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What are your spooky, creepy or unexplained stories?
It's that time of year again: October, spooky month! The perfect time to share creepy/spooky/unexplainable stories! I asked last year and we got some neat stories, so figured I'd ask again. Anything goes from creepy experiences with creepy people, to hauntings, to weird memories you just can't explain.
When I was about 9 years old, I was laying in bed trying to get to sleep. I was scared of the dark, so I always had the bedroom door wide open and the landing light on.
We lived in a 3 bedroom semi detached world war era house at this time. The landing space was probably 1.5 metres square, with each bedroom door and the bathroom door coming off of it, including the staircase.
I could hear everyone chatting downstairs and then my elder sister walked from the staircase, across the landing, past my door and into my parents room. I called out to her, and she didn't reply. So I called again, and then again, but louder. I didn't get out of the bed as it was an old style cabin bed, up about 5ft high with a ladder.
Eventually I started getting upset about being ignored and my mother hollered up the stairs to be quiet and go to sleep. I replied that my sister was ignoring me and Mum shouted back “She went out over an hour ago!”
Cue me freaking out about the ghost we now had in the house. I was petrified and took my parents ages to calm me down.
This wasn't my only weird happening in that house. I had a teddy wink at me from my sister's bed as I crossed the landing to the bathroom, feet walk past that didn't belong to anyone in the house while playing hide and seek under the beds, and other weirdness. Now I'm in my 40s I put it down to just a kid's wild imagination, but it was certainly terrifying back then, and making me feel weird as I type this out now.
That is straight up horror movie material.
...when i was younger i had more difficulty recognising my hallucinations, but in retrospect they're pretty evident...
Well, I know for a fact that I
saw real monsterssAaahh!!! Real Monsters multiple times when I was a kid. No way those were hallucinations because, like, reasons. And stuff.In high school, my buddies and I used to drink and party on an old bridge that was permanently closed due to structural damage. The bridge was built high over a canal so that large boats could go under while cars drive over, so you had a pretty good view from up there.
One of the friends who was with us that night, a friend I will call James, lived so close to the bridge that we could see his house when we were up there partying. In fact, we could see every house on that street and the thick woods that ran behind the houses. Some of the houses didn't even have a backyard per say, as they were just surrounded by woods.
Anyway, James is telling us how, for years, there has been a creep looking into windows on his street - sometimes even using a flashlight. He says everyone knows to cover the windows, but once in a blue moon they forget.
Obviously we start ripping on him for being full of shit. The party continues for a while. Then this other guy we were with says, "Hey, there's someone in the woods with a flashlight."
We all look, and sure enough, there is a flashlight moving through the trees. We watch as they go up to the rear of a house, then back into the woods, up to another house, back into the woods.
We all creep down from the bridge and make our way toward the edge of the woods. Then one of us yells, "HEY! What the fuck are you doing?!"
The flashlight turns off and we hear rustling - but not so much rustling that the person had fully run away. Nope, they hid somewhere. And we looked but never found them.
Scary as hell. Obviously James says "I told you so" to this day.
It's crazy to think people can get used to a creeper over years. I'm assuming he was never caught since James still talks about that guy enough to say "I told you so".
The fact you couldn't find him even while searching as a group just adds another layer of creepiness. Makes it feel like he A) knew the area that well, and B) was dressed so he could hide as easily as possible. If you all had found him that night, do you have any idea what you would have done?
Well, I'll start by saying that we were all pretty young and wild back then. If we weren't all doing a ton of drugs and drinking underage, we probably would have called the cops immediately.
Given where we were in terms of lacking maturity, we probably would have beat the shit out of the person. Maybe we would have been smart enough to hold them down and call the police?
I also found it odd that James and his neighbors were able to just dismiss the creep situation. Maybe they had tried before to call the cops with no success?
I think I'll actually reach out to him and see. I'm curious now.
Edit: He texted me back immediately.
Yeah, they creeped on the neighbors too. They called the cops all the time. Tried to break into our basement from a door we had under our patio and got chased off by a guy that used to live across the street. Crazy shit.
I recall years ago on the Let's Not Meet subreddit, someone posted about a peeping tom. It lasted months, not years, but one of the things that stuck with me was that there wasn't anything police could do because the guy was always gone by the time they arrived and they had no idea who it was. This case was probably a similar story.
