Our Boogeyman Turned Out to Be.... a Real Serial Killer

It's walking toward me, but something about him felt awe The way he moved he looked faded, like an old photograph, and then he stopped and looked directly at me. I felt this overwhelming sense of dread. Welcome to Tell Me a Ghost Story, the late night callin podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained. I'm your host, Michelle Newman. This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife. So grab a cozy blanket, turned down the lights. My name is John. I live in Little Rock these days. This is a story about when I was eleven. We lived on a farm in a very rural area. About three miles from that farm was a place called Felspar Hill. It was a place where if you feel like it's very humid, you might see fireballs or small gas making will of the wisps. And you always felt like, well, you can want to be there after dark. And one of these times I thought, well, it'd be a really good idea for me to go investigate it, because you know, I was bold young man and I've thought, well, okay, I'm gonna take a few things in my packet and go and have a little high crypt there, and I did. I had a really nice time. It took a while to walk there and climb up the hill and gett mirrors the apex of the field, and it was really lovely because I found snake skins and some bombs and there was a cave on one side and it looked really interesting and I kind of shined my flashlight into the cave and I was just taken by it was there, and I kind of lost track of time. And now it was suddenly getting kind of toward dusk, and I didn't want to be there at Nike, so I coutn't down and I figured I'll take a short cut home, which was the way I hadn't been before, which was probably a bad idea, but anyway, I still notice it's getting darker and darker, and you know, I'm walking along and suddenly I see there's something following me. Thing appeared to come out of the woods. It was it was like a little lamb, and it started to walk behind me, about twenty five feet behind me, and that it was kind of when I noticed I shine my flashlight on it, and he had bright red eyes, and it was getting a little closer to it. So I stepped up and started walking a little faster, and then I started wading weedy fast because I could hear it kind of snarling behind me, and my buck kinde of lamb is this? And I reached the sumblit of the hill and I looked back with my flashlight and it was much closer. It was like about fifteen feet and there was not just one of them, but there were luck three and they all had red eyes. When it shine flashlight on. The mail had kind of teeth. They were opening their mouth like with their teeth and shine there showing me their teeth. And I didn't know what to do there. I thought, oh, no, I better git out of here. And I kind of came to a part of the hill there. I was thinking, oh, this is kind of steep on this side of the hill, and all these I put my flashlight back on these things falling me. They were all pretty close. One of them was like right next to you, right like three feet away, and it was snapping and it was dark, and the fly misstepped on the hill and fell down about for thirty seconds, rolling down the hill, hitting every part of my body and beinging I'm dead and pumps dead though landed, and there were no things following me. I was at the bottom of the hill. I could sort of see the land was flatter there, and I could see in the distance the farm or my parents lived. My family lived, and these things had disappeared whatever they were. Thank you, John. Sometimes the most innocent looking things turn out to be the most sinister. Hey, Michelle, this is Jake calling from Missoula, Montana. I work as a fire lookout for the Forest Service, and I need to tell you about something that happened to me last summer in the Bitterroot National Forest. Something I've told maybe three people because I know how it sounds. So if you don't know what fire lookouts do. We basically live alone in these observation towers during fire season, watching for smoke, monitoring weather conditions. It's isolated work. The nearest town is usually hours away. My tower was at about seven thousand feet elevation, surrounded by nothing but wilderness in every direction. Most nights are quiet, peaceful. Actually, you see stars like you wouldn't believe. Sometimes elk or deer passing through, but mostly it's just you, the forest and the darkness. This was late July, maybe around two am. I was doing a routine scan with my binoculars, just checking the tree line like I do every couple hours, and I saw a light in the woods. Not a campfire. Those are orange and they flicker. This was different, white, steady, and it was moving. My first thought was poachers or illegal campers, but the light was too bright, too clean, and it was deep in the back country, miles from any trail. I watched it for maybe ten minutes, trying to figure out what I was seeing, and then it stopped moving, just stayed in one spot, glowing. I knew I should radio it in, but something told me to go check it out myself first, so I grabbed my flashlight and my radio and started hiking toward it. It took me about forty five minutes to get close, navigating by moonlight and that strange glow ahead of me. What I saw was a woman standing in a small clearing, surrounded by this soft white light. She was wearing a simple dress, long hair, and she was just standing there, not moving, not making a sound. I called out and asked if she was okay if she needed help. She didn't answer, but she turned and slowly started walking deeper into the woods. I followed her. I don't know why, maybe because she looked so sad. She never looked back, never acknowledged me, just kept walking. And the deeper we went into the woods, the more she started to fade. The light around her got dimmer. She became translucent, like I could see the trees through her body. I almost turned back then, but something kept me going. We walked for maybe twenty minutes, and then we came to this clearing and there was a cabin, or what was left of one, burned out, collapsed, just charred logs and ash. The trees around it were scorched black, bold fire damage, maybe ten or fifteen years old, based on the regrowth. The woman stopped at the edge of the clear and gestured toward the cabin, and then she turned to look at me. Finally, her face was so sad, Michelle, so full of grief, like she'd been carrying it for years. And then she was gone, like someone turned off a projector. The next morning, in daylight, I went back to the cabin, found remnants of life, a rusted stove, broken dishes, children's toys, melted and burned. I radioed in the location and my supervisor checked the records. Turns out a