The RV Stalks At Noon

 

Hey Gang!

 

I admit that I have an overactive imagination. I can’t help it. I have been creating these overt, elaborate plots of nothingness for no reason. For example, I once went for a walk on a trail in the back woods with some friends. Along the way, we found barrettes, a small pillow, and a blanket. As a precursor to my revelation, this is adjacent to a campground and fishing; well-travelled it is, as Yoda would say (did you read that in his voice? J). What then unraveled in my mind was that there was a serial killer on the loose in the woods, killing people while they sleep and burying them along the trail…and we were next! Completely true story! Not the murders, the imagination.

Another instance is that, on a date,   we sat and made up stories of all the people around us. We sat next to kings and queens, spies, and everything under the sun. It was a fun night and rare that you meet someone who shares that imagination with you. I understand that my imagination is ridiculous but it is fun and makes the mundane seem like a festival. However, it does get to me. I get uber-paranoid because I let my imagination run. For instance, I was driving through town and the car behind me mirrored every turn that I made. It was unnerving because I thought of every Creepypasta and episode of Alfred Hitchcock that was even remotely similar and it made me freak out. I started going faster, and they matched my speed, I slowed down thinking they would go around but nope, they stayed behind me. I finally whipped into my parking lot to see them speed past and into the distant night. I let out a long exhale and contemplated my sanity.

Fast forward to now. I come to work and every day there is an RV camped out in our lot. We share a rather large parking lot with a couple other corporate buildings. This isn’t your average RV; this is the watch-the-back-windows-for-someone-mouthing-“help” type of RV. It has not moved in 2 months and I have to say, it is a bit creepy but it is bringing out my inner sleuth. I have seen a balding man come out of it once and walk up to the building. The next time I saw him place something on the back bumper and then hop in a little S10 with filing cabinets in it and drive away. Below are the theories I have come up with:

1. He works there and is having an unfortunate circumstance where he cannot afford a house
2. He may be in the movement of not planting roots.
3. He is a murderer that is on the move and needs to be mobile to finish his awful deeds
4. He is using the RV as a kidnap shack in the open because he secretly wants to get caught
5. It broke down after he was traveling the world, making it by ship from Russia and is too attached to just leave it
6. He is a member of a secret society that only live in RVs used in ‘80s horror movies
7. He is Illuminati….
8. He may or may not be a vampire, which means I am living the real version of Fright Night
9. He is a meth dealer who used to be a chemistry teacher and now has cancer but this is his way of paying for the bills and not leaving his family in debt (followed closely by his sidekick, Jessie).
10. I need to get a life.

It’s definitely one of these!

-Chris

 

Campfire Tales Part 2: Creepy-Crawlies and The Scream That Ended The Trip

This was the first time I had ever camped, except in my ninja turtle tent in my bedroom floor as a tot. I feel like that doesn’t count.

I know one thing, the dark is pretty terrifying. Let me clarify, what is in the dark, or the possibility thereof, is terrifying. I use this preface to go on about when our noses started to run. We had no toilet paper, tissues, or paper towels. However, in the darkened exterior of the camp, about 50 yards away, was the public restroom. Ben essentially made fun of me when I proposed we both go look for toilet paper. It didn’t bother me. At least this way, when the three-eyed beast came to eat me, I wouldn’t be alone in its stomach!

I carried my gas lantern as Ben led the way to the outhouse. It was impossibly dark only three feet away from the lantern. This made my mind go to places I didn’t know possible, which is kind of impressive for me, no?

We get to the bathroom and he opens the door. I peek around inside, slowly lifting the lantern up to illuminate the small, dark space, and notice cockroaches all over the bathroom. Ceiling, floor, and walls were covered by long, dark insects. I was blown away from disgust.

“Got it,” Ben says as he takes a roll from the bathroom.

He passes in front of me. Now, the entire time he was in there, all I saw was the left side of his body. As he passes, I see the right side of him…which is now home to about four massive cockroaches. I try to emote but it comes out in stumbles.

