Fort Sill is a Madhouse

[MUSIC] Fort Sill is one of those places where it makes sense that soldiers tell ghost stories. And I don't mean that in a cheap way. I mean, when you look at the history of the place, it would almost be stranger if there weren't a few stories. Today Fort Sill is one of the army's major training bases. It's where thousands of civilians show up every year, get yelled at, loose sleep, stand fire guard, clean the trains, march around in the Oklahoma heat, and eventually walk out as soldiers. It's also home to the army's field artillery school. So for a lot of people in uniform, Fort Sill is where military life begins. But that's only the modern version of the place. And what have we learned so far from these stories? Where there's a lot of suffering, bloodshed, and dead bodies. Paranormal events tend to follow. Fort Sill was built in 1869 in what was then Indian territory. Before it was a training base, it was a frontier outpost. A place tied to the wars, forced removals, and reservation system. That changed life forever for the Wichita, Kioa, Comanche, Apache, and other native peoples of the Southern Plains. It was also a prison camp. In the 1890s, hundreds of Chiracua Apache prisoners were held there, including Geronimo himself. And Geronimo is still buried on Fort Sill today, along with thousands of soldiers, civilians, Native Americans, and Buffalo soldiers whose lives are tied to that ground in one way or another. So when people say Fort Sill feels haunted, I don't think they're just talking about old buildings making noise at night. This is a place where a lot of different histories overlap. Native history, army history, frontier violence, prisoners of war. Generations of soldiers passing through, training, deploying, coming home. And sometimes never leaving. According to the official US Army documents, there have been no less than 35 verified incidents of soldiers experiencing strange, unexplainable happenings while on the base. In barracks, in the trains, in old, on-post housing, out in the training areas, and sometimes even in broad daylight. These are just a few more that didn't make the official records. A few strange but true stories told by soldiers, officers, families, and civilian workers at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I'm Luke Lamana, and this is wartime stories. How long do we have? I don't know. Just hurry up. You're the one who had to go. Yeah, dude. About to piss my fricking pants here. Soon. Make it quick. Yeah, yeah. Oh, dude. Oh, Jesus. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, I saw it. Holy shit, dude. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, dude. Jesus. Oh, dude. Jesus. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, I saw it. Holy shit, dude. Holy shit, dude. Nope. Bro, I thought you were going to piss your pants. Fucking only. Wait up. I came across this first story on an online message board. It was posted by a US soldier who went through basic combat training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in January of 2017. And if you've ever served, you already know that bootcamp stories are basically their own genre. Everyone has one. Some dumb thing a drill instructor said. Some guy in the platoon who couldn't stop messing up. Some miserable night on fire guard when you were tired, cold, cleaning something, disgusting, and wondering why you made such poor choices that landed you here. But this story is a little different because according to this soldier, the thing that scared his platoon the most at Fort Sill wasn't the drill sergeants. It wasn't the training. It wasn't even the usual misery of being a brand new recruit. It was their own barracks, more specifically, the latrine. Because over the course of BCT, multiple recruits started reporting the same kinds of things, lights turning on by themselves, voices coming from empty rooms, shadow figures moving through the hall, and one recruit waking up to see something dark hovering over his bed. Now, normally, bootcamp is the perfect environment for your mind to play tricks on you. You're exhausted, you're stressed, you're sleep deprived. You're living in a room with 50 other people. But what makes this story interesting is that it apparently wasn't just one guy. It was enough of the platoon that by the end, even one of the drill sergeants had an opinion about it. You right. Around week four of BCT is where everyone starts to really know each other like. I think I knew all 50 of those guys' names by heart by that point. And as we got to talking, word starts going around that other people have had strange experiences as well. One guy said that while he was roaming the halls at night, he saw a shadowy figure walk out of the latrine and down the hall towards him. But just before it got close, he said it evaporated into thin air. Another person said that he heard noises on the other side of the latrine while he was cleaning it. And another guy said he actually heard voices when it was his turn to scrub the toilets. But by far the worst story I heard came from her crute named Hunt. So Hunt's cot was at the far end of the row right next to the latrine door. He told us that one night he woke up to see this dark figure hovering over his bed. He didn't even try to hide how freaked out he was, saying that he screamed like a little girl. According to him, it had happened a few times after that