Perhaps it's for the best you didn't catch him back then. Let us know if James reports anything new though, I'm curious too!
My partner had a similar experience with a stalker before I met her. A creep would follow her sometimes on walks. One day she got home and the window above her bed had been pushed in and her dog was hiding in the closet. She installed a bunch of cameras and captured him sitting outside her front door.
Through out the process police were unable to do anything since he hadn't "done anything." Eventually it ended but I can't imagine living with the fear she must've had.
Read The Gift of Fear immediately.
It forever changed the way I view stalking, gut instincts, and filing police reports.
I started reading it, but I didn't get that far into it. It just seemed like a lot of confirmation bias and selection bias to me? Of course you'll remember the times when you were scared and there was something scary and not the times when you were scared and it was nothing.
I freely admit the book may have gotten better later on, but for all the praise it's gotten I expected a stronger start.
The "trust your gut" advice is based mostly on case studies, so there is definitely a degree of selection bias and confirmation bias there. That's kind of inherent to case studies in general though.
As for the rest of the book, it does get better if that's what bothered you. He has experience and expertise since he has been doing this career for many years. He advises people, including celebrities, on how to best avoid escalations with stalkers and such. He also advises employers on how to avoid violence with disgruntled employees. He does support his conclusions with data often, but even where he doesn't provide data, I think his experience in the field is still valuable.
Worth a read. Gives you some interesting stories and things to consider if nothing else.
During the peak of the pandemic, my grandpa was in the hospital due to COVID for almost half a year. Most of that time was inside an ICU, and overall he had no contact with any member of my family. While he was in there, his cousin (who lives far away) died from a COVID infection during his cancer therapy. My entire family agreed to not let him know about this until he recovers a bit, because we were worried he'd get a heart attack or have a breakdown.
Turns out, he somehow knew before any of us told him? Inside the hospital, during his unconsciousness, he saw a dream/"vision"/whatever-you-wanna-call-it where he and his cousin were in the same ICU. The walls had started fading away, and both of them started getting pulled towards a void (I think?). His cousin was entirely pulled in it, but he wasn't, because he saw his kids holding him away with all their strength. And he was surprised nobody was mentioning his death to him after he left the hospital.
To this day, none of us had found a reasonable explanation for it. To be fair, it's not the only unexplained event in my family, but it definitely is one of the weirder ones.
Overall no contact is not entirely no contact. He might have heard someone talking about it even while he was unconscious, and that is why he dreamt of it. Someone might have also accidentally mentioned it to him or hinted at it and simply not realized or remembered doing so.
The latter is definitely a possibility that I've also thought of, but haven't had concrete proof of.
The former, probably not, as he only had contact with us during his last 2-3 weeks there (and even then, he couldn't speak for more than a few seconds). Most of his time in the hospital, he spent either unconscious, or semi-conscious but isolated from us. The hospital staff also wouldn't have somehow known it, as his cousin wasn't even in the same country. And, to be honest, I guess we'll never solve this mystery with high confidence anyway at this point, as it's been a few years since then.
I think I mighta told this one on here, but the search isn't returning anything, so. I don't know if spooky, creepy, or unexplainable are quite the right words - but it certainly gives me that same existential pause when I think about it...
My wife was in hospice social work, and of course she has a few death stories. My favorite serendipitous story of hers was that she was with someone who was unresponsive, and she tended to like using music as a therapy tool for people. Since she couldn't talk to her patient, she put on a random jazz record and stayed with him for a bit... And then the patient ended up actually dying in his sleep while she was there.
So, she paused the song and called the family over. It's wasn't an unexpected death and they were dealing with it appropriately, so they chatted a bit. The member who came noticed she had a speaker, so they asked what she was playing and she checked what she paused on. The member's jaw dropped; by sheer luck she'd chosen On the Sunny Side of the Street - his favorite song.
I had kind of a fun one on Christmas of 2017. My partner and I were living in Europe at the time and decided we were going to have our own trip rather than head back to the states and deal with figuring out who was going to get what part of the holidays. We ended up choosing to head to Scotland and had booked a single wide trailer on one of the lochs out by Glencoe. We didn't realize how remote it was until we drove out from Edinburgh. It ended up being about a 45 minute drive down a gravel road out to the middle of nowhere, but as we arrived during the day - with a gorgeous view across this secluded loch - things didn't feel creepy.
