337: UFOs, Skinwalker Ranch, High Strangeness & A Curse

[00:00:00] Tonight's episode is brought to you by my newest contributor, Jason, and the continued support of listeners like you. Thank you for making this show possible. Welcome once again, and thank you for listening. I'm your host, Nick Ryan.

[00:00:36] Tonight's first submission comes to us from Melinda, and Melinda's experience is called Ghosts and UFOs Melinda says Hi Nick, I've been listening to your podcast for the past year now. Even though it creeps me out sometimes, I always come back for more.

[00:00:56] Growing up, my mom always told me that ghosts exist. I grew up listening to all her ghost stories because she lived right next to a cemetery as a child. I always loved to hear these stories, but I thank God he never let me see these spirits

[00:01:10] that my mom and even my brothers talked about. I knew even at a young age I'd have a heart attack if I ever saw one. In 6th grade, I would check out books about the paranormal from school, and my dad would

[00:01:25] talk about aliens and the possibility of them. You could say that I was open to the paranormal from a very young age. When I was around 5, I saw something in the sky. This was in the early 2000s, so there wasn't much known about flying droids.

[00:01:41] The closest thing that I knew to them were remote-controlled helicopters that my older brothers would get for Christmas. While I was driving in the car with my mom, I looked out the window and saw a weird object.

[00:01:54] It looked kind of like a trident, but imagine it being more white and futuristic. It stayed stagnant for a moment, and then started moving from left to right, up and down, right to up, etc. I was speechless. Then with a blink, it vanished.

[00:02:12] I told my mom I thought I saw a UFO, but she brushed it off. To this day, I'm not sure if what I saw was a dream or if it was real, but if anyone has seen something like that, please have them reach out to me.

[00:02:27] This next UFO story is from a family friend that I have always found interesting. It will be brief because I can't remember every detail. When our family friend Josie was a teenager, her and her family were driving down an empty road in the south.

[00:02:43] As they were driving, they saw what looked like a cliche UFO in the middle of the road. Her dad had to swerve off the road to avoid hitting it. It appeared out of nowhere. It felt like a few minutes, but then the UFO flew up and then vanished.

[00:03:00] I believe another car drove up and saw it as well. And after they checked the time, it had been three hours. The next experiences I have are definitely ghosts. My body and soul say they are ghosts, and I've never for a second doubted it.

[00:03:18] My ghost experiences started when I was in seventh grade. My family moved to a new townhouse with our family dog. For a few nights in the new house, my dog would bark and whine all night.

[00:03:30] We thought that maybe he was scared to be in a new place, but we now think it was because of other reasons. One night, we let him out to see if he wanted to go to the bathroom, but he books it out of his kennel.

[00:03:43] He runs to the living room and then barks at our playstation. When we looked at it, it kept turning off and then on again. And when we tried to take him away from it, he wouldn't budge and kept barking at the playstation. That townhome was definitely haunted.

[00:04:01] Once we moved in there, I started hearing whispers in my ear every night. Some said my name, and some not. They would tell me random things. Some say this could be my imagination, but I did hear them.

[00:04:16] I never felt their breath, but they were never in my mind like my inner voice, and they weren't ever female. They were always male voices. Two were more prominent than the rest.

[00:04:28] One was more gruff and quiet, and the other was more proper and loud, and it was always closer than the other. I didn't realize this wasn't normal until I moved to a different house, and I never heard the voices again.

[00:04:42] My stepdad also saw a shadow of a man multiple times in that house, and every time the clock struck 2am, I would feel so uneasy in that house. It was like someone was watching me, and did not want me there.

[00:04:57] The other house I moved to was on a mountain in the middle of nowhere in Utah. It was a cabin with a gorgeous view of the valley that we called home. What we didn't know was the history of this valley.

[00:05:09] There is a plaque as you're driving into the valley that explains the small town. It wasn't really a town though, mainly some houses, lots of farmland, a church, and a fire station. The next real town wasn't for another 30 minutes.

[00:05:25] On this plaque, it talked about how this valley used to belong to a Native American tribe. Then the pioneers came and fought them out. After a few months, the natives came back, and it was a massacre on both sides. Almost everyone died.

[00:05:41] The legend says that the natives cursed the land before they left, and honestly, I think it's true. Every year that I lived there, there were so many fires it was insane. I was evacuated multiple times from my home, and on standby to be evacuated even more times.

[00:05:58] The soil is hard to grow anything, and all the farmers out there don't even try to grow hay. They only have cattle. Anytime any of our friends or even ourselves tried to grow plants, they would suffer and barely grow.

[00:06:12] So many shady people also moved into that area that we had to lock everything up just for safe measure, but some things were still taken. The crazy part is that a few miles out of town, it is so easy to grow plants, and there are barely any fires.

[00:06:28] Anyway, a few weeks later, we start noticing something strange. Random knocks and noises spread throughout the house at random times. Random things would go missing and then reappear within a few minutes. It was weird. My mom said that it was a ghost, while my stepdad didn't believe her.

[00:06:47] I was indifferent. My mom and I then visited a rock shop up in Utah Valley. There, a psychic wanted to do a free reading on me because I was a teenager, so my mom and I agreed.

[00:07:01] Without really telling him anything about our lives, he was able to tell us things that he shouldn't have known about. He told my mom not to worry about my brother, and that he and his family were going to be safe in the marines.

[00:07:13] We didn't even tell him that I had a brother. He then told me that it's okay to be Mormon and believe in different things. I didn't even tell him I was having a hard time with it, and I still do to this day.

[00:07:28] Then he said something that blew our minds. Without even telling him about our house, the ghost, or the history of the valley, he told us the land that we were on was cursed.

[00:07:39] He explained that it was cursed by the natives, who were wronged by the pioneers many years ago, and the ghost that is in our home is a native protecting us from the curse. We were shocked.

[00:07:51] When we got home, we welcomed and thanked the ghost, but I think that wasn't the best idea. The ghost got more needy, and made more noises. One night, we were having dinner, and in my mom's bedroom we heard footsteps and a drawer opening and closing.

[00:08:08] Then another day, we were having lunch, and we all heard plain as day a piano key being played right next to us, while the piano was upstairs in my bedroom.

[00:08:18] My stepdad was seeing a figure in the corner of his eye, and my mom was seeing a man sitting in her study chair, and then disappearing. It was getting crazy. It started getting out of hand when two things began happening. I once came home, and I was alone.

[00:08:37] I took a shower, and I heard three knocks on my bathroom door. I called out to my mom or stepdad, but there was no answer. When I got out of the shower, no one was home. This freaked me out. The other thing feels impossible.

[00:08:53] We have three giant solar panels at that cabin, and to get to the top of them to repair them, we have a super heavy duty ladder that we use to get to it. It takes two or three people to carry.

[00:09:05] We started noticing that this ladder would not be where we left it. Sometimes it was on its side a few feet to the right. My stepdad would say that it was just the wind.

[00:09:15] Now our winds are super windy and powerful, but never has it ever wavered the ladder. One day, we came home, and it was down the hill from our house at the very bottom. We had to get the rope and drag it back up with our pickup.

[00:09:30] That is when we had kind of had it. We went to another family friend who was a Norse pagan. He told us to do a ritual every evening until the ghost left. This ritual involved being in a circle in the middle of our home, telling the ghost

[00:09:44] to go down the rainbow bridge to the other side. We did this maybe two times, and then all the activity ended. I am a strong believer in ghosts and pretty much everything you talk about on the podcast.

[00:10:00] If there is anyone who has any similar experiences as me, please send them my information. Thank you for listening and thank you for making this podcast. It's a great way for people like me to know that we're not crazy.

[00:10:18] Before I continue, please consider showing your support by subscribing, sharing, and giving the podcast a positive review. If you'd like to support the show further, please visit me on Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or PayPal, where you can make a donation or become a member for as little as a dollar

[00:10:35] a month. Benefits include ad-free episodes and early access to select shows. And if you've had a paranormal experience, you can share it with me through email or voice message at sharemyevp.com. You can also get involved by joining the forum, subscribing on YouTube, and following me on

[00:10:54] social media. All of my support and contact information can be found in the show notes. With that being said, I'll be right back after this brief message. Our next experiences of the night come to us from Ray. And Ray's story is called... Bizarre. Ray says... Hi Nick.

[00:11:19] I've been meaning to send in my stories for some time now, so I'm happy I'm finally getting around to it. My experiences aren't so much about ghosts as they are just... strange. Although I do have quite a few family members, both close and a little more distant family,

[00:11:36] who have encountered ghosts, guardian angels, had prophetic dreams, etc. I'm sure with all of that running through my family, I'll at some point encounter more of the paranormal. I grew up in a Christian home and still am a Christian.

[00:11:53] My siblings and I weren't allowed to watch scary movies growing up. I didn't even see Lord of the Rings until I was 13 or 14, which I can see how some might consider that scary for kids.

[00:12:05] I didn't see my first actual scary movie until I was 14 or 15, although I have always been intrigued by the paranormal and mysteries of the world. The first experience I can remember is when I was around 11 or 12 years old.

[00:12:20] My family lives in western Montana, in a relatively small town. The area we lived in at the time was nice and quiet, with hardly any traffic, and with the homes on that road being on around 3-5 acres of land, we did have a good bit of privacy.

