridge at any one time consisting of a helmsman (who physically drives and controls the engines on my behalf), a more senior ‘quarter master’ (QM…whose job is to make sure the admin of the bridge happens while i am busy navigating/talking to the operations room) and another junior warfare officer under training to learn my job, if we have a few of them onboard. ‘Watches’ are 4 hours long, with the usual rotation being 4 hours on, 8 hours off. As such, one of the +most bemoaned watch rosters is being the person who gets the afternoon (12-4pm)-graveyard shift (Midnight-4am), also known in Navy slang as the ‘Arvo and Guts Watch’. This watch is hated as it gives you the most broken sleep, as everyone onboard normally has to be up and about at 6:45am to start the day. I digress.

What this means, is that if you are unlucky enough to get the midnight-4am watch, you need to stay awake. Being up on the bridge of a warship, you need to have everything dark so as to not ruin your night vision out the windows and into the sea beyond. 80% of the ship is asleep, and I personally enjoy the quiet ‘downtime’. Weird conversations happen, and more often than not, people start talking about weird things that have happened to them. I will never forget the one night I was on a patrol boat in the middle of the Arafura Sea in northern Australia, and the story two of the sailors told me.

A patrol boat is smaller then normal warships, so I only had a helmsman on watch with me. We were hundreds of miles in the middle of the ocean, and were just having a coffee and a laugh while we sat in the dimly red-lit dark of the bridge, the muffled thrum of the ship’s engines, the sound of our bow cutting through the dark water and the muted static of our VHF radio scanning empty channels being the only sounds. Every now and then the wind would pick up and you’d hear the howl before it deposited a thin spray of salt water into our bridge windows. Hopefully I have set the scene and made you feel what it is like to be in the middle of nowhere late at night.

One of the senior engineers had wandered up to the bridge for a coffee and he was sitting on the stairs that led up to the upper deck from the bridge, and I had just finished telling my story about our old house to the sailor on the helm, who was a bit freaked out! The helmsman then told me his story….and needless to say, it in turn freaked me out. And I generally like a good ‘unexplained story’. His story really re-enforced my wariness of ouija boards/seances, as this was the prime factor behind the weirdness of the afore-mentioned house I lived in as a toddler. His story is as follows….

THE HOSPITAL SEANCE

To begin with, the sailor told me how before joining the Navy, he used to work as a wardsman at the Royal Brisbane Hospital in early 2001. He said it was a great place to work, with other young wardsmen for company, and as he put it ‘heaps of hot young nurses.’ A few of the girls were into seances and a few of them were living on the hospital grounds in accommodation while they did their internships. One of the girls suggested that one night they go into an abandoned ward and conduct a seance, because as anyone who works in a long-established hospital will tell you, they are normally hotbeds of weird activity. (My mother is a 30 year midwife and she has some things she said she can’t explain…like mothers reporting a ‘smiling, kindly old matron with a weird hat who came and checked on me in the middle of the night and patted my baby to sleep’…despite there only being 2 young nurses on that shift all night, but I again digress). Thinking it sounded like fun, he said yes, and a few nights later after work, a few of them (plus a few nurses he hadn’t met before) all went up to the disused ward and set up the ouija board.

He said they started the seance and the glass started to move as they had ‘apparently’ contacted a spirit. He scoffed and thought it was a joke, as the glass was moving randomly with everyone putting a finger on it. Of course he thought that the others were moving the glass. He said someone was given a pen and a paper and told to scribe anything that happened. Little did he know that their innocent night was about to get really weird…

Apparently someone asked this spirit, ‘What is your name?’ The glass moved and spelled out ‘N-I-G-E-L.’ They all laughed and someone else asked, ‘Are you Good or Evil?’ (I have goosebumps as I type this) and the glass moved over to ‘EVIL.’ Still scoffing, the sailor said some other questions were asked, but they got back a lot of jibberish. Suddenly, about 2 mins later he said the glass started going absolutely nuts, and some people started goetting uneasy. Despite this, it seemed to be following a pattern so someone told the guy scribing to write down what the glass was moving to. He got something like the following, and slowly it started making words. Apparently it read, ‘I-L-L-B-A-B-Y-C-A-S-S-I-K-I-L-L-B-A-B-Y-C-A…..’ After a few more repetitions the guy scribing went, ‘Kill baby Cassi…..oh, Cassi kill baby? What the hell does that mean??’ (I joke you not here when I tell you this, the sailor telling me the story said this screwed/disturbed him for quite a while) One of the girls in the circle turned pale, held her hand to her mouth and ran from the room sobbing hysterically, like a wailing cry of utter terror. He said one of the guys went ‘Haha what’s up with her?’.