We had a wonderful evening and read some of the books that were left in he trailer. The best one was a book of Scottish Mythical Creatures. It talked of Selkies, Brownies, and Kelpies, and we spent the evening indulging in all the tales. Loving each one. But soon enough we packed it up and headed to bed.
The bedroom was pretty tight, a double bed with a bookshelf/desk combo on the wall across from it facing the bed. My partner and I have a small stuffed animal, a Jake the Dog from Adventure Time that I won at a carnival in Mexico, that comes on all out trips. It's about 8 inches tall and nearly flat. So we all hop into bed and turn out the lights. About 20 minutes later I hear a "creak creak", that sounds like the floor boards next to my side of the bed have just been stepped on. It's creepy as hell but I burrow down into the comforter and fall asleep. The next morning we wake up and I step out of the bed onto the floor and make the exact same "creak creak" sound as the night before. Like exactly. I look at my partner, about to tell her about the noise, and she is wide eyed too. "I heard that exact same sound last night!" "Me too!!!" We were both freaked out! And as we're talking about it we notice our little Jakey is sat on the book shelf, facing the bed. She asks me why I put him there and I exclaim that this was my first time leaving the bed since we had jumped in last night. Cue both of us freaking out, packing up the trailer as fast as possible, and getting back to civilization as quickly as possible.
We still talk about it to this day. Oddly Jakey, our little stuffed animal, has had more creepy things happen to it than we care to think about. It's bright yellow and one night it was the blackest item in the room - like looked like it was absorbing light. Another time my partner saw a ghost come through the window and inspect me and then Jakey. We think he might be haunted.
This one was a spooky read. Thanks for sharing!
Sort of meta commentary, but hopefully this is allowed. I love hearing people's creepy stories and I have a few of my own that I like to tell, but I don't believe in the supernatural whatsoever. I don't think ghosts are real, I don't think aliens have visited earth, I don't believe in vampires, etc.
I like hearing other people tell these stories, but often times they're told with the underlying assumption that "these things are real, because I saw them", which highlights a fatal flaw that, as far as I've seen, the majority of people have: they trust their own senses.
We've seen reams upon reams of research at this point proving that human perception is deeply flawed. We find patterns where none exist, we hear things that were never said, we see things from the figments of our imaginations many times, and often, these delusions are group experiences. The power of suggestion can make large groups of people experience things that never happened. There's a kind of cognitive dissonance that happens to people though, where they accept that other people have flawed perceptions, but they don't.
That's really interesting to me, and its fascinating to hear otherwise rational people tell stories about how they saw a ghost and that ghost must've been the deceased daughter of so and so who died in a fire and so on and so forth, and not even entertain the suggestion that they just hallucinated.
It makes me wonder if for most people, ghosts existing is somehow less terrifying than not being able to trust their own senses.
It's absolutely less terrifying! I accept that I can't trust my own memories or my own senses, to a certain degree, but when it turns out they are less trustworthy than I expected, there's very little that's more terrifying than that. How can you function if you can't trust any of your senses at all? How can you know if you're causing damage or harm if you can't trust that you'll hear about it or see it? How can you interact with the world at all? I can incorporate ghosts into the way I interact with the world, but without senses I cannot interact with the world.
Strangely, I tend to be the exact opposite. I tend to be on the skeptical side, and when I experience something unexplained firsthand, my default behavior is to immediately "talk myself out of it." That motion I saw out of the corner of my eye? Gosh, I must be sleep deprived. That slamming sound at the other end of the house? Probably something falling off a shelf, or something like a falling broom that had been leaning against the wall, or… something, but it doesn't really matter, because it's not a ghost or a home intruder. It must have a boring explanation.
Then all that goes out the window when I read other people's stories. They actually saw a ghost? Oh wow, I wonder if my understanding of the universe is all wrong? Their father sent them a message from beyond the grave? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't… but what if they did? Think of the implications!
(Then I forget about it once the thrill of the possibility wears off.)
I think a good skeptic will know not to trust their senses entirely. I know I don't. But there is something to be said for a time when you're sitting there, sober as a judge, and you see or hear something you can't explain. You rub your eyes, move around, try to get a different angle on the thing, and you still keep seeing or hearing it the same way. It can rattle you.
