Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - Listener Stories: Terrifying True Ghost Stories

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Spine tingling, bone chilling, and downright mysterious hauntings. Listeners share their own heart pounding tales about a headless cowboy, two separate ghost sightings in the military, and a girl who believes she may have gotten a sign from her deceased sister.    Have your own story to share? 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.    Shownotes: www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/listenertalesghosts

I'm going to lead you through some real life haunting tales today, submitted by listeners. But as always, listener discretion is advised. 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 saying, 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 joining us again, welcome back.

I actually heard from a bunch of you guys this week. On Instagram, over email, even on that new Spotify feature that lets you comment on episodes. I do a lot of research for these episodes, so I love discussing them with you all afterwards. Someone even said they wanted to write a paper on something I talked about in the last episode, so I sent her the source for that bit of info, which I thought that was really cool. I also wanted to announce that starting April 6th, I will be releasing a four-part horror audio drama called The Time Keeper. The trailer is up now in the Time Keeper feed if you would like to listen. It stars Judah Lewis, Chandler Kinney, and Argin Atelier. We'll be pausing heart starts pounding during the release of the timekeeper, but we'll be back on a weekly schedule in May.

I want to start by talking about that viral reddit haunting from earlier this month. In the beginning of March, a Reddit user named failed talk show host posted a photo to the ghost subreddit titled, After years of hearing noises from the kitchen, I caught this with Samsung's night vision. Upon first glance, the photo looks unremarkable. It's a voyeuristic shot of a kitchen at night, taken from far enough away that the hallway next to the kitchen is also in frame. taken from far enough away that the hallway next to the kitchen is also in frame. But the kitchen is enclosed. So while the front of it is semi-lit thanks to the night vision, the farther back into the kitchen you look, the darker it gets. Making the back area past the fridge a black liminal space. And that's when your eye picks up on something. What should be the shadowy corner

of the kitchen has a somewhat soft rounded edge. Maybe something is in the way of the corner, but the more you look, the more it takes on the shape of a shoulder. And as you trace that line upward, just pass where the shoulder would curve into a neck, you can see that there's a space that's just a hair lighter than the space around it, as if the faintest bit of light is being reflected. And then you see it. A full grown man lurking next to the fridge. And to confirm it, someone posted a lightened version of the photo where you can see the figure

well over six feet tall with long hair and a full beard. And to confirm it, someone posted a lightened version of the photo where you can see the figure well over six feet tall with long hair and a full beard. He's in a black shirt and his face is blurred as if he were in motion when the photo was caught. Admittedly, yes, it does look a touch like Hianna Reeves, and that is what one of the most upvoted comments on the post notes. The post had the ghosts subreddit divided for days and eventually the post was taken down. People just couldn't agree upon whether or not the photo was staged.

And if it wasn't staged, they couldn't agree upon if it were a ghost or just some insane person that was calmly using the poster's kitchen in the dead of night. That to me is far more terrifying. Listen, I am all for Keanu Reeves being in my pantry, but if I found this photo captured of my kitchen, I would simply pay a man on the internet to burn my house down. I would do it myself,

but I actually think you can get in trouble for that. The supposed haunting got worse. The user posted a new video to the group saying that they had caught the entity in motion. Watching the footage you can't see much in the total blackness of the kitchen, but about three-fourths of the way through the video, you can see the light of the microwave slightly get covered as if something slowly stepped in front of it. Once again, someone brightened this video and the result was madness.

The figure now stood crouched in the kitchen, moving erratically in a way that made no sense. Its face is looking dead into the camera app points and then turning quickly to look around. The clip ends with whatever this thing is staring directly into the camera. It's horrifying. I had chills going up and down my body as I watched it. The original

poster said that he had lived in this one bedroom flat for three years, and he always thought that the sounds he heard at night were coming from the old building, but one day he decided to set his camera up out of curiosity. He claimed that the footage taken of the ghost man was the only bit of activity and an otherwise unexciting video. Now that he's seen what's in his flat, he's moving out. I love tales of old hauntings, but there is something so guttural, so visceral, about hearing a firsthand experience from someone today, experiencing something paranormal. That's why I love love love when you all reach out to me with your stories.

