Episode 172: Sector X

Welcome to the world, I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This story is one that I really thought we were never going to hear. It's a story that was sent to us almost three years ago and got all of us very interested. But then, the person just kind of stopped responding to us. Which of course, made us even more interested. Let me tell you there is nothing more frustrating than being ghosted by a person with a ghost story and never being able to hear the full thing. But luckily, this person ended up reappearing recently and I was finally able to talk to them. The story itself isn't really a ghost story, in fact, I'm not exactly sure what it is. It's kind of this surreal, urban legend that reminds me so much of growing up and being a teenager. It comes from a guy named Eric who was raised in Marino Valley, California and in high school, there wasn't much to do around town. So him and his friends would drive around at night, exploring abandoned places, including a completely abandoned neighborhood that was once part of a military base. Then, a subdivision with hundreds of houses, community centers, street signs, everything completely abandoned and empty. I'll let Eric take it from here. This episode is called "Sector X" and you're listening to other world. Hello? Is this Bobby? What are they doing? I said it's a core of the science you can't argue with. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die a project that is whimmed for the purpose of life. Everybody knows that I can do the right, even if it takes time in it. My name is Eric. I am 42 years old and I currently live in around the Los Angeles area. I grew up in the city of Marino Valley. It's about 75 miles east of Los Angeles. It's a town that grew out of the military base there, March Air Force Base, that is now March Air Reserve Base. Because of that, it was a different kind of town. Do you think of Los Angeles that grew out of the entertainment industry, the Palm Springs that was more of a resort thing? Marino Valley, there wasn't a whole lot to do there. Growing up there, it was a good childhood. I had a lot of friends around me. I had a lot of kids in the same neighborhood as me that were around my age. We all did just regular kids looking back on it now and having kids myself. I realized how good I actually added because having so many friends right next door, right in bikes, playing and stuff like that. But as I got older, there wasn't a whole lot to do in that town. People would get involved in church or they would get involved in drugs. They would get involved in music and stuff but it's like there wasn't, I don't know, just a whole lot of activity centers in Marino Valley. With that, as we grew up, we would just kind of find ways to entertain ourselves. We got into off-roading a lot. We would off-road up in the hills around Marino Valley. We would just go way out into the hills and have bonfires. I think that when you're bored and you're left to be idle and especially when you get to the age where you have some freedom of driving and stuff, you probably start doing some stupid stuff. I remember at one point one of my buddies, he was like, "Dude, we can go to food for less and buy aerosol, air fresheners for like 99 cents and then we can throw them into these bonfires and then they'll explode." We got really obsessed with that. It's just random stuff that we would just all of a sudden be obsessed with. Because we had nothing else to do, it was just this, at other times we would drive around through town and we would try to find like at parks or random places where people would go to hook up in their cars and then we would kind of just try to like fuck with them and get them to chase us. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world to just piss the dude off so he would chase us and we would try to race away in our car, end up in some pretty sketchy situations. Because of that, pretty much it was just we would, you know, in our late teens, early 20s, some of us were in college, some of us were working, some doing both. I was doing both and at night we would just get together and just get involved in shenanigans. We all really got involved in the hardcore music scene and so we would go out to some of the music venues and the surrounding areas because there were none in Marina Valley and so there was a place called the showcase in Corona. There's the glass house in Pomona and we would go to hardcore shows and we just thought it was like the coolest thing that we would go there and since we were straight age and we weren't drinking and weren't doing drugs, we thought we were so cool because we were having sex. Even though, you know, come to find out later that we were, but we would just lie to each other about it, not the drug or alcohol, but people were definitely hooking up and we would go and just get crazy in the mosh pits and just, you know, right, drop, exes on our hands to show everyone, you know, we're straight age and we're bad ass and everything. Some people took it a little bit more seriously. One of my buddies was just like, he was like, dude, no caffeine, none of us could drink caffeine and I was like, dude, I mean, I got to drink caffeine because we're staying up late doing all this stupid shit and then I got to be up early to go to work or go to school or something like that, but he would always get on us about not drinking caffeine and stuff. The fact that we were straight age definitely played a big part in how we would get just involved and just random stuff. Where this happened is pretty far out from LA. If you ever play Grand Theft Auto, it's kind of more out towards where Trevor lives in Grand Theft Auto, where you're leaving the main city, leaving the hustle and bustle and then you're getting more and more out into a secluded area. With Grand Theft Auto, a lot of the stuff that's in there is like real stuff and you can just drive around. You can see that I've heard people who've never been in the area say that they'll drive