Personal Stories of the Bedtime Stories Team - Rich

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Hi people, I hope you're well.

This is your narrator Rich Speaking and this year for the Christmas episode we thought we'd do something a little different.

One of the purposes of this is to first of all introduce myself as I don't think I've ever spoken on the podcast so openly as I am now and secondly, believe it or not, many, many years ago, Christmas used to be a time when families would sit around log fires after sharing gifts and eating their Christmas feasts, regaling one another with scary stories.

It was a time-honored tradition which has sadly been lost amidst the more modern and commercial times in which we now live.

So instead of focusing on a more famous story, I'm instead going to recount some of my own personal experiences with the quote-unquote paranormal.

And the format is going to be a little different than usual.

This isn't scripted.

And instead of being something more formal, it's just going to be me sitting here in the dark, sipping a beer, and just relating these stories as they come to me in a more relaxed conversational tone.

And then on Boxing Day, which is the 26th of December for any Americans listening, you'll be hearing from our writer, Simon, with his personal experiences.

Now, I highly recommend listening to his stories as he's a cop and he's had some frankly hair-raising encounters whilst on duty.

Well worth a listen.

But before we begin, I'd just like to make you aware that I personally am a sceptic, I certainly don't believe everything I hear, but I am open-minded enough to accept that people do genuinely believe they have seen things they can't explain and that there are possibly things out there that go way beyond our understanding.

I say this despite the fact that I've had my own experiences, but the question of whether they were paranormal or not is, well, another matter entirely.

So now that's out of the way, I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has stuck with us and for listening to the podcast every week.

And I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

So without further ado, let's get into it.

So, my first weird experience occurred when I was about 14 or 15 years old, and I'm going to say weird experience rather than paranormal experience because even though to my mind it was paranormal, you guys might disagree.

So at the time I lived in a small village out in the country.

Now when I was much younger living out in the sticks was this great adventure.

There were endless fields you could go off and explore and you could go into the woods and play army with your mates.

But by my mid-teens that kind of horseplay had become a little dumb as you can imagine.

You want to do more grown-up kind of things.

But living out in the country like that, you're miles away from anywhere and it's not like you can just walk into town.

So I had to alarm my parents to drive me anywhere.

And on those days when they weren't available, the only things for kids my age to do was to play video games.

I'd go around to my friend's house to play on his PlayStation, and he'd come around to mine to play on my Sega Saturn.

And it was on just such an occasion that this particular experience occurred.

Now, I should preface this by saying that it's actually my friend's story, or at least the wider experience is.

I only witnessed a very small part of it and it occurred as I was going around to call for him, as we did in those days before mobile phones just used to rock up at their house knock on the door and ask if they were coming out there was none of this you know calling on mobile phones and checking if it was okay first

so anyway i'd walk through his front gate and i was making my way up the path towards his front door and i happened to see this little girl of about three or four

running up the alley at the side of his house.

Now, he lived in a semi-detached house, and I should explain that the front of the garden sloped upwards towards his front door, and then there was like an alley at the side that kind of went into the back garden and I just saw this little girl the back end of her running up this alley as I'd come through the gate.

Now I didn't think anything of this because he came from a large family he had a little sister of about three or four

so I just assumed that it was Natalie his youngest sister.

So I get to the door and He answers, lets me in and we just sit there playing video games.

And after about five minutes, I notice that the house is really quiet which I thought was odd like I say it was a big family so you'd expect it to be bouncing with activity to which he replies oh they've all gone out shopping nobody's here it's just me and you

and I say to him well that's a bit weird I've just seen your little sister outside running up the side of the house and he looks at me and he says you can't have done she's out shopping with my mum I've just told you

And then he looks at me with this thoughtful expression and he says, was she wearing a pink dress?

Now that was one of the things that made me notice her in the first place as I came through that gate I was looking down at the path as I was walking up towards the front door and it was this flash of pink in front of me in my peripheral vision that made me look up and that's when I just saw just the tail end like blonde hair and a pink dress running up the side of the house.