[00:12:36] At the back of the property of my home, and a few homes on our side of the road, was a small ditch, and then a big hill that went down, leaving us with an amazing view of the valley.

[00:12:47] The driveway to our home was about a fourth of a mile long, and just before you got to the paved part of our driveway to pull into the garage, you had to pull around a big pine tree that was to the right.

[00:12:58] At night, the headlights of whatever vehicle was driving around the tree would shine directly into the front living room windows. When the garage was being opened, you could hear it well, throughout the house.

[00:13:10] My siblings and I used the light through the windows if it was nighttime, and the sound of the garage as our last minute sign that our parents were home, and we had better get whatever chores we had been procrastinating on done.

[00:13:23] For just a little more info, across from the big pine tree, to the left and a little ways in front of the house, was a barn, which was used for storage, and we never really went in there.

[00:13:35] Anyway, one night, my parents had left me in charge of three of my younger siblings. There were five of us all together, with me being the oldest. My parents had gone out on a date.

[00:13:47] This was the first date they had been out on in a while, since my mom had had my youngest brother, only a month or so ago. Since he was so young, they took him with them.

[00:13:57] Once I had gotten my siblings to bed, I liked to stay up, and honestly I couldn't sleep until my parents were home, so I would watch TV or whatever to keep myself busy. I was just more comfortable that way.

[00:14:10] So later on that night, I put my siblings to bed, and I was sitting on the couch watching my movie, when I saw headlights shine and move through the front windows, indicating that someone was driving around the big pine tree.

[00:14:23] Immediately following this, I hear the garage start to open. So I turn off the TV, happy that my parents were home, and I ran to the garage door to greet them. When I opened the door though, the garage was still closed, with no vehicle inside.

[00:14:40] Okay, that's weird, I thought, but then I remembered that my parents would sometimes sit in the driveway and talk for a while before coming in, so I ran to the front door and out onto the porch to look, but the driveway was empty.

[00:14:55] I looked toward the barn, but there was no car there either, not that I really expected there to be since we didn't really use the barn, and there really wouldn't be any point in parking there. At this point, I start to freak out a little.

[00:15:08] I had definitely seen the lights flash through the windows, and the cars that were passing on the road were too far away for their lights to shine through the windows. But still, I had also heard the garage open, but nothing. How was there nothing?

[00:15:24] All of a sudden, I heard a small baby's cry inside the house that sounded kind of like my baby brother. But it couldn't be. He was with my parents. The next youngest was three years old, so even if he was crying, it wouldn't sound

[00:15:38] the same way as a newborn would. What's more, and I don't know how it's possible or really how to explain it, was that the sound of the baby's cry sounded like it was coming from a third floor. But we didn't have a third floor. Just a basement.

[00:15:54] I ran around the house, but the loudest I heard the cry was in the living room. The living room did have high ceilings, but still, how would there be a cry coming from above me? It didn't make sense.

[00:16:06] I then checked on my siblings, but they were all asleep. Eventually the crying stopped, but I was terrified. I didn't know what to do, and I don't know why I didn't call my parents, but I figured I'd just have to tough it out.

[00:16:20] I then realized that the curtains on the other side of the living room were still open. These windows were big, around ten feet tall, and if not just as wide. I didn't want anyone or anything peering in, but honestly, I was too scared to go close

[00:16:34] to the window and look into the darkness of the night, in case I saw someone or something in our backyard, staring from the other side. So I just left the curtains open. I didn't want to go to bed where my sister and I shared a room.

[00:16:50] I had to stay awake to keep an eye out and watch my siblings. I just needed to wait for my parents to get home. At the time, I was just short enough to fit perfectly between the two armrests of our

[00:17:02] bigger couch, so that was where I hid and then finished my movie to keep my mind off of what had just happened, until my parents got home. When my parents did get home with my baby brother, I told them what happened.

[00:17:16] They believed me, but my mom thought that it might have been someone trying to kidnap me. At the time, she was hearing stories of people putting a crying machine or whatever they

[00:17:25] could outside of people's homes to get them to go outside and to see what the noise was, or if there really was a baby on their porch. Once they did, they were taken. This had almost happened to my mom's friend.

[00:17:40] As much as the idea of that scared me, I didn't think that that was it. If it was, why did I hear the garage or the baby crying from inside the house? And when I went outside to check the driveway, why didn't they take me?

[00:17:54] Honestly, I don't know what it was. Nothing more happened that night, or at all, for the rest of the time that we lived in that house. A couple years later, when my youngest brother was around four or five, we were living in

[00:18:09] a different house on the other side of that valley. It was a much smaller house. This house did have an upstairs with no basement, but the whole upstairs was one bedroom. It was my parents' room with a folding and sliding door at the bottom of the stairs.