Today, I want to share some spine-tingly ones that I've gotten over the last few weeks from listeners. Some were just emailed over, some are told by the person experiencing them, and all of them made me stop in my tracks. To kick us off, I'm starting with a story that was sent over to me from a woman who was living on a naval base in Guam. She writes, Hi, I wanted to tell you about my experience while living in Guam. Guam is an island in Micronesia and part of the Mariana's Island chain. It's also a US territory and has a large military presence. The island and its people have largely been affected by the Spanish conquistadors and a Japanese occupation during World War II.

I lived on the naval base in military housing for three years, and about one mile from me, where the office family housing was located, there was a mass unmarked burial ground for Japanese soldiers from World War II. Every single night for three years, I would wake up between 12 and 3 a.m. and see a man standing in my bedroom looming over my bed or standing in the corner. He'd run up to me and try to grab me and I would start screaming. I swear I could feel him touch me. Most nights I would reach for my phone to turn on my flashlight and then he would vanish. My husband never saw him but he agreed that the house was really creepy.

I didn't tell anyone about this experience because I grew up with a mom that subscribed to Televangelis Preachers and I didn't want her to start praying over me and tongues on the phone. I also didn't tell anyone initially because I didn't have any friends yet. I had just moved to the island and then COVID happened and we never really saw anyone and I was just trapped in this house for a really long time. Finally, after two years of seeing the same shadowy man each night, I started telling the story at a book club. It turned out that my friend who lived two streets over had been experiencing the same things since she moved in, and that was two years before I even moved to the island. She woke up every night between 12 and 3am and saw the man in the corner of her room. So then I searched the neighborhood Facebook page for keywords,

and I found out that so many other people had been experiencing the exact same thing for years. It got to a point where I refused to be in the housing by myself, especially at night. Another story of multiple people on a naval base experiencing the same haunting, just like in my naval base on a haunted swamp episode. Right now, I'm convinced that if you've served in the military, you've definitely seen ghosts. I was so curious about the popularity of these specific hauntings in Guam that I looked a little deeper, and apparently there is a long, rich history in Guam of soldiers and ghosts, like the Leo Palace Hotel, where it's said that you can see the ghosts of two World

War II soldiers most nights, also from 12 to 3am. Legend has it that as you walk by the giant glistening resort, you won't see anything. But if you're in a car, the moment you pass the area, you'll be able to see two soldiers in uniform in your rearview mirror. They look just like real people. except one soldier has no head. He's just holding a helmet in his hands. The second you turn around for another glance, they're gone. I also found this post from 2009 on a largely defunct page called yourgoastories.com. This was sitting in the back of the internet freezer at risk of never being noticed.

The user added a little bit of context to the hauntings in their post. They write, I was stationed in Guam on the naval base from 2004 to 2006. I've had a few paranormal experiences before, but nothing prepared me for what would happen my last night on the island. I lived in Barracks 9 on the top floor, just down the hall from the kitchen.

I had a roommate at the time, but she was always spending the night at her boyfriend's place. I was a police officer, and I got to work with a few of the locals. They mainly worked at our entrance gates, and they were masters at telling us the local ghost stories. Every place has a woman in white and this place was no exception, although this story is not about her. The locals call the island spirits the Tadamonus.

According to the islanders, if they like you, they'll sometimes pinch you or play jokes on you. If they don't like you, they make you sick with headaches. I worked with a guy who suffered terrible headaches that doctors just couldn't diagnose. It got so bad they accidentally killed him with a morphine overdose. Don't believe me, just look at the memorial in the lounge of the Emma's headquarters. His name was Emma's 3-Brent. He had died a few months after I'd gotten there and I didn't know him that well. I did, however, take the spirits of the island quite seriously after that.