and he was having a really hard time coping. It got so bad that he straight up refused to use the latrine after hours. He was too afraid to go in and turn on the lights, I guess. He didn't want to risk seeing something that he wasn't supposed to. Honestly, I should have taken his advice. For me, this scariest moment actually happened during daytime. A buddy and I broke away from the group for a latrine break. We both ran inside and right as we flipped the light switch on, I saw this maybe six foot tall black figure standing there just watching us. It almost seemed to fade away as the light came on. And I was terrified. My brain was like that. That didn't just happen. That wasn't real. But when I saw the look on my buddy's face, I could tell that he saw it too. And he was every bit as freaked out as I was. So fast forward around week nine or 10, the final week of BCT. The drill sergeants actually start talking to you like normal human beings instead of dirt. We had a Q&A and someone asked about what's going on with the haunted living area. At our drill sergeant, she said something along the lines of you're not the first platoon to talk about this shit. I personally think there's a portal here. There's a history of people taking their own lives on the base. And I think they stick around, but I'm not the one who lives here so I don't mind. Needless to say, sleeping there for the last few nights after hearing that was tough. I know some people might not believe my story. But for any newer cruts doing their BCT at Fort Sill, just, no, that's you're probably not crazy. There's something seriously wrong at that place. [MUSIC PLAYING] This next story is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it comes from Lieutenant Colonel Seth Hall of the US Army. And second, it wasn't posted on some random ghost forum or anonymous message board. It was published on the Army's own website, which It doesn't automatically mean every detail is true, obviously, but it does matter. get a little harder to just brush it off as internet creepypasta. Hall's story goes back to when he was a young lieutenant living on Fort Sillo, Oklahoma, in a neighborhood called academic heights. And from the way he describes it, academic heights was one of those older, unpost housing areas that actually had some charm to it. Solid old houses, heavy wooden doors, brass knobs, families living close together. It's running back and forth between houses, you know, the kind of place where, when the dads were deployed, everybody on the block helped look out for everybody else. But according to Hall, there was something else in that neighborhood too. Something his dog noticed before he did, and something two little girls may have been feeding lunch to, without realizing what they were dealing with, he writes. I'll start off by saying that I've always been skeptical of ghosts and ghost stories that I still am. But I'll admit there are far more things in this world that I cannot explain than things I can. I'll put the following events into the latter category. Most of these accounts are 100% true, to the best of my recollection they happened some 18 years ago, but they are not embellished in any way. Both happenings occurred on Fort Sillo when I was a young lieutenant living in academic heights. Out of consideration to the young families who live in the quarters now, I will not share the exact addresses of where these incidents occurred. My first unexplainable encounter happened around six months after we moved into our place. My family left the day prior for a long weekend trip to grandma grandpa's house. Our faithful Beagle Elysees and I were the only two living souls in the house and had settled into bed around 10-30 pm. It was a cool fallnight. All the windows were shut and the bedroom door was completely closed as is my routine when I go to bed. If you've never been in academic heights, they were erected in the mid 20th century when buildings were made to last. At that time all of the exterior and interior doors were made of solid wood, making them extremely heavy, denobbs and latches were all brass and they looked original from when the building was originally built. I was reading for around 20 minutes and Elysees was curled up in his usual spot at the foot of the bed, sleeping. In out of nowhere Elysees jolts awake and he starts growling at the door. The hair on his back, standing straight up and his gaze is just laser-focused on the door. He was growling, showing his teeth, posing as mean-looking as I'd ever seen him. I hadn't heard any noises as we occasionally did, living in a foreplex. In any way, Elysees was used to those sounds, but this was different. He was scared. In an attempt to calm him and keep him from disturbing our neighbors, I reached down to the pet him and when I touched his back leg, he kind of startled him and he looked at me and then back at the door and then back at me and kind of a, "Can't you see it?" kind of way. There's maybe 10 to 15 seconds elapsed with his locked in that sort of tense cycle. Elysees could not be comforted or deterred from growling intensely at the door, and just as I was beginning to wonder if I had locked both doors, I heard the latch click and watched the door knob turn. Then the door between the bedroom and the hallway swung open to about a 45-degree angle. That was enough for Elysees. He lost it. In an instant, all of his bravado vanished