Speaker 1: Welcome once again, and thank you for being here. I'm
your host, Nick Ryan. This episode is brought to you
by my newest supporters Jutta and Snug and Shivers, and
I'd also like to say happy twenty seventh birthday to
one of my most devoted listeners, Jordan. Thanks to all
of you for making the show possible. Tonight's show is
going to be a bit shorter than usual, but I'll
be back to my normal schedule soon. In the meantime,
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So if you're ever curious about what I'm up to,
you can find a link to my Patreon page in
the show notes. With all that being said, let's begin
tonight's episode. And Tonight's encounter comes to us from Maya,
and Maya's experience is called a presence. Maya says hi. Nick. First,
I wanted to say thank you for creating a safe
space for sharing our supernatural experiences. I am an avid
fan of your podcast, and I am very happy to
say that I am up to date since I listened
to it every day at work. Since I was a kid,
I always believed in the supernatural, especially in ghosts. This
is because when I was a kid, I saw my
great grandmother in my living room just minutes after she
had passed away. I had actually submitted that story to you,
and to my luck, you shared it in one of
your episodes. Today, though, I'm ready to share the most
intense paranormal occurrence that I've had, and this time I
do recall everything that happened to this day. It gives
me chills. I'm just starting to write this to you
and Goosebump start populating my existence. It was the summer
of twenty twenty when I got accepted to be an
intern at a research facility in the middle of nowhere
in the United States. I am from the Caribbean, so yes,
I was going to be far away from home for
two whole months and working night shifts on a project
that needed me to do late night runs to the lab. Emotionally,
it was a mixture of sadness and excitement. I was
getting paid really good money, so I definitely was up
for the adventure. This research facility was part of a
farm land and the architecture was still the same from
the seventeen hundreds to eighteen hundreds. I did my personal
research before getting into the whole thing, and I found
out that the property was once owned by a wealthy
family and they had many, many acres of various crops. Sadly,
all of those crops were operated by slaves that also
lived in the property in a building called the slave Quarters.
After my little research, I was left curious to see
how the place was would actually look in person and
how the research facility would operate. I finally got to
the research facility and my breath was taken away by
how beautiful everything was. The place was close to magical
ponds everywhere, butterflies all around, flowering plants in every corner,
and open spaces that felt like they were out of
a postcard. It was breath taking. The staff showed us
where the students would sleep, and it turns out that
this was in the slave quarters. I didn't really know
how to feel about it, and as a fan of
the paranormal. It did kind of feel like we were
an investigating team staying in the most dreadful place of
the whole property. It was a hallway of rooms on
the second floor, and mine was the first one up
the stairs. The dreadfulness and sadness, paired with the loud
creaking noises of our own steps on the wooden floor,
plus the unbearable sound the screen door and wooden doors
made when opening, created a somewhat tense but chaotic atmosphere
in my room. I do recall that throughout my time there,
I spent as little time in that room as possible.
I just really tried only using it for sleeping at least,
though I was paired with such a sweet and awesome
room mate, who I will call Lily. She and I
were very similar in terms of how we lived, so
it was very easy to live with her. The weeks passed,
and I eventually befriended a staff member who was also
doing research. He lived on the property, but in a
house a little farther away from Oz. We were hanging
out on the property's private library one night when all
of a sudden it came to me and I asked him, Hey,
do you know of anything weird about this property. I'm
kind of a fan of spooky stuff, and where we
sleep feels weird at all times. Plus the history I
don't know now. I will never forget the look in
his eyes, and it was as if he was surprised
and a little scared that I picked up on something.
He then asked, why do you ask, have you seen
or heard anything? I was already scared of his reaction,
so I nodded as if to say no. He then said, well,
there are various stories about this place that I sadly
found out because I was too curious as you are
right now. And I say sadly because now I'm scared
to be alone here and every corner gives me the creeps.
After that, he started telling me, one by one all
the things he knew about the place. First, there were
many archived encounters where witnesses left a written statement of
what they saw. Many people, on many different occasions saw
a lady dressed in a black Victorian dress. This lady
had a transparent dark veil covering her face as if
she was a widow. The witnesses said that they would
see her literally levitating throughout the main hallway on the property,
or even by the main pond. Some accounts had even
seen a child with her. Her face had no features,
but you could see her hands, and they were pale
white and translucent. The second story was about an intern
night night, while all the interns went out, she stayed
behind alone in the property. As a big mistake, she
decided to explore the halls and found herself in an attic.
A while after that, everyone came home from the outing
and they found the intern almost paralyzed in her bed.
She couldn't speak, and she was getting very sick, very fast.
She finally said, I was in the attic when I
saw it. It just stared back at me, and then
everything in the room started to move on its own,
and I panicked. She died shortly after. Now, after all
of that, I was so scared, and to be honest,
my first reaction was to laugh. It may have been rude,
but I was so spooked that I needed to release
some tension. He then looked at me and said, you
can laugh all you want, but there is proof. While
he said that, he lifted his hand and pointed to something.