I've always been as respectful as possible, and I think that's the reason I was never hurt. Until this one night. I had always sensed that there was something in my barracks room with me. I wouldn't look at myself in the mirror when I brushed my teeth because I could feel it behind me, and I was afraid I would see it in the mirror. I had a friend who claimed she could see spirits, and she told me that she could see a shadow-like figure walking around my room through the window outside.

I never told anyone that I thought there was something living with me. So I had my orders for my next duty station and all my stuff had already been packed up and shipped out. I only had the sheets I was issued and a suitcase I had to live out of for the next month. I was sleeping and I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I was still in a half-dreamlike state where I wasn't fully awake or fully asleep. I'd woken up because I was talking. I was saying no, I can't, as if I was refusing an invitation. I was being polite, but I could see a vague shadow by my door. Right before I realized that I was

talking to something in my room, I was held down in my bed. I was on my back and my sheets were pulled up to my collar bones. It felt like something big had placed their hands on either side of my shoulders and pressed down on the top sheet. It scared me so bad that I woke up all the way and the pressure went away too. After I had a moment to process what happened, I came up with a theory. Whatever was in my room knew I was leaving the next day, and I think it was making a last effort to convince me to stay because it liked me there. I had to refuse the offer because I had my orders, and in a very last attempt, it wanted to force me to stay. I don't think it wanted to hurt me.

I just think it was tired of having to deal with so many young single sailors who only wanted to be loud and get drunk. I was a quiet and calm guest in its house. So if you ever find yourself headed to Guam, and I've heard it's just lovely, all ghosts aside, make sure you pay your respects to the Tatamonas, the ghosts of those who came before you. Our next ghost story was written in by Jadian. Jadian's mother had an experience growing up, but a little digging proved it to be even more terrifying.

Jadian writes, My mom has told me throughout the years about a ghost she saw when she was a child. Late at night, my mother would see a tall shadow standing in her doorway or in her room. She said the figure was male and was wearing cowboy attire like old western style. The scariest thing for her was that he had no head. His cowboy hat rested on his shoulders.

She said she saw the headless cowboy several times while living in her mother's house in Idaho. Years later, my mom's in her early 40s and she's telling her experiences with the headless cowboy several times while living in her mother's house in Idaho. Years later, my mom's in her early 40s and she's telling her experiences with the headless cowboy for the first time to her older sister. Right when my mom mentioned the headless cowboy, my aunt's face turned white like she had seen a ghost. My aunt said that she had also seen the headless cowboy with his hat sitting on his shoulders late in the

night in her doorway. So 2020 comes around and my mom sends me this article about a headless cowboy found in Idaho and immediately she called me terrified. It's quite a coincidence and it gave my mom on and me all the chills after reading the article. Jadien sent me a link to the article and I was shocked reading it. The article reads, In 1979, a headless torso wrapped in a burlap sack was found in an Idaho cave, and now, more than 40 years later, the victim has been identified.

Joseph Henry Loveless, who murdered his wife with an axe, was last seen before he escaped from jail in 1916, after sawing through the bars using a saw he had hidden in his shoes. In 1991, limbs were discovered in the same cave where the torso was initially found. Researchers and students from Idaho State University searched and excavated the cave in 2015, but Loveless's head was never found. Investigators had little to go off of in 1979. The sheriff at the time believed the remains to be of a gambler from the turn of the century,

just based on his clothing. Complicating matters was the fact that Lovelace used multiple aliases during the course of his life. The identity of Lovelace's murderer remains a mystery. I'll include a photo of Lovelace on Instagram, but the photo that they included of him in the article is of a man with a stern look wearing a cowboy hat. Was Jadian's mother really seeing the ghost of a dismembered murderous cowboy? And who the hell sawed loveless into pieces? To me, seeing a headless cowboy at night is just so specific. I can't think of anything

