Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - Ghosts of War: Haunting Encounters in Afghanistan and Iraq

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Ghosts of Russian soldiers, red eyed creatures made from smoke. These are real life horror stories from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's who saw the unexplainable.  Have your own story to share, or a request of something you want covered? Reach out on heartstartspounding.com Follow the podcast on instagram @heartstartspounding, You can support the podcast on patreon, or with a one time donation to Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you SO much to everyone who has already joined and donated, it means so much and allows me to keep making the podcast! Check out The Timekeeper Shownotes: www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/ghostsofwar  

I remember raising my rifle with my thermal optic on top of it and seeing a lone soldier out in front of us. And he had all the Russian gear, all the Russian equipment, AK, etc. He had everything. He was actually colder than the environment around him. So I blew up my rifle and told my guys, I was like, hey, I got a guy out here. And if they all started raising their rifles, I'm like, we don't see anything, we don't see anything, I don't know where he's at. Everybody was looking around, like kind of scared.

But I was like, he's literally right in front of me. Like, how are you not seeing this? So when I raised my rifle back up, he was gone. And then all radiotrophic ceased, and it was over with. It's that feeling. When the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment,

and everything starts to feel wrong, it's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. If you're new, we release episodes every Thursday. Before we jump in, I wanted to mention that I have something really special planned for you all in April. I'll be releasing a scripted, fictional podcast called The Time Keeper, every Thursday starting April 6. That will be on its own feed, not this one. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts,

you should be able to click the Heart Starts pounding icon to take you straight to it. And if you're listening somewhere else, you can search for it directly, or you can click the link in the show description to take you there. It stars Judah Lewis from the babysitter and the Christmas Chronicles, Chandler Kinney from Pretty Little Liars, Original Sin, and Argin Atelier from Are You Afraid of the Dark. and the Christmas Chronicles, Chandler Kinney from Pretty Little Liars, Original Sin, and

Argin Atelier from Are You Afraid of the Dark? Heartthouse pounding will be pausing while the time keepers being released, but make sure you keep up with me on Instagram and TikTok for a daily dose of horror. We'll be back on a weekly schedule starting May 4th, with some episodes that I'm so excited to share with you. Thanks guys. Last week, we heard from a listener who was stationed in Afghanistan when he saw the ghost of a Russian soldier

through his thermal lens. If you haven't heard that story, I really recommend you go back and listen to it. It absolutely shook me when I first heard it. And it'll add some context to what you're about to hear. In his story, the listener said something that really struck me. He said that other people had complained to the higher ups about seeing this ghost as well, but there was just nothing anyone could do about it.

I mean, make sense, our military's not taught how to handle paranormal experiences in the field. War is calculated, measured, precise. There's no room in the margins for anything unexplainable or supernatural. No. These stories tend to get squashed. But over the years, some of these stories have resurfaced, and they've been passed around like folklore to each other and on the internet.

It's not typical battle lore. They've been passed around like folklore to each other and on the internet. It's not typical battle lore. It's not fabled tales from the fields like the Trojan horse. It's first hand accounts of soldiers seeing the strange and unexplainable while serving. Time hasn't yet fully distorted these tales into legend. I wanted to take a more in-depth look into soldiers in the Middle East who saw things that left them chilled. I mean, these are people coming face to face with enemy fire, equipped with the most advanced

technology in the world, and they still couldn't explain what they saw. What I found was a deep, disturbing history of bizarre sightings in the Middle East by US soldiers. Today, I'm going to tell you some of those stories. You'll see that many of them have elements that are too similar to Shake Off, like this one, compared to the story that was told to me last week. This was posted three years ago on Reddit by user-spirited soul. They write, I have only told this story to three people outside the old military buddies who have similar stories

to this experience. First, I need to set the scene. Tucked in the mountain valley in Boglán, Afghanistan is a place called Russian Hill. Topa Gurgon is the best phonetic spelling of the local name. We just called it Topa. Topa is the only hill in this entire valley and that is not by mistake. It's a burial mound that has existed since the time of Alexander the Great. Generations of locals have been buried there, and this also includes the dead Russians

from the failed invasion back in the 80s. Now, what did the American special operations do when they came to this valley? Leveled off the top and stuck a combat post on it. So this is where my story begins. I was a regular Army paratrooper attached to the special operations team that built the outpost. One of the roles of the regular Army Paratrooper attached to the Special Operations team that built the outpost.