as he left off the opposite side of the bed and went to hide underneath of it. I instinctively reached for a small aluminum bat that I kept by the side of my bed and started yelling at whoever or whatever had just opened my door. Over the next 30 minutes, I checked and rechecked the entire apartment turning on all the lights and triple-checking the door locks. I couldn't find any evidence that anyone else had been in the house. When I felt safe again, when my heart stopped racing, logic took over and I tried for the next hour to replicate the door going from being latched, shot, to opening, but no use, something wanted in or out of my room, and it made no bones about letting me know. It wanted me to know, it was there. Because my kids were little, I did not tell them what happened, so that they wouldn't be frightened. I told my wife, but I'm not sure she totally believed me. We lived in those quarters for another few years, but neither Elysees or I ever saw anything else that we couldn't explain. The second spooky encounter didn't happen in my quarters or to me directly, but it did happen around the same time as my personal experience and in the same neighborhood of academic heights. As families living on posts tend to do, my family became very close to several others in our neighborhood. This was during the Operation Iraqi Freedom 1-3 time frame. For several consecutive years, at least a few dads were always deployed. When you were gone, you knew your family would be watched out, tore by friends on the block, and when you were home, you watched out for the other families. I still loved that about on post-living. Anyway, my oldest daughter, who was about four years old at the time, made friends with a girl her age, who lived in quarters across the street. The girls' room, the neighborhood, all summer and fall to the park and back, and in and out of both houses, often eating lunch at whichever house they happen to be at when they were hungry. At the age of four, the world is still magical. Every new playtime comes with dragons to be slain and unicorns to befriend. It wasn't uncommon to hear the girls singing with fairy choirs or whispering secrets to animals who always whispered back. The strange occurrences started, innocently enough, at lunchtime. My daughter's friends started asking if her new friend could have lunch with them. A friend who wasn't my daughter. At first, the adults assumed this request for a stuffed animal or another make-believe friend. And depending on how much food was left, whichever mom had assumed lunch duty that day would do their best to set aside an extra plate for this new friend. For a week or two, this lunch plan placated the girls. But that all changed one day when their friend didn't get any lunch. My daughter's friend was visibly upset. When her mother asked, "You know, what's the matter?" she said. Zoe is mad at you, mommy, because you didn't feed her today. Who is Zoe? Her mom asked. She's my friend and she's hungry. Replies this little girl. Trying to diffuse the situation and thinking that Zoe must be a stuffed animal. Her mother asked to see Zoe. Mommy, she's standing right in the hallway right there. Can't you see her? Her daughter said, "Now is equally puzzled as her mother." "No, I can't see her." Her mother replied very confused. She has long blonde hair and she's wearing a long white dress, like always, said her daughter. For fun, my friend showed her daughter photos of girls wearing white dressing gowns from the early 1900s. That looks just like the dress Zoe wears. Her daughter told her, "Okay," her mom said as calmly as possible. Tell Zoe it's time to go home. Her mommy will feed her when she gets there. The girls went to tell Zoe it was time to go home. And after that day, they never mentioned her again. This next account was sent to me by soldier named Ethan. At the time he wrote it, Ethan had just recently finished basic combat training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Like most people going through basic, he had plenty of reasons to be miserable, the heat, the old exercises, getting woken up in the middle of the night and told the stand-watch on fire guard well. Everybody else gets to keep sleeping. But according to Ethan, the thing that stuck with him the most wasn't a drill sergeant or the training or the Oklahoma summer. It was something that happened out in the field in your area. place called Potato Hill. His platoon had set up a patrol base for a land-have exercise, and Ethan ended up pulling fire guard in the middle of the night. At first it sounded normal, coyotes in the distance, other platoons moving around, wind in the grass. But then Ethan heard footsteps coming from a place where no one was supposed to be. And when he turned to challenge whoever was walking toward him. well, I'll let him tell it. writes. So I recently completed basic combat training and had some weird things happen during a couple of our field training exercises. For context I completed my training at Fort Sill during the summer months. Most days were spent in sweltering 100 degree heat while the nights felt like they dropped near freezing, especially with the wind. For my batteries and full field exercise we rocked out to a location called Potato Hill primarily to do some good old-fashioned land-have training. For our stay we were divided up by platoons into patrol bases. For anyone familiar with