One of the other nurses went outside to console her, and the story came back as such. The girl who ran outside confessed to the other girl that she had had a secret abortion 3 weeks prior after finding out she was pregnant. She told NO ONE about the abortion, not her parents, not even her own boyfriend. Her name? You guessed it, was Cassie. That pretty much wrapped up the night, and horrified, the rest of them finished the seance and swore never to do it again.

After he finished telling me this, I was pretty freaked out, but the other older sailor (he was in his 40s) just sat there and said nothing, and drank his coffee. Trying to lighten the mood, I said ‘that was a good story, but what about you Chief (his rank), surely you have a good one you have heard?’ I noticed he was looking really uncomfortable so being a great people manager/officer (lol), I decided to go for the jugular and shame him into telling it. ‘C’mon chief, tell us!’, I jibed. I probably should have left it there, but he decided to tell us. I don’t know if it was true or not, but in hindsight, judging how reluctant he was to tell the two of us, and how freaked out he looked when he told us, it’s inclined to make me think.

HIS STORY

To set it up, this guy was/is (as I mentioned) in his 40s. He’s been in the Navy for over 20 years working in the engine room as the Chief Engineering sailor, so he’s not a weak-willed guy prone to getting scared. From his posture, and the look on his face, I could tell he was really reluctant to tell his story. I’ve heard sailors tell stroies before (and I’ve heard some good ones) and you can tell when someone is pulling your leg. This guy was flat out scared. I almost felt bad that I tried to conjole the story out of him.

Anyway, his story started when he was 6. He said he was in Grade 2 of what some of you American readers would know as Elementary School. They had to make paper-maiche dolls for Mother’s Day, and he said he ended up making a clown marionette/puppet that was suspended on strings. He said his mother loved it immediately, and loved the fact that it was probably the first really creative thing he had made at school and prior that at kindergarden. She insisted he hang this doll off the curtain rail above his bed, as she loved seeing it hung up ion his room for ‘extra colour’.

Now being 6 years old, he said the novelty of having a clown puppet hanging over his head in bed at night started getting out of hand. After a year or so, he said he actually began to really resent the clown being there. He said he especially hated waking up in the middle of the night and seeing it leering down at him….after a while he started to realise that he hated the clown, and his imagination probably made it worse, as he felt like he was being ‘watched’ of a night time, or whenever he was in his room. He told his mother that he didn’t want it hung up above his bed anymore, but he said he could tell she really hurt by the diea of taking it down, as she really loved it being there. (I would have thought she should have hung it above HER bed, but I held my tongue!) One day, after freaking out in his sleep once too often, he took it down and threw it in the rubbish in the kitchen. He said he made sure he put some other rubbish on top of it so that his Mum wouldn’t find it. he went to bed early that night, and said he felt happy knowing it wasn’t above his head anymore on the curtain rod.

Next day he woke up to find the clown puppet back above his head. He said he cursed under his breath and thought that his Mum must have found it, gotten upset, and put it back in his room late that night/early that morning when he was sleeping. He decided not to say/ask anything about it of his mother, as he thought he’d get in trouble for trying to throw it out to begin with. A few weeks later he took it to the wheelie bin outside the house and threw it under some bottles and cans. He then placed a large bag of rubbish from the kitchen on top of it and wheeled the bin out for collection by the garbage men the next day. He woke up the next morning to find the bloody clown BACK above his head and hanging from the curtain rod.

As you can imagine he said he was upset by this point (and in real life, myself and the helmsman both realised that he was visibly shaken from telling us this) and he confronted his mother about it. He said to her, ‘Mum, why did you take that clown of the bin and put it back in my room?’ ‘James, what are you talking about? id you try and get rid of the doll? Why would you do that, you know how much that means to me, it was one of the first things you made!’ ‘Mum, I really don’t want it anymore, it scares me.’ ‘James that’s nonsense. It’s paper-maiche!’ He was upset, and assumed that his Mum was ‘onto him’ and had retrieved the doll from the rubbish.

He left it at that, but decided he would get rid of it once and for all a week later or so. One day when his Mum was out and his Dad was in the garage fixing the car, he took the puppet up the backyard and put it in the incinerator. (Australian readers will probably remember most people seemed to have one of these cicular brick areas in their backyards when they were younger for gardening/mulch etc) He said he lit the match and covered the doll in paper and dried grass. Afte ra few minutes, it was completely charred and had burned to ashes. Giddy with delight, he confessed to his mother what he had done later that day when she got home, confident in the fact that she now couldn’t do anything about it after the fact. He got grounded (and smacked!) for playing with fire, but he said his mother got over her dissappointment and moved on, with nothing more being said about it. Or so he thought.

That night he said he dreamed that he woke up, his bedroom door opened slowly, and that the clown, now on fire and in flames walked into his room and said to him, ‘You thought you could get rid of me didn’t you? Well one day you’re going to pay for what you did!’ He said he woke up screaming which brought his paretns running. He was crying but they assured him it was a bad dream. He quickly put it behind him, although he said his parents were quite concerned for a few days.

Years later, when he was 16 he had another dream. He dreamed (and now people, I can FEEL the goosebumps running up my legs!) the same clown doll walked into his room on fire and said ‘You thought I forgot didn’t you James? Well I haven’t forgotten, and trust me, one day you will pay.’ He woke up screaming again, and he told his mother about the dream. His grandmother, (who by his account was one of those hippie types who liked ‘alternate lifestyles’ etc) suggested that he see a clairvoyant/mystic/gypsy woman she knew for a card/palm reading. He thought it couldn’t hurt, and he went along and did it, despite his scepticism of such ‘rubbish’. He said the woman blanched a little when she read his cards and said ‘something or someone very bad wants to hurt you…have you offended anyone lately or in your life?’ He broke down and told her the story of the clown, and how it appeared in his dreams when he was younger and again when he was 16. She said to him ‘James, this is very bad. If you ever see that clown again, something terrible might happen and you need to be prepared.’ At this point we were quiet on the bridge. I was letting it all sink in, and I couldn’t help but notice that this sailor was shaking. I realised I shouldn’t have puhed him to tell the story, and that is was evidently something he was seriously scared of, and had been his entire life.

The helmsman, after a minute of silence blurted out what I had been thinking. ‘So Chief, have you seen it since?’. The Chief looked at us both and said ‘I have never seen it since, and I live in fear of the day that I end up dreaming I see it again.’

And that ladies and gentlemen, ended our few hours of telling stories. I went and pretended I was checking the radar and chart while the helmsman looked ahead and pretended to check the autopilot. The Chief finshed his coffee, came and looked over my shoulder at my nav-plan on the chart to see where we were, and bid us goodnight.

After the bridge door shut the helmsman and I looked at each other and uttered a rather prolonged, unified expletive. Whether it was true or not, it is the freakiest story I have ever heard. If he was pulling our leg, it was an Oscar award winning performance. The fact that he was so visibly shaken while telling it (his voice breaking at parts) led me to believe it probably wasn’t….if anything, it was real to him.

Another guy I was on watch with said he had a really freaky dream one night (wasn’t a true story, but his dream was freaky as hell) at sea. He said he dreamed he woke up in his bunk on the ship and no one was around. He dreamed he got dressed to go on watch, and all he could hear was the ship creaking and the dull sounds of waves outside the hull. He said he walked up to the bridge and found the ship on autopilot, with no one up there. Thinking it was weird, and hearing the creaking, he kept looking around. He said the worst part of the dream was that he opened a cargo hold in the lower part of the ship and found the whole ship’s company, some 56 people swinging by their necks from ropes hung from the roof of the hold, the creaking being the ropes swinging with the rock of the ship.

Weird. We laughed about it, but he said the dream freaked him out. Funny what the human mind can come up with while asleep!

- Posted by Ironhalo; Nosleep

“This is the US Navy control point access watch. Inside the two-bravo reactor compartment, you are ordered to come to the control point NOW!”

One night while I was in the Navy, onboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise, I was on watch when something really freaky happened. I swear as god is my witness it is true…not my perception of truth, I mean ‘holy crap that really happened’ true.

We were in overhaul, which means that the entire ship goes dead and is supported by dock-power as far as lights and all that goes. Normally with all the machinery running there’s always a background hum, but the ship had been dead for a year at this point.

The 2-Bravo Reactor Plant has a bunch of work going on that’ll eventually take another year to finish, and I am guarding the access door (the only door in or out, it’s about 2 feet think solid steel and lead) to the reactor compartment itself. There’s no work going on right at this point as it is the weekend…there are a bunch of temporary lights and power cords run through the doorway so the shipyard guys can just come in and start working Monday morning instead of having to lay all their crap out anew.