One of the roles of the regular Army guys was to watch the radio post at night. We would always get weird babble on them throughout the night, but that could be written off as interference, though years as a radio operator for my team led me to think otherwise. I had radio watch duty one night. Around 3am, my shift ends and I walked down the hill to our little bathroom area. I'm doing my business in this little cinder block hut with a hole when I hear walking up the hill next to me. At first I think nothing of it. It's probably just one of the local guards coming up for a shift change, but being the middle

of the night and me and a combat zone, I do listen and pay attention. I can hear the sound of gear rattling, which I know for a fact that our locals don't wear gear with metal buckles or boots for that matter. I've been on patrol with them multiple times, and they hang around the outpost. I know what they sound like when they move. and they hang around the outpost. I know what they sound like when they move. This was not that. This was the heavy set boot steps of a soldier in combat gear. Now, not wanting to die on the throne, and the fact that I was one of very few Americans at this outpost, I decided I probably needed to know who was going up the hill. So I cracked the door, to know who was going up the hill. So I cracked the door, peek outside,

and holy hell, there is someone on the hill. It happened to be a mostly full moon that night, and I had some decent ambient light. They were carrying an AK, so they weren't an American. They also had on a uniform and not the typical Afghan garb, so not one of our Afghan local police. At this point, they're close to the top of the hill and this person is not someone from the outpost.

I grab my rifle and pop out the door and I run up the hill after them. I get to the top and not a single person was around. So I walk over to the building where the radio guard is and I knock on the door. I check to see if anyone else was up or maybe came in there and he said that no one had come out of the barracks. The next day while eating lunch, we joked about it and one of the special ops guy who had been there longer than us said that it was the resident Russian ghost. Claimed he started

appearing after they used the dirt from the hill to fill our sandbags for the wall. Turns out they found some bones while doing it. He even told us that he had been face-to-face with it and even drew his side arm. All of the other guys kind of chimed in about their own creepy stories of that place. A lone Russian soldier caught in the perpetual loop of combat, forever walking up and outpost in the desert of Afghanistan. It sounds like a legend, like a story soldiers tell at night to scare one another. But we know that other soldiers were reporting seeing ghostly Russian soldiers in other areas. Hearing this story, the first thing I thought of was the shocking similarities to the most

documented military haunting in Afghanistan. This tale transcended legend and became wildly reported on, being featured in British newspapers as well as The New York Times. The most famous account of paranormal activity of soldiers in Afghanistan comes from observation post-rock in 2009, when eight Marines were stationed there for two months. It was 2009, and America had just deployed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. In the midst of the fighting and chaos of the war, eight Marines were given a mission.

They were to go to Observation Post Rock and keep watch over the area for 60 days. Observation Post Rock or OP Rock was a small hill that served as a watch out for enemy soldiers. Teams would be stationed there to keep 24-hour surveillance and report any suspicious activity or advancement of enemy soldiers back to the base using radios. There was currently a team of British soldiers there keeping watch, and, customarily, when a new team arrives to an outpost, the team departing will give them a lay of the land.

But as the eight Marines pulled up the dusty back road through the desert, they saw the British soldiers were eager to leave. The Marines reported that the British team leaving the post looked dishevelled and anxious, as if they had experienced an attack. There was no formal greeting, no breakdown of the area, nothing. The only word of advice given to the new team that arrived was, if you pick something up, put it back. It was said with the same gravitas, a sergeant would use giving a command in battle,

yet this warning seemed to be about the amenities at the post. What they could possibly pick up, they didn't know. As they searched the post that first day, they realized there wasn't much there. OP Rock was much smaller than other observation posts. It was mostly a few tents, some big sandbags to hide behind, and a series of trenches. But this was home for the next two months, so it was going to have to do. Observation posts are typically targets for enemy fire, so it's important that whoever

is stationed there has the ability to hide and protect themselves. The trenches were there to provide some of that protection, but the Marines quickly realized they were just not deep enough. When standing normally, their heads would peer over the top of the trench, visible to whoever was firing. If they were going to make it work, the trenches were going to have to be deeper. So they got to work digging. This was June, and the afghan sun can be brutal that time of year. So maybe at first they thought they were suffering from heatstroke when they dug the shovel in and heard a crack.