the location we set up hours in the lowland behind the large hill you encounter when you first arrive at Potato Hill. I ended up having to pull fire guard the first night we stayed and yeah, I was not happy about that. But my battle buddy woke me up and we agreed that I'd stay at the entrance of the patrol base and basically challenge anyone who tried to enter. Meanwhile my battle buddy another guy would patrol around inside of the base. Besides the distant howling of coyotes sounds of other platoons moving around the first half hour was pretty unadventful but the peace and quiet didn't last. So there I was chilling on some flat land facing the pavilion. When from behind me I heard footsteps crunching around in the high grass. I instinctively turned around to address who was there but there was nobody. My battle buddies were still over at the far side of the patrol base so definitely not them. At first I thought it might have been a drill sergeant trying to sneak up on us and making sure we're alert and whatnot. They'd done it earlier in the exercise so we were kind of expecting it. But just as I was wondering if that was the case, three more footsteps, walked right up in front of me, clear as day. I staggered back, completely caught off guard because we're a person should have been, it was just completely empty. I wasn't hanging around. I think I peeled out of there and then went and linked up with my battle buddies. The whole thing really creeped me out but I really didn't give it much thought after that night. That is until we ended up back at that same spot during our forge. We ended up having to do an additional land-of course and found ourselves setting up in the same foxholes and slit trenches we'd already dug and reburied the last time. And just like last time I found myself on fireguard, that was when the unwanted memories came flooding back. So in an effort to distract myself from all the creepy thoughts, I just started pacing and doing laps around the front of the patrol base. Coyotes were hailing again all night and at one point I swear I heard something in the grass. I stopped looking out into the dark and I'm listening and there they were just like last time. Footsteps crunching through the tall grass. At that point I knew there was something just dead wrong about the whole thing. Nothing to intense happen that night but just being there had my stomach doing flips that feeling you get when your whole body knows that just something isn't right. This next story was posted online by a soldier under the handle Jamie Lynn 96. And I have to say after reading through these forts he'll accounts I do feel bad for the people who had to go through basic training there because basic is already miserable enough you're exhausted getting yelled at you're cleaning constantly you're waking up in the middle of the night fireguard. You're trying to adjust this completely new world where every small mistake somehow turns into like a platoon wide punishment. And now on top of all of that imagine finding out that your barracks might have something else living in it. Footsteps coming up in empty stairwell voices in a bathroom nobody's supposed to be using showers turning on after lights out. And then one night a scream ripping through the squad bay loud enough for it to wake everybody up at once. According to Jamie Lynn that's exactly what happened during her time at fort sill. She writes I was at fort sill for my basic training every night we took turns doing fire guard which is basically two soldiers rotating every hour to watch the door clean up make sure everyone stays in bed. There were four barracks base hours the female bay was upstairs and across the hall from the male bay but each bay used a separate stairwell. Us females and the drill sergeants were the only ones to use the centermost stairwell. The sergeants would come up to check on us periodically while we were on fire guard. We could always hear them when they were coming up the stairway because the doors were heavy loud. But every now and then we would hear footsteps come all the way up to the top of the stairs and just stop. Neither of the doors would open and we'd never hear the footsteps actually go back down the stairs. I swear sometimes we'd even hear what sounded like objects rolling and crashing down the stairwell bouncing off each individual step and we'd go out we'd look and you guessed it. Nothing. I know a lot of the girls tried to shrug it off but it was honestly really scary. After Lightshelt everyone who wasn't on fire guard had to stay in bed. If we wanted to get up to use the bathroom we had to let those standing guard know and there was absolutely no showering allowed after that time. But despite this there were times where we'd hear people talking in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Sometimes we'd even hear the showers going so we'd go and investigate because we're all gonna get in shit if anyone was up making noise but nobody was ever in there. I should also mention that the lights in our latrine were on motion sensors but every time we'd hear noises coming from inside all the lights were off. We'd walk in the lights would flick on which meant nobody had been in there for at least a few minutes before we arrived. Between the stairs and bathrooms things were creepy enough but one night something happened that still freaks me out even all these years later. So in our barracks the beds were lined up in two rows. We're all fast asleep and suddenly this blood curdling scream just tears through the room like it sounded as if it came from right next to our row of beds. Everybody heard it. We all jolted out of bed at the same time freaking out looking at each other trying to figure out who or what had made that noise but nobody on watch or anybody. We never figured out where it came from. Speaking of screams in the night during basic training as far as screams permeating through the squad bay I had a very similar experience and it wasn't my drill instructors. So the kid that slept next to me I probably have a lot of stories about him actually but nice kid just maybe didn't have all his crayons in the box if you know what I mean as far as his decision making ability well anyway he got Pink Eye. Most of us got Pink Eye. I'm not saying that was the reason. Well the docks because he asked for them they gave him these eyedrops for discomfort you know and I guess one night he woke up at 3 a.m. and his eyes were all kind of crusted shut so he reached his back into his cammy bottoms like his trousers into the cargo pocket to get his little bottle his little eyedropper bottle of saline. Now at the time we were doing a lot a rifle training. And as part of your rifle cleaning kit, you get CLP, or cleaner lubricant protectant, it comes in a little dropper bottle. It's like a yellow fluid, and not meant for eyes, funnily enough, but anyway, I guess he kept his saline in one pocket, and then his CLP in another pocket, and at 3 a.m. when he's really tired and all crusty. He grabbed the wrong bottle, and the first impression I had when this kid woke us up was that somebody was stabbing him, like that was my first sort of knee jerk reaction as this blood curdling scream just rips through the whole squad. It's right next to me, like he woke everybody up, but this kid was right like three feet away from me. He's just thrashing around on the bed, like freaking out, and I pretty sure he was like screaming my eyes, my eyes, and I think I saw the CLP bottle next to him on the bed, and I put it together. I think it cleared up his pink eye though. I don't remember him having a lot of pink eye complaints after that, I would not recommend. Funnily enough though about that same exact bunk bed, because you move through boot camp you different phases, you end up moving squad base, you go up to Edson Range, you come back down, marching, drill. During that same period of time, well I'm in that same exact bunk bed. I remember going, this is probably the creepiest experience I had during boot camp. Not paranormal as far as I'm aware, but I remember going to bed one night, and just after lights, I'm just kind of cozy and tucked up in my very tightly packed blanket, and I hear this sound, and it's completely silent, except snoring and farting and all the other things you hear. Just this dead silent, and I hear this noise, and I'm like, what the hell is that? And it's getting closer, so my audible perception tells me it's coming from underneath the bunks, somewhere down the row, and I'm at the very end, near the drill instructor hut, and it's just like something's being dragged on the concrete floor. So I just am watching the floor, underneath this kid's bunk, the CLP kid, under his bunk, just like waiting for whatever's about to happen to happen. And I see this hand come up from under the bunk, and it grabs the edge of the rack, and I see another hand come up. And then I see a face, and this kid just kind of like pops his head up, and it was a white kid. I don't remember who it was. I don't remember everybody that I went to bootcamp with, but I don't remember ever learning after the fact who it was. He was upside down, so it was dark. But the look on his face, when he saw me, so he might have probably tried to cross that last gap to my bed, but then he saw me looking at him, and I was a squad leader, and I don't think that mattered, because this kid was just creepy as she just looks at me, like gomer pile, kind of look before he killed Gunny Hartman, and he goes, "Hi." And then he hooks his hands back under the bed, and he pulls himself back under, and I'm just watching this like, "What the hell am I looking at?" And I hear him dragging himself all the way back down the row to, uh, wherever his bed was. So, I just, you know, it occurred to me at some point, this kid just slithered out of bed and decided he wanted a Spider-Man his way all the way across the squad bay under the racks, and why the fire watch didn't say anything or do, I don't know. But like, what a weird thing to do, right? He's halfway through bootcamp, and this is what he does after lights is, mobs the floor with his skippy shirt in that, man, you've been to bootcamp, uh, share your stories in the comments, because I'm sure you got 'em, and if you haven't been to bootcamp, go to the comments and read people's stories, because I'm sure there are a lot creepier than what I just told you. That being said, I was so tired, I honestly could not have cared less, like I was weirded out, but I would, this kid's about to like murder everybody in the squad bay, like just, hopefully he kills me first, because I'm tired, kind of, I just think that, uh, everybody in army basic, no matter what kind of weird stuff that they're seeing, especially if it's late at night, your priority is getting