family died there in a wildfire back in two thousand and eight, a woman and her two kids. They got trapped when the fire moved faster than anyone expected. Their bodies were recovered, but the cabin was left to rot. I think she'd been out there alone all those years, waiting for someone to find them, to remember them. I go back to that clearing sometimes when I'm on patrol. Lead flowers say a few words, but it feels like she's at peace now. Thank you, Jake for Missoula. Ghosts aren't always looking for revenge or to frighten us. Sometimes they just need to be remembered. Hey, Michelle, this is Brenda calling from Charleston, South Carolina. And I saw the Gray Man before Hurricane Matthew in twenty sixteen. When Matthew was forming in the Atlantic, the forecasts kept changing. Some models had it coming straight for us, others had it turning out to see. Nobody really knew what it was going to do. I was watching the Weather channel obsessively, trying to decide whether to evacuate or ride it out. It was October sixth, late afternoon. I was standing on my deck looking at the ocean, and I saw him, a man walking along the beach. He was maybe fifty yards away, wearing all gray, gray coat, gray hat, everything gray, which was weird because it was still warm out, probably seventy five degrees and here's this guy dressed like it's winter. He was walking toward me, but something about him felt off. The way he moved, he looked faded, like an old photograph, and then he stopped and looked directly at me. I felt this overwhelming sense of dread, like every cell in my body was screaming at me to leave right now, not tomorrow, not in a few hours now. He raised his hand like he was waving. One second he was there, the next he was gone. No footprints in the sand, nothing, because I knew who he was. Everyone on Paully's knows the legend of the gray Man. He's been appearing before major hurricane since eighteen twenty two. I called my neighbors, told them what I had seen, and we got out of there. Hurricane Matthew hit two days later, category four. When it passed by us. The storm surge was catastrophic. My entire neighborhood was destroyed. My house was gone, Michelle, completely gone. But here's the thing, Me and my neighbors were alive thanks to the Gray Man. Thank you, Brenda. This legend goes back to eighteen twenty two, before the Civil War, when a young man was riding his horse along the beach to meet his fiance. His horse stumbled and he was thrown in the marsh and died days later. The grief stricken fiance was walking the beach when she saw a figure in gray approaching through the fog, the ghost of her lost love. He gestured frantically for her to leave the beach. She fled inland, and that night a massive hurricane destroyed everything on the shoreline. Her home was gone, but she survived. Since then, the gray Man has appeared before several major storms. Witnesses always described the same thing, a man dressed entirely in gray, appearing out of nowhere on the beach, warning them to leave. If you ever see a man in gray walking on the beach heading for higher ground. Hey, Michelle, this is Mark calling from Brooklyn. But I grew up on Staten Island in the eighties, and I need to tell you about Cropsy, our local boogeyman. Except the thing is, Michelle, Cropsy was real. So every neighborhood has their scary story, right the ghost in the abandoned house, the monster in the woods. For us, it was Cropsy. The legend was that he was this escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand, who lived in the tunnels under the old Willowbrook State School. It was this massive abandoned institution, you know, shut down in the seventies after they exposed how horrible the conditions were. Thousands of kids with disabilities just warehoused there, neglected, abused. The building was still standing when I was a kid, and it was this creepy, sprawling complex surrounded by woods. We used to dare each other to go near it, but no, but he ever did because of Cropsy. The story went that if you went into those woods at night, Cropsy would snatch you, drag you into the tunnels under Willowbrook, and you'd never be seen again. Some versions said he had an axe instead of a hook. Some said he was a Satanist. But everyone agreed, stay away from Willowbrook or Cropsy will get you. It was just a legend to keep kids from playing in a dangerous building. That's what we thought. But then kids actually started disappearing, real kids. In the seventies and eighties, several children vanished from Staten Island just gone, and the rumors started connecting it to Cropsy, to Willowbrook, to something in those woods. Turned out there was a real guy, Andre Rand. He was a janitor at Willowbrook before it shut down, and he was living in the woods around the property, camping out in the abandoned buildings, and he was abducting children. They convicted him for kidnapping, connected him to multiple disappearances. He's still in prison. But here's the thing, Michelle. Once we found out Cropsy was real, it made the legend worse, not better, because now we didn't know where the folklore ended and the real horror began. Was Andre Rand Cropsy or did the legend of Cropsy attract someone who wanted to become him. I was about twelve when they arrested Rand, and my friend Kevin and I we'd been playing in the woods near Willowbrook just a few weeks before. We didn't go close to the buildings, but we were there in the woods, and I remember we heard something footsteps behind us, sticks breaking. We thought it was just another kid trying to scare us. We turned around and there was a man standing maybe thirty yards away, just watching us through the trees. He had this long coat and he didn't say anything, didn't move, just stared. We got out of there. I don't know if it was I want to say it wasn't that it was just someone else, a homeless person, anyone else, But I can't be sure. And that's what haunts me, Michelle. The line between the legend and the reality is so blurred on Staten Island that we can't separate them anymore. Cropsy was a story, then he was a man, and now he's both. Thank you, Mark Uh. That's absolutely chilling when you realize a monster wasn't just a story. That's a horror on a completely different level. And not knowing if the man in the woods was andre Rand himself, that certainly might be worse than knowing. That's all we have this week, folks. Do you have a ghost story? Call seven oh one four eight four two six six six. That's seven oh one four eight four two six six six, or go to tell me a ghoststory dot com and leave your story there. Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week, and as always, i'm your host, Michelle Newman signing off, see you next week. M