The narrator had a firm belief in paranormal experiences from childhood and vowed to confront them if they occurred again.
The narrator heard footsteps approaching but saw no one, leading to a realization that the experience was paranormal.
The missing AirPod was found inside the dryer after two days, despite a thorough search.
The narrator experienced a vivid smell of burned leaves extinguished by rain, accompanied by a disorienting sensation of being in a forest during a storm.
The narrator blacked out and found themselves at a stoplight, with no memory of how they avoided the collision.
Amber's behavior, repeating phrases like a glitch, was never fully explained, leaving the narrator bewildered.
The key stopped working, and no explanation was found, leading to confusion and a sense of a glitch in reality.
The keys reappeared dead center in the passenger seat after the narrator had given up searching and paid for a new key.
The stepsister denied knowing, leading the narrator to question if they had traveled to another universe or if it was a dream.
The figurine vanished without a trace, despite a thorough search, leaving the narrator heartbroken.
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Whatever you're in the mood for, find the detail that moves you with curated touches at the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. If you have a true scary story you'd like to share with the podcast, go to astheravendreams.com and click the button to send it my way. Also, if the platform you're on has the option to rate the podcast or leave a comment, please consider doing so.
And as always, thank you. I'm a 35 year old guy living in Sweden, and this story of mine is truly mindbending. There's a precursor to this story that happened to me when I was around 7 years old that I won't go into here, but just know that paranormal experiences set a firm belief in me when I turned 12.
that if I ever were to experience something like that again, any paranormal things, I would face them. If it so takes 10 years, 30 years, or 50 years, I will wait for it and I will face it head on next time it happens. So when I was 21 years old, I went out one late night from my parents' house, where I lived, to have a smoke.
We lived in an ordinary Swedish neighborhood, with houses stretching along both sides of my street. As I went outside, I saw that it was a clear night sky, and as I'm fascinated by our universe, I always took my time looking at the stars whenever I could. To get a better view, I went out through our fence gate and stood in the middle of the street looking up. The stars were beautiful, and much clearer than it usually was.
As I'm standing there, I start to hear someone approaching me from a distance down the street, maybe like 30 to 40 meters away from me. It was very dark since it was late autumn, and very late at night, but I still tried to see who it was, as I could only hear the footsteps. As I'm standing there, squinting with my eyes and adjusting as you do with your body, you know, rocking back and forth to get a better view,
I realized that what if the person could see me? He would probably think I'm mad, standing there, late at night in the middle of the street, smoking a cigarette, moving around and looking intensely. So I just went inside our fence gate and stood there instead. I still wanted to know who was approaching on my street, so to speak. So I still tried to see him. I moved to our driveway where I could have a better look down the road.
There's nothing blocking my view here except for my closest neighbor's hedge that's about 70 centimeters tall. So I have a good overview down the whole street. Nothing. Just the sound of someone's footsteps slowly walking towards me down the street. It was when I stood there that I realized that this isn't normal, but paranormal. This guy was about 10 meters away now, and I couldn't see anyone.
When I realized this, every cell in my body screamed, "I've been waiting for you, you bastard!" I had sworn to myself to confront it whenever it happened the next time. And boy was I hellbent on it. The whole thing made no sense. I could feel it in my bones that it was paranormal.
But in my logical brain, the only rational possibility left was if it was a small person approaching that was shorter than our neighbor's hedge, thus blocking my view of him. So, to eliminate this possibility, I stepped out from our driveway, looking right down the road with nothing to obscure my vision. Nothing. There's no one there. Just the sound of footsteps right in front of me.
I kid you not, the sound of the footsteps were now coming from 3-4 meters right in front of me. He's right there. Right in front of me, but I saw no one. I now truly understand the mechanism of fight or flight. Because my whole body just acted on its own, and I started to run. You see, I was hellbent in my mind to confront him.
I've been waiting nearly a decade for it, but your body just goes on autopilot, and in my case, runs. There's no controlling it. After all, there was nothing to fight against. I ran to our house entrance door that was further away from him, but I was still damn determined to find out what the hell was going on, so I stood there looking instead, as I felt a little safer close to the door.
Sure enough, the sound of someone walking slowly was still there, but now he also had a bicycle with him that he led beside him. How did I know? Do you remember when you were a kid and you put those small plastic balls in the bicycle spokes, so it made that cling-cling-cling sound as the wheels turned? It was exactly that sound, alongside his footsteps. I looked as he passed the gate where I could see right through to the whole street. No one there. Cling-cling-cling.
I tried to see him through the gaps in my fence as he passed, but to no avail. The next clear path to my eyes was between my fence and my other neighbor's driveway. He walked with his bicycle halfway up my neighbor's driveway, cling cling, and then it all stopped. I was certain that he had now noticed me. I felt that he was looking at me, and for some reason, I just knew that it was a boy. I could feel it.
For a brief moment, I was terrified that some ghostly apparition would come flying any second towards my face. But suddenly he dropped his bicycle and started to run down the street. It was like lightning struck my whole body. "Oh no, you won't get away that easily." I sprinted towards our fence gate after him. When I got to the gate, I looked down the street where he had sprinted to and I found nothing. No bicycle left behind and no boy.
There was no way that someone would have sprinted the 30 meters down the street to the first turn before I sprinted my 7 meters out to the street. I calmed down. The experience was over, but then I noticed something. I noticed just how bright the street was. I could clearly see down the whole street. How could I not have seen him in the first place? I looked up. The stars were not anywhere near as bright anymore, and suddenly I realized...