a good night's sleep, because the drill instructors are gonna be on your butts in the morning, you're not gonna be that concerned, and then maybe as time went on, later they're looking back with a fresh mind, and they're thinking about these weird things, and they're like, wow, that was kind of freaky, wasn't it? Didn't really impact them as much at the time. Drill instructors do get a bad rap, so I do wanna say I'm very grateful for my drill instructors thank you, because they're the guys who, it's a very thankless job at the end of the day, and they're the ones who spend all that time making Marines into Marines, so thank you. Before we get to the next story, I also wanted to say thank you to somebody else, and that is the sponsors who help make episodes like this possible. So speaking of chaos, gone are the days of drill instructors waking me up at 4 a.m., marching me around all day, three square meals at the chowel hole, and then back in bed by 9 p.m. Honestly, it's kind of nice to have that structure in your life, but now I'm on my own, and with the kind of work I do, I don't really feel like I ever have a consistent work schedule between this and the kids, and trying to keep everything moving and flowing. There's a lot of days where me and my wife look at each other, and we're just like, "I don't wanna cook." And look, if you left me to my own devices, I'm gonna eat like a pickle and a slice of cheese, or an entire bag of chips, and that's one of the reasons I started using Factor. It's a chef-crafted dietitian design meals that are ready to eat in just a couple of minutes, so I don't have to choose between convenience and eating actual food. They're ready in just like two minutes, no prep, basically no cleanup, which is perfect when the day keeps getting away from you. Oh gosh, I could survive on their cheesy bacon ranch, a shredded chicken, and the grilled filet mignon, truffle mushroom, tortellini, amazing, guilt-free, and they make eating healthier a lot easier. I use Factor. I honestly think it's worth trying, too, so let's eat real head-to-factor meals.com/wartimestories50 off and use code wartimestories50off to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last until October 31st, 2026. That's code wartimestories50off@factor meals.com/wartimestories50off@factor meals.com. See the website for more details. Another thing I miss about the military is that someone else handled all of my medical appointments, I didn't have to figure out who to call, or whether they would take my insurance, somebody just handed me a piece of paper, and told me where and when to be. And after I got out, all that changed. So every now and then, I do need to find my own doctor, chiropractor, acupuncturist, whatever it happens to be, and honestly, I do usually put it off. I don't feel like calling around to a bunch of different offices just to find out that nobody has an opening for three months. That actually is how I ended up finding and using ZockDoc, who graciously offered two spots for this episode. ZockDoc lets you search and compare high quality in network doctors. You can see actual appointment openings and instantly book a visit. Appointments usually happen within 24 to 72 hours, and sometimes you can even get a same day appointment, and it's free. Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with ZockDoc head to ZockDoc dot com slash wartime stories to get started and check that appointment off your to do list. That's zoc doc dot com slash wartime stories. His final story was posted online by a user named dcessum. And unlike most of the accounts in this episode, this one doesn't come from a trainee going through basic. It comes from a civilian employee who says he's worked at Fort Sill since the late 1990s. So this is somebody who had been around the base for decades. He knew the buildings, he knew the stories, he knew the rumors. But according to him, he'd never personally seen anything he couldn't explain. Until one morning, in broad daylight, he walked across the street for a smoke break and saw a man crossing an open field, and at first it didn't seem strange, just a guy walking through the grass, but then he noticed uniform this guy was wearing. And after doing some research, he came away believing that he may have seen something connected to one of Fort Sill's oldest pieces of history, a Buffalo soldier, he writes. I have been working civil service at Fort Sill since late 1999, almost 25 years and never seen anything like this before. I'm a smoker. So when I take smoke breaks, I have to walk across the street. street to the small park, a vacant lot with a few trees. Last Thursday, I went out for a smoke break at around 10am, and as I was having my cigarette and looking at the news on my phone, I noticed a black man in a cowboy hat walking through a field. I see people walking across that field occasionally, so at first I didn't think much of it. However, I looked up and I noticed that his corporal stripes were upside down, and much larger than on modern uniforms. He was about my height, 5'8", and he had a light beard as if he hadn't shaved in a week or so. It then occurred to me that this guy is dressed in like a civil war style uniform, and I thought, "Oh, cool, it's a reenactoring, a civil war reenactoring. Maybe they're having some kind of historical event nearby." So I immediately thought, "Now I'm going to take a photo of this