somewhere and they'll see, oh, you know, this, I recognize this from Grand Theft Auto. I recognize this building, I recognize this stuff. And I think Brawley or the Salt and Sea area is kind of more where Trevor was in Grand Theft Auto, but Marina Valley isn't that far off to where it's just kind of, there's not much to do out there. But there's a lot of weird stuff that's out there, you know, you have, like our story is going to take place around the Air Force Base there. And there's a lot of just old buildings, old abandoned buildings that we would just get bored and start exploring stuff and looking at, there would always be all these little stories of things. And I think probably any community has these, but like there was this overpass for this street called Nason and when it goes over the 63 way, and there was this whole story about how back in the day a school bus got stuck there and something hit it and all the kids died. And now if you go and you stop on there and you put your car on neutral, even though it goes uphill, your car will start to roll up the hill and then you go and you look at the back afterwards and see a bunch of little kid handprints. Okay, Eric, I have to say my town outside of Chicago had the same story. I feel like every town has that story. I feel like it was an absolute BS story, but it's just, I don't know, when my friends and I would ever go to Vegas, we like taking the back way, stay off of the 15 and take Route 66 through all these side roads. Sometimes it'd be faster doing that and going through that way, you see all these abandoned towns, but it's like a whole gas station, a whole diner and I would imagine probably when the 15 got built that it killed a lot of that, Route 66 probably was the main throwaway for that. But yeah, it's just wild seeing all these abandoned stuff, like a whole water park, obviously that was pretty popular at some point, but yeah. With that, we would always have different friends kind of out finding new cool things for us to go check out. And, you know, if you go way down this road, there'll be, you know, some weird old abandoned school or if you go down here, you'll find a pirate ship or something like that. But there was this community that my buddy had found right outside the Air Force Base called Arnold Heights. And it was like a military community that had been built. Like I'm guessing in like the 40s, 50s, something like that. And it was completely abandoned, but it was probably like five, 600 houses just in here. They all looked pretty much identical, just cookie cutter one after another. And the backyards would, it'd be like a giant like football field with all the houses stacked up on the sides. And that would be just a common backyard. And there're like a few strips of that. And then some other outlying houses and stuff. My buddy says, he's like, hey, did I found this abandoned town? This abandoned abandoned community. We should go, this neighborhood, we should go check it out. And his name was Dustin. And so we, him and I had a buddy Mark, Jason, Chris, all of us, we just always be hanging out doing all this weird stuff. And we had like no fear at the time. I mean, I guess that's just part of being a teenager in your early 20s, you just feel invincible. And so we cruised over and it's right off of this, this main street called Van Buren and the 215. And it's, you come off of the 215 onto Van Buren and there's this little side street that you turn on. And it goes down maybe like a tenth of a mile or something like that. And there was a church there, an active church that was still in business. And it had a parking lot, it was all well lit and everything. And then if you go down just a little bit more, you would just see this whole community. Just no lights, no electricity, no running water, nothing. And the church being there is important because that's where we would always park. And the fact that it was just the one road that brought you into there, we would be able to tell if there was ever anyone else there. And we always had a pretty good idea. And then plus when we were in the community, since there were no lights, if another car turned down that road, we would see the headlights for the most part or some lights kind of shining in a way that would show us. 'Cause our only concern really for the most part would be that like the cops would come out and that they would give us hard time or something like that. Just go a park at that church, walk in there. And then it was just a free for all. We would go and just try to break syncs off the walls, bust toilets, punch holes in drywall, just being completely bored, doing weird stuff. For a little while, one of our buddies, Chris, he got a video camera. And to say that this was in the early 2000s and probably around 2002, something like that. And so, I mean, we didn't have cell phones with cameras and someone get a video camera that had a little tape that you put in and we thought it was the coolest thing. And we were like, do we should go in there and we should pretend that we're filming an episode of cops. And we had one of the guys inside the house and we'd pull up, we'd make it all sound all official. We're pulling up and there's a suspect in here who's been beating his wife. We're gonna go in and arrest him and then the camera would come up and someone would kick a door in. We'd rush the guy and tackle him and wrestle him and stuff like that. And so, for the most part, that's what we spent most of our time there. I mean, we would go there at least once a week, sometimes twice a week and just spend hours there. Just walking around, exploring this neighborhood and just doing all this weird stuff, bust him up houses and stuff. When you come to the houses, it would be just a two bedroom house. They didn't have garages, they just had little car ports. Every single one of them looked pretty identical and you'd walk in and as soon as you get in, it would be just a living room area and then a small kitchen. You go down in the hall, there'd be a bathroom, there'd