Through the soft dirt, they could tell they had hit something solid and fragile. One of the lands corperels reached down to grab whatever it was they had hit. It felt smooth and had rounded edges. It was cool to the touch compared to the blistering heat around them. But when he pulled it out of the ground, the other marines all looked on in terror. It was a human femur. Perfectly intact. The men decided they had to keep digging and see what else

was buried underneath their new home. And to their horror, they found multiple full skeletons as well as Russian artifacts like steaks for tents. The New York Times reported that these skeletons were not just from Russian soldiers that were there in the 80s. Some of these were potentially centuries old. What the soldiers didn't know was that OP Rock had a history, a history that even locals in the area got nervous talking about. According to locals, the outpost used to be a burial site before the 1740s, after which it became a fort. Legend has it that 40 Communist police officers were executed on the rock in 1980. The area was considered holy by locals after

a Soviet bomb hit the area but didn't explode. They would share stories of enemy tanks being swallowed whole by the earth. Whatever was going on there was unkind to invaders. Maybe this is what the British soldiers meant by, if you pick something up, put it back. But the Marines weren't thinking about that right now. They were just thinking about their safety, and they needed that trench to be deeper, so they continued digging, and whatever they disturbed made itself known immediately. The first night, one of the men, Corporal Lena, was preparing for the overnight watch.

Each night, one of them would stay awake to monitor the area while the others slept. While he was the lone man awake, he heard the radio's start glitching. There was a crackle, and then something that Lena described as a whisper, not in any recognizable language, but at times, it almost sounded Russian. The radios were the only lifeline that the Marines had to base. It was what they would use to let base know if anything was headed towards them, but it was also the only way they had to tell base if they were being ambushed. So it was crucial that the radios were in perfect working condition. So Lena takes out the batteries and reboots the radios, but they're still making those

weird noises. He ended up contacting base to see if they were sending out or receiving any signals that were similar to what he was hearing, but they confirmed that they weren't. The whole night, the crackles, and the whispers continued. But that was nothing compared to two weeks later, when another marine, Lance Corporal Hoyt, was on watch. When you're on watch, the safety of the group is your responsibility, so here it was just Corporal Hoyt seven sleeping marines behind him and the vast, open emptiness of the Afghan

desert. All of a sudden, Hoyt feels eyes on, as if someone is watching his every move. He doesn't want to tip off any enemy soldiers, so he slowly, slowly brings up his gun to his face to see if he can get anything on his thermals. The report says that at this point, the other marines were awoken by a blood-curdling scream, but it wasn't Hoi'ts. They all jump up, expecting an ambush, but all they find is a shaken Hoi't and the local dog, Ugly Betty, barking her head off.

Hoi't had seen something out in the desert. The figure of a man running behind a bush about 200 meters away. The scream had come from out in the distance in the man's direction. So Corporal Lina raises his thermal ends, but there's nothing out there. No matter where they looked, it was the same temperature, meaning no life. Once they determined that the man was no longer out there and there was no threat posed, they decided that they'd hunt for tracks the next day to see where the man came from and where he was going. But the next day, there was no trace that anyone had

ever been there. The men needed to make sure that the perimeter was secure, so they set off to find bullet casings, boot prints, anything that indicated the man Hoysaah had been there. But there was no indication. The marines were all shaken by this, but it seems like they still didn't think anything paranormal was going on. They're out there hunting for a threat hidden in the mountains, so every strange thing that happens is being processed through the lens of someone out there wants to kill me. Ghosts were the last thing on their minds. One of the youngest Marines there, Lance Corporal Zolnik, started feeling differently one night

when he was on watch. Zolnik remembers how warm it was that night. It's the desert in summer, and while it's cooler than the daytime, in all of your gear, the nights are still pretty warm. That's why it was so strange when all of a sudden, a pocket of cold air hits him. And it wasn't just a body chill. He started shivering from how cold the air around him became. Zolnik says he didn't think much of the change in temperature, since the other men had experienced the same thing since they'd arrived. But then, quietly behind him, he

hears whispering. And his descriptions of the whispers sound similar to Lena's description of what came over the radios. Soft at first, not sounding like a language, but every couple of words he can make out something that sounded faintly Russian. And worse than paranormal, Zolnik feared that he was losing his mind. It's no surprise that combat is extremely stressful, and that stress can play cruel tricks on your mind. Zolnik worried the effects of war had finally caught up with him. But before he can think too much about it, he hears footsteps above him, like someone