guy." So I switched my phone to camera mode, and I went to take a picture, but the man completely vanished. Bind you, he was 50 feet or less away from me the last I saw him, and we were in a wide open field. There was absolutely no way he could have run out of sight or ducked down that quickly. Puzzled me all day. I was trying to justify it in my mind, you know, what I'd seen, and I just could not. I'd never been much of a believer in the paranormal, but I have no other explanation for what I saw of a full-bodied apparition of a buffalo soldier in broad daylight. He looked like a real solid person, not a translucent, you know, see-through kind of thing like you see in the movies. I did some research and discovered that buffalo soldiers, which were African-American troops that served from the late 1860s up until World War II, had built some of the fort's original structures. Old post quadrangle, officers quarters, the original hospital, and livery staples, were all built by these men sometime 1869 to 1870. And to this day, many of those soldiers are still buried in the Fort Sill post-Semitary. Every time we do an episode like this, I come back to the same question, what is it about military bases and ghost stories, because at this point it feels like every installation has them. Fort Campbell has them, JBLM has them, Fort Poke, 29 palms, every base on Okinawa, Washington, that is JBLM, I guess, and now Fort Sill. And the easy answer is probably that military bases are just strange places to begin with. You've got old buildings, old training areas, people coming and going for generations, a lot of foot traffic, a lot of stress, a lot of boredom, a lot of young soldiers running on no-sleep, bad food, caffeine, and the fear of getting smoked for something they didn't even know they did wrong. And yes, some of this could be exhaustion, some of it could be nerves, some of it could be the normal sounds of old barracks, stairwells, pipes, doors, wind, animals, and people just trying to make sense of things in the dark. But even with all that in mind, the stories from Fort Sill, they're hard to write off completely, because in that first account it wasn't just one recruit getting creeped out during fire guard. It was lights turning on by themselves, voices coming from an empty latrine, a shadow figure walking out of the bathroom and disappearing in the hall. A recruit named Hunt waking up to something hovering over his bed, and then two soldiers seeing the same black figure in the latrine in the middle of the day. That's the part that makes this one harder for me, because when someone see something at night, have a sleep in a barracks full of exhausted recruits, you know, you can easily explain that away. But two people seeing the same figure at the same time during the day in a bathroom that they had just both walked into. That's a little different. And then you have Lieutenant Colonel Seth Hall's story from academic heights. And I really appreciated Lieutenant Colonel's very kind of professional approach to the whole situation. He didn't say that he understood the events. He just explained what happened to the best of his memory. And that one stands out because of how normal it started. He's not out in the field. He's not pulling security. He's not half asleep in basic training. He's just at home in bed, reading with his dog. And then the dog sees something at the door, starts growling. And a few seconds later that latch clicks, knob turns, and a door opens by itself. He searches the house, nothing. And then in the same neighborhood, you have the story of Zoe. Two little girls eating lunch, asking for an extra plate for a friend that the parents couldn't see. Sounds like normal kid stuff, but kind of freaky. On the back end of that, when the little girl says Zoe's standing right there in the hallway, long blonde hair, white dress. And she's upset that she didn't get her lunch. And then she stops showing up when the little girl tells her to go away. Then there's Ethan's story out at Potato Hill. And that one is simple, but I think that's why it works. A young soldier on fire guard standing at the edge of a patrol base in the middle of the night, listening to coyotes and other platoons moving around somewhere. And he hears footsteps in the grass, close enough to react to, close enough that he turns to challenge whoever is there, but nobody. And then when they return to that same place during the forage, he hears it again. Footsteps moving to the grass where nothing is supposed to be. Just that feeling that something was there with him, right outside the perimeter. And we got Jamie Lin's account, brings us back to the barracks, footsteps coming up and empty stairwell, stopping at the top. Objects sound like they're rolling down the stairs. Nothing's there. Voices in the bathroom after lights out, showers running. Nobody is supposed to be using them. Motion sensor lights stay in off until somebody walked in, which meant nobody had been moving around inside. That was visible to those sensors. And then the scream that wakes everybody up and tears through the bay. No explanation. Just an entire room of soldiers sitting up in bed trying to figure out what the hell they just heard. And finally, you have the civilian worker who had been there at Fort Sill for 25 years. And he doesn't claim to see a lot of weird things, but here's this random soldier from a different