Prowling Shadows & a Haunted Thrift Store | 426

[00:00:08] Welcome once again and thank you for being here. I'm your host, Nick Ryan. Tonight's episode is brought to you by my newest supporters, Emily and Brian. Thank you for making the show possible.

[00:00:39] Before I begin tonight's show, I wanted you all to know that my next couple of episodes are going to be a bit shorter than usual, but I'll be back with regular episodes over the next week or so. On a separate note, I'm also working on a new project, and I could really use your help. I've offered to assist to other investigators in locating information regarding an ongoing phenomenon in the state of Georgia. To learn more and whether or not you can help, visit my Patreon page at patreon.com slash paranormal mysteries.

[00:01:09] Now, just to be clear, helping does not mean donating. What I'm looking for is knowledge and anyone who may have a personal experience with the phenomena that are taking place. I simply use Patreon as a community hub in order to share updates, and of course, the paid membership is always optional. Thank you for your help in advance, and I hope to see you there. Now, let's get on with tonight's episode.

[00:01:34] Tonight's encounter comes to us from Marigold, and Marigold's experience is called My Paranormal Teenage Years. Marigold says, I wanted to say thank you for making a safe place. It makes me feel less alone knowing that people have experienced similar things to me and my situation. I have been meaning to write in for almost a year now, but I kept on switching what stories I wanted to share first.

[00:02:01] That being said, I have picked three events that I would like to share with y'all today. They have to do with my grandma's house, my old townhouse, and my paranormal city life experience. To preface this, I'd also like to mention that I'm a bit of a science nerd, and I try not to jump to conclusions when things like this happen to me. That being said though, some things really just don't have a logical explanation. I grew up in a small town with a very big, very close family.

[00:02:31] I spent a lot of time growing up at my grandparents' house. My family would meet there for holidays and events. At the time, I wasn't new to the ideas and feelings of the paranormal, but I was new to how frequent I would soon be having experiences. I remember growing up in that house, being babysat by my grandma, and always feeling like something was watching me when I was younger. I remember being seven and spending the night and sleeping in the spare bedroom,

[00:02:59] which was my soon-to-be bedroom as a 12 to 16 year old, and I would see something playing peekaboo with me from inside the closet. Needless to say that we grew up very Christian, and I just started praying until I eventually must have fallen asleep from being so tired. Again, when I was 10, I remember being dropped off at my grandparents' house on a weekend that my mom had to work. It was very early and I was tired, so I decided to take a nap in my grandma's room.

[00:03:26] I remember vividly having an out-of-body experience and seeing myself sleeping in the bed, and on the right side of me, I saw this big dark apparition hovering at least four feet off the ground. I remember feeling like it was looking right at me and being horrified by the energy that it was giving off. A few moments later, I woke up and ran out of the room. I remember that after I had woken up, the room was freezing cold, and my body felt like pins and needles.

[00:03:55] Now that I'm older, I still question what that could have been, because I get a lot of sleep paralysis, and this was nothing like that. Eventually, I moved into my grandma's house when I was 12, and that's when I began to have more frequent occurrences. For the first time ever, I started to have sleep paralysis involving a shadowy man, who would just watch me while standing around my bed. I would often see a shadow figure that was in the prowling position,

[00:04:22] and I would see it from the corner of my eye, or while walking past my room. It seems that no matter the entity, they would just always watch me closely. After I began to make this known to my family from my lack of sleep that I was having, I found out that I wasn't the only one who had been seeing the same apparitions. My mom's youngest sister, who was in her early 30s by then, grew up also complaining of the same apparitions,

[00:04:47] which, after a while, was comforting because I knew that I at least was not alone. These nightmares and sightings didn't stop for years, until the day that I moved out. But it did get less frequent when I was sleeping, because they started to show up more when I was awake. I'd only see them lurking in the corners of rooms, or from the sides of my eyes, or sometimes, in completely dark rooms. I remember the prowling figure would hang out on the top of my bunk bed where I would sleep,