else it would be. Most people who wake up and see the hat man, see this tall shadowy figure with a wide brimmed hat, but he always has a head. And then for her sister to see the same exact man. I know I said it before, but hire a man off the internet to burn the house down. Don't do it yourself, I think you can get in trouble for that. Our next tale was called in by a listener named Morgan. Morgan's tale is heartbreaking and it hits close to home, but it's one of my favorite types of ghost stories. It's a story of loss, but it's also a story of getting a sign that maybe the person

is still with you somehow. So to give you a little background, me and my sister, we were the only ones of our parents, and we grew up in Gran Rapids, Michigan. In our younger years, we were extremely close. We were like, just two peas in a pot, we were always together. And then after my parents divorced, she had a very, very, very hard time with my parents' divorce.

And she internalized a lot. And so she kind of became better. And she was kind of a hard person to be around. She had kind of fallen into drug addiction. The past, I would say, three or four years of her life, we were very strained. My family kind of fallen into drug addiction. The past, I would say three or four years of her life, we were very strained. My family kind of enabled her, and I was able to kind of pull back,

and I was like, you know, I don't want to be that person. And so we kind of stopped talking up until she had passed away. We didn't talk for a long time. And then the night I had gotten the call it was a Friday night so I always knew if I got in a phone call from my mom late at night it was something bad. She had told me that my sister Megan she had apparently overdosed and they didn't know how long she had been down but they had been trying to resuscitate her for about 30 or 40 minutes

and it wasn't looking good. So I had to sat on the couch and the way my house is we have a very open house plan. So if you're sitting on my couch you can kind of see into our kitchen. And I was just sitting there and I had taken a moment to myself. I wasn't hysterical. I wasn't crying at that point. I was just sitting there trying to just digest what I had been told and what I knew was going to happen. And I had seen something out of the corner of my eye. The walk past my fridge. And I'm like, that's so weird. And I didn't think anything of it. And then, I would say about maybe an hour later, my mom had called my boyfriend back and had told him that my sister passed away. After that, we all kind of gathered at my grandmother's house where

my dad, my stepmom, my aunt, my uncle, they were all there. And we were trying to gather our thoughts and just kind of, you know, plan what our next move is going to be. And we stayed there and it was very late at night. It was, we stayed there until about maybe two in the morning. And then we had to come home and I was just trying to decompress and I went and sat back on our couch, kind of sat in the same place and I had seen something look, passed our fridge again on the corner of my eye. Now it was just very weird and unexplainable and I again, I had never thought anything of it.

After that you know I didn't really talk about it. I didn't tell anybody other than my mom so she kind of knew when she's like oh I'm sure it was your sister and she's very religious so you know being me being a skeptic I'm like okay kind of just you know put it in the back of my brain, didn't think about it. We had always joked that if reincarnation was real, that my sister would come back as a black cat because when she had moved out of my mom's house and lived with her boyfriend, they had like 10 or 15 black cats. So Morgan thinks that she may have seen her sister,

maybe. But she thinks that if she were to really see her, it'd be in the form of a black cat. She's joking, but there's part of her that maybe believes it. Not too long after her sister Megan passed away, Morgan starts to notice that her grandmother's health is starting to fail. I had this feeling and I kind of had this with my sister too. That something was wrong and everybody kind of around me was kind of not blowing me off but was like, you know, it's probably this. And I'm just like, no, there's like something wrong with my grandmother losing.

My sister was extremely hard on her. I think she probably took it worse than all of us. A couple months later, after I had noticed that something was wrong with her, she ended up having a hip replacement. And then after her hip replacement, she went downhill extremely fast. She was very lethargic and so that just was not like her.