is running around the wooden slabs of the shack that they're in. He runs up to see what's happening because he needs to make sure it's not the Taliban, but when he gets up to where he heard the footsteps, there's no one there. So he goes back down, and maybe in an attempt to prove to himself that he wasn't losing his mind, he raises his thermal lens to his face to see if he can see anyone out in the vast openness. And he does. There's a man with a heat signature standing in front of the thermal lens. This man had his fist balled up by his face, and Zolnik starts freaking out. But before he shoots, he needs to make sure that it's not one of

his own men, so he brings down the thermal lens. And the man is gone. There is no one out there when he looks out. Zolnik was so disturbed by this event that he requested to transfer. Combat fatigue is real and it can have disastrous consequences and he figured his mind was slipping away from the stress. That would be believable if he were the only one having these experiences, but he wasn't, and they didn't stop after he left. They only got worse. Corporal Lena was out on patrol one night when ugly Betty started barking, really losing her mind at something in the distance. So Lena brings up his binoculars and he can faintly see the outline of something that looked like a person in the distance. Now Lena brings up his binoculars and he can faintly see the outline of something that looked

like a person in the distance. Now, already, they all thought that there was maybe someone out in the bush. So Lena is on high alert. He pulls his binoculars down to get a better look, but the figure is gone. He can't see it anymore. That was strange, he thinks. But Betty is still cujo-barking out into the empty desert,

so he brings his binoculars back up, and the figure is now a hundred meters closer, staring directly at him. He's terrified, so he rips the binoculars away, and the figure is gone. He's trying to figure out what he saw when he feels a double tap on his back. The double tap is how the man in charge Sergeant Green would get their attention. Lena spins

around to tell him that there's someone out there, but no one is behind him. And when he looks back into the vast darkness, there's nothing there either. Not even when he uses his binoculars again. After that night, the men slowly started talking to each other. It started with Lena, but then every man on the team confessed that they too had experienced something unexplainable and incredibly strange. But at that point, it was almost day 60. They only had one more night before they were set to leave. So that night, they're all excited that they can finally get out tomorrow.

They could make it through whatever happened that night because no matter what, they were driving out first thing in the morning. And now they were all expecting the usual, maybe some weird radio static and some whispering, but they felt more prepared. But then the radios go out. Not just glitching this time, dead, and both of them, not just one, so they were not able to communicate with their base at all. And then, enemy fire, from everywhere.

Corporal Lena said that it sounded like someone was standing in the trenches with them firing directly next to their heads. It was that close. No one could tell exactly where it was coming from, so they just started firing everywhere at everything, trying to cover themselves and make it stop. Worst of all, they hear the unsettling whistle of a rocket propelled grenade designed by the Soviets. Not only are they getting fired at from every angle, but by an artillery that they were not equipped to handle. And then, as soon as it started,

it stopped. All of the gunfire ceased, and no one in the trenches had been hit. Not only that, but there were no stray bullets or any evidence that they had just been shot at. The following morning, they said it took all of five minutes for them to pack up their stuff and head out. Though their time at the post was officially over, what transpired there haunted the soldiers for the rest of their lives.

And a few of the men have suggested that they feel like the post cursed them. Of the eight men stationed there in 2009, three of the Marines would go on to die in battle, and Sergeant Green would become disfigured by an IED attack. They fear that whatever was hunting them at the post may have followed them. Were they being tormented by a lone enemy soldier? Or was it something else? Maybe the echoes of the past can still be heard in the region, and maybe the ghosts of soldiers from before are cursed to permanently be stationed where they met their fates.

Maybe the land really is sentient like the locals suggest. These stories are chilling, but they're at least of our world. Various soldiers that have never met have recounted seeing the same entity and another part of the country, but this time it's not human. It's something much darker. More after the break. The years ago, in the heat of the war, there was a soldier who got a call that there was an ambush at the nearby airfield, and they needed everyone out there stat. So he jumps in the closest car and heads out to the airfield with a couple of other guys.

When he gets there, he can see one lone man crawling over the fence from the outside, trying to get into the airfield. So what do they do? They all lift up their weapons and each fire a single shot. One bullet makes contact and the man drops. But as he's falling, it looks like there's black smoke pouring out of him. One of the guys makes a comment, it looks like there's black smoke pouring out of him. One of the guys makes a comment that it looks like it was a suicide bomber and they must have hit his vest and now smoke was pouring out. But as they kept watching him, more and more smoke poured out, until black fog surrounded

the man and made a human-like creature. Through the creature's darkness, they could see glowing, red eyes glaring back at them. And then it started to laugh. They all raised their weapons in fear, but the man said the creature took a few steps towards them and then dissipated. He was never able to make sense of what happened. He claimed the soldiers only spoke about it one time after that, and then agreed to never speak about it again.