“Er.. You..On your back…Cockroach! Dude! Dude!”

Now, there are two versions on what happened next. Ben’s recounting and then the real story.

Ben said it freaked him out that I was yelling. That’s why he jumped.

What really happened:

He had a look of shear horror as he ran into the darkness swatting cockroaches off his back. I was dying laughing at this point. Grossed out and laughing.

He skulks as he is visibly embarrassed. We go back to the fire and blow our running, cold noses as the fire dies out. It is then the cold sets in but above us are stars; billions of stars unlike anything I had ever seen. We stood there looking upwards in the cold for quite a while.

Ben then decided he needed to go back to the truck for something. I thought, “Oh god…I have to be by myself in the dark with a broken lantern (lantern broke, I guess a breeze blew by and knocked it over. I blame karma).”

He went off and I became hyper-aware of my surroundings. My ears perked up and I could hear every insect landing on a leaf from 10 meters away. It was terrifying for no real reason. I felt like I was being watched the entire evening and now, by myself, it was amplified. He finally skulked back but the feeling never left me. We stood there growing colder but still in awe of the heavens above us for a while longer.

That was when we heard the lack of frogs croaking. It was silent. I remarked something to him for a moment, I can’t recall right now, and that is when we heard this blood-curdling scream coming from where we fished not but a few hours ago. We looked at each other in shock. The scream continued and moved up towards us as if it was coming up the hill. We were immobile. It then sounded like it went through the woods, which Ben’s back was to, and then flew over head and away. Its scream drowned out as it flew into the distance.

“So, go to sleep?” I said.

“Umm, yeah,” he quickly retorted.

We dove into the tent and set up the partition between us. We joked about the sound for a bit, calling it a witch, and then went to sleep. The next day, the boredom and monsters finally got to us. We decided to fish one last time in the main river and head home.

I guess that’s how most people camp, right? Fear and boredom?

Stay tuned for my next campfire tale: Mr. Raccoon has his day!

-Chris

 

SAM-13

Hey Gang!

Man, it has been a wild ride! I have been pounding the pavement for just over a month now and it has finally paid off. That’s right, I am once again part of the employed world! It has been crazy though. I have been floor surfing for a month now! I wish I remembered what a bed was like! So many exclamations! I was laying in the coffin-like room I now call home for a bit longer and I started thinking about my new job. The prospect of being in a position that is different from what I am used to. It’s a desk job but it is good money and shall be worth it but , as always, I let my mind wonder back to four years ago when I had the greatest job I have ever had.

A job fraught with danger, intrigue, beautiful women and car chases. You may be thinking I was a spy but you may be wrong. I was SAM- 13. A “Mall Cop”.

Has your laughter subsided? Good. Now, I must say that I am being completely truthful when I say that all of those things are true. I lived in the Midwest and worked at a rather large mall in a rather large city. I started working there to pay my way through college. I thought it would be boring but with a director that treated it like the military and a crew of guys who wanted to pretend they were in “Die Hard”, it was a recipe for excitement.

In light of remembering those glory days of wearing the awful black, white and gold uniform and the sweater that made me look rather dashing, here are three of my favorite stories.

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Mystery of Where Did The Gun Go

– When being mall security we had a device known as the d3. This was a digital log where you would scan areas for each hour and put in reports of incidents that occur. You then sync it at the end of the night and it uploads to a computer. This had our routes in it as well that told us where to be at any given hour. We affectionately called it the babysitter.

One day I was on the upper tier, being completely bored. We would often go by the Victoria’s Secret store and chat up the young ladies there (Give me a break , I was 22 and wore a uniform). I was talking to a lovely blonde woman when I hear over the radio that a man was spotted at the lower level with a baseball bat. I leave her and head downstairs. I am pretty nonchalant as I go down the escalator. I was young and dumb, thinking nothing can hurt me. It didn’t help that I was 6’7″.