It was a black box on a top shelf, which
you definitely needed a letter to get to. The smirk
that I had on my face from laughing disappeared and
it was official. I was terrified. He then changed subjects
and later asked me not to tell anyone about it,
because he was told not the spread information that could
scare people away from the property. I promised that I
was going to keep it quiet, knowing that I was
indeed going to be breaking that promise the day after.
I then told Lily about it the next day, without
knowing it was a mistake because she turned out to
be too scared to look into the matter. I, however,
needed to see what was in that box, so I
told some other people, and to my luck, they were
up to the challenge. One night, we grabbed a ladder
and managed to get up to the box. We opened it,
and I immediately regretted all the decisions I had made.
All the written accounts he had told me about they
existed and were very well preserved in plastic coverings. The
account of the intern who died, well, all I'm going
to say is that it was all true, and there
were even pictures to prove it. Everything was true, and
there was even more about the lady in the Victorian dress,
but I stopped. I needed to stop. Have you ever
heard of the phrase curiosity killed the cat? Well, my
curiosity indeed killed any sense of peace and safety that
I felt while being there. Knowing this happened in the
first three weeks and I had a whole other month there,
I was not excited anymore, especially since my job was
a night shift type of job. We then closed the
box and we left it in its place. We obviously
talked about our findings, but we decided to leave it there.
What happens at the library stays at the library, someone said.
The days after that were weird, and we tried to
forget about what happened, and to be honest, we did
somewhat of a good job. We hung around a lot,
drank a lot, and had as much fun as we could,
and in a matter of days I felt okay once again.
Like two weeks after that, the internship was about to
be over and the director of the place decided to
throw a party for everyone one at his house. We
were all very excited, but obviously sad since I was
not going to see any of my friends that I
made ever again. When I saw the date of the party,
it was my last night of work, so unfortunately I
was not able to go. The night of the party
finally arrived and everyone was getting ready. I walked around
to see if at least one of my friends was
going to be staying, but no, it turned out that
everyone was going. The reality that I was going to
be the only one on the property didn't really hit me,
as I'm a forgetful person, and I actually found myself
being very okay with the idea. The hours passed and
it was around midnight and I was still awake because
of work, so I decided to get into an article
that I needed to read. I was in my room
with the screen door closed and the wooden door open.
It was a peaceful night, very quiet and serene. The
light breeze coming through the screen door made the room
feel comfortable, so I decided to just stay there and
read my article. I got up to the top bunk
and with my back facing the door, I started reading.
I would say that like half an hour had passed
when all of a sudden, I started to hear heavy
footsteps coming up the stairs. I knew some of the
students wore heavy boots all the time, so I assumed
it was one of them. Not paying too much attention
to the footsteps, I kept reading since I was about
to finish and I was getting into an important conclusion
of the study. Then whoever was coming up the stairs
reached the top and stopped for a second, but I
was still very into my article. Suddenly the screen door
of my room opened wide, and it did have somewhat
of a little lock that you also had to unlock
to get in. With my back still facing the door,
I assumed that it was Lily coming back from the party.
Four very heavy footsteps then reached my bunk bed, and
that's when I finally turned around while saying, so Lily,
how was the party? But this is when I realized
that there was no one there, but you could feel
a presence being on the top bunk. I could almost
feel how my face was close to whatever this was
in front of me. I was frozen, almost paralyzed, and
my heart was racing too fast. I gasped for air
while staring at the door slowly closing. Once I felt
that it was all gone, I jumped off the top
bunk and closed both doors, and I turned on every
light possible. I was trembling horribly, and I could not
believe what just happened. And I really thought that I
had fallen asleep and it was all just a vivid dream,
but sadly it was not. I was fully awake and
even more now. I tried to go back to reading,
but I couldn't concentrate. A while after everyone eventually returned
from the party. I could hear their laughter and I
could smell the alcohol from a mile away. I was
not going to ruin their night, so I decided to
fake that I was asleep. My alarm then went off
at three a m. To go to work, and I
turned it off. I decided that I was going to
give an excuse the next day to my boss. I
couldn't move from my bed, and some parts of me
were still trembling. All the stories, the encounters, the evidence
from the box in the library, what happened to the
intern that stayed behind all of it flooded my thoughts.
Days after that, I ran into my friend, the staff
member who told me about everything in the box. I
needed to tell him what had happened, but as soon
as I told him that I had heard and seen something,
he said, nope. I don't want to know. This place
already scares me enough. Eventually, the program came to an
end and I was back home when I told my
family what had happened. Thankfully, they are very open minded
and have had supernatural experiences before, so they understood completely
and they comforted me. To this day, I wonder who
entered my room and why. Maybe they got close to
my bed to tell me something that my ears just
couldn't hear. Maybe they were asking for help. I will
never know, and that will haunt me forever