Scary Stories #10: Gadzooks!

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Hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in demand fields. Learn more at About Amazon CA hey folks, this is Kevin on this week's episode of Risk of Hear Ian Steffing. That'll fuck up your life. Thinking that any moment some civil war general's gonna come into the shower with you bleeding all over the walls and shit.

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Now, here's the show, Right? Hello kids. This is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison.

This is Kim Pet behind me now with a song called Boo Bitch. Because this is our annual Halloween special. This year, my friends, this is scary stories. 10 colon catzooks.

And you know what my favorite part is? The colon. I want to give a little shout out to three of our new Patreon patrons. There's Jason Kyle, there's Christa Sexour, and there's Ahill.

Those three have given us $25 or more per month. Of course, you can give $8 a month, $5 and $10, $3 a month, $1. You can give any amount you want per month and get all of that bonus content that we [email protected] risk now, as always, we have all kinds of scary on this year's Halloween episode of Spooky scary, funny scary, freaky scary. In a little bit, we' hear from Kelly Copel, who has never been on the show before.

And before that, we're going to hear from Ryan Estrada, who you have heard on the show recently, our friend living over there in South Korea. But before all that, Sam Mullins has returned to the show. Sam did the Vancouver show that we did just a little time back, and here he is now with a story we call the Driving Dead. All right, so this story begins at a live storytelling event in Vancouver, not unlike this one.

There's this terrific storytelling show on Main street called the Flame. And that's where I told some of my first live stories. And the Flame has a very loyal audience. And a lot of people that go to the Flame are sort of like the old guard of the Vancouver film and television industry.

Like, if you throw a pebble in there, you're likely to hit someone who like held the boom on the X files in the 90s or like had a three episode arc on CBC's the Beachcombers. So there's lots of film types at the story show. And one night I tell a story there and I'm having a cigarette outside. I'm on the lozenges now.

And this guy who I'd never seen before, he was like 50, he came up to me and he said, man, I really love your story, but I gotta tell you that the whole time you were up there, my brain was just lighting up because the whole time I was thinking, oh my God, this kid would be perfect as the protagonist in this film project that I'm working on. He's like, dude, do you act at all? And I'm like, no, no, I don't. I don't act.

I'm more of like a comedy writing person. And he's like, ah, but you'd just be so perfect for this role. Would it be okay if I sent you the script and you could think about it? I'll make you an offer.

I'll give you a few days. So I give this guy my email and he sends me the script and he makes me an offer. And at this moment in time, I'm in like my early 20s and I'm living in like the dankest of the dank Vancouver basement apartments. And I'm literally like slinging waffles in this like brunch place.

And one day I'm slinging waffles and one of my coworkers is a server, Kelsey. And I tell her about this offer that this guy gave me and that he offered me more money to do this than I'd ever been offered in my life. And I'm like 32 years old now. It's still the most money I've ever been offered to do anything, which is sad.

But I tell her that I'm thinking about not doing it because the thought of being the lead in a film just fills me with too much anxiety. I'm like, it's not worth it. And she's like, sam, you're a waffle waitress. When someone offers you a job that isn't being a waffle waitress, you need to say yes to this opportunity.

So I'm like, I guess I'm an actor now. So I take the starring role in this film and what this project was was a zombie themed driver safety video paid for by the government of Vancouver for internal use only. So I guess the idea of the premise is like, hey, even if the zombie apocalypse is upon us, don't forget to buckle up, city employee. Really, really check those mirrors before you back up the truck.

So I set the role and in the negotiation, I'm even able to finagle a job for one of the guys in my comedy troupe, Peter. And Peter's over the moon because he somehow hasn't even danker apartment than me and he needs money. So the film shoot took place over the course of three days up in the mountains above Northman, where the reservoir for the whole city is. And up there there's like, it's like in the forest and there's all these huge buildings that house all the water purification equipment and there's like this big manicured lawn about the size of a football field.

And when you stand on the lawn, you have like a bird's ey of all of Vancouver. So we're shooting this one sequence on the day and it's the final day of shooting Where I'm basically running from zombies. But being so safe around cars. I'm so safe around cars and cars.

And there's a scene where it seems like the zombies are about to get me. So I run out of the building, and who should pull up in a white Ford F250? But my friend Peter, who I got the role for, and he kicks open the door, and his character kind of reaches out to mine and says something to the effect of, come with me if you want to live. And my dear friend Peter, he's one of these guys that just gets away with everything.

He's one of these guys that'll show up to a job interview two hours late, and he'll start roasting the interviewer about their choice of decor in their office and somehow get the job. He's one of these very charming and unflappable Peter. So we're shooting this scene between my character and Peter's character. We're in the truck driving down this wooded road, and this is, like, a full film shoot.

