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In the military, a smoke pit can be anywhere: a few stacked wooden pallets and sandbags on a distant forward operating base in an overseas desert somewhere, or a concrete pavilion and some tables outside of a barracks building on Camp Hansen in Okinawa. Whether at work or off duty, nowadays smoking isn't allowed in any of the buildings on military installations, so that's what the smoke pit is for.
But what is also highly frowned on during working hours is the discussion of strange and unbelievable happenings. The kinds of stories guys will insist are true, but are often denigrated as campfire stories or some other made-up nonsense. And if they ever really tried to file a formal report about the events, they would probably find themselves pulled off of their upcoming deployments as a mental health risk and instead sent to see some kind of specialist.
So the stories end up circulating around places like the smoke pit. But as for the guys telling the stories, they certainly believe what they saw and heard, whether or not anyone else does. This episode contains a compilation of several of these kinds of stories. The first is from a soldier writing under the anonymous heading of Sergeant M.
The second set of encounters are actually from a buddy of mine, Trip, a fellow Marine who I met while I was stationed overseas in Okinawa. And perhaps not so ironically, where did I first meet Trip? In the smoke pit, right outside our barracks. Anyway, let's get to the stories. I'm Luke LaManna, and this is Wartime Stories. I'll begin this episode with Sergeant M's experience, told from his perspective.
In 2015, I was placed on desk duty in the barracks on a 24-hour rotation charge quarters, as it's officially called.
We sit at the desk for 24 hours from 9 a.m. until 9 a.m. the following morning, often passing the time with books, video games, homework, or movies, and intermittently doing patrols, conducting these roving inspections of the barracks, just trying to maintain orderliness, especially at night, making sure guys aren't making a lot of noise or being too rowdy, that kind of thing. And of course, if anything serious happens,
We're there to respond to it and to report it as quickly as possible. But on occasion, this particular duty also requires that we monitor any high-risk soldiers that have been confined to the barracks because they unfortunately pose a safety risk to others or themselves, but have not been psychologically evaluated yet and are likely going to be discharged.
The military is probably like most jobs. You get all types. And I get it that the country has a lot of respect for its service members, and so do I. That's why I wanted to serve. But once you get to boot camp, the reality is that you quickly realize there are some strange dudes that try to join the military. And some of these guys, quite honestly, should never be allowed to hold a loaded weapon.
I'm guessing most of the super weird ones don't make it past the recruiting office, but then the recruiters are always under pressure to meet their quotas and some of these guys slip through the cracks. But in some cases they still don't even make it through boot camp. Mental health problems show up and they realize they don't want to be there anymore, but you can't just quit boot camp, you signed a contract, so they suddenly try to throw themselves off of the third floor.
Then they spend the next few days handcuffed to a bed or otherwise being escorted everywhere they go, including the bathroom, until the army figures out what to do with them. And then one day, you don't see them anymore. But some of these guys that I'm talking about, they make it through boot camp and they get sent to their first unit. And one of the guys in my unit was one we all thought probably never should have enlisted.
He was an angry, hate-filled individual that never progressed past private second class in his 20 months in uniform. It is rare that someone can remain at such a low rank for so long. And he never got promoted because he was a troublemaker. And this guy was also rumored to be interested in the occult and was said to practice rituals and dark magic in the barracks. What I do know for a fact though was that when he was finally discharged,
He left his barracks room in a complete and disgusting mess. The toilet had been broken and didn't flush, but he had continued to use it, probably for weeks. In the closet there were mountains of trash and rotten food in the sink and the refrigerator. The shower was also filled with garbage and water. So wet garbage. I don't think this guy really used his shower much anyway.
But aside from the awful mess, there were strange things in the room as well. When the commander, first sergeant, the supply sergeant, and I went into his room to inspect it, we found chicken bones tied together hanging on strings from the ceiling. They had been lashed together in what appeared to be archaic symbols of some kind. We counted roughly two dozen of these things before we just quit counting.
The floor was covered in grime and there was a ring of candles that in the center of the room that had clearly been lit on the floor in a circular fashion and all of the furniture had been stacked out of the way or shoved in the closet. I will spare you the description of the smell. So considering the rumors that we had heard, this guy's room not only matched his personality and his work ethic, but it certainly suggested a cult.
The whole room had this unsettling feeling to it. I joined the military in my late 20s, and I had a good amount of life experience by then, which admittedly included a brief interest I had in the occult when I was in my late teens.
As I told my superiors in the room, who were likewise creeped out, I wasn't really fazed by the bones hanging or the candles. It all looked pretty run-of-the-mill, nerds in the basement with a paperback edition of Necronomicon that they'd bought on Amazon. But the air in the room? It felt... wrong.