As I got to the bottom I bumped into the man. He was visibly upset, pissed off is more accurate.

“Hey man, you can’t have that in here,” I said, smiling in disbelief.

He then mumbles through a long story that I won’t bore you with. He basically had an altercation with an employee at a shoe store the night before at a club. He came back with a bat looking for a fight and then I hear something an unarmed security guard going solo never wants to here.

“Mother****** has a gun, mane,” he exclaims. I tell him to go take his bat to the car. My jovial nature fades. I can remember this part going slowly. I radio in, “we have a 10-32, person with a gun.”

That was the longest walk. Going to that store with no one in it. I look in the doorway and see a tall employee who reaches into his waistband and then runs to the back room. He comes back out and I cautiously ask him about his weapon. We talk for a moment as he looks at me, fear in his eyes. Then a female employee, the manager, comes out from the back room and we relay the events to her.

It took about ten minutes for multitudes of police and my director and assistant director were there as well. I stood guard out front to not let people in. Three stocky little guys pushed passed me and I yelled, “Hey, we are closed right now. Come back in a while.”

A man with a skull cap turns and gives me the dirtiest look I have ever received. I stood guard and then went back in service. In the following days I found out some things. Those thugs that came in including the mean-mugging savant were related to the employee with the gun and were, in fact, gang related. The police didn’t find the gun because it was hidden by…can you guess?……..

The manager! When I came in, he gave it to her and she placed it in her car outside by slipping through the back loading dock.

Finally, I learned that next time someone has a gun, I should probably wait for back-up or at least someone who has a weapon better than a mini Maglite.

In Response

– I was on the lower tier and we got a call from LP at a store, LP meaning Loss Prevention, about a woman needing first aid. I was with a fellow PSO, Public Safety Officer, and we hustled to the back hallways and then sprinted down them until we got outside. I remember seeing a car with its’ front end planted firmly against the side of the mall. I run into the glass entryway and see a PSO giving her first aid. He looks at me and yells, “Gloves, 13.”

I had learned by then to never question anyone when they yell “gloves”. I pulled on my latex gloves from my utility belt and look around. I see a person, won’t be specific for legal reasons…never know, leaned up against the wall. They are coughing and light red blood leaks from the corner of their mouth. The person looks dazed and in pain. I call in to base to get an ambulance out to the location.

“Watch your step, 13,” he says.

I look down and see these bright pink pieces of flesh that the individual had been coughing up. It made a grim, colorful trail that lead to where they sat. I was surprised by how pink they were. Not a deep, ruby red but pink much like opal. The person’s  cough brings me back to reality. We administer ice to stop their fever and we give the person water water to stop the dry cough causing more damage.

The ambulance took the person and we find out the whole story. The person had just had throat surgery and a vessel burst in their throat while they were driving. They drove into the building and stumbled in for help. That was one of the first times where the normally funny and crazy job got serious. It could have went wrong in a lot of ways if we hadn’t been first aid certified.

It’s A Trash Can

This is the story I tell everyone about. I got a call about a man in the upper entrance that was causing a disturbance. Me being bored and thinking I was amazing, I went up to the call alone. I got out there along with my best friend/ supervisor. I see a man in rags, digging through the trash. He is mumbling to himself incoherently. His hair disheveled and his beard mangy.

“He looks 10-96. I’m calling pd,” said my friend.

“I’ll keep him occupied,” I said.

You see, 10-96 was code for mentally handicapped and possibly violent individual. So, I begin a conversation with him that I have yet to forget.

He tells me that he is looking through the trash to get differennt things. He pulls out a brand new bottle of orange crush and tells me that it is vintage from the 1920s and it is worth millions. He pulls out a coke can and tells me that the mall is sitting on a gold mine of old coke syrup in a bladder underneath.