Like, there's, like. There's, like, gaffers and assistant directors and, like, craft services. But of everyone up there, I am the only person that knows that Peter, the person driving the truck in the driver's safety video, does not have a driver's license and in fact, has never once in his life sat in the driver's seat of a vehicle. But.

But I'm not worried because, you know, it's so. It's so isolated up there, and we're just, like, driving very slowly while we get this dialogue scene. And the only people in the truck are just me and Peter and our new best friend, the sound guy, who crouches on the floor behind us holding up a blue microphone. And so we get all those shots for the dialogue scene, and we pull over the side of the road, and we're sitting there just talking when 40 zombie extras show up.

And the director comes over to our window and he says, okay, for this final shot of the film, I'm gonna direct the zombies to sort of mill about randomly. And, Peter, if you could just sort of weave the truck through them, accelerate towards that building and slam on the brakes, ideally making a squealing sound, stopping just short of that building. We'll have the shot. So the first few takes don't work at all because Peter's so terrified, he's not driving fast at all.

Like, in one of the takes, there's zombies actually passing us. We're going 2 kilometers an hour, and we're not going fast enough. To get that tire sweet at the end. So we do about nine takes, and the director comes over the window, and he says, okay, we're just gonna do this one more time.

But Peter really go for it this time, which filled me with fear, because in the last few takes, I'd seen Peter getting more and more confidence in a bad way. And as Peter rolled up the window, I already knew exactly what was gonna happen, because Peter really did go for it. And he weaved the truck aggressively through the extras, and he accelerated towards the building, slamming on the brakes, letting out the desired squealing sounds as Peter crashed the government truck. Government building.

In a driver safety video paid for by the government. So we get out of the truck, and all the union film guys are like, what the fuck? And because we crashed into a workplace on a workday, like, dozens of people are coming out of the building, like, what the hell are you guys doing? We're like, isn't it obvious?

We're shooting a driver safety video. So one of the guys who comes out of the building, he looks more serious than the other guy. He sort of looks like Sean Penn. And he takes the director aside, and I'm close enough within earshot that I can hear Sean Penn say the words internal investigation.

I turn to Peter. I'm like, peter, I think you gotta tell the director that you don't have a driver's license to see if he can nip this in the butt. So we wave the director over. Peter comes clean.

And the director's like, I never heard this conversation. Never happened. So. So Peter is unflappable, but in this moment, he's flat.

He's beside himself. And around the corner comes no fewer than eight police cars into the parking lot. And Peter's like, what the fuck? Did they.

Did they call the police? Am I gonna be arrested for crashing into a building without a license? Like, Peter's like, two seconds from running into the woods and starting a new life, when in the distance, we hear a helicopter. And pretty soon we see a helicopter.

And we're so high up that the helicopter's actually below us, and it's coming over the trees up towards us. And before long, it's right above us. And Peter and I, when we look up at it, we're confused with what we see. And Peter's like, what the hell is that?

And underneath the helicopter, there's a long rope that's tethered to a stretcher. And on the stretcher is a body bag with a dead human inside of it. And it slowly Descends onto this grassy area right in the middle of the 40 zombie extras and the police and me and Peter and Sean Penn. And they lower it softly onto the ground.

The police officers come and collect the body. They put it into the trucks and they drive away, all eight cars. And the helicopter leaves. And we're all just kind of standing there stunned.

And a few minutes later, the director comes over and he's like, guys, I just got to see the footage of that final shot. And it's so good. So we're wrapped, so you guys should get out of here. So Peter and I drive back down into Vancouver.

I drive, we go to Wendy's. I get the number two combo. Peter pays. And because the world is cruel to actors, the next day I was back at my waffle job.

And I'm waiting tables with a woman, Kelsey, who convinced me to do this project in the first place. And she's like a really sunny person. But this day, after the shoot, she seemed like there was a dark cloud over her all day. And I'm like, kelsey, what's going on?

Are you okay? She says, sam, the most fucked up thing happened. I was hiking by myself in North Van and I found a dead body. And I called it in and I had to wait with it until the helicopter came to take it away.

Yeah. So it took me a few years before I was ready to watch the zombie themed driver safety video. And it was not good. And I was not good in it.

If you guys want to watch it. If you type into YouTube the driving dead Metro Vancouver, you can see what your tax dollars are up to. And true to form, Peter got in no trouble over this. He didn't even get an email.

And last year, Peter turned 32 and he got his driver's license, so watch out for him. And I found out that the body that we saw that day was actually a hiker who was 20 years old who'd gone missing six months earlier after he went on a hike by himself. But watching the driver video all these years later in preparation for this story, I was struck by how quickly life can careen from comedy to tragedy. And how some days all you can do is buckle up.

Thank you. It's all about survival. Always check behind your vehicle. Never drive while distracted.

Slow down. Speed kills. Safety always comes first. You know that feeling when you're having a really, really bad dream and there's something after you and you know that it wants you dead.