The red-eyed creature shows up in multiple accounts from soldiers who served in different units. Each account is in a different context, but every time the creature is described similarly, like this story that was posted to Reddit 8 years ago. I was an infantry man during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We pushed into Baghdad and then took an airfield just north of the city. Then we headed north up Highway 1. The majority of my unit stayed in T-CRETE while my company just kept going north. We began operating around that area

and then shortly moved to a nearby K2 airfield and set up a more permanent forward operating base or FOB. K2 airfield had a residential area that had been abandoned near the end of the runway. It was on post-housing for Iraqi Air Force personnel that ran the base, but they had left way before our arrival. What's strange is that it seems like it was abandoned before the invasion. There were pots and pans in the sink, there were clothes on the line, but there was dust all over everything. Looters had been there, but there was dust all over everything. Looters had been there, but they left mostly everything.

My unit moved up into the end of the airfield, into some bombed-out warehouses, and another company moved into the biggest houses in the abandoned housing area. We started to call it Ghost Town. The MPs that took up residence in the Ghost Town moved out after about a week. I asked one of the very tired looking MPs why, as everyone was jealous that they lived in actual homes instead of these bombed out warehouses that I was in, and I was curious about their speedy move. He said that they couldn't sleep. Doors would open and shut all night. They heard footsteps running up and down the halls. And then finally, they began to see children's faces looking in at them through the windows.

The U.S. Army does not function with considerations to ghosts. And for them to get their chain of command to move their entire company out of the ghost town, there must have been some tangible events that affected their operational readiness. Now our residence was the new perimeter of our FOB closest to the ghost town, so we took up nighttime security every night around our warehouse. We would each do an hour shift, and we had a watch going all night long. We had thermal sites in night vision, and we would sit out there scanning the desert for enemy activity.

During our watch, we could all hear children laughing and playing all night. It sounded like a playground was active in the ghost town, but we verified with our thermal sites that it was totally empty. One night, we were patrolling through the ghost town in a modified wedge formation. One of our soldiers said, what the hell? Then screamed. What the hell is that? He pointed his weapon to the middle of our formation and then dropped the weapon and ran. He ran alone in the dark, unarmed in the middle of a combat zone, away from everyone. Those of us that looked where he pointed saw it. Those of us that looked at the fleeing soldier heard it. Walking with us was a solid shadow,

roughly the shape of a person. Tall with really long arms, skinny legs, and a very narrow torso. It turned its head back and forth as if surprised to be discovered. It bent down and then it leaped. It landed in a crouch position on top of a nearby chain link fence still facing us, and it moved its head to look at us. Its eyes flashed red, and then it jumped backwards, off the fence, and disappeared into the night. We had caught up with the soldier, and he had absolutely lost it, screaming and crying. And that soldier was solid. We had all been through a lot, but we were both confident and competent. The enemy made sense. This creature didn't.

It was by far the most disturbing thing that I've ever witnessed, as it seemed to have a purpose keeping pace with us. From that point on, whenever it was our turn to patrol ghost town, our squad leader would lead us to just the edge and we would wait, not going in. I'm sure we all still appreciate that to this day. Whatever that was doesn't feel like a ghost, and it certainly doesn't feel human. Some locals suggested that these were gins, creatures from the Quran that were forged in the smokeless flame of a fire, while angels were formed in the light. American soldiers may compare them to demons, but they're more nuanced than that.

Some will say these are just tall tales from the battlefield, legends forged by over exaggeration and combat exhaustion. But when multiple people are coming home and complaining about the same red-eyed creature, it makes you wonder, what is it doing out there? And is it specifically targeting invading forces? and is it specifically targeting invading forces? So, dear listeners, what do you think it was hiding in the desert? Are these just the battle legends of our day? Is it just combat fatigue mixed with rogue enemy soldiers? Or is it really something darker?

Something ancient, sentient, and vengeful. This has been another episode of Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore. Join us back here on May 6th, but in the meantime, enjoy the timekeeper starting next Thursday. Have a scary story you'd like to share on the podcast, or even a recommendation of something to cover? Check out Heart StartsPounding.com, our new fancy website. Until next time, ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo you