Hey, y'all, how's it going. This is Cam Buckner with the Dixiecrypted
Podcast. This podcast is going to be different than anything I've ever done.
It's really short, It's only eight or nine minutes long, but it is
an experiment with artificial intelligence voice recordings. Two of the stories are my voice
cloned and it sounds like my voice, but they can't duplicate my accent,
and the others. I think the story in the middle is just some random
voice I picked off the software just to read a story. This is probably
the only one I'm ever gonna do, but I thought it would be fun
just to try it out. And if your story is in this podcast,
I will do it in my own voice in the next week or so.
You're going to hear this these stories, probably twice, but I'd like to
get some feedback from you in the comments or what you think of story one,
two, and three and how it sounded to you. And I'm just
here. I think it sounds good. I don't think it's as good as
a naturally read or narrated story, but it is interesting how this technology is
progressing. And I bought a subscription to this service. I may probably cancel
it next month, but I want to get my money's worth out of it,
so I got three stories out of it. Let me know what you
think. I hope you enjoy it. And remember this is probably the only
time I'm going to do this unless people just really love it. It takes
just as much time to edit these and get them ready as it does to
record them, so it makes no difference to me. But I just thought
it'd be a fun little project. Let me know what you think. I
hope you enjoy it. In the mid two thousands, my friend Eli had
gotten a new video camera. He was around twelve years old and was eager
to put it to good use. His camera was not nearly the same quality
as the ones on the market today and was definitely not as user friendly,
especially when filming something without benefit of a second pair of hands. Eli lived
way out in a rural area. There was a clearing near his home that
was overgrown with tall grass and weeds, typical of a country boy his age.
He wanted to film himself on his four wheeler. Eli set up his
camera and tripod at a safe distance, jumped on his ATV, and began
doing a series of reckless stunts. The more dangerous, the better. He
was a beginner as a budding film director and didn't always capture himself in the
center of the frame. When he was done, he took the shot footage
back to his house to pull it up on his computer and review his movie
making skills. Watching the videos he took that day, something unexpected appeared in
several of the frames. What he saw shocked him. The footage shows Eli
on his ATV performing a several stunts. Suddenly, in the background, on
dead center, a dark figure walking on two legs rises up from behind a
tree and walks into the forest. It's hesitant in its movements, as if
waiting for Eli's attention to be drawn away so it can escape undetected. Eli
posted it to YouTube, and the video got ridiculed and labeled his fake.
The haters and non believers suggested a number of scenarios on how Eli used everything
from camera angles, a guerrilla suit, and even photoshopping the image. November
fifteenth is a holiday in Michigan, as it's the opening day of the state's
firearm deer season. Schools close and families get together for the annual tradition of
deer hunting. A friend of ours name Jimmy was a sixteen year old man
child who stood at six two inches and weighed two hundred pounds. He was
eager to get out there well before daybreak, park his truck and begin the
mile long trek to his deer blind, which was really more of a shack
with windows and a door. He had been regularly placing deer bait in front
of it to out the deer. Jimmy had gotten about sixty yards from his
blind when he heard something off to his right. What he saw would seriously
change his attitude towards hunting in general. He panned his flashlight in the direction
of the disturbance and saw a huge figure moving quickly through the trees. He
didn't glimpse any defining features beyond its enormous, brown haired back. He later
described it like a freight train barreling through the woods. Whatever it was,
it freaked him out. Too scared to run back to his truck, he
instead headed to his blind and quickly locked the door behind him. He dropped
to the floor and hid there until dawn. Once the first rays of sunlight
began streaming through the cracks of the deer blind, Jimmy wrenched open the door
and raced to his truck as fast as he could, never daring once to
stop and look behind him. No opening morning of deer hunting season was going
to bring him anywhere near that place again, even if we agreed to travel
back there with him. Like me, Eli and the rest of our friends,
Jimmy grew up in the sticks and swears what he witnessed wasn't a bear
or like anything he ever saw before out in those woods. I know I
believe him. I've always had a recurring dream where I was being pursued by
what I don't know. I always managed to outrun it, apparently, and
wake up before whatever it was had me cornered. It was really unsettling.