And then just before it happens, you bolt awake and your heart is beating, you're dripping in Sweat. But you realize everything's okay. It was all just a dream. I once had the opposite of that.

In the dream, everything was great. I was relaxing on the beach, sun in my eyes, sand in the toes. But then I felt something creeping in from the outside world. Thousands of tiny legs tapping on my chest, papery skin running along my legs.

And then it kept multiplying. I felt it in my hair, on my arms, in between my toes, creeping up on my face, some living thing all over my body. And the sound, the sound of thousands and thousands of living things feeling like it's enveloping and entombing me. And that's when I woke up into the nightmare.

I was on a tiny island off the coast of Thailand called Koh phi phi. In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami killed a quarter of a million people. It was the seventh most deadly natural disaster in history. Shortly after that, I just moved to Ko Phi Phi to volunteer and help in any way that I could.

Many people told me, what are you doing is not a good idea. Because even on the news, the scientists, experts, they all said, we don't know if this is finished. There could be another wave at any moment. And when I got to the island, the feeling of death was never too far away.

Every day as I was hauling debris, dive teams would be deep in the underwater graveyard pulling the victims bodies out of the water. I remember one time I was working in the children's center, taking care of the kids, though their parents could help rebuild. And this girl came up with this drawing, and it was all blue with these little shapes floating in the water. And I said, oh, are those fish?

And she said, no, people. And I said, are they swimming? And she said, no. Die.

Every person I met had a horror story. But it wasn't something that happened to a friend of a friend. It was something they had just witnessed and something that always ended with, and it could happen again. The one thing no one was telling me was how to tell if another tsunami was coming.

Until one day I was hauling away the debris from what used to be an old hotel. And this old man sitting on a rock just kind of whispered as I walked by, and he said, watch the animals. I didn't understand what he meant, and it looked like every syllable was painful coming out. But I had to ask what he meant.

And he said, the day it happened, the animals were acting strange. The dogs were howling. The pets ran away on the main line. The elephants all ran to the tops of the mountains.

The animals knew before we did, but we didn't listen. Watch the animals. So this brings us back to that moment when I woke up from the nightmare. As I opened my eyes, the first thing that hit me was how dark it was.

Because I knew I'd left the light on. And I could see light, but it was like thunderbolts shooting from the ceiling of my room. And as I kind of squinted with no glasses, trying to adjust my vision, adjust to the darkness, I saw that the light was on, but it was covered by some living thing that wasn't letting the light through, except for these sparks shooting out. And as I tried to focus on what was in those sparks, I saw that the entire room, all of the air, was filled with these same creatures.

I just saw flashes of legs and eyes and antennae crashing and entangling with one another. And I followed the light to the walls of the thatched hut that I was living in. Walls that I could no longer see. Whatever this was was just covering them, crawling over every inch of the room.

And then I looked down at myself. Those legs that I'd felt all over my body were there. What appeared to be locusts were covering every square inch of my naked body. And that's when I screamed.

They all flew up, and it looked like a swarm of bats flying away from me, except pencil thin with long, spindly legs. And I jumped out of the bed and I ran out of the room, hoping to get to safety. But what I found was even worse than what I'd seen in the room because I was now standing naked in the deep jungle. And as far as I could see, this cloud of locusts stretched through all the trees and all the trails.

It never ended. I had to run. But first I reached my arm back in my room and quickly bind anything I could to cover myself. I found an old pair of shorts, and I was running and hopping at the same time, trying to put these on.

After a month of working in the hot sun, they could barely fit me. And as I'm doing that, that image of that child's drawing kept coming back to me. All those shapes floating and it matched the shapes in the sky. And it kept reminding me of all those bodies floating in the ocean.

And then suddenly, something hit me. It was so heavy and alive. It felt like disembodied head hit me in the leg. And then another one hit me in the thigh.

And I looked at the ground and I saw eyes looking up at me. And as I focused, I saw that it was these giant jungle frogs that had somehow flown from the sky. And another hit me in the back. And I just jumped over them and I kept running.

And that's when I heard the sound. I looked up and I saw dozens of yellow eyes staring down into the sky. As I saw them in the trees, I knew exactly what it was. It was the gang of feral, distorted, inbred island cats that had taken over this part of the jungle.

They were all mingled with knotted fur and twisted tails. But the most frightening thing about them was that they all had the exact same markings. They were solid white, with a swoop of black fur over one eye and a small rectangular patch under their noses. I used to joke that they looked like Hitler cats.

But in this moment there was nothing funny about it. Because that was when I realized the animals were acting strange. This was exactly what the old man had warned us about. And I knew there was a tsunami coming.

And not only that, but plague of locusts. That's biblical. End of day shit, rain of frogs. That's straight out of the Bible.

Killer cats heading for higher ground. That's not the Bible. That is not good. So I ran.