A few more of my fellow PSOs come out. My friend signals for them to stay back and he hides behind a corner as well. The man was becoming visibly upset by so many people. I just wanted to calm him down and make it a conversation between us. That way he would be distracted until pd, police department, got on scene.

He yells for me to come to the trash can in a harsh, deep croak. I see my supervisor start to come out but I hold up my hand to stop him.

He shows me a Styrofoam cup with a straw in it and tells me if I put it in the backseat of my car, I can get free satellite radio. He pulls out a crusty, nasty, disgusting, old shirt and says it was his from when he was a kid.

I say, “Oh, okay, so it is like your time capsule, huh?” I was not patronizing by the way. Just trying to be involved. I was scared, actually. It’s hard to calculate the actions of a man who believe you can get XM radio through a straw in a cup.

He answers me and to this day I wonder who was really the “crazy” one, him or me. He blinks twice in disbelief and says, “Nah, man, It’s a trash can.”

He is taken away and I found out from pd that he brain damage from meth use and they knew him well. I was a bit unnerved but I was commended by my director for how I handled it.
——————————————————————————————————————————-

There were so many great stories and these were just a few. I got in a car chase, drank beer in the squad car with my fellow officers on an overnight shift (22, remember?), broken up an 11 person fight by myself and been flashed by a woman trying to show that she stole nothing. We wanted to look in the bag not her bra. It was wild and fun and it will never happen again. The people I met are still in my life just not in the same facet.

I have been a videographer, a broadcast journalist, a marketing intern and a Teacher’s Aid since then but I know, when I am sitting at the desk with a plate that says Chris, that just above it, visible only to me, it will read: SAM-13.

Thanks for sticking with me in my absence and through this long story!

-Chris

 

People Are Strange When You’re A Stranger

Hey Gang!

So, I was going to post this last week but it was such an unbelievable thing that I had to let it marinade. Let the whole situation really sink in. It was one of those days when you think to yourself, “This cannot be real. This doesn’t really happen, does it?”

It does.

So, I have been slinging my resume around like a chimpanzee slinging his poo (too graphic?). I have been using many online job finder sites and basically just putting it in to any job whose description read, “Now Hiring”. I have recently had a lot of great feedback and interviews from the site but that isn’t what this post is about. This post is about the first interview I went on and the bizarre nature of the experience.

I had gotten an email from an individual who claimed that they needed someone to help edit iMovie projects for their online business. I have had a lot of experience with iMovie and genuinely love editing video. So, I was more than happy to meet with them.

I am naive. I have no doubt about that. I like to think that everyone has the best intentions and that everyone is generally trying to be good. So, when I saw the address was on a county road, I began to think to myself, “what kind of business is on a county road and why at 530 at night?” Then a thought creeped upon me that it may be a person’s house. I shrugged that off and thought that since they sell farming equipment it was naturally in an area where farming is done.

I got all gussied-up and put on my tie and P-coat. I headed out to the destination which is somewhat a distance from where I live but you can’t really complain where the money is coming from and at what distance you’ll go when you are wondering which flavor of Ramen you would like to eat that night. Because Ramen is the only choice.

I am driving and, after about a half hour, I hear my little gps say, your destination is on the right.  I am a few minutes early and in the dark blue horizon of the setting sun I see a rather large, white house with a two car garage attached. There is one light on and it all seems creepy as I realize, “Yup, this is at somebody’s house.”

I drive down the road, contemplating just driving away, but I finally decide to go to the interview, bills still weighing on my mind.

I pull up and get out, all of the sudden, a rather large dog begin barking a deep, chesty, cough of a bark as he gallops towards me. I freeze as it reminds me of when I was a child and was chased by three rottweilers and a Doberman pincher for three blocks and almost got hit by a UPS truck. The dog is a few feet in front of me and gives me a low growl. I was thinking, “I may be the first man to be mauled to death on job interview….ever.”