That said, I have never seen a ghost or an alien. I don't believe in anything supernatural. I tend to think that the strangest things can be explained by natural phenomena if we are able to gather enough information.
Spooky stories are still fun though. Doubly so when told by a rational, skeptical person. My aunt is a highly rational thinker, the furthest thing from a conspiracist you can imagine. My favorite story of hers is when her my uncle saw a strange object hovering over their backyard in the early 90s in rural New York. They sat there stunned and to this day say that the movements were completely bizarre and unnatural. I suspect it was a reflection or some other easily explainable thing. They say it couldn't have been based on what they saw. Whatever, I like the story either way because of the source.
This happened well over half a lifetime ago. I'm nearly 45, and this occurred when I was approx. 10-13 years old.
I come from a broken family. My (at the time) step-bro had been allowed to stay overnight with me on a weekend while I was at my Mum's place. There were not enough beds, so we slept head-to-toe in my bed for the night (we're both boys).
Anyway, we slept.
My first memory was seeing two shadowed figures right next to me beside the bed, in the position I always sleep in, facing away from the wall and into the space of my small bedroom. I remember seeing the quilt falling down to the floor, and a shift of my body slightly upwards and then to the other end of the bed. This I gleaned from maybe two blinks of an eye. The figures were both the same size, maybe a meter tall, and completely shrouded. My bedroom was always really dark, but there was a blinded window right next to the head of the bed, so not completely absent of light.
I woke up on the other side of the bed where my brother had slept, and he was still asleep but in the place where I had originally set down. Both of us had the same pillow we originally had when we went to sleep.
I woke him up, confused. He awoke, confused.
Now, I am a pretty light sleeper. I wouldn't have been able to be psychically moved and not wake up. The only other people in the house were my Mum, who is not a joker, and my two younger sisters, who could not have moved us. All 3 of them denied that they were messing around with us. I believe them.
This waking up on the other side of the bed happened two times to me afterwards, without anyone else being present. One time....my pants had been removed (still had my underwear on). I have never told anyone about the missing pants part until now, but hey, this is the internet, and I am anonymous.
Also, during this period of time (maybe a year or so), I had a next door neighbour with a small dog. This dog, for whatever reason, despite having a big vacant backyard, used to park right near my bedroom window at night and bark for non-stop for extended periods.... Now, this didn't happen on the night, but the fact that this dog used to do this at all for seemingly no reason always really used to irk me.
Despite growing up in a very religious household, I'm now an Atheist and a sceptic. At the time, I used to believe in the supernatural, but I never really had any idea what to think about these experiences. I've always had an inkling that it may have been an inter-dimenesional incursion, what with the two shadowy figures, general fuckery and the occasionally barking dog, but I dunno..
We were both asleep, though, so it's probably a case of unconscious minds doing unconscious mind things.
But, the fact that we both woke up with the same pillows on the opposite sides of the bed, and the preceding vision of those two dark figures, means that I have never truly forgotten this part of my life.
The fact you both got moved in the first instance is really bizarre to me. The vision of the figures feels like it could have been a dream, and the other times you woke up in a different position alone could also be just sleepwalking.
I'm open to the idea of the supernatural and unexplainable things, but my mind still tends to stray towards potential real explanations. The nicer one is that you were a sleepwalker, and your stepbrother saw a chance for a fun prank. The darker one... Well, there are far too many stories of people secretly living in houses, though I'll cut off that line of speculation there.
Yep, the fact that there were two of us is what makes me revisit this in my head sometimes.
I'm totally a sceptic these days. I chalk it up to sleepwalking as well. However, aside from those other two times when I was alone, sleepwalking is not a thing that has happened to me before or since, so....idk.
I assumed my step-bother just moved over to his side when I "sleptwalked" over to his side, but he was just as confounded as I was when I woke him up. We could have both been in that sleep-like state and just swapped over - in fact, it's probable.
It's just....both of us? And then the preceding vision?
The vision of the two figures being a dream is obvious, I mean there's really no other explanation, right?
It could have been my two sisters (though they are years apart and heights vary, plus there's just no way they could have physically moved us). It could have been my Mum, but she and they denied it.
I totally get why one would assume it was a prank, I did. But if you knew these people you would understand why it's just not something that they would do lol
The dream included the blanket falling off (which was still on the floor when I awoke) and a sense of "floating", or being moved.