I was looking around for anyone, anywhere to turn to. I knew that there are other huts around here, but I saw no lights. I saw no people. There's nothing but darkness and insects and frogs.

As I ran, trying to find someone, anything, I imagined, what if they've all already evacuated? I don't know where to go. So I just ran through the darkness. I still didn't have my glasses.

I was completely night blinded. Branches were just smacking me in the face, scratching me and making me bleed as I ran with no shoes, the sharp rocks and thorny roots were cutting up my feet. I couldn't even use my hands to find my way because it was all I could do to hold up the loose fitting pants that barely covered my frame. And I just ran and ran in terror.

I couldn't even open my mouth to breathe. Even though I was hyperventilated because it would immediately be filled with these insects. And then I finally came upon the clearing. I reached the top of the hill and I looked out and I could see the lights.

I could see the entire beach. And everyone was there, partying, not panicking. It was Friday night. They hadn't evacuated.

They just didn't know it was up to me to tell them. I didn't know what to say. I learned about what happened, but I didn't know what we were supposed to do. What was I warning people for?

I knew we should head to higher ground, but this was a small island. There was no Higher ground to head to. I felt like if I'm going to tell people about what's gonna happen, I needed to know what to say. So I had to find someone that I knew.

So together we could come up with a plan. I ran into the bar, but still night blind. Without glasses, it was hard to find someone that I recognized. I had to get my face inches from everyone else's, trying to see if I could recognize any features.

As I ran, it was just a blur of eyes and noses and faces that I didn't know, laughing and mocking me. I stopped and realized why no one was taking me seriously. I took a look at myself and realized I was standing almost completely naked, except for this pair of shorts so loose I might as well have worn nothing at all. My hair and beard were splayed out in every direction.

My face was covered in bloody scratches. My legs were caked in the gross mixture of blood and dirt. And I was just hyperventilating in the middle of the bar. And I was getting more and more desperate.

And finally, when I found someone that I knew I'd met, I didn't know their names, but I recognized them. And I went up to them and I tried to explain everything that I'd seen. The plague of locusts and the rain of frogs and the Hitler cats. And I saw him take in what I'd said.

And he stood up and announced to everyone, this guy is wasted. And I knew no one was going to take me seriously. No one believed me. I had been shown a sign and I was the only messenger this island had.

But I didn't know what to do. So I decided I had to take care of it myself. I took the only other piece of advice anyone had given me to heart. They said that before the water goes up, it first comes down.

So I marched to the ocean. I sat in the sand and I watched for the tide to recede. It was so dark I could barely see. But I just squinted and watched the barest ripples of moonlight to know that the ocean was still there.

And the next thing I remember was darkness. I got that feeling again that I was asleep and the outside world was clawing its way in. But this time I felt. It felt like my face was buried in burning hot sand.

So I opened my eyes and my face was, in fact, buried in burning hot sand. I rolled over to see the sky and the sun. I looked out and saw all the people just walking down the street, heading to work, averting their eyes again, I looked down at my own body and realized that my shorts had long since given up on covering anything and I was now lying naked in the sand as everyone tried to go about their day. Nothing had happened.

It wasn't the end of days. So I got up, I put on my pants and I walked back to my hut. When I opened the door, absolutely everything was covered in mountains of dead insects. That very afternoon, I went back to the old man's to try find some explanation for what I lived through.

And I gotta tell you, I have never heard anyone laugh as loud as he did at how it interpreted his warning. Because you see, it turns out on this island there's a specific breed of insect that does exactly that Once a year. They live only for one night. So they spend the entire night breeding and laying the eggs for the next generation.

Now normally they'll go out deep in the jungle to do this, unless some asshole goes to bed early, leaves the lights on and draws them out to the cabins. When this happens, the frogs come out for the free bug buffet. And all this action pisses off the hippocrats who head up under the trees to get away from it. Turns out I hadn't survived the apocalypse.

I'd survived a self inflicted insect orgy. This was a very small island in a very small community, so I never really lived this down. And I'd just been through the most terrifying night of my life. But it did have two upsides.

Number one, no one had ever seen that old man that happy. And number two, even if it was all in my head, I knew that I had stared down the apocalypse and won. I got a bouncer in my closet Someone's underneath my bed. Sits there and staring me and it won't let me get I got a monster in my closet Someone's underneath my bed no one's knocking at my window I feel it but it's already there.

So when I was newly married, my husband and I bought this dilapidated bungalow in downtown Phoenix. Now we worked night and day on this house until it was absolutely beautiful. And everybody in the neighborhood would come over all the time. And every Wednesday night we would have potluck at my house.

My home was the hub of the neighborhood and people even called it the mayor's house. And I love to take care of my neighbors and I love to be mayor. So one day, my girlfriend Mel, she was about twice my age, she was from Sweden, super cool, I loved her. She walked down to my house and she said, kel, how about we get all the girls together this next weekend and go away?