[00:18:25] On the main floor, my sister and I shared one room, and the three boys shared the other room. My youngest brother would often wake up crying from nightmares and come into my room.

[00:18:36] If I could, I'd get him to sleep and put him back to bed, but if not, or if I could tell that he was going to be inconsolable, I would take him upstairs to my parents.

[00:18:47] One night, when my youngest brother did wake up and he was inconsolable, I picked him up and took him up the stairs. There were three long windows, each about two and a half feet wide and a foot tall,

[00:18:59] across from my parents' bed, and those windows didn't have any sort of covering, so I could see into my parents' room relatively well with the light that would come in through those windows.

[00:19:10] When I got to the landing and looked at my parents' bed, the bed didn't look like there was anyone in it. It looked made, with my mom's mini pillows there for decoration.

[00:19:20] I walked in and up to the bed and touched around it to make sure that I was seeing correctly, but there was no one there. Where would my parents be at this time of night? And why would they leave without telling me?

[00:19:35] At this point, I walked back downstairs and stood in the living room not sure where my parents were, while at the same time still holding my little brother and trying to console him.

[00:19:47] I wasn't in the living room for long when my dad came down the stairs and wondering what was wrong. I was in shock. How did he just come from upstairs? No one was up there when I had just checked.

[00:20:01] I asked him if he and my mom were up there sleeping, and he said, Yes, where else would we be? I was so confused. After he took my brother, I followed him back up the stairs to look, and there was my mom

[00:20:14] in bed with the blankets and sheets looking like they would if two people were sleeping in them, and my mom's throw pillows were on the floor. Was my mind playing tricks on me?

[00:20:25] If they were in bed when I had come up the first time, why hadn't they heard my brother crying and woke up, as he was quite loud? I didn't know how to explain it.

[00:20:35] Once I went back to bed, I couldn't fall asleep, trying to make sense of what had just happened. But I never could. For my last story, this happened around three years ago when I was 22. At the time, my family was camping in Duchesne for a family reunion.

[00:20:53] My dad had told us stories about Skinwalker Ranch growing up, and it was only about an hour from where we were camping. He and my grandpa wanted to check it out, and asked if my sister and I wanted to go too. We of course did.

[00:21:08] Now we honestly didn't expect to see anything when we went out there, just to go out, get a feel for the place, tell some stories for fun, and then leave. Although my dad also finds the paranormal interesting, he isn't one to jump into anything he hears or sees.

[00:21:24] He's a researcher and a scientist, and once he has a good story or found something cool, he's a phenomenal storyteller. So anyway, the drive out was fun. My sister and I got on well, so we were telling jokes in the backseat on the way there.

[00:21:39] Once you're there, it's not like you can just go onto the land. It's all fenced off, and when you've pulled up to the gate, a floodlight will come on with a recorded voice saying something along the lines of, Do not cross the gate. This is private property.

[00:21:54] There is also a big stop sign and another sign saying, Only private personnel beyond this point. This is a private road. This property is monitored 24-7 by security personnel and multiple surveillance systems. If you proceed beyond this point, you will be cited for trespassing.

[00:22:14] We did not proceed beyond that point. We stopped the car and took a look around. My grandpa didn't get out of the car. He wanted to watch from inside, and my sister was too scared to stay outside for too long.

[00:22:27] My dad and I had our elbows on the car, just looking at the land, and talking about some of the stories again. It was fun, and we were only there maybe 5-10 minutes. While my dad was talking, I noticed an odd and bright light in the sky.

[00:22:43] I pointed it out to my dad, and his first words were, I think that's just the light from the moon. To which I responded, No, the moon is over there. I then pointed to the other side of the sky.

[00:22:57] We stared at this light, and after a minute or two, it disappeared. We were trying to figure out what it could be. Were they stadium lights? No, there wasn't a stadium in that area, and it was too high in the sky to be that. Was it a UFO?

[00:23:12] Well, we couldn't see an object in the sky. Not that there couldn't have been one. So what was it? Nothing made sense. And we left after that. The next morning, one of my aunts was asking the family if anyone had seen the weird lights

[00:23:28] in the sky the night before, and when my dad and I said that we had, she got excited that she wasn't the only one. We talked about it for a while, but still couldn't make sense of what it was. I guess we'll never know.

[00:23:44] I'm interested to hear if anyone else has seen anything similar to my first two stories. Or anything. On Skinwalker Ranch. I hope you enjoyed tonight's episode, and before I leave you, I'd like to thank Melinda and Ray for coming forward with their experiences.

[00:24:04] And remember that if you'd like to submit your experience or learn more about supporting what I do, you can find all of my contact and support information at paranormalmysteriespodcast.com. And of course, in the show notes.

[00:24:19] Until next time, thank you again for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you back here in my next episode... of Paranormal Mysteries.