The street lamps were on. They couldn't have been turned on the first time I went out into the street. It was very late night and the lamps come on as soon as it gets a little bit dark outside. No, they hadn't just switched over to night mode. That boy that I heard had extinguished the entire street's electricity with his presence. I never had a feeling that this was a ghost. He felt very much alive.
I believe I got an audio glimpse into a clashing parallel universe, where maybe most things are similar and some are not. Maybe it was daytime for the boy, and he was out with his bicycle. Maybe my house was an old abandoned one, and maybe he eventually also clashed into my universe, seeing my silhouette standing there in the doorway of this creepy old house, looking intensely at him.
Well, then no wonder the poor boy dropped his bicycle and ran for his life. Hello Raven, I really enjoy your glitch stories, and so I'm submitting mine. About a month ago I was sitting on my couch. It was about 10pm, and I was actually listening to a glitch video of yours. I'm pretty new here, so I'm backtracking, checking out the older videos and catching up on stories I've missed.
Anyway, I'm listening on my phone with my AirPods in my ears. I get through a couple of stories, and as I hear the six musical notes that are between the stories, I decide to pause and take a bathroom break. My bathroom is about ten paces from my couch, so I go in and do my thing. As I'm looking in the bathroom mirror while washing my hands, I noticed my right AirPod is missing.
I look on the floor and in the sink which did have the plugs so it didn't fall down the plug hole. It didn't fall down the neck of my t-shirt and I didn't hear it hit the floor. I retraced my no more than ten steps back to the couch in the living room and searched the floor thinking that I would find it. No. I looked on the couch and between the cushions. It was nowhere. I decided I would find it in the morning.
Next morning, I did a thorough search of the whole bathroom, hallway. It was nowhere to be found. Now, I'm thinking maybe my dog picked it up and took it somewhere, so I did a phone search for it, but it could only locate the left airpod. Now I'm thinking, damn, I'm going to have to buy a new one. Fast forward two days, and I'm doing my weekly wash, and as my clothes are now ready to go into the dryer, I open up the dryer door before loading it with my clothes.
And right there is my missing airpod, sitting by itself on the bottom of the drum. I have no idea how, but oh well. By the way, the airpod still worked okay, so wherever it was for two days, it didn't affect it. Hey Raven, I just recently came across your channel and I wanted to say how much I love it, especially the Glitch and the Matrix stories.
I've always had an interest in the paranormal, and I look forward to sharing my weird experiences with you in the community. There's so much that's happened in my life that it sometimes feels like I'm caught between different layers of reality. I know that sounds strange, but once you hear my story, I think you'll get a better idea of what I mean. As a bit of backstory, I frequently have precognitive dreams. Dreams that come true.
Sometimes within days, weeks, or even years. It's like catching a glimpse of the future in my sleep. I can't explain how or why it happens, but it's been a constant theme throughout my life. It's one of the many reasons why I've come to believe that I have some level of psychic ability. But this particular story isn't about my dreams. I'll save those for another time. This is about something that happened while I was wide awake.
A truly terrifying and surreal experience that makes me question what exactly I encountered. Right now I'm living with my best friend and their family, and ever since I moved in, strange things have been happening around me. There have been odd occurrences that I can't explain, but none of them compare to what happened on this one particular night. That night, I was sitting in my bedroom watching YouTube, just trying to wind down before bed.
It was a pretty normal evening until I was suddenly hit with a very strong and distinct smell. At first, I couldn't quite place it, but after a few moments I realized that it smelled like dried leaves that had been burned and then extinguished with rain. The scent was so vivid and overpowering that it was as if I were standing in the middle of a forest previously on fire after a storm. But here's the thing: I was in my bedroom, nothing out of the ordinary.
I tried to shake it off, but the sensation only got stronger. I felt like I was both in my room and in a forest at the same time, almost like I was straddling two realities. I can't fully describe how disorienting it was. I could see the walls of my room, the soft glow of my phone screen, and yet, overlaying that, I was seeing dense, dark trees swaying in the middle of a storm.
I could hear the rain pelting against leaves, and feel the dampness in the air. Even though I was physically still in my bedroom, the weirdest part? It wasn't that I was just seeing the forest, I felt like I was experiencing it through someone else's eyes. It was almost as if I had been transported into another person's consciousness. This person was terrified, hiding in a makeshift shelter deep in the woods.
I could feel their fear as intensely as if it were my own, and it was overwhelming. I could tell that they had been there for a while, maybe a couple of weeks, just trying to survive. I have no idea who this person was, but they were running from something or someone, and the feeling of dread was suffocating. What made this even stranger is that I am originally from the Midwest, and I recently moved to Texas.
I'm nowhere near any forests like the one I was seeing, and it rarely rains in my area, so it wasn't like I was just picking up some nearby sensory cues. The vision or whatever it was had no connection to my current surroundings. At that point, I started to panic. The experience felt so real and yet I was still aware that I was in my room. I didn't know what to do.
I got up and went to my friend's room and woke them up, desperate for help, but they didn't know what to say. I could barely explain what was happening because I didn't understand it myself. I was having a full-blown panic attack, caught between two realities and unable to pull myself out. Now, for a bit more context, I have dabbled in things like remote viewing, astral projection, and channeling.
so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the idea of stepping outside of my own consciousness. I've always believed in psychic abilities because, like I mentioned earlier, I've had precognitive dreams and gut feelings that ended up being accurate more times than I can count. But this experience was unlike anything I have ever encountered before.
I don't know if I was somehow tapping into another dimension, another person's experiences, or something entirely different. I couldn't shake the feeling that this person, whoever they were, was in serious danger, and that I was supposed to help them. But how could I? I didn't know where they were, who they were, or how to reach them. The whole thing left me feeling completely helpless.
Was I glimpsing into a parallel reality? Was I channeling someone's experiences in a different part of the world? Or was this some kind of message meant for me to receive? I have no answers, and honestly, I'm not sure I want to. The whole experience left me rattled, and I'm just hoping that I never go through something like that again. Once was more than enough for me. In the days following, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened.
I kept asking myself, what if that was me in another universe or timeline? What if I was supposed to do something? But the truth is, I don't know. And I may never know. I've always appreciated my psychic abilities, but this experience was way beyond what I'm comfortable with. I don't know what I tapped into that night, and I'm not eager to revisit it any time soon. So, Raven, that's my story.
I would love to hear your thoughts, and if you or anyone else has experienced something similar. Maybe there's someone out there who can help me make sense of it, because I'm still trying to wrap my head around what happened. Thanks for listening, and I hope to never have a night like that again. Hey Raven, this happened a few years ago, but it shaped the course of my life.
I've always been a spiritual guy. I believe in God, not that I follow anything too closely or ritually, but the odds of this happening randomly are surely too wild to comprehend, so I believe it's a glitch, or at least an event engineered by a greater power. I'd been wanting a copy of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses for a while. A bookstore in the city had it in. I took the train in and picked it up.
I got back to my apartment complex and went in the back entrance, which I don't normally use. At the back entrance are the mailboxes, all stacked like beehives. I only rent a bedroom there, I'm not legally registered so it's rare that I get mail, but as I passed the mailboxes I thought I would do my housemaid a solid and collect her mail.
Again, it's rare that I carry the mailbox key, but I had my backpack on and thought I would check the compartment in the off chance that I'd chucked the key in at some point. I had. The key was there, front zipper. I knelt and wrestled the mailbox lock, opened up to a sea of detritus. Apparently nobody had checked our mail in time. Maybe thirty letters lay there, some damp and some muddy.
I made myself comfortable and took them out a pile at a time, leafing through for any clean ones addressed to my housemate that I could take in for her. About a dozen in, I came across a small, pristine envelope, wider than the rest, and on the front, my name had been written by hand. I was intrigued. It's always interesting getting mail addressed to you in pen, but also because, like I said earlier, I'm not registered to this address, and I live in a different country.
None of my circle around here would write letters. I assumed that maybe it was a birthday card that had sat there for months. Anyway, I nonchalantly slid the envelope inside the novel I had just bought, all the pretty horses, and then I shut up the mailbox and headed in, deciding that it was nothing worth fetching in the house for my housemate. Just a bunch of junk. I got in my home and took the envelope from inside the novel, chucked the novel on the kitchen counter, and tore open the envelope.
My excitement faded when I saw that, even though it was a letter written in beautiful cursive font, it was clearly a religious letter, not a personal one for me. I read the first line and then my eyes were drawn to the middle, to the only line written in marker, or stronger pen at least. It stood out, dead center, as if everything else was written around it only to emphasize its importance.
It was a Bible verse: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." I don't know the wider context because I didn't read the rest of the letter, but anyways... My attention turned to All the Pretty Horses, the novel I had just bought. I picked it up from the counter and read the blurb, smelled the pages, and then, as I often do with new books, turned to a random page to read a sentence. I was stupefied. I couldn't believe my eyes.
I was reading the same Bible verse, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. The first random page I had turned to, the first sentence I randomly looked at, contained the same Bible verse that I had just read on the letter, the letter I had carried into my home inside the novel. Any Cormac McCarthy fans out there will know that All the Pretty Horses is not a religious book. It's about two guys cutting through Mexico on horseback looking for work.
What are the odds on that being a random event? Sure, the Bible verse is one of the more famous, but even if the novel was a Christian book, what are the chances of me opening to a random page and seeing, first, the very same Bible verse that I had just read highlighted on a different, unrelated letter? A letter I happened to acquire on the same day, in the same hour, as the book.
And then there's the synergy of me carrying the letter inside the book, as if somehow the verse had transferred from one medium to the other. I just want to know what it means. Hi Raven. I want to start off by saying that your podcast is my absolute favorite. I share it with all my friends and family, and now they're hooked too. Rightfully so. Thank you. Now, my story. I should have died back in 2021.
This all started when my best friend and I were taking a trip to Florida. We're both from a college town in the Midwest. I'm used to driving on backcountry roads, never going more than 50 miles per hour because I'm a nervous driver. However, being the only one with the license, I became the driver once we landed from the airport.
I was not thrilled about this, but my friend was notorious for not being the best driver, hence the reason I was the only one with a valid license. For those of you who have visited Florida, you know the driving there is no country road. The third day into our trip, we decided to go to the beach, so I drive us there. By this point, I'm getting a little more used to the roads as well as the enhanced speed limits."
I'm feeling more confident, so I'm feeling a bit more at ease, and just moving with the traffic. I'm going 70 miles per hour at least as I'm in the middle of a six-lane highway. My best friend and I are just singing along and having a great time, excited that it's our first trip together. The singing quickly stopped and turned into both of us screaming for our lives. There was a car coming right toward us at an excessive speed. It was going to smash right into us.
All I could think was I needed to move, I needed to switch lanes, and we had to get away from this car, or we were going to die. As I looked around, we're boxed in. Cars around us in each lane. There was nowhere for me to go without hitting someone going at least 70. A crash like that with any car could be fatal. This is where things start to get very strange for me. I was terrified when this was happening. Screaming. I don't scream.
All of a sudden, the fear left my body, and I turned on my turn signal. From that point until we were stopped at the next stoplight, everything went black for me. There was nowhere for us to have gone, no lane for me to switch to. We should have been killed, and maybe we were. The next thing I remember is being stopped at the light, as the cars around me are full of people clapping and giving me a thumbs up. It was such a relief, but we were still so shaken the rest of the day.
Now, I know this sounds like a bad driver story, but what still freaks me out to this day is the fact that I don't remember driving. I don't remember what I did to get us out of that situation. It was like as soon as I turned on my turn signal, I left my body and it was no longer me driving. I remember my best friend saying, ''I don't know how you just did that. That was some Matrix crap.''
This was way before I really knew much about glitches in the Matrix, and I couldn't explain it. I don't know how one second we should have been smashed by a reckless driver, and the next we were sitting at a stoplight. Maybe it was a glitch. Maybe someone or something was looking out for us. Or maybe we did die that day, and we switched timelines.
Hey Raven, here's a Glitch in the Matrix story that just happened yesterday, and I think you should hear about it. It was an average Saturday when I dropped my daughter off at the park to meet her friends. I settled on a bench with my coffee. I couldn't help but take in the scenery around me. The park was buzzing with energy, typical of a sunny weekend. Kids were playing, parents were chatting, and the distant sound of laughter echoed through the air.
I noticed Amber walking over, towards me. She's one of my daughter's best friends. She was wearing one of those crop tops that shows off her belly button, and those ugly crocs that seem to be in fashion for some reason that I'll never understand. They're everywhere these days. Amber's boyfriend with his trademark mullet had just dropped her off. I watched as Amber plopped down beside me, full of energy, ready to share whatever new lingo she had recently learned.
I was telling her last week that I couldn't understand the 14 year old these days. At 42 I felt old. She then told me that she would explain what these words meant next time she saw me. So here she was, keeping her word. She was going on and on as I chuckled, trying to keep up. "Okay, hit me with it," I said, knowing that it would probably go over my head, waiting for the next strange word.
Amber launched into a quick explanation of something called No Cap. I nodded, pretending to understand, but my mind was swirling. She was always so enthusiastic about these new phrases, and I admired her ability to keep up with the ever-changing language of the teens. But then, just as we were laughing, Amber's demeanor shifted. Her face went blank, and she suddenly started repeating, No Cap, No Cap, No Cap, No Cap.
It was as if she were glitching out, like a computer struggling to function. I thought at first this was just a new TikTok trend and my daughter might be filming it from behind to capture my reaction. Her head twitched to the right and then snapped back to me. "Slay, slay, slay, ghosted. You're gonna get ghosted, ghosted." The repetitive phrases echoed in my mind and my heart raced.
I glanced around, half expecting to see a camera nearby, but there was no one. Just families enjoying the day. Then she turned her head to the left and started saying Riz. The confusion settled in and I could feel my stomach twist. Was she having a seizure? A stroke? My mind raced with panic. I had to do something. Amber, are you okay? I finally managed to ask with my voice shaking. There was no response. Just more of the same strange mantra.
I felt helpless. Frozen on the bench? Should I call an ambulance? My thoughts spiraled in a dark corner of anxiety as I debated the urgency of the situation. But then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Amber blinked rapidly, her eyes flickering like a malfunctioning light. She looked at me for a moment and the eerie atmosphere dissipated. What's up? She said, laughing. Why are you looking at me like that? I was bewildered.
"'You were just saying some really weird things.' I stammered, still trying to wrap my head around what just happened. She brushed her hair behind her ear, looking genuinely confused. "'Really? What do you mean?' "'I was just talking about those latest words. You'll get these eventually,' she said, shrugging it off as if nothing unusual had occurred at all. I blinked at her, my heart still racing.'
You were repeating things like some kind of computer glitch. I thought you were in trouble. Amber laughed again, that carefree sound that reminded me she was still just a kid. You're silly, I'm totally fine. She looked at me with those bright, innocent eyes, and suddenly I felt foolish for thinking anything was wrong. As I sat there, I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing. Could I have been so wrapped up in my thoughts that I misinterpreted her playful nature and
The surreal moment hung in the air, and I tried to convince myself that maybe this was just a weird phase she was going through, some kind of trend I didn't understand, or maybe this was a menopause symptom I was having. The atmosphere around us shifted back to normal, the chatter and laughter of the park enveloping us. It felt like a small piece of reality had shifted, like we had crossed into another realm but no one else seemed to notice.
I chuckled nervously, still feeling the remnants of anxiety coursing through me. As we continued our conversation, it felt as though the strange episode had evaporated into the background, like a fleeting dream. Yet, in the corners of my mind, I couldn't shake the feeling that something had happened, something I couldn't explain. Maybe I had witnessed a glitch in the matrix that only I could see, or perhaps it was just a peculiar moment in the life of a teenager.
Either way, it left me pondering the nature of reality and how easily it can bend in unexpected ways. Hey Raven, I wasn't going to do this as I've never told this story before to anyone but like many others who send in their stories to you, I've been listening to your channel for a while now and thought, well, why not? So, too, unlike most of the others,
Anyways, to get down to it...
I live in Regina, Canada, and have worked as a steelworker there for a very long time. I'm an average dude with no major hangups. I have a stable home and a decent network of good friends. So, basically, my big party days and going out regularly are behind me. I work, pay the bills, and mostly putter around my house or polish my car on my days off.
and can even reinforce my basic sameness and tranquility by saying that I even have a cat and goldfish now. I'm not saying that I'm a total bore, but I just want to emphasize that I have a simpler, more stable life than other times in my past when I was much more of a Hellraiser. And actually, I think most of us as we get a little older can totally relate to this as well. Okay. Okay.
So now I've laid the groundwork with just one other caveat that, as a steelworker, I've been working 12-hour graveyard shifts on a rotating schedule as well. So needless to say, when I get off a shift, it's straight to the shower and then to bed to crash. This applies to between shifts, or to my first day and the start of my days off as well.
Again, after a long, tough 12-hour pull with the work I do, sleep is simply mandatory for the body as needed. So, now getting down to this event as it happened to me in October of last year. I had just started my days off and woke up way later in the day, around suppertime, and as it was mid-October, it was also the start of hockey season in Canada. So, for those that live here, this needs no further explanation.
But for those who don't, well then I can simply point to the start of another cricket season in India, or rugby season in South Africa, or baseball or football seasons in the United States. Yes, Raven, as any avid sports fan can tell you, when it's a new season it's time to once again ride it out with your favorite team or teams. All the highs and the lows, the screaming and yelling, and whooping it up after a win.
and the despondent nights of moping after a tough loss, especially if it's to a fervently hated rival. Anyways, I had just got up, charged downstairs, grabbed some leftovers out of my lunch cooler box, snagged a beer out of the fridge, and got settled in on the couch just as the national anthems wrapped up, and the players started circling the ice for the puck drop.
So I sat and watched the first period closely as this was the first look at my hockey team for the new season, and I wanted to see some of the new players we had acquired in the offseason, and just simply get a good first feel for the kind of team we might have for the run this time, and naturally get a feel of where my hopes might go. So I watched closely, until it was late in the first period and after the next offside whistle.
I knew there would be a short set of commercials and thought this is a perfect time to run my empty plate into the kitchen, dump my empty beer can and snag another cold one out of the fridge. I'll also add that I felt perfectly too, as I had just started days off. It was the start of the new season, my team certainly did look good out the gate, and we were skating well to a 1-0 lead over a hated rival. So all was grand.
until I stepped back into the living room with my new beer, frozen just as it was dangling in my hand, and total and complete shock set in, for I was not gone from the living room or my game for more than 45 seconds, if even that. For now, in fact, the first period was over, and the whole intermission between periods, and it was now well into the second period and my team was down two goals to one.
I know what I saw. I know what I saw and cannot describe the feelings really accurately here. Just complete disconnect. Total shock. My eyes darted all around my living room looking for anything or something that could possibly explain this. No, I was not looking for something else out of place. And as it turned out, there never was.
but just looking around wildly, like you've been lost suddenly before, or panic when you've misplaced something vital that you suddenly need, that you were sure was right there beside you. Complete and utter disassociation. Slowly I put my beer down on the coffee table, stepped slowly back after more than a good minute had gone by, and backed up again into the kitchen through my entryway.
This time, I took a short pause to try and regain some of my balance and composure, not really succeeding all that much, but at least enough to tamp down the sense of disconnect and spinning confusion. This time, I looked very slowly around my kitchen, and threw the entryway in reverse back into my living room. Nothing to see here. Situation normal.
So slowly I moved back into my living room, thinking automatically that I must have been seeing things, or got something wrong somehow or some way. Obviously the score I knew to be real had to be there. So I looked over at the TV and stared very carefully at the screen once more. Fleetingly I thought maybe it was a tape delay, and they'd run the program forward. But I knew better as I've been watching this sports network my whole adult life,
and knew full well that a tape-delayed game did not play the national anthems, had far fewer commercials for the shortened game, and the live logo at the bottom corner of the screen would have been overlapped with the tape-delayed one. No, this was indeed a live hockey game where at least 40 to 50 minutes of it, including the full intermission, disappeared. Gone.
And as one final ode to transparency and full disclosure in this story, I knew also that I had not lost that time. For you can believe, had I been watching the whole time, then there would certainly have been more than one empty beer can sitting right over there on my kitchen counter. So, no question about that either, as my long rituals of several beers and a hockey game goes back several decades as well.
and most Canadian hockey fans would swear to this alongside me without a second thought. So, anyways, that's my story. And that's what happened to me one day in my home last October. And like everyone else out there, when confronted with the totally inexplicable, like many have posted here, I know what I saw. I have no rational or possible coherent or tangible explanation.
And like everyone else out there too, even after pondering the event many times since, I have not once doubted what I had seen. So that's it. And thanks to all for hearing my story, and hope for myself at least, that I never get knocked out of my senses like that in this life, ever again. Hi Raven. I found your channel this year, and I relate to so many stories.
Your voice is also nice to listen to while I fall asleep. Like many storytellers, I have many stories that I have to send in, but it's nighttime, so I'm skipping the scarier stuff for now. When I get time, I will send it in. When my son and I first moved into our apartment four years ago, I was 34 and he was 11. He was just old enough to be home alone while I worked, and I was put on afternoon shift or midnights.
When he would message me that he needed me, I would come straight home, which was about a 7 minute drive, just setting the picture up. One night, I was home and it was a cool night. We had one fan that my son had, even though he had screens in his windows, and I did not. I still cracked open my windows just to get a cool breeze into my room. That night, I had a dream that I was above myself watching me sleep.
and something was scratching at the wall under my open window, and it was about to jump into my room. I do not know what it was, but it was not friendly. I jumped out of my bed and shut my window. I went into my son's room and crawled into bed with him. I can't sleep when I'm hot, and I was a little scared. I forgot about that dream, and a week later, my son was home alone, and he would sleep in my bed when I would work midnights.
He messaged me at 3am asking me to come home because he was really scared. So I clocked out and drove kind of fast. I was worried. When I come in he hugged me and told me about his dream. He'd had the same exact dream that I had the week prior and I was in shock. I didn't tell him about having that dream. He knows now but he's 15 and I'm home every night now too.
We had the same dream down to us both jumping up and shutting the window with our eyes shut. At that time, I took a few days off to get him a cat. Cats typically protect you from bad spirits, and I told him that. We did not have issues again together. There have been a few times that I've had sleep paralysis, and I believe my son has too. The other issue is things go missing and then show up out of the blue.
I had a press-on nail pop off in the past week, and I set the nail to the side to glue it back on. And when I grabbed the glue, I had nails on all of my fingers, even though I was looking at the nail that popped off on my side table. There are so many glitches, but these are the least scary. I also have paranormal stories, but I live in Appalachia, and we don't talk about those at night. This is messing with my head big time.
I visit my mom every day. She lives alone. I drop my fiancé at work and drive straight to her house every single day. I hang for a few hours, go pick up my fiancé, and we go home to our apartment. Every day. Rinse. Repeat. I don't know if this matters, but a few months ago, she had every lock in her house changed. I was there. And I have keys to all of them.
Old owners of the house didn't leave keys to every lock, so that's why she did that. I usually show up before she wakes up for the day. I was here yesterday. I come in through the garage door that opens into the laundry room every single day. I only have four keys on my keyring. Her garage slash laundry door, our apartment, mailbox, and my car.
I always have to unlock the door when I get to her house. Always. Yesterday, my key worked fine. Today it doesn't. I stood there for what felt like forever, trying to unlock that door and my key does not work. I eventually gave up and entered through the front doors. Keys work just fine for those. I keep them on a separate ring inside my purse.
Once inside, I tried and tried again, and my key will not open the door that it opened yesterday. Then I checked her keys, and her key to that door doesn't work either. She had a few spares made of all the new lock keys, and none of them work either. It's like the lock was changed in the night. Assuming someone didn't break into her house, which has an alarm system, and change the lock, how is this possible?
None of the keys work anymore. I tried a total of ten keys. This is so stupid, but I am so confused. Now, this part may seem strange to some people because I am adding a bit of a caveat to this story. This story ended up not actually being a glitch in the matrix. The reason I'm including this is to show that, sometimes, these stories do have logical explanations.
By no means am I saying that every glitch story has a logical explanation, because let's be honest, some of them don't. This one did. Apparently this was an issue with corrosion in the lock. The person ended up spraying PAM into the lock, the non-stick cooking spray, which by the way is never suggested because it will destroy the lock potentially, and the keys actually worked.
Now you may ask why I'm including this if this isn't a glitch in the matrix. Again, I'm doing so to show that even the strangest stories, stories where something works one day and doesn't the next, they may appear to be glitches, but sometimes there's, again, logical explanations. Plus, still an interesting story in my opinion. I'm an arborist, and I cut and load tree limbs into my trailer daily.
When I arrive, I park my truck and set my keys on the passenger seat. I do this so routinely that it's a muscle memory movement, and on the day of which I perceived a glitch in my reality, I was doing a typical job. I loaded my trailer and was set to leave. I reached for my keys, and they weren't there. The homeowner saw that I was confused and we began looking through my truck. We couldn't find the keys.
We took everything out of the truck and still no keys. We looked in the cracks of every seat. We looked under every floor mat. He called his son out, and we tore through my truck all the while I kept insisting that I always leave them on the passenger seat. I eventually unloaded the tree brush off my trailer three times and sifted through the brush with the father and son.
Soon after that, I called my wife because she is the best I've met at finding lost items, and she couldn't find the keys either. It got dark, and I gave up and paid a locksmith $250 for a new key. This vehicle is my only truck, and I work out of it every day. It's also my personal vehicle. I'm stating that just to say that I spend more time in it than my house."
I continued working every weekday in my truck like normal, and then three weeks later, as I'm driving down the highway to a job, I see in my peripheral, my original keys. Same broken key fob and everything, just sitting dead center in my passenger seat. The only thing on the seat were the keys. Dead center. I called my wife and the client and told them both, and they couldn't believe it.
As much as it was weird to them, it was five times more weird to me. I immediately felt like I was in the Matrix. Just a week or so later, I stumbled upon your podcast and felt inspired to tell this story. This person submitted two glitch stories that were on the shorter side, so I'm going to combine them into one story. Hi Raven, this is my biggest glitch. It began innocuously enough...
One day, I decided I would make a list of all the cats I've had since childhood. When I got to my cats Kip and Pandora, I came to a realization that I still can't wrap my brain around. I hope I can explain it well. I have two different memories of each cat when I lived in the same place. I should have had them both at the same time, but I didn't. In one reality, I had my white seal point male, Kip.
In the other reality, I had my black female Pandora. My friend remembers both cats, but has a different memory of how I got Pandora. And when I think too hard about my life situation in those years, it begins to fall apart and make no cohesive or linear sense. Like the movie Dark City, which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it. I have a lot of other glitches, but this is the most perplexing.
And then, their second story. For a long while, I made a living doing balloon sculptures at a Chevy's restaurant. I always wore a tip badge, as that's how I made my money, and I was darn good at it, if I do say so myself. One night, while getting ready to go, I reached for my tip badge. I always had it on my VCR, and lo and behold, it was gone. I searched everywhere for it. I even felt on top of my VCR in case it was there-
And I couldn't see it. Frustrated, I made a lame one on the fly and ran out the door. Cut to getting home and flopping on my couch, and the badge is there. On the VCR. Just sitting there. I lived alone and there's no rational reason for this. It disappeared and then poof, there it was again.
Hi Raven. I recently became one of your listeners, and I have a few stories I could share, but I believe this is the first I should. This story is for no one younger than 13 years old.
Background story, my parents were divorced since I was a baby, so I had a stepmother, stepsister, and half-brother from my dad's side. One weekend when I was staying at my stepmother's house, I was hanging out with my stepsister and the front house neighbor who was a teenager. At this time, me and my stepsister were 8 or 9 years old.
We were talking, as one does, and they broke the news to me in a making-fun-of-me-for-not-knowing way that Santa wasn't real. I have always been a very honest person, so I felt betrayed by my mother for lying to me about it. Obviously, now that I have grown, I understand the magic of Christmas and all, but back then, my world crumbled. As I had just found out, my mother had been, quote, lying my whole life.
So when I went back to my mother's house, I started crying, telling her I knew the truth about Santa because my stepsister told me, and how mad and hurt I was that she had lied to me. The next weekend, I was at my father's house. I was talking to my stepsister about the existence of Santa, and to my surprise, she didn't know about it. I asked her, ''How don't you know if you had told me the last time I was here?''
She denied ever saying such a thing, and I got heavily scolded by my father and stepmother for ruining that for my stepsister. Fast forward to when I was 20, I was telling my stepmother how my stepsister told me that Santa didn't exist, and she said that couldn't be true because I was the one who told my stepsister. I called my mom, thinking I was going crazy, and I asked her if she remembered who had told me about Santa,
and she confirmed by saying, ''Yeah, it was your stepsister. I remember that I was fuming about the fact that she popped that bubble for you, but yes, you had even thrown a tantrum on how betrayed you felt. So this made me question, how can I remember what my mom is telling me, but also recall the scolding I had for my father and stepmother over telling my stepsister?''
How can the person who told me Santa wasn't real also know that Santa wasn't real? I oddly believe the most logical answer is that I possibly traveled to another universe after the weekend when she had told me. Or maybe I dreamt it. The dream is not very logical because I typically recognize I'm dreaming in my dreams and know how to differentiate reality versus dream easily.
And if anyone has any other explanations, I'm all ears. This is a true story, and it happened to me today. I want to begin by saying I love your podcast, and I've been listening to it for about a month now. Thank you.
My fifth grade teacher, who we will call Miss Apple for the story, Miss Apple celebrated Chinese New Year with us and gave us red bookmarks with our names in Chinese. And on the back it had our names in English, so we would know whose was whose. And mine said my name, which is Bella. So I was like, cool, I'll bring it home and use it, because I love reading.
So, that day, I brought it to my house and lost it a week after. Of course, I was really bummed to lose it, and I searched for it every day, but I just couldn't find it. So fast forward to today, my now 6th grade teacher tells us to go get our library books for silent reading, and of course I was happy. So I walked over to my cubby, and right when I opened it, guess what I saw? My red bookmark.
And at first I was like, "Oh, someone probably replaced theirs," so I flipped it over to see the name so I could return it, but instead of saying one of my classmates' names, it said Bella. At first, I was confused because no one else's name is Bella in my class, and then I realized it was mine. I'm still confused right now because, like I said earlier, it feels like the Matrix just grabbed it to use it, then gave it back.
I really don't know what happened, but thank you for reading my story. Hi Raven. So, to begin. Since I was very little, I would have dreams in places I had never gone to. The funny thing would be when time went by on a random day, I would actually be at that location that I dreamt about.
I understand if some don't believe me, and you might think I had previously gone there, but I remember very vividly once dreaming of a place that looked kind of old, and had a statue of Abraham Lincoln, which I had never seen before. Where I'm from, there's no white statue of any president. After a hurricane hit the island that I live at, I had to make an emergency trip in order to get a power generator.
On that trip is when I stepped into the place that I had dreamt about. So, fast forward, it was maybe a month or two into my relationship, and I told my boyfriend how I had dreamt about a drawing a classmate was doing, and actually guessed right what he was going to draw next. How, in my aunt's wedding, I had a glimpse of a dream I had where my granduncle, my grandmother's uncle, was looking to the side while a beautiful sunset was behind him.
and he was wearing a hat, which is unusual for him. He was very skeptical. I understood as I would be the same way if I were someone else. So, one day, I asked him for help with our move. The thing I needed help with was to undo the whole bed frame in order to take it in pieces.
As I'm unscrewing it, I tell him, "You know, a few days ago I had a dream where I was in the same room, except in the wall that I'm standing at, there was a male energy sitting around where you are right now. Then, a wood board fell on my foot, but maybe I'm crazy. As soon as I finished saying crazy, the board that was connected to the one I was holding fell right on my foot.
My boyfriend was in such shock that he was just sitting there paralyzed, looking at me with wide eyes. I just acted as if it was nothing because, again, this had happened to me before. So I grabbed some ice, put it on my foot, and kept working. He was silent for a good ten minutes until he spoke and said, "'I'm sorry for not helping you to bring the ice and all. I just can't believe that happened.'"
Now, every time someone doubts my clairvoyance, he tells them this story. I'll also be submitting some paranormal stories that I have, the good, the scary, and the bad, but until then, thank you Raven for entertaining me as I work. Hi Raven. My Glitch in the Matrix story requires a little bit of context before I get into it. I had my eldest daughter young. I was pregnant for most of being 18 and turned 19 the month after she was born.
The only work I had done up to that point was a server in a hotel for a short time, a retail assistant in a card shop over the Christmas holidays, and a little bit of work experience in a reptile shop as I was studying a course for animal management. Fast forward a few years, my daughter is now five or six. I haven't worked anywhere else during this time having the opportunity to stay home and raise her. I decided to take her swimming one afternoon.
The swimming pool is laid out like a big loop, so you can just go around and around. I notice as we're going around the loop that there is a woman who is maybe in her mid-30s, early 40s, with dark curly hair that keeps looking back at us. I know that she's also there with more than one child, so I keep telling myself that she's trying to keep an eye on the older ones who are swimming around the loop, faster than us moms with the little ones.
It becomes apparent that she is definitely just staring though, after a few loops around. I just keep trying to ignore her and act like I don't notice her staring, but I'm very aware of this woman watching us. Eventually, in one of the loops around, we end up coming close to each other, and she calls out my name. I'm already very guarded at this point, and it catches me completely by surprise, and I ask if we know each other.
This woman seems a bit taken aback that I don't recognize her, but proceeds to tell me her name. I apologize to her and tell her that I'm very sorry, but I don't know who she is. We're both obviously very confused at this point as she clearly knows who I am. She even inquires after some of my family members by name. I've lowered my guard a little at this point as there doesn't seem to be anything sinister about her, but my curiosity is definitely piqued.
I switch tactics and ask her where do we know each other from. What she said next left me completely confused. She proceeds to name the place where we worked together three years ago. I tell this woman that this isn't possible. I've never heard of the workplace before, and I haven't worked since I had my daughter. The conversation pretty much ended there. She looked absolutely horrified, and I'm sure that I did too. To this day...
I still can't understand this interaction. That woman definitely knew who I was and was sure that we used to work together. I can't place her, and I still don't know the workplace that she mentioned. I wonder about this a lot. Did I jump timelines to one where I went back to work after having my daughter, or did she jump timelines? I think that this will spoke me forever."
When my sister and I were kids, we loved to play with cat figurines. We had a lot of them. Different characters with personalities. We had our own extended multiverse of cat characters. One day, we were playing a game on the table in our room. There was one character who I always played as, who was one of our favorites. We both loved the character.
He was like a fatherly mentor type doctor, and we played with him every game. In the middle of an emotional scene, I had set him down to switch characters, and I accidentally knocked him off the table. The floor was a bit messy, but we both saw where he landed, and he wasn't there. He had just vanished. I looked around the floor, even places where he couldn't have been. I deep cleaned the entire room searching for him, but he was gone.
My little heart was broken. I never lost another character before or after, and I even still have them in a box in my closet at 27 years old. But I never found my favorite boy again. As a kid, I thought that God was punishing me for loving something material, or something. This feels silly to write out, but I was really emotionally attached to my toy cats. It's probably autism-related, I don't know.
I just wanted to share my most heartbreaking glitch story. Hey there, friends. I hope that you enjoyed this collection of scary stories on this episode of the As The Raven Dreams podcast.
If the platform you're on has the option to follow podcast and you enjoyed my work, please do consider doing so. Also, leaving ratings and reviews are super important for the algorithm to support the growth of the podcast. I'm just one guy doing this. I don't have a team. It's literally just me doing everything. So any support like that is greatly appreciated. Never expected, though. So if you go above and beyond with that, I do appreciate it.
Some platforms also allow you to leave comments, and if you feel inclined to do so, please do. I would appreciate that. I do have a Patreon and a merch store that you can also check out if you want to support a little further. The Patreon side of things gets you early access to all of my content. It is formatted differently as it goes in line with what my YouTube channel is, but it is the same stories, just different collections.
There is also a website, astheravendreams.com, where you can check out pretty much everything about me, my social media platforms, fiction stories I've written if you want to read those, as well as submitting your own stories, which there's a big button on the front page you click to do so. And those stories basically keep the podcast alive, to be honest with you. So, yeah.
All that said, friends, I do hope that I see you again here very soon. Until then, remember that you are loved, that you are valid, that you are important. You're the best you that you can be. Don't forget it. And until next time, much love and sleep well.