be a couple of bedrooms that you can go check out. They all had a sliding glass door on the back that would lead into this big, vast, grassy area where I thought that'd be pretty cool. If I was a kid, I'm just going out there and just in the backyard, all you and all your friends are sharing a backyard. I just always try to imagine what it was like when it in a tape day. But yeah, and so one time we get there and when we get to the church, we saw a car park there and it wasn't insane that there'd be a car there but it was really rare. I think in a time we went there and we went there dozens and dozens of like I said, we were going there every weekend for probably like a year and a half, maybe two years and in that time I think we saw a car there maybe like three times that there'd be other people there. Most of the time actually, after the events that happened, if we ever saw a car there, we just wouldn't go because we just didn't want to deal with anyone else. But this one time we pull up, there's a car, we get in and we're doing our normal stuff, just going just checking out houses, looking at stuff, exploring, trying to find stuff. Some of the houses would still have stuff in it. Most of them were completely gutted, nothing inside at all. But some of them would have just a random piece of furniture or an old picture. And so after we kind of got over the whole destruction phase of just trying to beat the shit out of everything, we thought it'd be pretty cool just to try to explore and try to find maybe someone left some money or some jewelry or something behind or just a cool historical thing, something from the wars. And so we were going around just kind of exploring stuff. We'd been in one house and we'd come out and we'd see another group there and it was probably about five people. And they were like, it's kind of, oh, like are you guys cool? Is there going to be drama like that? And they were really cool. But they were asking, hey, what are you guys doing? And we were saying, oh, yeah, we just kind of explore, we walk around and stuff. And then, and we had always called it Arnold Heights or just called it the neighborhood or something like that. And these guys, they were like, oh, well, yeah, you know, they were calling us Sector X. And I'm like, what do you mean Sector X? Like, why do you guys call it that? And like, you've never heard the story? Like, they were there for a totally different reason than we were there. And they were pretty serious about it. And they tell us the story that they're saying that within this community, that there's a back area where there's kind of like a little cul-de-sac of secluded houses. And that in that area, they called it Sector X. The story they had heard was that at one point, someone's child had drowned. And after that happened, this person went just on some rampage, just kind of complete psychotic break and murdered a bunch of people. And then, dragged the bodies into a community center that was inside this neighborhood. We've been there a ton of times. I had never seen a community center. I had never seen this little kind of cul-de-sac area that they talked about. And we thought we had pretty thoroughly searched this thing. And these guys were telling us like, hey, yeah, like, just, you know, if you find this neighborhood, you'll know that it's it because all the houses where someone was murdered have an X painted on them. And in the community center, there's a big X where the bodies had been put. I've always been more of a skeptical person. And I was just kind of like, OK, like, this is probably just people trying to scare us. Or maybe they wanted the whole area to themselves. They didn't want the people there kind of messing around. So they didn't want us to be there. And so I was like, OK, yeah, yeah, whatever. And then they said, if you ever find that area, make sure you don't go. Like, turn around, leave. Don't get yourself involved with it. And we're like, oh, OK, cool, man, whatever. So they took off. And so obviously, immediately, we started searching for this area. And we spent probably like an hour or so there walking through. And it was a big community, but it wasn't like, insanely massive. Like, like I said, we thought we had walked through all of it and checked it out. And so just to hear that there was stuff in there that we hadn't seen just made us really eager. And so we spent, like I said, a couple of hours walking around the whole neighborhood, trying to find this cul-de-sac. Couldn't find it. Trying to find this community center could not find that. And so we were just kind of like, you know, fuck it. We'll just get out of here. We turned around and we left a couple of weeks after we had encountered that group. We went back. And we were like, determine, like, hey, we're going to try to find this place. And I honestly thought, I'm like, do these guys are just bullshitting us? Like, there is nothing there. None of this is here. We've walked through this whole community so many times. And I have never seen this community center. I have never seen this cul-de-sac. First of all, we pull up and we get to the church and there's no cars there. So we know we're alone. And we park there, walk in, and we start walking around. We would usually go there probably around 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night because, you know, the later you get there, the less chance that you're going to just run into random people and stuff. And we get in. We start walking around. And I'm just thinking, like, we're just wasting our time that we've walked everywhere here. And so we're just kind of going through walking around, walking around after like an hour, maybe an hour and a half or two hours. I'm just pretty over. And I'm just like, you know, we've looked all over the place. Like, there's nothing here. And then we come around this corner. And all of us can, like, distinctly hear running water. And it's-- It's weird because we had been there, we had, like I said, we busted up sinks, we had mess with