Unfortunately, Naval regualtions stipulate that if that door is cracked open for any reason, a guard MUST be stationed to keep track of who enters or leaves, how long they are in there, what they bring in and what they leave with, are they clean, etc…it’s a big radiological safety thing.

So here I am working the 8pm to midnite watch, and I am the only living soul in the entire damn plant. Everyone else is gone. I brought a book with me to read (though that was kinda illegal) and two Dr Pepper’s, one of which I kept in a bucket of (hopefully) fresh water that was damn near frozen (January in Virginia) we kept in the bilge.

So I start reading. I open my first Dr Pepper and kick back as no one is going to be here till midnite. Hell, I could set the place on fire and run around naked and no one would ever even hear me…it’s that barren of people, nothing but mazes of machinery and pipes. It’s so quiet that I can hear the individual bubbles of carbonation in my drink as they pop inside the frickin tin can. It’s so quiet I can hear myself breathe and the pages of my book rub against each other as I hold the book.

So it was around 10pm or so that I first heard it.

Footsteps. Unmistakeable footsteps…coming from inside the Reactor Compartment.

Of course, this is impossible. There is one way in and out and no one has been in there for a day. It’s literally a matter of national security to even be able to get in there and the way is guarded by me and the watchstanders before me. No one is logged into my book, no one is supposed to be in there period. Hell, if someone WAS in there and not logged in that’d be grounds for whoever let them in to go to Captains Mast (a Navy Court Martial) and spend serious time in the brig on bread and water…that’d be no laughing matter. If we were at sea, I’d be justified in calling in the Marine squad they always have on standby and they’d be justified in scattering the offender all over the wall with 12-gauge goodness if he/she said anything but ‘yes sir, put my handcuffs on’. Nothing more sensitive that access to the RC.

So here I sit in disbelief. No mistaking the shuffle of steel-toed boots on steel flooring on the catwalks in there.

So I lean towards the door and yell “This is the control point access watch, who goes there!?” through the doorway.

Nothing. Whoever it is just keeps shuffling around every minute or so on the catwalks, sounds like he’s got a purpose to his walk, like he is doing something or looking at something. And this guy isn’t supposed to be in there.

So I get pissed. I lean over the rail and scream directly into the doorway “This is the US Navy control point access watch. Inside the two-bravo reactor compartment, you are ordered to come to the control point NOW!!”

Silence, and then some more walking. Like he didn’t even hear me.

So right now, I am freaking out that someone, somehow got in there, and I am pissed. This is federal property and my responsibility, and some asshole shipyard worker (a Navy guy would never EVER be in there without permission) is ignoring me. We keep a locker of heavy tools nearby, so I go and get an aluminum pipewrench about 3 feet long the 2-plant mechanics call ‘The Persuader’ for it’s handiness in getting things unstuck.

I want to call someone, but there is no electricity for phones and leaving to get someone is expressly forbidden as someone has to watch that door period end-of-discussion…but my relief would probably come and check to see if I had to take a piss or anything, so I waited, intermittently shouting how the guy inside was going on a one way trip to federal prison unless he came out.

The walking lasted off and on for about 30 minutes. Then it abruptly stopped. Because I was wondering WTF was going on, I decided to shut the door as much as possible and chain the handle to the wall, so anyone trying to get out couldn’t without an acetyline torch.

Sure enough, the watch supervisor came down to shoot the shiat and make sure I was alive and well. So I go ballistic and tell him everything that was going on. He thinks I’m screwing around and says “Yeah, it’s the boiler guy, right? Suuuuuuuure” and I, half panicked, am yelling “No way Senior Chief, there’s someone farking in there!”. He gets the religion and calls on his walkie-talkie for people to get down there pronto. IN the meantime, we hear the walking a few more times, and his eyes get as big as pieplates and he says “You aren’t farking kidding me…HEY, WHO THE FARK IS IN THERE?? COME DOWN HERE NOW!!!” So it wasn’t just me.

So in half an hour or so, after hearing the footsteps a few more times, the cavalry comes with Shore Patrol in tow, and I check them in to enter the Reactor Compartment, armed mind you, to see WTF is up.

Nothing. They found nothing and no one. Dead as a doornail, no wind, nothing moving, no electricity but lights so there was no fans blowing and not a damn thing was moved or seen in any way. Everyone chalked it up to one big ‘WTF?’ and left, but Senior Chief Willingham heard it too. As everyone was leaving and chalking it up to who knows what, Senior again said something that slipped past me the first time…he said “Damn, I was just joking about that kid who got caught up in the boiler, but now I ain’t so sure”.

I swear my heart stopped beating for a second.

I had forgotten, amongst all the tales on a 30 year old ship and all the sea-stories about crazy stuff you hear, about that one, and it was a true story sadly enough.

20 years back in the early 70′s, when it was commonplace for sailors to get into fisticuffs with their superiors, we weren’t treated so nice. They had to go in and clean some scaling and plating out of the bottom of a 2 story water boiler (like getting the lime out your tub only 10000 times worse) and because of it being in the RC, you had to wear a wetsuit and wear an air hose/mask to breathe to make sure you got clean air and didn’t get contaminated. One younger sailor protested and didn’t want to get in the confines of 150 degree metal and pipes because he was clausterphobic, but they bullied him into getting in anyway.

He threw up in his mask after getting in because he freaked out…he got caught up in the pipes and they couldn’t pull him out…he drowned on his own vomit right there on the spot.

SO after that the running joke/spook was that if you listened real close on a shutdown, you could hear him walking around in there trying to find his way out. Of course navy guys tell lots of tall tales so I took it in stride just like you would if you were at a campfire with your dad hearing the story about the one eyed lumberjack or whatever. You just laugh and it rolls away as the next guy tells you the story about the 3 Phillipino hookers, etc, and you go on.

But it all came back to me right there. Holy shiat. It was the 2b reactor where the guy died too. And it was a matter of recorded nuclear safety that he died in there…it was in our RSB case study books on how to handle emergency situations.

The both of us were kinda freaked, but me moreso than him because I sat there for 30 minutes listening to the unmistakable sound of Navy steel-toed ‘Boondockers’ kicking around the steel catwalks not knowing WTF was going on. We both stood by our claims of what we heard too under official inquiry.

Man, I’ll never forget that shiat. My own M. Night Shamylan moment when I discovered that the guy I was yelling at and was going to pound with a pipewrench if he tried to leave through my doorway and started out as an asshole ignoring my orders and then advanced to being a possible saboteur to his own serious detriment was a dead sailor from 20 years back trying to find his way out of the reactor compartment.

- Posted by TheGoblinKing; Fark

The Dead Fleet

Several years ago, I landed a gig aboard the Golden Hinde, a replica of Sir Fancis Drake’s flagship that he used to circumnavigate the Earth from 1577-1580. (See it at http://www.goldenhinde.co.uk). Anyway, one day we were making our way along the Eastern seaboard, and passed what the Captain referred to as “the Dead Fleet”, rows upon rows of WWII ships mothballed and moored together. That was creepy enough, but as dusk approached, I and a number of other crew in the Great Cabin heard the ship’s bell call All Hands. We immediately jumped up and ran for the deck; when we got there, the First Mate just looked at us.

“What?” he said.

“We heard the bell,” we said.

“No one rang the bell.” he said. “The clapper’s in the Captain’s trunk.”

We got the key and opened it. Sure enough, that’s where it was.

Now, obviously, anything could have been used to ring the bell, but everyone abovedecks insisted that no one had struck it, and certainly not in the “All Hands” signal.

I don’t believe in the supernatural, but it was still a damned odd thing

- Posted by buckler; Fark

Test Pilot

This isn’t hospital related (I just graduated and I hope I don’t run into any ghosts too soon…I have enough to worry about already!), but it is a ghost story. Actually, it’s a story that happened to my best friend several years ago. About 14 years ago her hubby was worked for the air force and they were stationed at Edwards Air Force Base (where the shuttle lands). Anyway, her Mom had come out to visit and they were driving off of the base pretty late at night. Well, according to her, at Edwards in order to get off the base you have to drive for miles and miles through the desert and it is, of course, very very dark at night. So, they’re driving through the desert she and her Mom and her son is in the back of the car when her headlights light up a guy walking on the side of the road way up ahead. He’s got on a flight suit and he’s carrying his helmet in his hand down next to his body. When they’re getting closer to him, her Mom turned to her and suggested that maybe they should pick him up. My friend agreed and when they both brought their eyes back to the road he had vanished. She said it was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to her. They both just kind of looked at each other with shocked faces. The thing about Edwards AFB is that they do a lot of test piloting for planes out there and several planes have gone down in the desert killing men over the years. Anyway, that’s just another story to scare you before you go to bed tonight.

- Posted by cloudydrms; Allnurses