I couldn't remember if any of my friends were in the dream. Maybe they
were the ones who got caught while I escaped. It's like that joke when
you're in the water with a buddy and a shark attacks. You know you
don't have to outswim the shark, just the other guy. One weekend,
a couple of my friends and I were hiking. It was autumn and the
ground was heavy with fallen leaves, the kind that dry up quickly and crunch
under your feet as you make your way down the trail. Sometimes you can't
tell the sounds of the outdoors from the sounds of your friends as they laugh
at dumb jokes or struggle to maintain a heart healthy walking pace through the woods.
We were oblivious to all else. We'd hiked for hours, so we
stopped by a tree for a rest. It was getting dark and we didn't
have the energy to make the long trek back to my car, so we
decided to just stay there for the night. We told more dumb jokes and
laughed until we each started to drop off to sleep. That's when I heard
something rustling around out in the dark. I grabbed my flashlight out of my
backpack and swept the light beam back and forth into the darkness, but saw
nothing. The noise stopped, which only put me on edge. I made
one more sweep of the area with my flashlight and that's when I saw it.
It looked like something half human on all fours with its hind end up
in the air. I couldn't tell if it was wearing a black suit or
if its entire body was covered with coarse black hair. I flashed my light
back at my friends just to see if any of them were awake and seeing
what I was seeing. They were still snoozing, totally unaware. Suddenly I
heard this horrible, demonic roar, like something out of that movie The Conjuring.
I spun around with my flashlight and there it was some sort of animal,
standing upright on two legs like a man. I ran my light up
its body all the way to its head. It must have been eight feet
tall. My friends were now wide awake and scrambling. It was every man
for himself as we ran back down the trail. After ten minutes of total
panic, we finally ran out of breath and sat down by a big rock.
We realized we'd left our wallets behind with our hiking gear, so we
voted to wait until daybreak and go back. I kept aiming the flashlight into
the night, but it appeared that our monster friend hadn't followed us. Maybe
he was as afraid of us as we were of him. One could only
hope. At the crack of dawn, we went back and recovered our things.
Our backpack smelled like sewage. When we got back to the car,
I threw everybody's gear into the trunk. I left my backpack outside in the
rain for weeks before I finally broke down and took everything to a laundromat.
I didn't want to contaminate my own washer. Goes without saying that. No
one believed our story, but at least I knew that, unlike my dream,
in real life, all of us got away. Not long ago,
my husband and I purchased a small log cabin that sits on ten and half
acres of land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We're working to restore the
property and bring it back to its former glory. It faces a small pond
and we can see a few neighbors in that direction. To our northeast is
an open meadow. Other than that, we are surrounded by densely forested state
owned land. It's isolated, but it's the kind of seclusion that induces peace
and tranquility. I was sitting out on the open front porch enjoying a tall
glass of iced tea one day when I saw something directly ahead of me that
looked like a massive iridescent bubble floating about fifteen feet off the ground. It
was moving slowly into the thick forest and changing shapes and configuration as it was
doing so, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. After watching it
for several minutes and marveling at how beautiful it looked, I chalked it up
to being some sort of weird natural phenomenon and went back inside. Later,
we were putting together our log bedroom set in the small back bedroom when I
was overwhelmed with a feeling of being watched that raised goose bumps all over my
body. I glanced out the two side by side windows and saw a gray,
human looking creature with a large elongated head, two big black oval eyes,
and no eyelids, staring back in at me where its noose should have
been. It had two small slits, but I couldn't see its mouth.
We had a one hundred gallon propane tank right outside the window that wasn't hooked
up yet, and the creature was standing behind it. The tank was four
and a half feet tall. The being had its long fingers stretched out across
the tank and was craning its neck to look over the tank so it could
watch me. The second we made eye contact, it ducked down behind the
tank and out of sight. I ran to the window, but it was
gone. It was mid morning on a clear day. I reached the window
and plenty of time to see any human that might have been out there before.
They could have disappeared into the woods, but this thing was gone.
I have never had an experience like this before. It isn't a story I
share with anyone who knows me. I wasn't frightened by what I saw.
In fact, I was probably as curious about it as it was about me.
But I sure would like to know what it was. Do you have any ideas