Hey, it's Michelle Newman, and this week's stories range from quietly strange to genuinely unclassifiable.
Larissa from Texas calls in with her mother's story, one her mom still denies to this day. Home alone in the shower, expecting her kids back from school, her mother called out twice for a towel. She heard the front door open and close, and stepped out to find one waiting for her. Except her children weren't home, and no other family member had stopped by. Around the same time, Larissa had been telling her mother about a little girl she kept seeing in the house, until her mother had her own encounter, waking to find the top of a small head peering over the edge of the bed. The family blessed the house and never spoke of it again.
Gary D. from Southern Ontario returns with a story that goes beyond a typical haunting. Passing through an airport parking garage decades ago, he encountered an elderly man in a tight tan suit who slowly turned his head and flashed an unnervingly wide, perfectly white smile. Minutes later, he saw an identical man, same suit, same build, different face. Then a third at his gate. Two boarded his flight and stared at him the entire trip before vanishing mid-flight from seats a flight attendant confirmed had been empty the whole time. Years later, on a completely different flight, two more men in matching gray suits smiled at him again. "Nice to see you again," one said. "It's been some time." The other told him, "We will be seeing you later." Neither has appeared since.
This one sent me down a research rabbit hole, because what Gary describes maps almost perfectly onto three separate strains of folklore. There's the Smiling Man, a modern urban legend that started in 2012 on Reddit's r/nosleep, a tall figure in an old, ill-fitting suit with a frozen, exaggerated grin who stalks people down empty streets. There's Indrid Cold, sometimes called the Grinning Man, documented back in 1970 by investigator John Keel and tied to the Mothman phenomenon, a tall, deeply tanned man in a strange glossy suit who appears out of nowhere on dark roads and stares in total silence. And there's the broader Men in Black tradition: entities in slightly wrong tan, beige, or grey suits who seem to be mimicking human behavior without fully understanding it, no eyebrows, rare blinking, a rigid smile meant to seem friendly that lands instead as deeply wrong. That's the uncanny, hypnotic feeling Gary described.
00:00 Intro
00:42 Larissa and the towel nobody delivered
06:21 Gary D. and the men in matching suits who followed him across two flights and decades.
Have you ever seen something like this? A man who smiled a little too long, dressed a little too wrong, standing a little too still? I want to hear about it.
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Theme music: Sexy Sax by Cool Cascade
Production: Newman Media