Eventually, she ended up going to the emergency room and she ended up finding out that she had cancer for the second time. A week after she had found out she had cancer and discharged from the hospital, she passed away. The day my grandmother had passed away, my whole family was there and I had walked outside because I was emotional at that point and I didn't want anybody to really see how much I was breaking down and I went and sat on their back porch and this little kitty came sprinting towards me. He was extremely loud,

but he was just a frail little black cat. And I'm like, okay, that's weird. And so I was just sitting there petting the cat, and you know, me and my family were always at my grandma's house. So we knew the stress in the neighborhood. And so I'm like, you know know I've never seen this cat before. I eventually went back inside, you know we were just talking and I had looked out the kitchen window, the cat was just incessantly staring inside and meowing. I'm like, what is up with this cat? It was so strange. And I

had went back outside. And I was petting it and I was trying to show it away to go wherever it came from. I had walked outside for the last time and it had been a couple hours that this cat was lingering. And mind you, I didn't give it any food, didn't give it any water, nothing. And the last time I had walked outside, somehow this cat got inside and darted towards the room that my grandmother was in. And she was sleeping at this point, but she was kind of sedated. They had given her a bunch of medication to kind of make her comfortable. It almost jumped on the bed. So I don't know if she was aware of the situation. I don't know, you know, a lot of medication to kind of make her comfortable. It almost jumped on the bed, so I don't know if she was aware of the situation. I don't know, you know, a lot of people say that if someone's passing,

they can still kind of hear the commotion going around. My first thought in a lot of our minds was oh it's my sister. And I had made a little comment to myself, I'm like oh that was megan. made a little comment to myself, I'm like, oh, that was megan. And we had noticed that she had been hanging on. We don't know why, but for some reason she was just hanging on, but after that she had just she passed a couple hours later. And it was just very weird, and my grandma had made comments to me when it was just me and her, and she, and I'll never forget this. It was very emotional. She had turned to me. And she had said, she had the biggest smile on her face and she said, I'm so lucky. And I said, why are you so lucky?

And she's like, I'm gonna be the first one that gets to see Megan again. Just makes you think, you know? I can't say for sure, like, oh, that was my sister, but it just, you know, like I said, it just makes you think. So, and I have never seen a sense. And I have asked my grandpa, I'm like, have you seen this cat sense? And he's not now.

And I have asked my mom and my aunt, I'm like, you know, have you guys seen the cat? And it hasn't been seen since. And that is also another weird thing. Like, it was like the cat was there and then it was gone. So many parts of that story really get to me. I also have a sibling that's obsessed with black cats, and I get emotional listening to it. It's not necessarily bone-chilling, but it does make me wonder. And it also plays into some of the superstitions people have about black cats. Sixteenth-century Italians actually believed that if a black cat jumped on the bed of an ill person, the person would soon die.

Personally, I think black cats have an unearned bad reputation, but this cat seemed to know what was going on. I like to believe that it was her sister. Now, as I mentioned before in our first story, if you've served in the military, I'm just going to assume you've seen a ghost unless you tell me otherwise. And this story just further proves my theory. I listened to this voice memo in the dead of night one night when I couldn't sleep.

It's from a man who needed to share what he saw, and it kept me up for the next few hours. I knew I had to share it with you all. This story comes from a listener who was serving in Afghanistan when something incredibly strange happened. So this was back in 2006. I was in the Hindu Kush Mountains and the elevation there was about 56 to about 5,900 elevation somewhere around there. I've seen level obviously. This was February, so there was tons of snow, tons of rock, and it was freezing cold.

I was a part of a eight-man recanting way back a long time ago, and basically my job was to go and identify targets for just teacher intelligence and all the other kind of crazy stuff that the military does. So we had dug in for the night after patrolling all day and up into the mountains. And we set up a 360 perimeter and kind of starting to survey our areas and whatnot, put up our sectors of fire. And we actually started to hear Russian radio traffic over, you know, the radio is basically.