I see a little woman pop out of the garage and yell, “Sammi! Leave him alone dammnit! It’s okay she won’t bite you. Come on in.”

I go into this unmodest house. It is quite incredible coming from the relatively humble upbringing I had. I was used to being enamored by houses with more than two toilets but this place…had four! It was incredibly large and modern. It had nice argyle carpeting, a basement (fully furnished), and a massive backyard that lead to cornfields. It was rather empty, though. A few pictures adorned the walls but for the most part, it was a bit cold. She tells me to sit down and gives me a glass of water. Her husband will be home soon, she tells me. She is on the phone with a person about to interview for the secretary position.

I sit and sip my glass of warm tap water and it happens. That little “Oh, Sh**” light starts to go off in the back of my mind. I should definitely leave at this point….but I don’t. Sammi changes her tune about me and I begin scratching her little head. It’s cute and fun until I realize that her hair is swirling around me and getting on my “interview” clothes. It reminds me how weird this is again.

The petite woman and I talk idly and then we go down the long hallway past the immense master bedroom and into the home office….where I would work…in their house…

She turns to me and smiles up at me. She tells me how unbelievably tall I am and then gently rubs my arm. I sit down immediately and pop in my video reel of stuff I have shot and edited. She decides to talk about her new iPhone for a moment so I tell her what I know about it and then she says, out of nowhere, “You are a cool, tall drink of water!”

“I always saw myself as more of a lukewarm cup of tea,” I say.

She laughs and touches my arm again. I hear the door open from down the hall. Her husband is finally home, so I stand up to greet him as he enters. He is a short robust gentlemen, with a large grin that is perpetually on his face but always having a twinge of malice. They are both seemingly nice people but they are rich and extremely rich but also eccentric . They bought those large monitor macs, two of them, on a whim for his business. The guy invented some new polymer and this is just his side business! Ominously, do you know what separates crazy people from rich people? Money.

I show them my videos and we go back into the kitchen area. We talk more and more about the job position which is seeming less glamorous by the minute as it is tentative and he has so many random ideas. He kept bragging about the shots he had done and was wanting me to tell him how great I thought they were so I abide. Up to this point I never really felt severely uncomfortable even with the creepy advances of the wife . It just kept getting more and more outlandish and then strip clubs were brought up at one point. He went into a big diatribe about synthetic fertilizers or something and then he gave me a bit of a curveball…

He was telling me that they were going to a business fair with 107 other businesses that were their competition. I quote as close to what I can remember:

“I always got some money in my pocket. Money is literally no object. Now, here is what I want you to do. Get in and pretend to be a student who is doing a story for a class or sumtin, then take a picture of each booth and interview a person for 45 seconds or so about what they do at their business. Then, when you are done, just bring it back and I will pay you handsomely. I always got a few Franklins in my pockets”

He said all this with a devious smile. His wife watching my reaction intently.

“Yeah, okay, so corporate espionage,” I say laughingly. I thought he was joking.

“Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what it is,” his wife says flatly.

CORPORATE ESPIONAGE IS ILLEGAL AND I MEAN GO TO JAIL DO NOT PASS GO KINDA JAIL!

I couldn’t believe it! They wanted me to be a spy! I ended the meeting about there and told them I had to go. As I packed up I thought about taking all of those other applications they had for secretary and running so that no woman would have to be there alone with Mr. and Mrs. Run-like-hell away from us.

I got in my car and called my mom and had to laugh at how insane it all was. Being hit on by a married woman, the eccentric millionaire and being asked to be a spy as well as a love slave was too much. I left out how much they said they liked my look, many times they said this.

My mom reiterated those thoughts to me and said, “Maybe just pass up an interview at someone’s house from now on.”

Words to live by but I can’t help thinking how interesting it would have been to be a spy…

I found them strange but maybe it was because I didn’t know them. Strangers meeting strangers….nah, they were just plain weird.

-Chris

 

Bump In The Night

Hey Gang!