[00:05:16] so when I would go into my room, I would have to make sure to try to ignore it. These brought fear to me at first, but I eventually got used to it happening every so often, and I would just try to not pay mind to them, and eventually I'd only get startled every so often. During my time at that house, I would see many more passing through entities as well. My mom would always tell me that the more that I fed into what I saw, the stronger they would get. She would also go on to tell me, after we moved out,

[00:05:45] that she always thought our family had different kinds of spirit gifts. I no longer talk to my big family, but I sometimes wonder if my little cousins will eventually see things too, or if those gifts just ended with me. My second story takes place after I moved out of my grandma's house, around my 17th birthday. During this time, I had a lot of huge changes and lots of stress in my life. I know this can be a big feeding energy for spirits and entities,

[00:06:14] and at this time, I would move into a townhome with my mom and my boyfriend. Mine and my mom's room was on the second floor, and the main floor was the kitchen, living room, and dining room. The basement would have the laundry room, another living room, and my boyfriend's room. Throughout the house, there would be spots and rooms with darker energy, or just a heavy feeling, and my room was one of them. The first time I stepped into that room, I was automatically overwhelmed with a heavy feeling.

[00:06:43] I moved in a week before my boyfriend, so my first night there, I FaceTimed him like we always had done, but especially because I was too unsettled from the energy in that room. After a few weeks, I got used to sleeping in that room, but because it was summer at this point, I would often be out late. I would walk around the house or to the kitchen to get snacks, and I started to notice more things in the corner of my eyes. Things that looked like a tall man in a hat and suit,

[00:07:10] and I would often see his boots standing by the dining room table before fully walking down the stairs. Whenever I would take a second glance, he would be gone. I never even got a good enough look to notice if he had any facial features, or not. I would also see other shadow figures with less detail, but they would also be just around the house, and they would vanish when I would turn my head to look in their direction. Their behavior and mannerisms almost reminded me as if someone were living out their regular day,

[00:07:39] and standing in various rooms in the house. But some of them were different, and would pay more attention to what I was doing, and they would peek at me from around the corner, watching me. In the hallways, I would smell a flowery powdery perfume at times, and it wasn't like anything my mother or I used. It would also happen at times when no one was at home but me for hours, or there would be just random spots in my room late at night. My sleep paralysis was also worse than ever before.

[00:08:08] But a part of it may have been my fault. I say this because I received a free huge mirror that was previously owned by my mom's friend of a friend, who I didn't know much about other than she wanted the mirror gone. And of course, as I was a broke high school student who was looking for a mirror that big, but seeing that they were around $300, I gladly took it. I put it in the corner of my room, and I now realize that it may have been a bad idea, but it was facing the general direction of my bed.

[00:08:38] I did get bad feelings about the mirror, but I tried my best to ignore it, because I was excited to finally have one. My friend, who was also experiencing lots of strange paranormal experiences, told me that she didn't like the way the mirror made her feel, which I also tried to brush off. Inevitably, though, one evening I took a nap, and I slipped into a sleep paralysis dream, where thousands of large spiders, not necessarily tarantulas, but just large wolf spiders,

[00:09:06] were falling onto my face, and into my mouth. I'm not sure if other people can feel when they have sleep paralysis, but I could actually feel them crawling down into my throat. Luckily, though, after what felt like forever, I finally woke up. Now, I often felt like most of these things would only happen to me, because when I would tell my mom, she would never say much about it, but she does try to ignore things like that. My boyfriend also said that he hadn't noticed anything like that,

[00:09:35] but he is also a very logical person, and would probably have brushed it off if something like that had actually happened. However, there was one night in maybe late March of 2024 when I had gone to my room for the night after hanging out in the basement with my boyfriend. I think I had been in my room for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, and my boyfriend was already asleep. That's when I got a phone call from him asking me to come back downstairs, and telling me that he had a bad dream.

