Strangetober Macabre Minisode #7 | True Paranormal Stories for Halloween

0:03 Welcome back stranger. It's strange Tober Eve eve and I'm celebrating with another mini Strange O Ween episode. These macabre minisodes will be story narrations only, but every other Wednesday I still release a main episode with my usual commentary after the story, including dragging you kicking and screaming down endless rabbit holes. Obviously, before we get to our true strange story. Just a quick reminder, if you're ingesting a whole lot more scary content lately and you find yourself scared and wide awake at 3:00 AM, remember that you can feel afraid and not be in danger. Definitely, probably, maybe. And a special spectral shout out to my Patreon patrons who helped make the podcast possible. TJ Hotter of Tapes of Trepidation podcast, G Man Music Ted, Keith and Tori, thank you to my Fiendish 5 for supporting the show.

0:58 Now it sounds like it's about to rain Hellcats and Hell hounds out there, so you know what that means. On to the true Strangel wean stories here on Madam Strange Ways. Phantom Cat by Jason So about 8 years ago my older brother and I were driving to a nearby gas station to fill up the car. My brother was driving and I was in the passenger seat. As we were pulling into the station, I saw a black cat that was running across the road.

1:52 Which is odd in itself because the station is on a pretty busy highway and I've gone to that station for years and have never seen a cat anywhere near there before or afterwards to this day. Yet as I was watching this cat run across the road, it got about halfway across when suddenly it just faded away into a plume of smoke right before my eyes. I was completely stunned and was super confused. I was watching a cat one second and the next it turned into smoke. I remained totally silent and I didn't say anything to my brother next to me because I was still processing it and I was wondering if I was going crazy or if my eyes were just playing tricks on me. But then out of nowhere my brother suddenly spoke up and said hey did did you just see a cat running across the road that faded away into smoke?

2:54 And I was super relieved and was like oh good you saw that too. I thought I was going crazy. Turns out both of us saw the exact same thing, what was clearly a black cat running across the road and then suddenly fading into smoke and dissipating away. We still bring this up to each other and talk about it once in a while when we're driving along somewhere together. It was such an odd and strange experience, but I'm glad we both got to experience it together as it made for a cool talking topic.

3:40 Saw something in my grandparents old trailer by Anonymous. All right so this is stuck with me for years and I still can't explain it. I lived in Oklahoma from about 2014 to 2017. Small town, middle of nowhere, and at the time there was this abandoned trailer house on our property used to belong to my grandma. She and my grandpa lived in it back in the day, but by the time I was a kid it was long abandoned and used for storage. It was literally falling apart. One day I was doing yard work with my brother and we were heading back to the main house.

4:20 On impulse, I looked into the broken back window of that trailer, which was the bedroom window, and I saw a pale, long limbed figure standing in the shadows of the room, just silently waving at me. I turned to my brother and asked, Do you see that? And the second he looked, he just started running. And of course, I also ran for the hills with him, Tripped on a damn water pipe too. So yeah, we both saw it. And a year later, I asked him again out of nowhere, remember what we saw in the window.

5:03 And he described it exactly how I remembered. Same figure, same window, same feeling of being watched by something. Now the weird part, When I was way younger, possibly even before I was born, I had this memory that always stuck with me. My first conscious memory ever. I was in this shed, brand new, looking totally clean and bright. A man I didn't recognize was talking to me, gently smiling. My brother was with me, putting a necklace around my neck.

5:44 Then the man walked into the backroom of the shed and that was it. Years later, I realized that shed from the memory existed in real life, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. It was my grandfather's old work shed connected to the same property. I never saw it up close as a kid, yet the memory matched it perfectly, literally down the layout and how it looked when it was new. I eventually told my dad the memory years after the fact and he froze, asked me to describe the man. I did. Tall, pale, short hair, kind but serious face.

6:27 My dad showed me a photo. It was my grandfather, a man who died long before I was born. I never saw a picture of him before then, but I knew that face. So now I'm left with all of this. A memory from before I had any context where I met my deceased grandfather. A necklace placed on me by my brother, almost like a ritual or marking. A silent pale figure waving from the trailer years later, The same trailer my grandparents shared. Could the figure have been him trying to reach back out or something tied to that land and memory?

7:11 Is it possible to remember something from before you were even born? I'm open to thoughts. Paranormal, spiritual, ancestral, whatever angle you've got. This still gives me the chills to this day. Thanks. Midsummer Festival by Duchess 5788. I work in a pharmaceutical company. Our site is big, think multiple buildings, roughly 800 people working in shifts and away from the general population. 20 plus minutes drive to the nearest residential area.

8:02 Last year we had A Midsummer festival A2 hour event where employees could hang out, play some games and have some snacks. I was volunteering. It was set outdoors on a lawn under a tent. I was talking to a participant and had the urge to look behind me, away from all the buildings and near the woods. On the asphalt Rd., which is only used for delivery trucks, was a child about four or five years old in a Halloween costume of a black bear and holding a pail, the pumpkin shaped one kids use to collect candies. We kept looking at each other. Then I walked to another volunteer and asked them what's that kid doing here?

8:49 They looked in the general direction of my sight and said what kid? I asked one more person if they could see a kid and they said no. Then I turned around trying to find someone I knew and when I looked back there was no one. There could be a perfectly normal explanation for this, but I couldn't figure out why no one else was able to see the kid. And even if a delivery driver brought a kid with them, we are not allowed as it's a manufacturing site. Why would they be walking around in a bear costume in the sweltering heat of August?

9:40 Thank you for joining me. For more true strange stories of the unexplained, remember that you can feel afraid and not be in danger. You're safe here with me, probably. Please follow the podcast, leave a rating on Spotify or Apple, or tell your friends and foes about the show. It would mean the world to me. The underworld, obviously. I mean, come on. Was that not? Was that not clear? Madam Strangeways is produced and narrated by me. Madam Strangeways thememusicisbymarina.ryan@marinamakes.co Cover art is by Andrea Chisel Roldan at Cult of Teddy on Instagram. You can submit your own true strange story at madamstrangeways.com or e-mail it to madamstrangeways@gmail.com.

10:33 See you soon, she said ominously.