And I couldn't tell at the time if it was just the smell or the filth that was making me uneasy, but whatever the reason, none of us wanted to stay in there very long. We quickly left and our command called a special cleanup team and put in a work order to have the room stripped and cleaned by professionals. And after they were finished, the room was spotless. But in the months following this dirtbag getting kicked out of the army, the soldiers sitting barracks duty would start quietly talking about...
hearing things in that room, which had remained unoccupied. And occasionally, reports about the room would be made in the logbooks, actually written down. Something along the lines of: "I heard some sort of sound from room such and such, CQ investigates, finds nothing, smells burning plastic, cannot find source, no electrical appliances in the room, will monitor and notify my replacement."
But usually these reports, particularly the noises, were brushed off as soldiers playing pranks and trying to spook the new guys on duty. And so a couple of months after the rumors started, my name finally comes up on the duty roster. And it was a Thursday night. The rest of our unit was mostly off base this night. They were doing field training.
meaning the barracks was mostly empty, and my CQ runner and I were quietly going about our business. The room in question is halfway down the hallway from the duty desk, so it's pretty close. So we're sitting there at the desk, and suddenly... We both hear some sort of roar, a really loud sound that definitely came from that room.
It didn't sound like a dinosaur from Jurassic Park or something from a video game. The best I can describe it, this sounded like metal tearing while someone played a recording of a scream, except it was distorted and played in reverse. The soldier with me later described it as a car accident, and when he was asked to clarify what he meant, he said it was like...
The loud part of a metal collision with no buildup or drop off. Just sudden noise. That's what he said. But anyway, being the senior ranking guy, I kind of walked down the hall to check this out and I instruct the CQ runner to call the barracks representative, the LNO, and have him get to the desk as soon as possible so he can come open up the room.
Five minutes later, the LNO and I are using his master key to gain access to this creepy ass room while the private covers the front desk, staying with the phone. As soon as we enter the room, we are hit with the smell of what dog shit and burn plastic. That's what it smelled like. Neither of us can identify the source because the room looks completely clean, but we sweep the entire room, every nook and cranny, and we find nothing.
But we both later said that we had this really horrible feeling, like we were being watched the entire time. You know the feeling? Just... Anyway, we found nothing that would tell us where this horrible smell in the room was coming from. We agreed then just to re-secure the room and to not even log the incident because, I mean, the room is empty and the barracks rep wasn't even there to hear the noise.
So he didn't even know whether to believe us or not. And I, for one, didn't want to press the issue and end up looking like some crazy idiot when someone up the chain of command reads the report. So anyway, we walk back to the door to leave the room and I walk out first. I open the door, I walk out. And as this lieutenant turns to pull the door closed behind us...
Some kind of massive force suddenly hits the door from inside the room, shoving the lieutenant out of the doorway and slamming the door shut. Now, because all of the barracks rooms have those hydraulic door closers at the top that would prevent that sort of thing from even happening, I mean, you would really have to put
push on that thing to slam it shut that quickly let alone slamming it so hard it could move a grown man honestly no you would probably have to unhook the closer or break it because otherwise slamming that door should be impossible for any normal person to do with that kind of resistance
and the hydraulic arm wasn't broken I had just opened the door and we had just walked into the room the door was working fine when we entered the room and the windows were shut when we checked the room so something slammed that door and it wasn't the wind out of instinct you know getting pushed out of a room the LNO immediately tries to open the lock again to see what the hell just did that but this time the key card wouldn't even work and after a few times of trying to lock
With neither of us really even wanting to go back in anyway, we said screw it and we just left. We agreed not to report any of this for obvious reasons. And after that incident, I kept an ear out because I lived in that barracks. But I didn't hear anything like that noise again. But at least on one other occasion, when I ended up sitting duty again, even while the room was still unoccupied,
I could swear I heard what sounded like some kind of shuffling coming from the room, like someone was moving around inside. But that time I just decided to ignore it and I ordered my CQ runner to just stay the hell away from the room as well. To this day, none of us have the foggiest idea of what was going on in there. And I'm not even sure if they ever started using the room again, but...
I sure as hell don't envy the next guy that has to sleep in there. As I mentioned earlier, the next accounts are actually those of a Marine buddy of mine, Trip. And since he conveniently had the studio equipment to record his own voiceover, I asked him if he wouldn't mind just telling us about his experiences himself. Trip, the mic is yours.