[00:10:03] I kind of chuckled at that because he never really scared all that easily, so I thought that it must have really spooked him. He is also a person who doesn't dream often or at all, so I was also a little surprised that he had a nightmare. So, I made my way down the stairs, and when I got to his room, I asked him what the dream was about, and he proceeded to say this. I was already asleep when I heard my door open. I thought that it was you because it sounded like you also knocked something over on your way in.

[00:10:32] Well, I'm a very clumsy person, so it wasn't out of the ordinary for me to drop things or trip a lot. He then said that he called out my name, but there was no answer. However, he then told me the most chilling part. He said, But then I felt you crawl into bed with me and lay down. He finally went on to say that after that, he shot up from the bed and looked around and called out my name once again. But of course, there was no one in the room.

[00:11:00] After I heard this, there was no way I was going to sleep in his room, and after I texted my mom what had happened, she didn't want to sleep upstairs by herself either. So, I made him sleep in my room, which of the two was the better option. On the way up, I checked the doors as well as the cameras, because I was also scared that it could have been someone who broke in. But I, of course, found nothing out of the ordinary. After a year of living in our house, we decided to move once again, which leads me to my last story,

[00:11:30] my paranormal city life. Two days before my 18th birthday, my boyfriend and I moved into our little apartment. As I mentioned before, we live in a small town, and we moved into the historical part of town. We also both work in the small town area. A little backstory on the town, as well as our building, is that this is the original town, and these were the first buildings built in the 1920s, and some are even older. This means there's a lot of history, as well as a tunnel system underneath the town,

[00:12:00] which sounds crazy even to me. But it's true. I grew up here and heard stories, but originally they were used as a shortcut to dump dead bodies to and from the morgues, which is the building connected to our building. So basically, underneath most of the buildings are tunnels, and all the local businesses typically have their own ghosts, or some sort of spooky stories. My boyfriend's work has a basement entity who messes with the lights and knobs on the water heaters,

[00:12:27] and my work also has a few entities that are a little more scary though. I work in a thrift store, so we get a lot of old items with history, so we have lots of items that pass through with things attached to them, and we have some that keep coming back to us. Now, I wasn't the first one warned about the entity in our basement, because apparently we've had customers ask if we are aware that we have something in our basement. It's a pretty heavy feeling when you walk into the basement, and you automatically always feel like someone is watching you.

[00:12:56] When the lights are off, you can hear what sounds like someone moving the hangers all around. I've also heard that the building connected to us has an entity, and people experience the same things that we do. I'm not sure if it's the same one as ours, but as far as I know, everyone thinks the basement ghost stays in the basement. Sometimes, small items will even fly off shelves. My coworkers and I have even heard voices upstairs during close and open when no customers are there.

[00:13:24] A few of my coworkers like to ghost hunt, so one morning one of them had brought in their EVP device. The three of us who believe in things like this automatically decided that we had to take this to the doll section, where we keep dolls from all different time periods and parts of the world. The day before this, two other workers had mentioned that a certain few dolls were giving them a creepy feeling, and as soon as we all walked over there, coworker A turned on the EVP, while coworker B grabbed the doll.

[00:13:53] The EVP started shooting out words like, go away, and run. We all looked at each other in a bit of shock, and while coworker B was holding the doll, the EVP then said the word, monster. And at that point, my coworker put down the doll, and ran behind the register. My other coworker and I walked over still in shock, and we started to wonder what other items might have things to say.

[00:14:18] Then, all of us started talking about the new pre-World War II camera that we had just got in, when coworker A started saying how she would feel annoyed if she was a ghost and someone gave away all of her things. And at that very moment, the EVP said, you're annoying. And that's when we turned it off for the day. Since that day, the camera has been brought back to us a few times. Each of the customers claimed that it was a perfectly good camera.

[00:14:46] However, they just no longer wanted it. Well, I'll end it here. I just wanted to make sure that I got all the details correct and in order. I have lots more stories to share from different places that I'll share another time. Thank you so much for reading.