I know this Wonderful place in Globe, Arizona. There's all these natural hot springs. There's a beautiful hotel. The Rolling Stones used to stay there.

And we can rent it out to ourselves. We don't have to wear clothes. We can just go from hot spring to hot spring. We can just send out, read.

It will be fabulous. And I said, oh, that's fantastic. Definitely, I'm in. So we got a group of girls together, we all pitched in some money, and Friday was coming along.

That's the day we were going. And then I remember I packed in my bag some really nice towels because I wanted to stay in the hotel. My bathrobe and a cooler full of really healthy food, a cutting board and two of my favorite knives. And so on Friday, that afternoon, Mel and I drove up to Hot Springs together in her white Toyota pickup.

And we loaded everything and we started driving. And it was a beautiful day. There was nothing wrong with the day. But about halfway through the drive, I just got this really horrible feeling.

The sense like something just wasn't quite right. And so I thought, well, maybe there's something wrong with my husband or my dogs. I'm just not. I'm not sure why I feel this way.

But I didn't want to say anything to Mal because we had just left. We weren't even there yet, and I really needed to get away. So right before we got to our final destination, I said that there was a gas station. And I said, mel, could you please pull over?

I'm actually going to go use the phone. I want to call Ivan, because this is a while back. And I had a cell phone, but I shared it with my husband, and I got nothing of leaving it at home. And Mel didn't have a phone either.

We were sort of just free spirits. So we got to this gas station, and I remember I walked in and there was a man behind the counter, and I asked, use the phone. And he legitimately told me there was no phone there. So nobody had a phone.

So I just sort of stepped it up, walked back out. I think Mel filled up her truck with some gas, and we continued driving to the hot spring. So then I sort of was trying to change my mind around and thinking, okay, you're going to go to this fabulous place. Just, you know, it's going to be wonderful.

And when we approached, I was really looking forward to, like, a beautiful raw iron gate and manicured shrubs and just a really beautiful place to vacation. But that wasn't true. We came to this chain link fence, and there was actual barbed wire above the fence and a padlock. And Mel had the code to the padlock or the combination.

And she jumped out of the pickup truck, unlocked it, we went through and it was just a gravel road. And so right away I looked to my left and oh shit, there was this like dilapidated, just like a bungalow that I restored. This really dilapidated little structure. And next to it was a rusty school bus.

And the first structure right there, it had a porch. And all of a sudden I really am like, what the heck is that? There was movement and it was a dog. And the dog was tethered to the porch.

And right away I grandmother's knee, I'll never forget. And I said, mouth, if we're here alone for the weekend, there's nobody here. We rented it out. Why the heck would anybody leave a dog?

Because I was a dog person. I have four dogs. And she's like, hell, don't worry about it, I've been here before. You know, the groundskeeper probably left the dog here.

It probably can self regulate and has food and water, but if you feel like it later, we can definitely come and feed the dog. So I'm a little like, man, I just don't feel right. And this is weird. This isn't what I expected.

But we carried on and we're driving down this gravel road and I looked to my right then and there's this two story building and it's a hotel, but the paint is falling off and it's just super old. It looks like it's on its last leg and it is not where I'd want to stay at all. But Mel said, come on, Kyle, let's go check this out. Let's just look around.

Use the bathroom. So we go in and right away I'm just overcome with this smell. And you can see in the main room that there had been people in there. They had pumpkins and they had thrown the pumpkins against the wall.

You can see where the pumpkin landed on the wall because you see the moldy flesh and you can see the orange stripe where it dropped down the wall to the floor. And then there are about 20 moldy pumpkins. Now I'm down with being funky and like throwing things. That feels great.

But I clean my pumpkin up right. This was just disgusting. And I said to her, how can this be? I thought, you know, you've been here before.

And she said, well, a lot of groups come here and they probably just didn't have time to clean it up. So don't worry, everything's fine. So I went to Find a bathroom. The bathrooms were not usable.

They were all just plugged up and disgusting. And this is the truth. And there was also no electricity and no telephone views. So we came out of this hotel, which really wasn't a hotel, but I guess someday it was.

And we got. We were looking around, and there was a wooden picnic table. And Mel said, kelly, let's load this into the back of my pickup and we'll drive down to the campsite so we'll make camp. And as I'm helping her load this wooden picnic table into the bed of her pickup truck, I noticed that all around there's rudimentary garden implements.

I'm not kidding. Just like scattered rusty shovels and rakes and pickaxes. Just rusty crap all around. And any good gardener would pick up this stuff and put it away.

So I'm already feeling weird. And I might have been overboard at that moment, but I told her, I said, any weirdo could use these things to hurt somebody. So I started gathering them. I put them in the bed of the truck, and we carried on.

Now, after driving to the campground, I said to her, I said, mel, how about this? How about we just turn around? You take me back to that gas station. I'll wait for somebody with a phone, and I'll call my husband, and I'll have to pick me up because I just don't feel well.

And again. And I really liked her. She was twice my age and this really cool lady. And she reassured me, kelly, it's going to be fine.

You just need to relax. There's nothing wrong with this place. So we get to where we can set up camp, and we do so. And she has, like, this beautiful tablecloth she brought, and we start cooking and lighting a fire, and other girls trickle in, but I have this weird, weird feeling like something is horribly wrong.

Just this impending sense of doom, but nobody else is feeling it. And I'm asking them, don't you feel like something's here other than ourselves? And nobody agrees. And so everybody's just eating and having a fun time.

And I can't help myself but gather some sticks. And I take the tin foil that I brought to cook my food in, and I wrap it around the ends of these sticks, and I make two torches. No shit. And I light them on fire.

And I start walking the periphery of our camp. Little me. And I like the littlest one and the youngest one there. And I'm like, I know you're out there, motherfucker.

I know you're out there. And my Husband knows how the fuck here. And if you do something, you're in fucking deep. Kimchi.

I mean, it was. I was so scared, and my girlfriends were getting so annoying. But to top it off, seriously had a whistle on my keychain, and I tethered it around my neck. And I put the knives that I brought the cutlery on the edge of the picnic table so they'd be, like, an easy grab.

And so I would then, like, blow on my whistle and grab my knives and, you know, like, stab at the air and say, I know you're out there. I did this until I tired myself out. And my girlfriends were just so sick of me. So it was, like, time to go to bed.

And they decided that they wanted to sleep in open air. And I thought, there is no way I'm going to be an easy, vulnerable target. So I got into the cabin, Mel's truck, and I rolled towels in both of the windows. And I had my knives and my whistle.

And I thought, if there's something out there, this person or this thing will not know where my head is or my feet. They will not know how to get me. They'll get those girls, right? They're easy targets.

So I try to sleep. I do, and I can't. And all of a sudden, it's morning and the sun's out, and I get out of the cab of the truck and, oh, my God, I'm insane. Everybody is fine.

Nothing was wrong. They all slept great. Nobody was harmed. Everything's perfect.

And it's actually really beautiful now that I can see in daylight, right? So initially that day, I felt fine, like, for the first couple hours that morning. But then that afternoon, we all sort of scattered about. I was reading and others were painting or going from hot spring to hot springs.

I felt that feeling again, but it was worse than ever. So because I was alone and there was daylight, instead of lighting torches, I just kept, like, flipping off the air and saying, you motherfucker, I know you're there. And, like, jumping around and scaring myself and, like, it was crazy. I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't, like, keep it inside. It was so real. And again, I just. It was.

It was tiring me out. So it comes time for dinner, and I'm having dinner with everybody. We're eating this wonderful food and having a great time. And I'm really trying to be in the moment and relax and just have a good time with my friends, and I can't.

So, again, after a week, I try to wait as long as I can. I can't control myself. I like those fucking torches again. And I do my freaking dance, but it's louder than ever.

So my one girlfriend, Amy, and she was a really smart lady and she just grabbed me and she said, you need to chill the fuck out. You really do. You're ruining this for everybody. And I'm so like.

Like in that moment, I felt like so embarrassed and so hurt and just like, lonely. So I went to the only thing I could do. I found refuge in Mel's cow because of her truck. I put my towels up again and I just hunkered down with my whistle in my knives.

And I thought, shit, I don't know why I feel this way. It's horrible. But nobody else feels it. So I'm just like, Sol.

So I try to sleep again. It's not happening at all. But I just. Later, all night, and all of a sudden it's morning again.

I get out of the truck, same scenario, everybody's fine, it's perfect, everybody's alive. Nothing has happened. Now it's Sunday, the last day there, and I've ruined this trip for myself. I've not enjoyed a single second.

And so I think Amy was right. I need to chill the fuck out. I need to have a good time. So Mel, my good friend who planned this Stretchy and I get together and we're gonna go to a hot spring room.

And I'm actually gonna try to have a good I time. So I'll never forget she had a towel around her and she took her towel and went in the hot spring. And I had like this man's shirt on, but it was unbuttoned. And I was going to attempt to try to have fun and go in this hot spring, but it just.

Something in me was like, don't take off your clothes. Don't get in that thing. Don't do it. So she's, you know, doing her thing and I'm talking to her and I'm pretending like I'm okay.

And I'm just counting the moments until I can pack up and we're going to leave. And she gets out and I hand her her towel. And as she's wrapping her towel around herself, she drops it. And at the very same instant she screams, jonathan.

And I don't know what she's talking about. I'm sort of just overcome with my anxiety that I've had the whole weekend. But I look into her gaze where she's looking into the reeds right by where we were. And I don't know what it is at first, because it sort of looks like a short, fat, totem thing, Colorful.

And then my eyes sort of adjusted, and it is a bald man without a shirt on, covered with tattoos, on his knees with his pants on, done with his hands down his pants. This is Jonathan, the groundskeeper. He was supposed to be gone the whole time. He knew this, but he had been watching us and hiding out and masturbating and watching us.

This is the evil that I felt the whole time, I'm telling you. So I. I could not. I couldn't move, I couldn't pee, I couldn't talk.

I couldn't do anything. And my friends, the other ladies that were there, they're like, oh, fucking pervert. They're really not making a big deal out of it. Nobody said, kelly, this is what you felt.

Holy shit, this is wrong. We could call the police. We could. Nobody did anything.

So I really don't remember exactly what I was doing these next moments. The next thing I remember is that we were in her truck. Everything was packed up. We had a very long, quiet drive back home.

And I got back home, of course, I told my husband, and he was beside himself. And we just couldn't believe that nobody thought this was a big deal. Because, I mean, think about somebody watching you the whole time while you're naked and doing these things, and you don't know what they're thinking or what they're capable of. So everything, too, in the neighborhood changed.

Usually on Tuesdays, people would call me and say, kelly, should I bring gazpacho? What should I bring for Pop up on Wednesday? Because every Wednesday, like I told you, people had dinner at my house. The entire neighborhood, including all those women who went with me.

So I was really sad and lonely. And I'd walk my dogs, nobody would come out. And I was hurt. So one day, I'll never forget, I was mowing our lawn.

We had an electric lawnmower. And I remember I was moving the cord so I wouldn't mow over it. And I saw my neighbor Lex, this guy walking down the street to my gate, and he motioned for me to turn off my lawnmower. So I did.

And I let him through the gate. And he motioned for me to go to my scoop. So we walked to my porch and we sat down by one another, and he looked at me and he said, kelly, thank you. I didn't know what he was talking about.

And then he had a newspaper in his hand, and he opened it, and there's an article and you can still see this to this day. And it says, jonathan Bailey, groundskeeper at Eden Hot Springs in Globe, Arizona, murdered the missing. There's a missing physician who he had murdered, who had gone to the hot spring. And he had hid this physician in that school bus that was there.

And now when the police connected him to this murderer and he knew that they were coming to the hot spring, he put a bullet through his own head. So he had the capabilities to do anything, right? This guy who was watching us, I could feel his evil. Right?

He had guns. Yeah, we could use him. He killed people. So.

So it felt really good to have that validated, that I felt that way for a reason, that I wasn't a fucking psycho, right? I didn't ruin it for no reason. I ruined it for a good reason. And that night, my husband and I were eating on our porch.

And again, I was still starting to dig out by all this. And then I saw the girls who. I went to Hot Springs with all the neighbor ladies walking towards my house, and they all had. Seriously, they were all bearing gifts.

It was like a. Could have been a funeral procession or a wedding march, I don't know. But they were coming with gifts, and it felt sort of good because they were coming into my yard and they came up on the porch and they gave me all these wonderful things. And they're saying, kelly, you know, thank you.

We don't know what that guy could have done, but thanks for, you know, going with your butt and not being afraid. Thank you. And I'm sorry, you know, we were so bitchy to you. And then, you know, we all.

They were hugging me, and it was great. We were eating together, and it was wonderful. So, you know, in the end, it was a horrible experience, and I'm glad, you know, my emotions and my intuition was validated. But also, it felt really, really good to be mayor again.

And that's it. So thank. You. I'm just an average man with an average life I work from 9 to 5k I pay the price always to be left alone in my average home but why do I always feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone?

And I always give one. Somebody's watching me and I'm under Roxy's watching me to me it's just a dream. This is Risk. This is Rockwell and Michael Jackson behind me now.

And we just heard from Kelly Coppel. She shared that story at the Risk Live show in Los Angeles. And before that, a little something by Gnarles Barkley. And before that, a story by Ryan Estrada.

You can find [email protected] Jeff Barr edited that. All those frogs and locusts and Hitler cats. And then before that, we played around with that driver's ed video starring Sam Mullins. Now in a little bit, we are going to hear from Malik Masters.

When she isn't telling stories about cannibalism, she's telling the final story on this episode. But before that, we're going to hear from Ian Stefe. He returns to the podcast. He told this story the last time that Risk was in Baltimore.

You can find Ian on Twitter ianvonstephen. Here he is now with the story we call Ghost Dad. I always did that. I'm 8 years old.

I'm lying in bed trying to tire out my eyes and reading Johnny Tremaine. And I just wanted to get some sleep for school the next morning. And as I'm reading the book, I hear laughter. It's coming from inside my closet.

It's not menacing, it's just sort of like this high pitched Slim Pickens giggle. Like someone heard a joke in church that they weren't supposed to laugh at. They're just laughing at the idea of laughing. And I'm sitting there reading my book and my brain goes, well, Ian, that's your pet ratio.

And I went, that is in fact an excuse. So, okay, it's my pet rabbit in this cage. And I continue reading the book when 45 seconds passes. And I went, wait a minute.

Rabbits are usually silent. It's kind of what the reputation is. And I did like this bad Abbott Costello devil tape. And I ran in my parents room.

I woke up my dad first. He ends up going like, what'd you hear? I said, I heard a man laughing. It's a common trope that you hear like, I heard a noise.

Put me to bed, ruffle my hair, give me a glass of water. So he's like, okay. He walks me down the hallway holding my hand, and then he kicks open my bedroom door. Where the fuck are you?

I didn't invite you here. And he's holding rosary beads and he starts praying the Vatican rite of exorcism. He leaves the room, he comes back with the camera, starts taking pictures in my closet. And after he's done, he goes, whatever was here is now gone.

Nighty night. And so I'm standing there in my pajamas, I'm like, well, fuck the book. Man's real, right? That was proof.

That was my life. My father was a paranormal investigator in the 1980s and 1990s. There was never a conversation where we sat down and we're like, my mom never said, like, well, sometimes your father breaks into mental institutions. I want to Reagan close down.

And he's trying to prove the existence of the devil. Like, we never. That would have been nice to talk about, but we didn't get that. So instead, you would know what he was doing.

It was like, inference. He would come down the stairs sometimes at dusk, and he would watch the Exorcist in full. And then he would take a black antique doctor's bag and load it with, like, a camera, a tape recorder, Poland Springs bottle with a label ripped off that just said holy water and Sharpie inside of it. And then he'd go break into derelict cemeteries, taking pictures of ghosts.

How I found out why he was doing this is for my mom. She's, like, the only person I still talk to. It's normal. But she explained to me that he was like, a child of half habits.

Like, he had a lot of attention deficit disorder. Like, he wanted to be something big, but he couldn't get there. His family put a yoke of responsibility on. He always had to work jobs to take care of his mom, jobs to take care of his sisters.

Like, so when he wanted to be a paleontologist, it was like, that's not gonna make enough money. Instead, you work. You want the military, you work. So by this point, let's say 1979, 1980, he's watching an episode of that's Incredible, hosted by Fran Tarkins and two other 70s haircuts.

And they're doing an episode about infrared photography. And this guy's got this picture that he got in Toys R Us of this guy made completely out of smoke, with a dim jacket on, with eyes glowing, looking right back at you. My father watched the episode, went, well, fuck, I could do that. And he did.

He went and broke into a cemetery. And rather, like, we watch these kind of, like, haunted shows. They have, like, orbs, like, big blasts of light. Like, that would happen if you just, like, had your flash on by, like, a fucking dust.

He can get those pictures. Pictures he got with Interact Photography was like accordion armed war of the world's creatures over the tombstones. And after doing that that night, he's just like, you know what? That was the one time I did and shoved in a drawer and moved on his life.

He just. He continued his interest in the paranormal. My mom always buying books for Christmas about what ghosts like, in New England, New Jersey. And he's continuing this, like, obsession because he doesn't really believe in ghosts.

But he does. I don't know, he's just trying to find something, a reason why to be. And he ends up seeing this picture in a book of something very similar to something about the cemetery. It was a picture of a woman standing 8ft tall in front of the doors of this place called Joshua Wardhouse in Salem, Massachusetts.

A place where witches were allegedly tortured. This huge picture. My dad writes a letter of the author. He's like, I don't know if I believe in that, but I'd like to find out.

And the writer goes, okay, well, we'll bring you there. So they walk around, they take pictures of cracking jokes. My dad gets up to the second floor and he feels a hand wrap around his throat. He felt himself rise off the floor, his toes touching the carpet.

Something picked him up by the fucking throat. And at that very moment he's like, I believe in God. That was his religious conversion. Just getting choked out in a fucking haunted house.

So what's that like growing up with that little father? You go to at least four schools. Like you have to continue to explain that you're okay. Like he started this love affair with paranormal investigation.

He was taking pictures in all the fucking heads. Like he even went to post Raven took pictures. Like he was going on sightings and Unsull Mystery and History Channel. All the shit you watch now when it's in the morning you're stoned.

He's doing that and as a kid I'm lonely because like he's doing all these crazy investigations and set up in the newspaper. Even my Spanish teacher in middle school called me Fantasma. Like I'm getting heckled by children and teachers. So what do you do?

I spent a lot of time alone, watched a lot of television, watched a lot of standup. I admired the fact that they were unbelievable people. I thought it was cool that you could just kind of reverse the interrogation of someone's shitty behavior. Being a stand up.

And I watch it all the time. But my dad working two jobs and respiratory therapists and I'll do one. Ghost hunting. Because you'll make money.

Ghost hunting, come on. He doesn't have enough time for me. So the author told you about sky name Bob. He was someone who's completely different.