hoses or, you know, spigots in front of houses and stuff, there was never any running water, no sign of it at all. And we, we heard what we thought was running water, and it sounded like it was coming from behind, there was like this big, big hedge. And we kind of noticed that this hedge had kind of overgrown part of the road there. We peel it back, kind of move past it. And behind it, there is a cul-de-sac. There's houses there that we had never seen in all of our time there. There is this area. And it, it wasn't a lot of houses, I want to say it was like 10, 15 houses, maybe less. It was just a small, and in our mind, we kind of just assumed that maybe this was like an officer area. It was like a special area for the officers. But it was definitely secluded. It was away from the neighborhood. It wasn't like, we had been in the neighborhood, and then just getting past this bush, then we see it. And so it's, it's part of the Arnold Heights, but I don't know, it's kind of just hard to explain how it's, it's part of it, but it felt definitely separate. And as soon as we get around it, it felt different. I don't know how to explain it, but it definitely felt different. It felt cold. Once we got around that bush, it's, and it wasn't, it's just so weird because it's like, there was no change in temperature. We didn't get far in that. We just went behind a bush, and all of us on all of us feel this definite chill. And we're still hearing this running water. And we're trying to find, you know, what is the source of this running water? And as we're going around from house to house, we, we finally kind of isolated, like the sound of this running water is coming from this house. We figure, oh, we've, we've found what these other guys were telling us about, but we're not really like thinking there's anything bad, but I don't know, like I said, it was, it was definitely cold, but as soon as we get into this house, there was like this just oppressive feeling, like heavy, like in hindsight, I would describe it as just like, it's simply anxious. And we can hear the running water in it. And so we go in, we start walking around, we're hitting up faucets. In this area, the stuff wasn't busted up. Like in all the rest of the community, it, like I said, doors kicked down, sinks busted off, toilets busted off. In this area, it was all pretty well preserved. It was dirty. It was clearly abandoned, but it wasn't all destroyed, like it was in the other areas. And we're going around where we're kind of messing with the sinks, trying to flush the toilet looking at it, no, no running water. And I don't know if, if you ever are like in a house and someone turns on the shower or something like that and you can hear the water just running through the house, that was the sound, like, like unmistakably, it sounded like running water, but that it, it wasn't, there was no running water. And so after kind of looking around the house, I was starting to get weirded out because, like I said, this oppressive feeling, it felt cold. I might do, let's get out of this house. And so we walk out and then we go over to the next house, and that's when we see an X painted on the door. And then it all kind of like clicks. And I'm thinking the story that we were told was that someone's child had drowned. And then he went on some kind of psychotic rampage, murdering people. We're hearing the sound of water running, can't find water anywhere. And then now we're here and we're seeing these X's that we were told, we're symbolic of houses where people have been murdered. And as we're looking at these houses, we can see that pretty much all of them apart from a couple had X's painted on their doors. And so we're like, dude, let's, let's get out of here. Like, I don't want to mess with this. I don't want to check it out, but there was always like one or two instigators in the group that are like, oh, you know, let's keep, let's keep checking it out. Let's, let's keep looking. But I'm pretty in season like, dude, let's just get the fuck out of here. Let's not mess with whatever this is. And so we decide to go back around and around the bush. And we go around that bush. And then it's like the whole community is foggy just out of nowhere. And it's not super uncommon in that area, in Marino Valley, for just fog to all of a sudden be there. You wake up in the morning, just the whole community is just a low fog would drop in. But this is pretty weird. Like, we had just been through this area. There was no fog. It was a clear night. And we had been over in this secluded cul-de-sac for maybe 15 minutes, maybe even less. And we come around this bush and it is foggy. And it's like so foggy that I would say that I could not see 10 feet in front of me. Just dense fog. And so I'm like, dude, I don't know what's going on. But we absolutely just need to get out of here now. And at this point, the rest of the guys are like, yeah, let's, let's go. And so we start wandering through the neighborhood. And we, we don't know where we are. Because we had done all this wandering to find this separate little cul-de-sac. And so I'm trying to remember like, how did we get here? What did we do? It's not a complex community. It's a pretty basically laid out like giant rectangle shape. And it should not be hard to find our way back out of here. But we are walking around for a while. Like, it felt like an hour. It may have only been 15, 20 minutes, but it felt like a long time of trying to find our way out. And then we're walking around and sure as shit, we end up right in front of this community center. We had never seen this before. So many times through this thing, we had never seen this community center. And boom, there it is, right in front of us. And so then we're like, well, I mean, now we find this, we have to go inside and we have to look. We have to see what this thing's all about. Because who knows if we'll ever find this place again. Like, from the outside, it just looks like just a plain just large building. Like what I would think of being