Good evening, everyone. Good evening, everyone. So my name is Trip Ainsworth. I'm an author writing the Smokebutt Fairy Tales novels. I'm an artist and I was in the Marine Corps for a while. I was actually on Okinawa with the 31st Mew with Luke, the host of this show. We were talking on the sidelines, you know, just kind of chit-chat about spooky stories and
And I mentioned that I had seen an odd thing or two in my life. Some of it relating to the Marine Corps, or at least around the Marine Corps. I spent, yeah, 12-ish years there. Now, I'm a little sensitive to what some might call the dark side of the Force. I'm by no means a medium or an oracle or a seer or anything like that. I've just noticed or seen a thing or two. I remember the first ghost I ever saw or witnessed or whatever you want to call it.
It was actually a very mundane story. I was 13 or so and working a summer job at a cold storage place in Jacksonville, Florida, where I grew up. And there was this ghost that a lot of people saw back in the deep freezer and the way back for like the long-term storage. And as the stories went, the ghost never really did anything. He just, you know, sweep the halls back there. I don't necessarily think that the ghost was intelligent. It was probably just residual energy.
The rumor was when they were constructing the building, somebody fell off a railing and died. And that's all I really knew about it, except for one day I was there real early because, you know, my dad was the manager. And he would come in and count the inventory every day before anybody else showed up. And since he was my ride, I was there an hour before everybody else too. But one day I was back there looking for a crate of crab legs or hush puppies or something. I looked up from the clipboard and, you know, right beside me, I saw this guy just sweeping along like he was pushing one of those big push brooms.
And I only saw him for half a second and he disappeared. And at that point, I already heard so much about him that, you know, it didn't spook me or anything. I just made a mental note of it and went about my day. Now, between that and the next ghost encounter that I had, there was two deployments to Afghanistan and one tour with the 11th Mule and a Westpac. And while I had heard a lot of creepy, eerie, spooky tales about stuff in Afghanistan and some of the places that we visited, I never saw anything.
But I get back from my first Mew, my third deployment. I'm a sergeant still living in the barracks in Camp Margarita on Camp Pendleton. It was in the headquarters and services barracks, and ironically enough, it was room 316. If it was any other room number, I don't know if I'd have remembered it. But something always felt off about that room. While I was inside, I could never escape the feeling of being watched. The hairs on my neck were always stood straight up, and I kept with me this impending sense of dread.
Now, I'd woken up a few times with what people would call sleep paralysis, I guess. You know, you wake up, you're alone, you're sweating, there's an overwhelming sense of dread. But eventually I'd shake myself out of it and try to get back to sleep. But there was one night and I woke up and everything was... What was weird about this night, on top of the overall feeling I had, was I woke up, I was still in bed, and I looked across the room and there was another me...
on the other side of the room, and I was talking to something else. I mean, I still remember the thing pretty vividly. It was about six, six and a half feet tall. Pale greenish skin, like it had been dead for a while. It didn't have any hair or ears, really a nose. If it did, it was small. The thing had just like a little slit for a mouth.
It still gives me the chills to think about. Like, right now, I feel like somebody poured ice down my back. But he also wore this, like, schmuck thing. It was beige. Imagine a turtleneck sweater. But the neck was exceptionally thick. And then instead of arms and a piece of fabric that came down to the waist, it just went all the way down. Like one singular robe. Now, I asked the thing what its name was.
Told me, but I don't remember. Where are you from? And then I asked it where it was from. And it said not here. Now, whatever definition of here forms in your brain when I say that, it wasn't that. It's not this plane. It's not this planet. It was not this universe. It was not that barracks room. It's not here.
But then I asked it what it wanted and what it was doing there. And it told me that it was just checking things out. And then it stopped talking to me on the other side of the room and looked at the me in bed. And the little slit that used to be its mouth opened up to this wide gullet that would have reached its ears if it had them. And it was full of dagger-like sharp teeth. And it hissed at me to wake up. And it did. And I was freaked out. I thought it was just a bad dream. I chalked it up to that. But I needed a glass of water.
So I get out of bed, and the instant that my feet hit the floor, the lights turn on and the door and the window slam open. Fortunately, I was PCSing in a couple of weeks and didn't have to stay there long. Unfortunately, I didn't have anywhere else to sleep besides my car. The other big one would be...
It took place in 29 Palms years later, but I kept waking up in the middle of the night. And there was this thing at the foot of my bed. Just an ambiguous, dark, hazy mass. Almost looked like smoke. I'd seen an odd thing here and there in the time between, and I had done a lot of reading up on the supernatural at that point. And this thing that was in my room, it wasn't scary, it was just annoying. ♪
So I lie in bed for another hour and a half-ish, and I get up. It's two or three in the morning at this point, and I can't sleep, so I go out to the front of the barracks, and I have a cigarette, and my buddy George is out there. And it's during the week, so there shouldn't be Marines out there, but it is the barracks. There's always somebody out there. I talk to George about it a little bit. I tell him my story, and he's a little weirded out because he had a very similar experience, except for instead of a shadowy black mask, it was this odd...
thing as he described it. And when we're done smoking, we go inside and I go to my room and he to his, but in the day room, on the way, we see this woman and she's sitting down in the chairs by the duty hut. She's glowing. She's got golden sun rays for hair and her clothes are so white that you can't even look at them. Me and George looked at each other and looked back to the barracks duty and then looked back to the woman, but the woman was gone. George and I talked about that once or twice, but...
But yeah, those are my military-related ghost stories, or whatever these things are. Thanks for having me on, Luke. Ciao. I'm not sure what you make of these experiences. I did have some questions after listening to Tripp's encounters.
And ultimately, my question to Trip was, do you think, especially with the first one, because he did identify that as him being asleep, and that thing that he witnessed in his room, that kind of out-of-body experience that he had, he did acknowledge that as being a dream, or maybe you'd call it a vision. It's obviously out of the norm, because...
his room, it was like being in a different reality, right? That the room was identical. And how many times do we dream in the exact same kind of living environment? At least in my experience, I usually, my dreams take me somewhere else, usually. But for the second encounter, he did say that the woman in white and this black thing in his room, all of that, he was fully awake and conscious at the time that he saw these things. And then his friend George was
had kind of a shared experience where, you know, maybe that was what drove them both out of the barracks to go smoke at three in the morning, whatever time it was. I've noticed as I go through these stories and talk to different people, the fact that we haven't all seen something strange, not that people can't make up stories, but perhaps there are people that are more sensitive to these kinds of things. You know, I've seen stories where they theorize that children are more sensitive and you'll have a mother recounting a story about her child
saying that she's talking to someone in the room and the mother looks to the corner where the girl is pointing and there's nobody there and maybe just wanting to humor the child the mother's like okay well what does she look like and what is she saying and what the child starts to say
Very matter-of-factly, it starts to scare the parent because they realize that the child is actually speaking to something. Because how could the child know these things that the parent was asking them? And in these instances, maybe the parents find out the next day that a grandmother or a different relative had passed away. And that was the supposed spirit that the child was talking to. Something like that.
But, ghost encounters aside, since I can't think of another place where I could share this story, I suppose there was something I did want to share with you guys, an experience that I had. It took place in the barracks, and reading or listening to Tripp's account is really what reminded me of this. And it's not going to be a story about ghosts, but it is about dreams.
Because for some reason during my time in the Marines, I had a developing interest in the nature of dreams. And early on in my career, I began picking up these books on the topic of dream psychology. A lot of Freud and other why do we dream and what's the purpose of dreams and what do dreams mean.
as well as engaging in the study and practice of lucid dreaming. And if you're not familiar, lucid dreaming is when you become conscious in a dream, but rather than waking up, which is usually what happens to us, you are able to prevent the dream from collapsing and you can continue to explore the dream space and do a lot of crazy stuff in there. And you can even interact with other figures in the dream. In effect, you are speaking directly to your own subconscious.
And in one of the first books I read on the subject, it was titled simply Lucid Dreaming. The author, Robert Wagoner, wrote that for beginners, even starting to contemplate the possibility of having a lucid dream, it can manifest the experience. And sure enough, that is what happened to me. After reading only the first few chapters of the book, while I was deployed overseas to Okinawa, I had one of my first lucid dreams.
And the book teaches you how to prepare your mind before bedtime, which is to concentrate your mind on something, an object. Then if that object appears in your dream, it triggers your, I think your conscious mind, into realizing that you are in a dream, that this is not reality.
And the author's recommendation was to pick something simple and something that you'll always have, which is your hands. And so that's what I did. I'd spend a good 60 seconds before I turned off the lights and went to bed. I would just sit in bed and I would stare at my hands. I'd put them right in front of my face, pretty close. And I would just study the lines, the patterns, the fingerprints, the scars I have on my hands, just everything I could try to put to memory.
And I'm not sure if it happened on the first night. I don't think so. I think it was maybe after a few nights of practicing this and I think I'm ridiculous like staring at my hands. It's just silly. But at some point I find myself walking in a forest of tall pine trees and I didn't think anything of it until suddenly both my hands just fly up right in front of my face. They're blocking my view of the forest and I hadn't consciously thought to do that.
So it struck me as very odd that my hands are suddenly flying up in front of my face when I don't want them to. And then it hit me. I'm looking at my hands. This is a dream. So at that point, I tried to put my hands down. I probably did it too quickly because the forest immediately starts to violently shake and vibrate and everything is fading to this very bright white. The dream is collapsing. And realizing that, I immediately brought my hands back up in front of my face.
And I just started concentrating on them and nothing else. And it worked. Slowly but surely, the forest around me starts to come back into view and everything stabilizes. So I just continue to stare at my hands for a little while to make sure that I'm in control here. And then I start to slowly lower my hands and nothing happens. The forest remains as vivid as ever. So I think, cool, I'm in a dream. That's pretty neat.
So my next thought is what do I want to do next? And as would be the case with many of my future dreams, I want to fly. That was my first thought. I want to fly. And almost immediately I felt myself lift off the ground completely weightless. It was really cool to be able to be in control of it because I've flown in dreams before, but I was never in control of it. It was just something I was doing. Now I'm in control of it. It felt really cool.
and i just started to float straight up until i had risen above the tops of these very tall trees and i can see this forest and these mountains it's just going on for miles and miles is this beautiful scenery but as i continue to go up and up and up i suddenly have this terrifying thought what happens if i fall will it hurt and the moment i had that thought i immediately started falling like it started slowly like a slow increase
And then I start to panic. I lose my composure and I don't remember to put my hands up in front of my face or anything. I just start bracing for the impact of the ground that's rushing up at me. But when I hit the ground, usually what would happen is I would wake up. Like, you know. But rather than feeling the impact or waking up, it's like a video game glitch. I passed right through the ground and then I'm suddenly back in the air above the treetops again.
but I'm still falling. It was like it just teleported me right back up above the trees and I'm still falling. And again, I'm completely panicking. I just brace for the impact of the ground. And when I hit the ground this time, I immediately woke up from my bed and I sat up. And the first thing I hear is the sound of breaking glass on the floor. And I look down towards my feet and for some infuriating reason, my roommate, Mitch, who is kind of a funny guy,
Well, he and his buddies, probably my other recon buddies, have stacked all of their empty beer bottles. I'm like, they outlined my body, my feet, my legs. On top of the blanket, they've stacked all these beer bottles against me. And when I woke up, I kicked one of them off, and they're all tinkling around, and I'm trying not to move too much, but I accidentally bump another one off the bed, and it shatters. So now I'm, I've just woken up from this very strange dream, and now I'm getting pissed.
And so I look over at Mitch who's sound asleep and I'm like, Mitch, Mitch, trying to wake him up. He's not waking up. I'm thinking he's pulling some really stupid prank on me. And then I'm like, okay, maybe he's super drunk and that's why he won't wake up. And then suddenly without warning, I woke up again and I was still in my barracks room. It was still dark outside. Mitch was now sleeping in a different position, but he was still fast asleep in his bed. But now the beer bottles are gone.
And I could still recall everything that had happened. From being in the forest, to flying, to falling, the whole thing. To waking up with the beer bottles. And now waking up the second time. In the same bed. In the same room. And it freaked me out. Because now, I'm realizing that that first time I'd woken up, that was a dream. It's like I woke up from a dream into another dream. That had never happened before. So then I start to...
look around the room and kind of humor myself and I'm like, you know what? Is this a dream? Like, I'm pretty sure it's not to be honest, but I'm like, is this a dream? Am I still sleeping? And then I woke up again. Again, room was still the same. It was dark outside and Mitch is still sleeping in his bed across the room from me. So now I'm sitting there in bed having woken up three times.
And I'm admittedly becoming very terrified because I'm starting to question my sanity and have I lost grip on reality? You know, how many times am I going to wake up? Because now I'm not even certain. I felt certain the two times before that I was in my original reality, let's call it. And now I'm not even sure if I'm awake.
And I must have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do here in this case is to just go back to sleep. And whether this is a dream or not, and the next time I wake up, everything will be sorted out. So of course, I did wake up at some point, I got out of bed, and I went to work as usual. So that was my first experience, at least the one I remember, with lucid dreaming.
At the time, I did think about just burning the book and saying, I'm never going to try to do this again. That was too freaky. But...
My curiosity got the better of me and it didn't stop me from continuing. And I've had a number of other lucid dreams since then. I haven't really, I don't know if I've ever gained anything from them, like learning about my subconscious and all that stuff. But they were interesting. And of course, it is always fun to be able to fly in your dreams. That's usually what I ended up doing. But that was the only dream that I ever woke up multiple times.
So, whether in dreams or in our waking reality, it seems that nowhere can we expect to find ourselves safe from the strange and unexplained.
Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain. Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.