And Russians were not there. They did not exist back whenever we were there. I mean, they used to be there a long time ago, but for our time back in 2006, like there were no Russian soldiers boots on ground in Afghanistan. So we ended up hearing these booms out in the distance in this Russian radiotrafik over top of our normal like comms channels, like over our radio channels. So from there, we were trying to actually raise our headquarters more or less and trying to tell them, like, hey, like we have burst in soldiers out here or somebody speaking Russian on the radio, like, you know, all this other stuff. But some of the Afghans there do speak Russian. Actually, a lot of them do because of whenever they came over and invaded and whatnot,

and they were trying to conquer Afghan-standed stuff, a lot of the Afghan villages picked up the dialect of, you know, Russian. So at first we were like, oh, these actually could be like villagers just talking to each other, but there were booms going off like in the distance and whatnot, but the booms kept getting closer and closer and closer.

They were almost on top of us. Like, they were in the valley and whatnot, but the blooms kept getting closer and closer and closer. They were almost on top of us. Like they were in the valley for below us. Like these loud explosions. And I'm a part of an eight man recon team at this point. And everybody was looking around, like kind of scared, like, are we not seeing this giant firefight that's going on around us? You know, like, what's going on?

And we ended up basically trying to get a hold of the hour headquarters, trying to tell them what's going on? And we ended up basically trying to get a hold of the hour headquarters, trying to tell them what's going on. And a bunch of my guys are starting to look through their scopes and look through thermals, and look through night vision, and all that other stuff. I remember raising my rifle with my thermal optic on top of it, and seeing a lone soldier out in front

of us at about 100 yards, maybe 125 yards or so. So with thermals, it gives off a heat signature kind of like Predator's vision, right? He was actually colder than the environment around him. And granted this is a February in the mountains of Inducush, it is about zero degrees, maybe even colder than that. And he had all the Russian gear, all the Russian equipment, AK, et cetera, he had everything. But he did not have, I didn't have visual like with my eyes on him, I had him through a thermal scope.

So I blurred my rifle, I told my guys, I was like, hey, I got a guy out here, he's here, he's right in front of us, et cetera. And they all started raising their rifles, and I was like, we don't see anything, we don't see anything, I don't know where he's at, you know, whatever. 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 radio traffic ceased, and it was over with, like, there was no more booms in the distance, there was no more any form of like radio traffic or anything like that. And all of our comms, our comms, like our radios,

they all started to work again where we could actually get in touch with our face. But I'm really free to sell because one thing that, like I guess with Afghanistan is that hour, this story that I'm telling you now is not something that's kind of like unheard of in a one time thing. This is something that many people have experienced.

Long story short, we ended up getting extracted out of there like a day later and we told our command like basically what happened and all the other stuff that goes with it. And they ended up kind of telling, like pulling us and aside and being like, hey, like you're not the first person to experience something like this Like a couple of teams before you guys have experienced the same kind of thing like and they they were straight up honest with us So like look, man, this is the graveyard of empires more or less because

I mean there were Alexander the Great was there and he was there like 350 BC so like Afghanistan is just this weird pocket of the world that empires go to die. And so it makes sense that that spirits were everywhere all throughout those mountains and all throughout those cities. Once again, the same strange phenomenon was seen by multiple people, reported to the same officer and remained unexplained.

And even if the Russian radio signals were really just interference, how do you explain the Cold Man? This was something that I wanted to look into more, since the listener said he had heard other people had experienced this, and you guys. When I say the stories are terrifying, they're terrifying. So much so that next week's episode is going to be fully dedicated to them. It'll be scary stories from the military, specifically focusing on the entities that were seen in Afghanistan during the war. I'm so excited, but I'm also so scared. Meet me here next week. You won't want to miss it.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore. If you've been enjoying the podcast, you can sign up for bonus content on Patreon or make a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee. Both are linked in the show description. Have a heart pounding story you'd like to share on the podcast, email Heart Starts starts pounding at gmail.com.

Until next time. Woo! you