So I said yeah she had a pink dress on.

And he kind of looked at me with this knowing smile and he said, you didn't see my sister.

you've just seen a ghost and of course i just laugh it off and say oh whatever mate come on and i just think he's pulling my leg but then he proceeds to tell me about what's been going on in his house uh for the last couple of months and it all started after his family got back from a holiday in the summer now i remember that holiday because

he didn't go with them he remained at home You know, it was a holiday in Wales, so it was a sun, sea, sandcastles, that sort of thing.

But he didn't want to go.

He was just getting a bit too old at 16 to enjoy that kind of holiday.

So he asked his parents if he could stay home and look after the house.

And after agreeing with a neighbor to come and check on him to make sure he wasn't burning down the, you know, the family home, they agreed to let him stay there on his own, which he absolutely loved because it was like a rite of passage to him.

You know, like a bit of independence.

He was just loving being able to play on the PlayStation without having to share it with his sisters or watch the TV without having to share the remote, all that good stuff.

So off they went and they left their 16 year old son at home on their own.

Now they were supposed to have been gone for about two weeks but they ended up coming back after about four days.

And I remember my friend being really annoyed about that because like I say he was enjoying that brief moment of independence he'd been granted.

And so he asked his parents why they'd come back and they said something to the effect of, oh, the weather wasn't great or, you know, they just weren't enjoying themselves or whatever it was and although he was disappointed he thought nothing more of it at the time

but after a week or so weird things began to happen in that house whenever he was there alone which was quite often because as I say he was from a big family they had a seven-seater car and that was always full he was always the one who wouldn't fit in because all the other seats were taken so whenever they went out shopping or to visit friends and family or to do an excursion or whatever he was the one who was usually left at home.

And he went on to tell me that the first weird thing that happened was one day when he was in the kitchen standing at the sink washing the dishes, he was looking out of the window into the backyard when he saw this little blonde head of hair go bobbing past the window just below the windowsill.

You know, he didn't see a body or anything, it was just the top of the head.

as if some short child had gone running past the window.

And his initial thought was that it was his little sister she was about that height and she had blonde hair just like he had seen but then it suddenly occurred to him that his parents were out and his little sister wasn't even at home so he ran out the back door into the garden to look around and there was nothing there nobody now I should mention that the back garden was actually surrounded by a high fence with a locked back gate so there definitely wouldn't have been any possibility of a child a small child of that size anyway getting into the back garden so he thought it was a bit strange but just put it down to his imagination you know maybe he saw like a visual anomaly and just kind of made sense of it thinking it was a head of hair when it really wasn't it was just something in his vision but then other strange things began to happen so for instance he'd be watching tv again in the house alone and he'd hear the pita patter of little feet running about in the upstairs hallway or in the bedrooms.

Now he'd get to the bottom stairwell and look up the stairs just in time to see the tail end of a pink dress go flying past.

Wouldn't see the body, wouldn't see any hair or anything like that, just see the tail end of the pink dress as if somebody had ran past on the upstairs hallway and he'd just missed them.

Other times he'd be doing some chore or just relaxing watching T V

and he'd have like a feeling that he was being watched and

he'd see something move in the corner of his vision and when he'd look he just caught a glimpse of a blonde head of hair receding around the door frame almost as if somebody was peeping around the door looking at him and when he turned his head they quickly you know went back behind the door frame to hide themselves.

Now of course this was starting to freak him out.

But the tipping point came one day when he was downstairs watching TV and all of a sudden there was this huge commotion from upstairs as if somebody had tipped over like a wardrobe or a chest of drawers.

It was that loud and it startled him to the point where he ran upstairs to see what had happened and he went from room to room checking if anything had fallen over or whatever and there was nothing.

There was no signs of any disturbance whatsoever.

And as he was walking back towards the top of the stairs, he heard this giggling, like a little girl giggling.

And it was coming from his parents' bedroom.

And when he walked in there, they had like a built-in cupboard, like a closet.

And he opened the closet door and it was empty.

And this scared him so much that he basically ran downstairs, straight out the front door, and he sat in the garden until his parents came home.

And

by this time, he'd kind of put two and two together.

All this stuff was happening after his parents came back from that holiday.

So he knew there was some connection there.

Now, when his mom got home, he basically laid into her with this stuff.

He was saying that he knew something had happened on that holiday.

He knew there was a reason they came home early.

He told her about the weird stuff that had been happening whilst they were away.

you know, whilst they were out of the house doing shopping or visiting friends or whatever.

And at first, she denied all knowledge of it she wasn't prepared to answer any questions but he kept prying and eventually she opened up and told him that on the first night they were there on this holiday in Wales

she'd woken up in the middle of the night and seen this little girl in a pink dress sitting on her husband's legs Now, she thought it was her daughter and reached out to grab this little girl, but just as her hand went to touch her the girl disappeared now his mom initially put this down to like a waking dream or something you know like that state where you're between sort of wakefulness and sleep and you kind of manifest things from your dream in your vision but over the next few nights the children kept coming in from their bedroom saying that this little girl was coming in wearing a pink dress and that she had no face and she was tapping them and running away and she kept waking them up and scaring them because this girl would look right in their faces as they were sleeping.

So that's why they came home early and his mom being his mum went and put in a complaint with the campsite owner about what they'd been seeing in the caravan and the campsite owner basically confirmed that about 30 years beforehand A little girl in a pink dress had drowned in that brook about 30 feet behind the caravan where they were staying.

and they seemed to think that this little girl had followed my friend's parents home and basically attached herself to my friend probably because he was the only one who was in that house alone and

that was the one she could kind of show herself to more frequently

Now I know some of you are probably listening to this and you're thinking sounds like nonsense and I wouldn't blame you if you did but personally I believe my friend's story because first of all I've known him for most of my life, since I was about nine years old, and I can tell when he's pulling my leg.

Not only that, but his mom had corroborated the story pretty much word for word regarding what had happened in the caravan.

She also told us about other things that had been happening in the house, which she herself had witnessed.

And finally, I know that I saw that little girl with my own eyes.

Is it possible that she was some random child from another household trespassing into my friend's garden?

Absolutely, of course it is, which is why I labelled this as weird rather than paranormal.

But for me that seems unlikely given that the property was well secured from the rear with high fences as I'd already said.

And I feel it was just a little too coincidental for my friend to have described this girl before I had even told him anything about her.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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My second weird experience occurred a few years later when I was about 18 and by this time my

family had moved out of the country and into the suburbs of the town where I still reside to this day.

And I just want to to say this experience wasn't really creepy.

If anything, I thought it was kind of cool.

Now the town where I live is what's known as a new town, as we call them in the UK.

And what that means is that it's basically just a collection of smaller towns and villages all banded together under one unitary authority.

This creates a weird kind of setting where you have vast swathes of rural land with centers of population dotted throughout all over the place all surrounding one main town centre.

Now there's a footpath which stretches about 14 miles from the north end of the town to the south and it links many of these populated areas which was a godsend to me back in the days before I got my license because

I mean I used to cycle everywhere and I could get anywhere in the town within you know like an hour or so.

And I was using this path back in the summer of 2000 on my way back from the town centre after having met up with some friends.

And I was just nearing the estate where I lived when I saw a group of people standing on the path in front of me.

Now at this point, the path runs past a sprawling 16th century manor house which has been converted into a hotel.

And on the opposite side, there's a football pitch.

So I just assumed that the guests there were watching watching a football match as they were standing at the edge of this pitch.

But as I got closer, I realized that they were all looking up towards the sky.