I distinctly remember having this vision directly before waking up on the other side of the bed.
I get the way we recall memories isn't reliable...so I have no real choice but to chalk it all up as just that - a dream, or memory reconstructed by my mind in a way to help make sense of the situation.
Still, the content and timeline of it hasn't changed much from what I can tell, and this is nearly 30 years ago now...so yeah, just feels like an ongoing part of the puzzle for me (despite now consciously recognising it as nothing but a dream).
It's also definitely not a house in which someone could go unnoticed. It's a small single-story housing commission place and there's no way anyone wouldn't notice, but I appreciate the idea. I know that has happened before in this crazy world of ours.
Anyway, this is all probably easily explained at the end of the day. But even after all these years, this is the one incident I have experienced in my lifetime that makes me question the state of the nature of my existence.
I'm actually grateful to have experienced it, even if it's all just in my head... (which it's not really cos two people lol).
About a decade ago, I rented an apartment with a rather unique bedroom that basically sold me on the place. It was a small unassuming room with a single window, but in the back corner there was a large sliding panel that concealed the entrance to another tiny room. When I was touring apartments, I knew that this had to be the one. I could see it in my head already... the desk by the window and the bookshelves lining the walls to form a classy little library and office in the front room, and the semi-hidden panel concealing my secret bedroom hideaway. So I rented it and made the vision real.
Months later, in my typical routine, I turn off my lights and the computer monitor in the "office" and retreat into my secret bedroom. As I enter the bedroom I close the panel behind me, as I always did. It being closed gave me a feeling of security since I couldn't see the main bedroom door around the corner. I climbed into bed and eased in to sleep...
Hours later, in the middle of the night, I awaken to a loud bang. My eyes shoot open, but my body doesn't respond as I'm trying to sit up. It feels as if all my muscles are asleep, heavy, and it takes monumental effort to even lift my head just an inch from my pillow. I recognized this as sleep paralysis, as this wasn't my first encounter, but was still in a panic to try and break free of it to assess if the sound that woke me was legit or not. So I fought, hard, to try and get out of bed.
Still, I could only tilt my neck maybe a few degrees at best, my eyes now able to see the sliding panel door just barely in peripheral view. Relief washes over me as I see the closed door and also rationalize that I haven't heard anything else by this point. Still, I want to try to get up and be sure, so I continue to try and rise out of bed. Slowly feeling a little bit of the weight fade away, I can now tilt my neck fully and feel my arms lifting from the bed. That's when I see the sliding panel slowly start to open.
As the panel fully opens, I am now in full fight or flight mode trying to get up, but still paralyzed. Beyond the open door is only pitch darkness, but soon that darkness itself seems like it's advancing into the room. A pitch black shadowy figure slowly comes into form out of that darkness, standing just inside the doorway and staring with eyes that are somehow just even darker shades of black void. All I can do is watch as it stares at me. Then after a moment, it slowly starts gliding over to my bedside like some sort of apparition. I feel malice behind those dark voidlike eyes as closes the distance, yet all I can do is lie there helplessly, trying to scream but nothing is coming out. It climbs onto the bed, and I feel immense pressure on my chest as it bears down on me. Dark pitch black tendrils of shadow then wrap their way around my neck and push me back down into the pillow. As the weight of the thing continues to crush me and I struggle to breath, everything fades to black.
I wake up, heart racing, feeling like only an instant has passed, but the light from the doorway makes it apparent that the sun has now risen. Light from the doorway that I shouldn't be able to see from my hidden bedroom retreat, if the sliding door was closed like it should be... I glance over and can immediately see it is completely open, daylight spilling in from the window in the room on the other side. Up in an instant, my body finally obeying this time, I checked the rest of the apartment... nothing missing, no doors or windows open or unlocked. Only other strange thing was the PC monitor was still on, when I know I shut it off. I'm sure the explanation is that it was just a sleep paralysis demon dream, and I probably forgot to turn the monitor off or didn't hit the button all the way. But the sliding door panel was always shut and I can't explain how it would open on its own - it was not easy to do so.
When Mr. Tired and I lived in our last apartment and got our little Bean, she would bark at random spots in the apartment at walls or the closet. After a while, I thought it would be funny to "ask the ghosts" to stop antagonizing the dog, and doing so in a friendly manner. Once I started doing that, she stopped barking at the same three or four spots regularly and would occasionally just randomly bork in the apartment at a random place, but never like it was, it was more of a friendly "hi" bork, like the ghosts were being nice to her instead of antagonizing her.