like maybe a gymnasium or something like that, like a school gymnasium, just a large rectangular building, nothing remarkable about it. I don't remember seeing any signs or anything on it. It had a small parking lot attached to it, but the parking lot only had like maybe five spots. I would imagine that if it's a community center for the community, people would most likely just walk there. And so maybe they didn't need a large parking lot. But we get inside and on the inside, it kind of looks like a gymnasium. It's just a big open space. Off to one side, there were a bunch of like those old school, like picnic tables that they would have at schools, the ones that had the bench and the table all included and they could fold up flat. They would put them up on wheels and push them against the wall. There were like a bunch of those, just pushed up against the wall on one side. Over on one side, it looked like there was an area where there might have been a kitchen. We didn't go over there and explore that. But for the most party, it was just a wide open area. And once we walk in, we see a giant X painting on the ground. This is exactly what the people told us about. And we've been here so many times, we've never seen this. It's insane that not only did we find that community, the same night, we find this giant community center with this huge X painted the middle just like they said. Being the skeptical person that I am, I'm just thinking like, this all could just be stuff of these people fucking with us. Who am I to say that? Those people didn't go around and paint X's on doors. They didn't paint the X on this community center. And then tell us the story, knowing oh, we'll run into it. But like in hindsight, like the running water, and then how we had never found either of these places, we find it both. This dense fog that just hits, it was really fucking weird. And we were all very weirded out. And immediately we're like, do we, we need to get out. Like we already had been in the mentality of like, we need to get out of this community. But now we're seeing this. It's like, definitely let's go. We all just bust right out. Start, start try, still we're lost. The fog is still thick. We still don't know where we are. The fog was was so thick that like I said, I mean, I could, I say that I couldn't see 10 feet in front of me. I'd be surprised if it was even 10 feet. Like it, you know, they say that fog is so thick that you can cut it with a knife. Like that is what it felt like. I had never experienced fog this thick. Could not see through this fog. It, I mean, we were, we were tripping on curbs. We were tripping over stuff because it was legitimately so difficult to see that there were times that we thought we were still walking straight down the street. And we had just gotten mixed up and we're crossing the street, hitting a sidewalk, walking straight towards a house. We're, we're walking through and you don't know how to get back to this road. I was trying to tell us like, hey, let's, let's stick to, to one side of the road and just try to stick with this sidewalk thinking that if we stick with that eventually we have to find this road. Eventually we have to come around. But if we keep bouncing around like crossing through the grassy areas, we're going to end up getting lost. But no matter what we did, I, I think we came up with several different systems in this time of trying to find this road. And there was absolutely nothing we could do to find this road. It just felt like we were in, like, the twilight zone or just, I don't, I don't know, like just a never ending maze of these houses because they all are completely identical. And and everywhere we're turning, it's just houses, houses, houses. After continuing to go through the fog, continuing to try to find it, we feel like we're totally lost. And I mean, this is before cell phones, I mean, maybe we had cell phones, but there definitely wasn't a map turning like that. These weren't smartphones. And so there's no way we could have pulled up a map and been like, oh, yeah, we gotta cruise down over here. Like, we were just completely helpless in this situation to where it felt like, it honestly felt like we were gonna be in this community for the rest of our lives, or that it was gonna be just something where time stopped and this is our life from now on. And I mean, I worked in medicine at the time. I was also working in medicine, but I was working as a medic. And so I was used to like high stress situations. And kind of a part of your training when you're being a medic is that you have to be of the calmest person there. You cannot let on that you are freaking out because if the medic gets on scene and they're freaking out, it's just a cascading effect. Everyone freaks out. But if you have that person there, the calm presence, even if you're just completely losing your mind inside, it helps kind of keep everyone together. Let's figure this out, let's get out. And I was just panicking on the inside. I'm trying to keep it together on the outside, but I am just freaking out because I was in the boy scouts. I'm an eagle scout. And so I know how to navigate. I know how to get around. I have a very good sense of direction. And I was completely lost. No idea how to find anything. And all of my friends completely helpless too. Like we started off with plans and then after everyone's plan failed on how to find this stupid street to get us out of this community, which we have never had a problem finding before. And so we're just wandering, completely lost, unable to find it when we come around this corner and just off in the distance, we see this large looming figure. This just massive presence of a man. Like I'm 65 and this man made me feel little. And I just seem standing there in front of us wearing overalls, not like a shirt underneath or anything, just overalls. Barefoot, I do specifically remember that. Like I specifically remembered that. It felt like all he was wearing were these overalls and he's carrying an axe. Yeah, it was like just a classic like old axe. Like it looked beat up, would handle with, I mean obviously just like an axe blade, like a metal blade but it didn't look shiny and looked old. Like everything about this dude looked old. But he himself like didn't look old. He looked like I would say maybe in his 40s and just this massive presence, just standing in front of us, appearing out of nowhere. And it legitimately looked like this guy was from, like in earlier time, like I, because of where it was, I would think like 1940s and with that. But this, I mean, it honestly looked like he was from like the 1800s. It's like something that I picture when you think of like, like an old movie where there's this big dude living on a farm and just, he did not look like he belonged there with us in the early 2000s. I remember that he was bald, he was very muscular, like a very big imposing presence. Like I don't know if you've ever watched sports and then you meet an athlete in person and it's like especially like basketball players. Like you see like this guy's the point guard. And on the court, he looks so much shorter than all these other guys. And then you meet them in life and you're like, this dude is fucking huge. I mean, when you meet athletes, it feels like they're not human. It feels like they are something else. They are just someone else, like just a different species than us because they're so big. This guy felt like he was a different species, like just so big, so imposing and then just dropped in out of nowhere. And it just, it freaked us all out. Just in he is standing dead center in the road. And to add to how absolutely insane this is, he's just standing there like in the fog. He's the only thing that we can see. I cannot see the street. I cannot see the houses. I can't see the sidewalk. I can't see anything. It's just this guy standing in the middle, this massive, imposing presence right in the middle of the street and just absolutely terrifying. But we're all standing there silently and it felt like a long time that we're just standing there. It was probably seconds, but it just feels like we're just standing there. All at a stand still. Like we don't know who this guy is. Honestly, I'm thinking like, is this guy gonna attack us? When you see a dude carrying an axe, this absolutely massive guy, after everything we've experienced, my first thought is this dude is gonna chop us up with this fucking axe. Like we are done, but we're so freaked out that we just kind of stand there. All of a sudden he speaks to us in this loud booming voice, but it's so weird because I swear, and I still remember this distinctly like it was yesterday. And I have an absolutely terrible memory. I can't tell you what I have for dinner last night, but I remember this, it sounded like he was talking into our heads. Like I, it was just such a loud booming voice that felt like it was coming from inside me. And what the fog the way it was, we could see him there, but like I couldn't really see facial features. I could just tell there's this huge bald man standing in front of us, but I couldn't see like his mouth moving. So I don't even know if his mouth was moving, but just in this booming voice, he says, "What are you doing here?" And we just, we're all just frozen. Just, we didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to say. And I mean, I feel like I'm the kind of person that in these situations, I mean, these situations, like this happens a lot, but like in a high stress situation, I'm sure the guy that people go to like, like what are we doing here, they'll look at me, and it's just, I'm completely frozen, and I never find myself like that, but we stand there frozen, and then after, you know, five, 10 seconds, again, this voice that feels like it's coming from inside of our heads, at least my head. "What are you doing here?" And my buddy Dustin just says, "We're just exploring the area, you sir, just trying to be polite to him." And Dustin was definitely not that kind of guy, that would be, you know, super polite to just some random dude standing there with a fucking ax. Like, I would imagine Dustin, Dustin honestly was the guy who would we would go to these hardcore shows. He was, and Dustin was little. Dustin was probably five foot three, a little guy. And we would go to these hardcore shows, and he'd be the one in the mosh pits, trying to like be aggressive. I don't know if it was just like a complex, like he was trying to prove like, "No, I'm a big tough guy in a little guy body." But Dustin is the guy who I would expect in that situation to be like, "You know, what the fuck are you doing here?" And like go after him or something like that. But Dustin just, like he's in church talking to the pastor, just, "Oh, we're just exploring the area, you sir. We're just looking around." And then after another brief pause, this guy, and this guy, he doesn't move. He just standing there. Just, it hasn't moved anything, hasn't raised the ax, nothing. And then just, the ax was in his right hand, and then with his left hand, it just slowly raises, and points behind us, and just that same booming voice, "Get out of here!" Or leave, they leave. And we immediately, like, we're out of there. Like we turn around, we start booking out of there, and just the most insane thing of all these insane things, another one on top of it, we turn around, and it was, I mean, it's as if he commanded the fog to leave, too, because the fog just kind of parted in front of us, just cleared up a little bit in front of us, enough to where we can see, straight behind us, is that street, the street that we need to get out, the street that we've been looking for, for what feels like forever, is right there behind us. And we take off running towards it. After a few steps, I turn to kind of, like, look back, because I'm concerned a little bit, like maybe this dude's gonna chase us like that, but the fog is still thick behind us, and it has consumed him, I can't see him, I can't see anything back there, I can't even see the houses. It's like as we're running, the fog is clearing up in front of us, but then closing up behind us. It's insane. And we take off running, get out of the neighborhood, run all the way back to our car, and as we're getting in the car, I turn back and look, again, at the neighborhood, no fog, completely cleared up, all the fog is gone. And I mean, it's not like we were running for minutes. Like it was probably like one minute to get from where we were running to the car. And somehow all that fog is gone. And there was no fog anywhere else. It's as if like that fog was just placed in that space. Like we were somewhere different, I don't know. Like as if we were in some different place during that time with this fog and with this man and with this little community center and this other little cul-de-sac area. And then as soon as we got out of the neighborhood, it was the regular neighborhood was back there. And we're in our car and we're gone. (soft music) All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. (soft music) We get in the car, we take off. I don't think anyone said a word, the entire drive back. And usually we would all park at like a Del Taco or a gas station down the street that way we'd only have to take one car in. And we get back, we get to our cars and we just see it, it's weird. I don't know why we didn't just have a little debriefing moment of like, holy shit dude, what the fuck just happened. Like it was just, see you guys later and we just take off. I don't know if we were all in shock, what it was. And it's something that like in hindsight, I would have thought it'd be something we would have always talked about. 'Cause it's hands down the craziest thing that I've experienced in my entire life. And it's something that it's like, it's just hasn't been a conversation piece. It's occasionally, one of us would bring up like, oh dude, remember when we saw that giant dude in overalls at sector X and like, oh yeah, I do that was crazy. Like, but the conversation never goes any further. We have never tried to dissect it to try to figure out, you know, what happened? What did we experience? Because it was definitely something that was not part of this world, was not part of what we were. And it's, yeah, I just don't know why we haven't tried to talk about it. After this happened, we really didn't have a lot of interest in returning back to it. And we started finding other random stuff in town to do to occupy our time. But shortly after a large fence was erected around it. And we did occasionally go back to check it out to see what was going on. I don't feel like we were really trying to re-explore it, try to figure it out. It was just something that we would do, I don't know. But like, went around and we were trying to show it to other people. I think once the fences went up, we kind of got the impression that it was not going to be there much longer or at least you weren't going to have access to it. And so we wanted to share it with other friends. And so we went back there, looked around there. There's a couple of other little crazy things that happened there. When we were there, there was one time that I was there just with my buddy Dustin. And we were walking through it. And all of a sudden, we saw a car pull up. And around this time when the fence went up, the police would start patrolling the area. They would come around a couple of times at night and check it out and stuff like that. Especially, I think, maybe someone who reported a car came up or something. And we saw a car pulling up and then go through the fence into the neighborhood and start driving. And we were freaked out because I'm like, is it a cop? Or are we going to be in trouble? And we went and we lay down in the ditch and just hit here. And this car pulled up and parked on the side of the road and opened up its trunk. And then, I mean, I'm not-- I don't want to think that it was a body. But they dumped a body-sized bag. Maybe, I mean, honestly, there's probably just someone dumping the trash. But dumped it off to the side and then they took off. We didn't go explore that. Another time we were there with a bunch of friends. And we were walking through. And then, I can see lights in one of the houses. And I'm like, here's my dude, like, what, why is there lights? And then we hear what sounds like gunshots. And being a young dumb guy, like, I'm just, oh, I'm kind of curious, like, what is it? Let's go check it out. And so we start walking through. And then I go through the houses. And I see this grassy area in the back through this grassy common backyard area that there's a house that's illuminated. And I can hear the gunshots. And in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, man, I wonder if these other cool people, like maybe we can go meet someone. I'm completely, like, I don't know. I'm lucky to be alive based off all this stupid shit that we did back then. But I'm telling my friends, like, hey, let's go check this out. We walk up and I come up to the sliding glass door, which is broken in the back of this house. And then I look to my friends. None of my friends are with me. They have all abandoned me. And so I walk through. And I can see that there's, like, two or three people in there. They've set up a little kind of, like, shooting range inside this house. And they're shooting. And I step through and I step on the broken glass. And they turn and they look at me. And I'm like, hey, what's up, guys? And just one of the dudes says, shoot the motherfucker. And they turn and they start shooting at me. And I take off, I'm running. And I'm trying to find my friends. I'm trying to do this, like, like, yell whisper thing, where it's like, guys, guys, like, I want them to hear me, but I'm trying not to give, like, in case these people are trying to chase me and shoot me, just running. Finally, I find them just walking on a street. And I'm like, dude, like, they were shooting at me. They were shooting at me. And like, one of the guys, like, ah, dude, now you're just, you're lying to us. I'm like, no, and my buddy Dustin, who was my best friend at the time, like, he's like, no, dude, I know Eric. I know that he is telling the truth. Like, we need to get out of here. We take off, we get in the car, we get back to Del Taco. And then one of my buddies goes, like, dude, you got blood on your sock. And I was wearing new balances. And the word new was gone. Like, something had shot through it. And when I took off my shoe and my sock, there was a little just chunk out of the back of my foot. Like, I had been shot through the fucking shoe while I was running. And that was the actual, like, last event that happened. We went back. I refused. I don't know, maybe they went back. I was like, hey, I'm never, like, that was the final straw. But after that, you know, pretty surely after that, the Marines started doing training there. They kind of converted the whole neighborhood into what looked like a Middle Eastern town. And they were doing some, like, rage training and stuff like that in there for a couple of years or maybe less. And then once they finished using the area, it was completely demolished. And then in common, in an empire fashion, it was turning to warehouses. And so now if you go over there, it's just a nice little warehouse area with no more houses. Looking back on it, it legitimately feels like we were dumped into some different reality for a brief moment in time. Because, like I said, we had fully explored this neighborhood. And I had never seen this little cul-de-sac of houses, had never seen this community center. And it's just the fact that we were so lost, it felt like it was out of a horror movie, the fact that we couldn't even find our way out, that we just couldn't even figure out which way it was straight. And it just felt like we were just dropped into something, or something else was dropped onto us for a brief period of time. And then as soon as we got out of that community, we were back into our reality. Like I really, I just don't know how to explain it. Because when we got back to our car, there was no other car. So I don't know where this dude could have come from, because I mean, I may not have described it, given it enough credit or justice before. But the whole neighborhood was off of a main street, but it wasn't like there was anything else. Down across the street is a big national cemetery. And now the area has shopping centers and something that there was nothing there. So there's no one just walking there. If someone's walking there, it's going to take you a long fucking time to walk to this neighborhood. So just the only explanation-- I don't know, like the only explanation I could have, is like I said, that either we were dumped into some different reality, or some different reality was dumped onto us. Like I have no idea how this man ended up there, and how we ended up so lost in this area that we knew well. We knew the area. I've looked into it. I've tried to find any possible story of someone in the military going on a murder spree in the community. And I've never been able to find anything. Even just looking up the community, like Arnold Heights, you find very little. It has a Wikipedia page. It has stuff. But there's not like any stories of crazy happenings there or anything like that. I mean, it's been well over 20 years since all this happened. I've spent time trying to figure out, like if anyone else has had any experiences there, if there's been anything else, the only other kind of just people that I have to be like, OK, like something weird was there was these other random people that we ran into there. And like in hindsight, I really wish that I would have talked to them more, Maybe run into them again. after and just asking, okay, tell me about your experience. What did you guys experience here? Because they were very adamant about do not explore that, do not go look at it, just stay away from it, avoid it. Like you guys can keep messing with the houses here and stuff like that, but don't mess with that sector X shit. And I wish I would have heated their warning, but I'm just super curious what their experience was that made them feel the exact same way. - Okay, thank you to Eric for sharing his story. This one was different than a lot of other world episodes, but I really liked it, we all really liked it. I think a big reason for me is that it reminds me of the type of books I used to read as a kid, like Goosebumps or Eerie Indiana, stuff like that, books about teenagers in the suburbs finding themselves in very surreal situations. It's a story where I could certainly think of some potential explanations for various parts of it, but it sort of doesn't matter because I just really like this one and I'm sure Eric feels the same having lived it. I did look for any kind of records of murders happening at Arnold Heights. I did not find anything, but it did occur on a military base and I should say that the military is pretty well known for keeping crimes that occur on base hidden from the public. I'd say they're actually quite famous for that. So maybe somebody else will find something that I couldn't either way, Arnold Heights is long gone and seems to have been paved over and had several massive warehouses built on top of it. Thank you so much to Eric for reaching back out to us. I can't even tell you how many times one of us would say, I wonder what happened to that guy with the Arnold Heights story. So I'm so happy I got to hear this finally. This episode was called Sector X and you've been listening to Other World. Other World is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Shaffer, Theo Krants, Haley Parson and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Koldisak Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Other World, you could become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leo Riestennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Other World now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained, you can send us your stories at [email protected].