And as I passed them, I turned to look in the same direction and immediately slammed on my brakes.

About half a mile distant and around, I don't know, 300 feet off the ground, was this black 3D hollow diamond shape slowly rotating as it sat there in the sky and between the top and the bottom apexes of this diamond was a weird kind of squiggle and you could see the sky through the gaps in the center.

Now the group of people who were there were all kind of talking amongst themselves discussing what this thing might be.

And I remember someone saying that they thought it was some sort of weird-shaped blimp or like a hot air balloon.

And that kind of made sense to me because there was a festival on in the town park at the time, as there is every summer.

And my immediate thought was that it was a child's balloon which had got loose.

And looking back, obviously, you know, given the distances, you know, it's perhaps just a little too big to be a balloon.

So that's why I jumped on the idea of like a blimp or hot air balloon instead.

And that was the kind of consensus amongst all of us as we...

stood there watching this thing for about, I don't know, five minutes until it shot off.

Just like that, it was gone.

There was no sound, there was no kind of gradual acceleration.

It was literally there one second and gone the next.

There was a split second elongated smudge on the sky, almost indicating its direction of travel, and then that dissipated and there was nothing.

I'd never seen anything like it before, and I've never seen anything like it since.

In my mind, there's no question that it was a UFO, as it was certainly unidentified.

It didn't look like any conventional aircraft I've ever seen,

so I guess my only question is

who was piloting it.

My third and final strange experience, which I'm going to relate here, occurred later in life when I was approaching my 30s.

And to be honest, this was a whole series of incidents all centered around one household.

Just to give some backstory, me and my girlfriend began dating back in 2010.

and on our very first date we talked about films we had watched recently

one of which was Paranormal Activity 2.

Now this naturally led on to a conversation about ghosts in general and whether either of us believed in them and whilst I was rather sceptical despite a few weird experiences she said straight out that she did and that furthermore the house she was living in at the time was haunted.

She then went on to tell me about all these things that were going on there and I kind of listened with a mixture of open-mindedness and

you know healthy scepticism.

And every now and then I'd ask a question like, are you sure it's not just the floorboards creaking back into place or, you know, were there any windows open, that kind of thing.

But she was adamant that something wasn't right about that house.

Fast forward six months or so, and I was stopping over maybe a couple of nights a week.

And in all that time I hadn't seen or heard a single thing at that property that would suggest it was haunted and I was seriously starting to wonder whether she was imagining things maybe scaring herself while she was there alone

but again she was adamant and she explained that the activity only seemed to occur whenever I wasn't there and that it was getting worse For instance, originally it was just a case of things disappearing from one location only to reappear somewhere else in the house, or ornaments would inexplicably fall off shelves, that kind of thing.

But it had now moved on to doors opening by themselves, and even like a full-bodied apparition appearing in her bedroom.

So she was genuinely terrified of being there on her own.

I honestly didn't know what to make of the whole thing.

but that soon changed.

I remember the first time I witnessed anything, I was stopping at her house on a weekend and I was lying in bed at 2am struggling to get to sleep.

I think it was summer at the time and the heat was just unbearable.

Anyway, my girlfriend was fast asleep next to me and I remember thinking about the things she had said and I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if something weird happened right now?

And no sooner had that thought entered my brain,

there was this enormous thump right outside the bedroom door.

It was so loud that my girlfriend sat bolt upright out of a deep sleep, and it was so powerful that it felt like the whole house vibrated as it happened.

And I shot right out of bed and began looking around for anything which might have caused it, like something falling over, and there was just nothing.

This wasn't like a floorboard creaking back into place and it wasn't a door slamming shut in a draft.

it sounded and felt like someone had hit an interior wall with a huge, and I mean huge fist or hammer of some kind.

Of course after that all kinds of weird things started happening whilst I was there, but I would always only witness the aftermath.

For instance, I would never see anything physically fall from a shelf or window ledge.

