Policing the Paranormal

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Experience tells us there are certain professions in which people are far more likely to encounter the unexplained than others.

As the many accounts featured on our sister podcast Wartime Stories clearly demonstrate, one such group is military personnel.

But another, just as frequently, is the world of law enforcement, where officers across the globe have reported experiences that defy logic, reason, and training alike.

In this episode, we'll be exploring some of those accounts: cases where those sworn to uphold the law found themselves policing the paranormal.

Law enforcement has always occupied a strange position in society, one that sits somewhere between order and chaos, the living and the dead hours of the night.

Police officers are, by the nature of their duty, often required to step into situations and spaces that most people would instinctively avoid.

Abandoned buildings, remote country roads, roads, empty industrial estates and silent residential streets.

These are their workplaces, and whilst most of the population sleeps, officers patrol through darkness, quiet and isolation, chasing calls into the forgotten corners of the world.

Their role demands that they enter without hesitation the very environments that heighten human vulnerability.

When a light flickers in an empty factory, when a noise is reported in a derelict home, when a figure is seen lingering by the roadside at 3 in the morning, it is the police who go to investigate.

They do so not because they want to, but because duty dictates they must. And in those quiet, unguarded hours, the normal rules of reality can seem to fray.

Anyone who has worked a night shift will tell you that the world feels different after midnight. Familiar places take on an eerie stillness.
Streets that are bustling by day become hollow and unreal.

Sound carries differently. Shapes at the edge of vision seem to move.

For police officers, that atmosphere is not an occasional experience, it is routine.

They live their professional lives in the threshold between safety and danger, light and dark, the seen and the unseen.

The psychological strain of that environment is difficult to quantify. Officers are trained to rationalize what they see, to measure, to record, to verify.

But there are occasions when even the most disciplined mind cannot find a rational explanation for what it has witnessed.

Over the years, police forces around the world have quietly accumulated stories of encounters that defy reason.

Apparitions glimpsed in rearview mirrors, footsteps echoing through deserted corridors, disembodied voices over the radio. Many such reports never make it into official documentation.

They circulate instead by word of mouth, shared between officers in quiet moments, not as jokes, but as uneasy confessions.

Perhaps what makes these stories so compelling is the credibility of the witnesses themselves. Police officers are, by training and temperament, practical people.

Their job depends on assessing evidence and dismissing falsehood. They are not easily fooled, nor prone to hysteria.

When they admit to seeing something they cannot explain, it carries a weight that few other professions can match.

Sceptics will argue that long shifts, sleep deprivation and stress can distort perception, and there is truth in that. The night does strange things to the mind.

But to those who have had their own unexplainable experiences on duty, such reasoning provides little comfort. They know what they saw.

Law enforcement officers are, in many ways, the gatekeepers of the unknown. They are the ones who enter the scene first, often alone, before the journalists, the paramedics, or the daylight.

And it is in those quiet early hours, in the margins of routine patrols and emergency calls, that strange things are most often said to occur.

The stories that follow were either sent into bedtime stories by former and serving members of the police force or have been sourced from other reports.

Each account reflects a moment when the rational world briefly gave way to something else.

Something that even the most seasoned of officers could neither predict nor explain.

In the early hours of a February morning in 2003, Chicago emergency dispatcher Trudy Wakeland received a call that would remain with her for the rest of her career.

It was shortly after 1am,

a time when emergency lines were still active with routine calls, noise complaints, disturbances and minor domestic incidents when a new call came through the system.

The caller was identified as a 14-year-old girl named Emily, who lived in a quiet suburban neighbourhood on the western edge of the city.

She reported that she was home alone and could hear someone moving around inside her house.

Wakeland followed protocol, immediately dispatching a patrol car to the address whilst keeping the line open to reassure the caller.

The girl stated that she had taken refuge inside a bedroom closet and was using her mobile phone to make the call.

At first, the noises she described seemed distant. Faint creaks, doors opening and closing, the sound of movement on the lower floor.

But over the next few minutes, the intruder appeared to move upstairs. The dispatcher could hear the faint thuds and scraping sounds in the background growing steadily louder.

The girl reported that drawers were being opened and slammed shut, and that the noises were now coming from directly outside her room.

She told the dispatcher she could hear someone moving about as though searching for something, knocking items from tables and shelves.

The dispatcher reassured her that police units were en route and instructed her to remain silent and stay hidden.

Seconds later, there was a sudden increase in background noise.

The sounds were sharp and chaotic, a series of heavy bangs followed by a long pause.

The girl whispered that the intruder was now inside her bedroom.

Moments later came the sound of a brief scuffle. and what investigators later described as a high-pitched distortion of unknown origin on the recording.

Then came the final words the dispatcher would hear from Emily.

His feet aren't touching the floor.

After that there was a sharp burst of static followed by a cacophony of noise that sounded like rushing wind before the line abruptly went dead.

Police arrived less than two minutes later having not witnessed anyone leaving the scene. The house appeared to have been ransacked with drawers emptied and furniture overturned.

The girl's mobile phone was discovered on the floor inside the closet, still connected to the dispatcher's line.

There was no blood, no fingerprints and no evidence of a forced entry.

The family's valuables remained untouched and nothing appeared to have been stolen.

Emily, however, was never found.

The next account comes from Poland and was reported by a serving member of the ambulance service.

On the night of December 31st, 2022, officers were dispatched to a small village located several kilometers outside the city of Bydgos following a report from a concerned neighbour.

The caller claimed to have heard what they described as animalistic growling and inhuman screams, coming from an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the settlement.

When the officers arrived, they were surprised to find another emergency unit already at the scene, a paramedic crew who had been requested by two men waiting outside the property.

Both men appeared shaken and informed police that a woman who had accompanied them inside had suddenly begun behaving in an erratic and violent manner.

The three of them, it later transpired, had entered the abandoned residence earlier that evening to conduct a seance using a Ouija board.

What had begun as a bit of New Year's Eve fun had quickly descended into something far more disturbing.

The property itself already carried a dark reputation amongst locals. Decades earlier, it had belonged to a family suspected of cannibalism and ritualistic murder during the post-war period.

The house had been empty ever since, and villagers tended to avoid it.

According to the witnesses, their friend Kamilka had appeared perfectly normal at first, laughing and joking as the board was set up on the floor of the living room.

But as the session continued, her behaviour changed.

She stopped responding to them and began growling softly under her breath.

Within minutes she was screaming, thrashing and hissing at the others.

When police and paramedics attempted to approach her, she reacted violently, throwing items across the room and producing deep, guttural noises that several witnesses later compared to those of a wild animal.

The short clip recorded by one of the paramedics shows officers standing in the doorway whilst the woman moves erratically inside the room.

She continues to emit inhuman sounds while striking nearby furniture.

Eventually, the officers managed to restrain her with assistance from medical staff. She was transported to a nearby hospital where she remained under observation for several hours.

Toxicology tests later confirmed that there were no traces of drugs or alcohol in her system.

Following a psychiatric evaluation, Kamilka was declared mentally stable and released.

Her friends insisted that it was not in her nature to act this way or even play pranks like this, and they were baffled by her actions.

She reportedly had no memory of the incident or of her behaviour inside the house.

The following morning, police sealed off the property once again.

The official report lists the event as a psychotic episode of unknown origin. Unofficially, the attending officers maintain that what they saw and what they heard was not human at all.

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In the late hours of a warm summer evening in 2019, Sean McCory, a serving police officer in the suburbs of Oakland, California, responded to one of the most unsettling calls of his career.

Although not paranormal as such, it is a stark reminder of how normality can quickly unravel.

At 9.47pm, a 911 dispatcher received a call from a trembling voice, a young boy only six years old, claiming there was a zombie outside his house.

He wasn't alone. His twin sister could be heard quietly crying somewhere nearby.

Their mother, a single parent, had gone to the grocery store less than 10 minutes earlier, leaving the children home together.

The boy said the creature had first appeared at the kitchen window and was now walking around in the street.

The dispatcher tried to calm the frightened child whilst relaying the information to patrol units in the area.

Calls from children describing monsters or intruders were common, but the urgency in his tone was impossible to ignore.

Procedure dictated that any threat to child's safety had to be treated seriously, so McCrory and his partner were dispatched to the scene.

The address lay within a quiet residential cul-de-sac, rows of idyllic family homes set back from the road, the kind of neighbourhood where nothing dramatic usually happened.

As their cruiser turned the corner, the headlights swept across the asphalt.

At first the street looked empty, then out of the darkness a lone figure stumbled into view.

It moved unsteadily, arms extended, head lolling from side to side.

Its gait was uneven, almost puppet-like, and its hands seemed to be groping at the air.

McCrory slowed the car, uncertain whether he was looking at an injured man or someone under the influence.

But as the lights fell fully upon him, the truth became disturbingly apparent.

The man's face was streaked with blood, his eyelids were missing, leaving two gaping sockets that oozed and glistened in the glow of the headlights.

His bare chest was smeared with dirt, and his mouth twitched as he muttered incoherently.

He appeared completely blind, shuffling forwards with his palms outstretched, occasionally brushing against parked cars for guidance.

The officers stepped out cautiously.

When McCrory called out, the man turned towards the sound with a guttural, animalistic scream, wildly flailing his arms around.

His fingertips were shredded, nails torn down to the flesh.

He resisted violently before collapsing to his knees, mumbling disjointed phrases about strange voices, bright lights, and insects scratching at the inside of his head.

The patrol subdued him using non-lethal force until paramedics arrived. Even whilst restrained, the man thrashed against the pavement, bleeding heavily from his eyes.

It was later confirmed that he had been high on methamphetamine and had used a spoon to gouge out his own eyes during a psychotic episode.

When McCrory returned to the house, he found the boy and his sister being comforted by a neighbour.

The mother had arrived minutes earlier, horrified to discover emergency vehicles lining her street. Both children were shaken, but unharmed.

The man whose identity was withheld survived and was committed to psychiatric care.

The official report classified the event as drug-induced self-mutilation, but for the officers and dispatchers who witnessed it, the memory remained unnervingly literal.

The boy had told them a zombie was outside, and in its own grotesque way, he had been telling the truth.

Route 210 in Pender County, North Carolina cuts through a quiet stretch of farmland, pine forest and marshland on its way towards the coast.

It's a lonely road at the best of times, particularly after dark when the trees seem to lean inward and the night air grows thick with humidity.

But for locals, it is known for more than its remoteness.

The highway passes a small historical site known as Patriots Watch, a preserved section of Revolutionary War battlefield where hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the conflict lost their lives in the late 1700s.

The site attracts a modest number of tourists by day, but by night it has become the subject of enduring folklore.

Drivers travelling along Route 210 after sunset frequently report seeing ghostly figures standing near the roadside, some dressed in tattered colonial uniforms, others barely visible except for the faint glint of metal buttons or a musket barrel catching the light of passing headlights.

A few have even claimed that one of these apparitions bears obvious signs of mortal injury, its bloodied uniform torn open to reveal a horrific wound to the chest or neck.

The local Sheriff's Department has long dismissed such stories as imagination and coincidence, the tricks of headlights on mist or the reflections of nearby signage.

But one particular incident, which took place in the early hours of the 31st of July 2022, has continued to puzzle investigators and terrify those who have heard the recording.

At 2.15am, an anonymous male driver was travelling alone along Route 210, heading eastbound towards the town of Rocky Point.

He had just crossed the narrow bridge over the Black River, a meandering stretch of water that cuts through the swampland south of Patriot's Watch.

As he approached a long bend in the road, His headlights illuminated a figure standing on the shoulder ahead.

At first he assumed it was a pedestrian, perhaps perhaps someone injured or a stranded motorist in need of help.

But as he drew closer, the details came into sharper focus.

The person appeared to be male and was covered from head to toe in what looked like blood.

His clothes were in tatters, clinging to him as though soaked through. and his posture was unnervingly still, head slightly bowed, arms limp at his sides.

Alarmed, the driver passed by, peering through the passenger side window as he did so.

The figure never moved, instead it seemed to watch him, its eyes unfocused, its mouth slightly open as if mid-breath.

Convinced that he'd just come across the aftermath of some terrible accident, The driver continued on his way and dialed 911 to report what he'd seen.

The dispatcher who answered the call later described the man's tone as concerned but coherent.

The caller explained that he had just crossed the Black River and had seen someone injured on the roadside, possibly a crash victim.

He estimated the person was about a mile west of Patriot's Watch and might be in need of immediate medical assistance.

I'm driving on 210. I just crossed the Black River and I thought I saw a guy standing on the side of the road bleeding.

Okay, you

where are you at, sir?

I'm on 210. I've just crossed the Black River.
I'm heading towards 53 East.

I I just passed Patriots launch.

Okay, so you're over near Morse Creek?

Yes.

Okay.

And did you saw a man standing on the side of the road?

What was that, sir?

That's not human! That's not human!

Sir, are you okay, sir?

There's nothing in the back of my truck. Okay, what's in the road? No, it's not in the road, it's in my truck! In the bed! There's something in the bed of your truck?

Yes, ma'am, I just turned on my bed light for my truck, and there's something in my bed.

Okay, sir, when you say something, what do you mean?

I just knocked it off of the bed of my truck and went over my room. Okay, what was it?

According to the subsequent investigation, deputies arrived on scene roughly 20 minutes minutes afterwards.

They found no trace of an injured person, only skid marks along the shoulder and fragments of broken glass scattered on the tarmac.

The driver was later located at a fuel station several miles away, visibly shaken.

He told officers that shortly after making the call, something had leapt from the roadside directly into the open bed of his pickup truck.

At first he assumed it was an animal, perhaps a deer or a coyote, but when he looked in the rearview mirror, he realised whatever it was had stood upright.

He described it as spindly, with long limbs and pale, almost luminescent skin. Its face, he said, looked almost blank, like a person who had stretched a sheet of white elastic over their face.

It was hairless. featureless except for shallow impressions where the eyes and mouth should have been.

The driver claimed that, as he watched in disbelief, the thing pressed its face against the rear window of the cab, peering in at him with a strange, deliberate curiosity.

When it realised he could see it, it began pounding on the roof with alarming force, the sound echoing through the cabin.

Panicked, he accelerated to over 60 miles per hour, hoping the airflow would knock it loose.

When that didn't work, he slammed on his brakes.

The sudden deceleration threw the figure forwards into the road.

He saw it land in the pool of his headlights, a blur of limbs and white skin before it scrambled upright and bolted towards the tree line, vanishing into the darkness of the forest.

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Deputies who examined the truck found several dents along the roof and tailgate, consistent with heavy impacts, but no trace of blood, hair or prints of any kind.

The caller refused to have his name released publicly, but he told investigators that he had no history of drug use, mental illness or sleep deprivation, and insisted that what he had seen was real.

In the weeks that followed, a handful of other motorists claimed to have experienced similar sightings along the same stretch of Route 210.

Pale shapes moving at the roadside or the sensation of something running alongside their vehicles before vanishing. None, however, have been verified.

The official report filed by the Pender County Sheriff's Office lists the event as a disturbance call unfounded.

Some commentators believe it to be the restless spirit of a revolutionary war soldier. mutilated in battle and condemned to wonder the route of his death.