Not sure if we really had ghosts, or if she was just being a puppy, but it was really odd how that happened.
Most dogs have insanely good hearing so they can easily hear critters moving inside walls. I always knew when to set fresh mousetraps out whenever my old dog Quincy started randomly barking at the walls. I usually caught a mouse fairly shortly afterwards, and then he would go back to his normal self of hardly ever barking, until the next mouse inevitably showed up and he would start barking at the walls again. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was what your dog was barking at too.
p.s. As another example, my sister's old dog Bella used to know exactly when she got home even though she lived in an 8th floor apartment. Bella could hear her car pulling up and somehow distinguish it from all the other cars she would hear throughout the day, even through closed windows. She would run to the apartment front door to wait for her, and whenever she did that I could always look out the window and see my sister pulling into the parking lot below. It wasn't just a timing thing either, since at the time my sister worked as a waitress at a bar and her hours were all over the place.
That is true that their hearing is far superior to human hearing! and Beanie is part rat terrier. We used to joke that the walls were so paper thin we could hear an ant through them at this apartment, but you're likely right, lol. It was just spooky that she would calm down after we started talking to the walls too lol.
So this is more of a funny story, but I think it might fit here.
My nephew and I were watching "The Babadook" late one night. In the movie, it's explained that the appearance of the Babadook is preceded by 3 knocks. There is a suspenseful part of the movie where the 3 knocks happen. Shortly after that scene, the same damn knocks happened from another room in our house and it scared the piss out of us.
It turned out that someone had left the wrinkle shield feature of the dryer on, and it was just coming from that. We had a great laugh when we realized the rational explanation.
Okay, this one could be considered strange, definitely is unexplained, probably isn't creepy, but I'd call it mundane.
Summer 2009.
My friend and I were going to be the kickers on our high school's football team, so we were on the school's field practicing kicking, of course. We would kick however many balls we had, then go round them up. We had one ball that we knew had flown over the fence...maybe it bounced off the roof of the concession stand, but we knew it had landed on the other side of the fence. All that was on the other side was an empty parking lot. And yet, when we tried to gather up the balls...that one was missing.
Super boring, I know, but we looked everywhere. I even checked under the bleachers in case we were going crazy and it was actually a bad kick and it bounced insanely far. There was nowhere for that ball to go, and yet it was gone.
We checked everywhere it could have possibly gone, but it had simply vanished. No one could have grabbed it without our noticing, it couldn't have gone under something...it just wasn't there.
So it's not the most paranormal or supernatural thing to ever happen, but it's the one thing I've just legitimately never been able to explain in any way.
I haven't told this story to many people, because it sounds like a joke without a punchline. But it's the most unexplainable thing I've ever experienced.
When I was about ten years old, someone sneaked into my family's house, left a giant pile of shit on the floor, and sneaked back out. This all happened in broad daylight, in a time window of about 15-20 minutes when my entire family was upstairs having lunch. It was mid morning on a weekend and two cars were parked out front. We didn't have any pets and the entire family was accounted for. It happened in a room my parents were renovating downstairs, and I was the last person to leave that room. When I got back down there after lunch, I almost stepped in the pile of poop.
To this day, I have no idea who did it, or why, or how they got in and out undetected. The last part is the least mysterious: I know from experience that the front door was noisy, and you'd have to pass through several doors to get to the room at the back of the house. But those doors were usually unlocked during the day when people were home, so it wouldn't have required any Mission Impossible style antics, just being very very careful not to make a noise while opening and closing the doors. The more interesting question is who and why. What could possibly be the reason? I can't think of anyone in my life at the time that would have done it as a prank, certainly not done it and kept quiet about it for more than 20 years.
I was more intrigued than creeped out at the time. Now, many years later, I'm thinking a freak who would do something like that, so brazenly with a whole family present in the house, could potentially be capable of something more sinister. But nothing else creepy or strange ever happened in that house, which my parents have been living in for more than 25 years at this point.
So yeah, that's my unexplained experience. The mystery pooper. It's so bizzarre I'd almost convinced myself it was a false memory until a family member brought it up recently. At least it wasn't a severed horse head!