Well it is that time of year that seems more like Christmas than Christmas to me…Hallowwweeeeennnn!

Along with the amazing autumn weather and the trees that have golden, auburn and red leaves and look as if they are on fire in the light of the dying sun, there are the instances of creepy! My favorite part of the year, when everything is creepy and people think that for maybe a second, that this stuff, these instances of paranormal are real.

I happen to believe in this stuff but only because I have had the opportunity to see these things. Apparitions and other things. Below are a few of my accounts of paranormal activity. I am not asking you to believe them but to go along with the season and say, “maybe”

• When I was around two, I was playing in the floor at my grandmother’s house. Most of my family was there as my aunt was in town from Texas. She came alone though because she and my uncle were fighting (at least that is what my mom tells me) My grandmother was having problems with her phone, so it was not working and this was before cell phones were prolific. So, I am sitting there and playing with my toys when I turn to my aunt and say, “your little boy is sick”. I go back to playing but I guess it freaked her out so much she ran down the street to a pay phone and called my uncle. Turns out my cousin who was about my age at the time was admitted to the emergency room about an hour before I said that. She flew home the next day. It creeps my mom out to this day but for one other reason. That was the first time I had ever met my aunt and I didn’t know she had kids…creeptastic!
• This account takes place from 1993-1994: We had just moved into this really nice town house. It was great, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It had a nice large fenced in backyard and I had my own playroom. This should have been great but there was just something wrong with that place. It started when the furnace went out. Maintenance came in and saw nothing wrong with it but said they would replace it. So, they did. It broke again for no reason. Winter was almost over so we went downstairs and slept in front of the heater for those last few months. My mom made the best out of it by saying it was like we were camping. It was fun in that weird way but always cold. Then, spring came and things got better, warmer that’s for darn sure!

We had this old tube television set that looked like furniture. It was huge and set inside this large wooden cabinet type enclosure. This was also the time of the VHS so we had tapes stacked on top of the TV. A lot of them.  We would argue sometimes. Yell would be more like it. Then one day we were between the living room and the kitchen yelling at each other when we both saw all of those tapes fly off of the television and hit the couch. This couch was probably 20 feet away. We stopped arguing immediately and tried to figure out what had happened. We never did. It kept happening though but got worse. The next thing that accompanied the flying tapes were cockroaches would come out of light sockets and telephone receivers when we yelled. It got so bad we stopped talking altogether for a while.

Then the first night I saw the thing. I was lying in bed and I saw this large shadow figure walk slowly passed my door and into my playroom. A few minutes later it would come back and pause near my door, then go back along the same path and it was gone. I have never been so scared in my life. It was scary, just the feeling it gave off. I never wanted to go home because I knew there was something upstairs that wasn’t my biggest fan. In the fall of ’94 we moved because of this incident: I was lying in bed almost asleep when I felt like someone was choking me. I opened my eyes and the shadow figure was near me just there. So, I am lying there and not breathing. I begin choking and start vomiting. I run to my mom’s bedroom and shake her bed. She wakes up wondering what is wrong and I am pointing at my throat. She realizes I am choking and grabs me up. She takes me to the bathroom and sets me down in from of the toilet trying to make me puke. She keeps telling me to breath. The last words I hear before I black out are, “Chrissy, breathe!”

(Gross point): I wake up to my mother on the phone with my doctor and two of her fingers down my throat. I immediately start puking my life up. It was intense. I know most people say that it was acid reflux and stuff but I saw what I saw and felt what I felt. I told my mom about the shadow figure, that wispy being and she clammed up. She had seen it as well, almost every night so she started shutting her door. She said it was always like she was being watched. We moved out soon after and I had limited breathing capacity because I had asphyxiated on my own puke so my lungs were kinda damaged for a year or so. It was terrible living there and we left. We moved into this nice house across the city and that was years ago but I still remember that “Roach Motel” as we like to call it.

END OF PART ONE

Chris