Others are convinced it is something far older, an apparition born of the swampland itself, feeding off the fear of those who pass through after dark.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain.

On the 31st of July 2022, a man driving through rural North Carolina placed a terrified call to emergency services claiming that something inhuman had entered his truck.

And whatever that something was,

no one has ever found it.

Of all the accounts featured in this episode, each carries its own set of unanswered questions, and, inevitably, a number of possible explanations.

Some cases lend themselves easily to logic, whilst others resist it entirely.

The first account concerning the 911 call received by dispatcher Trudy Wakeland remains one of the most debated.

Trudy, a respected and long-serving dispatcher in in the Chicago area, has always stood by her story.

She maintains that the call took place exactly as she described, a frightened teenage girl whispering from a closet, the sounds of someone or something moving through the house, and that chilling final line before the connection went dead.

The difficulty, however, lies in the lack of verifiable evidence.

Trudy was never given permission by her superiors to retain or release the audio recording, citing department policy regarding active investigations.

Without that record, there's no official trace of the call in the public domain.

Some have argued that this opens the door to skepticism, that perhaps the story has grown over the years, passed along and embellished by others until fact and fiction blurred.

Yet, it would be unfair to accuse Trudy herself of fabrication as she came across as entirely genuine when recounting her story.

The case of Kamilka, the Polish woman allegedly possessed by a violent spirit, presents a different challenge.

On the surface, it could be dismissed as a case of performative hysteria or an attention-seeking act, a claim supported by those who suggest she may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Yet, toxicology screens return negative results, and multiple witnesses, including her two companions and a responding paramedic, reported behaviour that seemed far beyond conscious control.

Her friends, who knew her well, are adamant that she was not the sort of person to stage such an event. They described her as shy, private, and easily embarrassed.

hardly the type to throw herself into the spotlight, let alone in such a disturbing way and in front of police officers.

If she truly wasn't acting, then the incident raises uncomfortable questions about temporary possession or dissociative trance states, phenomena recorded in numerous cultures but poorly understood in modern psychiatry.

Whatever the cause, Kamilka herself has no recollection of the episode, and subsequent psychological evaluations found her entirely sound of mind.

Then there is the Pender County incident. The anonymous man who claimed to have encountered a blood-covered figure near Patriot's Watch and later reported something in the bed of his truck.

On paper, the simplest explanation would be a hoax call.

False emergency reports are far from rare, particularly in the era of viral storytelling.

A convincing 911 call could easily be staged to attract attention or create an urban legend.

But in this case, the responding officers found the driver in a state of extreme distress, and photographs reportedly showed claw-like marks along the paintwork of his pickup.

Forensic examination was inconclusive. No blood, no prints, just damage consistent with something physically gripping the vehicle's exterior.

Sceptics point to wildlife, perhaps a large bird or stray animal startled by the vehicle.

But the driver's description of a pale, humanoid shape with featureless skin has no obvious parallel in local fauna.

Could it have been a prank, a figure in costume, or even the driver's imagination amplified by fatigue and fear?

Possibly, yet the audio recording of his call suggests genuine terror, a man reacting in real time to something he truly believed was happening.

Plus, someone being thrown from a speeding vehicle would likely have resulted in serious injury.

When it comes to cases like these, the explanations often sit uneasily between the rational and the inexplicable.

Some people see what they expect to see, and fear has a way of shaping perception.

But it's equally true that the world produces experiences that don't fit neatly into any category, events that leave even the most sceptical observers questioning what they know.

Perhaps in trying so hard to explain the unexplained, we risk missing the deeper pattern.

That the unknown still walks beside us, whether through malfunctioning phone lines, abandoned houses, or dark country roads.

And whilst each of these stories can be rationalized to some degree, there remains that small part of the human mind that is reluctant to dismiss them completely.

Because sometimes, when the lights are out and the world falls silent, logic feels like the least convincing answer of all.

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