Shadow dogs, East Coast bigfoot and the glowing man (Sn. 21 Ep. 44)

Derek Hayes (0:52)

Good evening, and welcome to Monsters Among Us. I am your guide, Derek Hayes.

Welcome back to the second spooky season episode. It's a real pleasure to be with you here this evening.

I hope you're here for a fright, because I have a slate of calls to share with you tonight that will likely turn your hair white. Stories about big, hairy monsters, mysterious glowing men, doppelgangers, premonitions, shadow dogs, and even a tale from an infamously haunted location. But first, we kick things off here tonight with a chance encounter with a ghost. Please welcome Carla from North Carolina.

Carla (1:42)

Hi, Derek. My name is Carla and I'm calling from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, Smoky Mountains. Although my event happened in DeBerry, Florida, Central Florida, and what happened was in the particular house that I was living in, I had lived there about 22, 23 years, and it was just a regular day, and I had stepped out onto my front porch to go check the mail. But when I did so, I saw my neighbor, Pete, walking down the street towards my mailbox. And I think I was like in my pajamas or in my robe or something like that. For some reason, I didn't want to run into anybody, so I was just going to stand there and wait for him to pass by. But he stopped at my mailbox and he was looking across the street, and Pete was kind of the neighborhood busy body, I guess you could say. You know, if there was something going on, he knew about it or he was watching it. And so, he was staring across the street and there was new construction going on. They were putting up a new house and they were laying down the sod that day, putting down the grass. And so, he was watching all this taking place. And Pete had lived in the neighborhood well before I ever got there. Probably 40, 50 years he had been there. And I remember just watching him just get in the feeling that he wasn't, you know, like I bet he's not happy that they're putting a house there.

And so, eventually, he looked over and saw me and he put up his hand. He waved at me. I waved at him and he went on his way. He turned the corner and, you know, went to his house.

And so, the next day, my daughter comes to me and she says, Mom, did you hear that Pete died?

And, you know, I'm like, Oh my God, what happened? I just saw him.

And she's like, when did you just see him? And I said, yesterday when I went to check the mail. And she's like, Mom, he died like three months ago.

And my first reaction was, well, I don't know where you got your information from, but you're wrong because I just saw him. In fact, I think that's exactly what I said. And so she pulled up his obituary. And sure enough, he had died several months earlier. And the thing about Pete was you couldn't mistake Pete. He was an older guy. He was a small guy. And he walked in a very distinctive way. He would walk kind of hunched forward. And he took these little tiny steps. He walked kind of fast. And I always remember thinking like he walks like a bird.

And also, he always had on a maroon ball cap. Always. Never in 20 or more years saw him without it ever. And he always wore a t-shirt and shorts. No matter, you know, what season or that's always what he was wearing. And so I say all that just to say there's no mistaking Pete at all. Not to mention the fact that from my front porch to my mailbox, maybe two, two and a half car lengths. So, you know, he was maybe 40 feet away.

And yeah, that's the day I saw a ghost. You know, out of all the things that have happened to me in my 40 plus years, that's the one that without a doubt 110% cannot be explained away. You know, I didn't see him out of the corner of my eye. I didn't see him in my peripheral vision. We locked eyes. We waved at each other. I watched him standing by the mailbox for probably two minutes waiting for him to move away before he saw me. And, you know, I don't know how it happened. I don't know why it happened. I don't know why he showed himself to me or, you know, I don't know how it works. Maybe he was just still, you know, patrolling the neighborhood in death, the way he did in life, and I just happened to see it. But once I realized he was, in fact, dead, I was really freaked out, obviously. And I remember, you know, calling my mom and telling her, like, I saw him yesterday, but he's dead. And she's like, oh, well, you know, you probably saw him longer ago than you think you did. It probably wasn't as recently as you think it was when you saw him. And I'm like, mom, it was yesterday.