I would only hear it and then arrive to find whatever had fallen on the floor.

We would hear a door slam shut but never see it with our own eyes.

We would hear footsteps walking about upstairs or moving around downstairs whenever we were in bed but we would never see what was causing them.

For my girlfriend though this was a very different experience whenever she was there alone.

Things always seemed to happen right in front of her.

And of course I was trying to be rational about the whole thing, you know, looking for drafts, checking door hinges, leaving my camera running overnight with bait to see if there was a mouse or rat problem, all that kind of thing.

I checked everything that might explain what was going on, but I couldn't find a damn thing.

And about 18 months later, I had moved in with my girlfriend and ever since that point, things seem to have died down.

We decided to just kind of ignore the activity and as we did that it occurred less and less.

But But the weirdest thing and the thing that freaked me out more than anything else is what occurred just after Christmas 2012.

My girlfriend had been cleaning upstairs and she had gone into the study where I used to sit and work or play video games or whatever and for Christmas she had gotten me this massive box of Ferrero Roche.

I'm not sure if you get them in the United States, but they're like a ball of chocolate with a creamy hazelnut centre and each one is wrapped in its own kind of individual gold wrapper.

Of course I'd ate the lot and left these gold wrappers strewn all over my computer desk which she begrudgingly cleared up for me and she'd threw them all in the waste bin in the corner of the study and

She'd also chucked in this pair of old socks which had seen better days and then off she went downstairs to get the Hoover.

Now as she came back upstairs she almost had a heart attack.

All I heard from downstairs was Rich!

Rich!

Come and look at this and I came running up the stairs behind her and was confronted with a sight that just didn't make any sense to me at all.

Sitting on the top step in a very precise pyramid formation were all of these Ferrero Rocher wrappers and balanced on top of them standing upright was this old pair of socks.

The socks were barely touching the tip of this pyramid shape and were balanced in such a way that it was

well

physically impossible.

They should have been tipping over one way or the other but instead it looked like they were just being held there by like an invisible hand.

Of course, me being me, I reached out to touch it and before my fingertips even reached the socks, I I got this kind of static shock and the whole thing just crumbled.

The socks fell, all the foil wrappers lost their rigidity and it just kind of collapsed into this messy pile.

And that was one of the last weird things that occurred in that house.

We lived there for another six years and the activity just kind of dissipated, died away.

Didn't experience anything for the last, you know, five, four or five years.

Now, do I think the house was haunted?

Actually,

no.

But my reasoning for this is as pseudoscientific as any paranormal research, really.

And the reason I say that is because when my girlfriend was about 19 years old, she sustained quite a nasty head injury, which caused her to suffer from seizures afterwards.

This affliction lasted for about three or four years and then the seizures suddenly stopped.

However, when I met her in 2010,

she was going through quite a stressful time, which was causing lack of sleep.

And these seizures began to re-emerge.

So whenever she got overtired or felt too stressed,

you know, she'd get...

worse with this condition kind of thing.

And this all came on about the same time that the paranormal activity began at her house.

And over the next two years, as the seizures began to alleviate, so too did the paranormal activity.

Now when researching cases for this channel, I've often heard about a hypothesized connection between alleged poltergeist activity and people who suffer with seizures or high stress levels.

And as the theory goes, seizures may manifest some unconscious unconscious or dormant kind of telekinesis.

And as crazy as that sounds, I do often wonder if this is what was behind the activity, as opposed to, you know, spirits of deceased people simply playing tricks.

I mean, which sounds more realistic?

Perhaps neither of them.

But still, you know, who knows?

So yeah,

that's me.

Those were my experiences.

And before I go, I just want to say that everything I've told you in this bonus episode is true.

I fully expect that many people won't believe what I've said, and that's perfectly fine.

Believe me when I say I've had a harder time convincing myself than other people,

even though in the grand scheme of things, I've probably experienced very little compared to others.

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