place in time walking through a field and just disappears. And after looking into it, this guy comes away believing that he had seen a Buffalo soldier. One of the men whose history is tied directly to the early years of Fort Sill. So I don't know. Maybe Fort Sill is just old. Maybe it's the stress of basic training. Maybe people hear one ghost story and then every weird noise starts to feel like part of the legend. That definitely happens. But what makes Fort Sill interesting is that these stories don't all come from the same type of person. They come from recruits, officers, military families, drill sergeants, and civilian employees. People in barracks, people in houses, people in field training areas, people standing outside in the middle of the day. And again and again, they describe really essentially the same things. Footsteps, voices, shadow figures, doors opening, children who may or may not be there, and that overwhelming feeling that they may not be alone. Fort Sill has been a lot of things over the last century and a half. A frontier outpost, prison camp, a home to Buffalo soldiers at training ground for generations of American servicemen and women. A final resting place for thousands of people whose name is most of us will never know. So maybe that's why the stories keep coming because for a lot of people, Fort Sill is just the place they pass through. A few weeks, a few months, schoolhouse at duty station, one miserable chapter of basic training that they are more than happy to leave behind. But the ground itself has been there through all of it, the wars, the prisoners, the families, the recruits, the soldiers who built it, the people buried there, the people who came home, and the people who didn't. So whether you believe these accounts are fill in the blank, ghosts, stress, imagination, something else entirely. Fort Sill seems to be one of those places where the past never feels that far away. And maybe that's the real reason soldiers keep telling stories about it, because some places don't just have a history. Some places feel like they're still carrying it. War time stories is created and hosted by me, Luc LaMana, written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing, sound design, mixing and mastering by Alex Carpenter, with additional audio work by me. Animation and motion design and production coordination by David Williamson. Research by Jake in myself. Artwork by Pekata and Radameer is Gauravik. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around here for the after-action in the credits. Still a little gravely this week. Appreciate the patience on that. You know, if you saw last week's episode about the marine soldiers, crazy encounters, it's kind of the demonic stuff. I have a confession to make and maybe you didn't even notice, which would be very gracious of you. But when I did the after-action for that story, funnily enough, I had just finished reading the script for this episode. And so I think my mind kind of blended the stories from that episode with Fort Sill and all these stories. So I'm pretty sure in my sort of collective rambling commentary I was talking about Fort Sill and how these guys, you know, they didn't show up to the boot camp to see a demon. You know, they showed up there to get trained not to have a religious experience, I think is what I said. So if you were wondering why I was talking about Fort Sill, well, now you're getting that explanation. It was mentioned, I think, in the episode, but everybody's got a boot camp story or two. And this is one of maybe the few opportunities as we were talking about kind of the misery of boot camp that I have to now share with you at least one funny story from my time in boot camp. There's so many. It is such a, maybe because it's such a formative experience. The funniest stories that I've ever told came from a time when you're with a bunch of other guys and right, you're all experiencing the same nonsense. And so it just, it becomes like a meme within your group, like kind of a running joke. And you, my whole Marine Corps career was kind of highlighted by these, you know, calling back to that stupid thing that happened, that funny thing that happened. Well, you don't go to boot camp with all of the same people. So as you go throughout your career, regardless of what MOS you have and the kind of nonsense you went through at your units, boot camp is that one unifying factor of your whole career. And even as I'm reading these stories about Fort Sill, I'm like feeling a lot of sympathy to these soldiers, even though I wasn't in the army right, I went to Marine Corps boot camp. So cleaning the bathrooms and waking up in fire guard, fire watch we called it in the Marine Corps, all very reminiscent. And you remember so much of it, I don't know why, maybe because you barely sleep and it's just, it seems like it's a very long three months. But anyway, to give you the background for this story, I had the impression when I went to boot camp that I would have time to write letters, you know, to family, friends, whatever. You don't get any that. I mean, we kind of did sometimes, we'd have a little downtime in the evening, but for the most part, it felt like we were always giving, given some assignment, like you need to, you know, you need to iron something on your clothing, you need to stitch something on your whatever, you need to organize something, you need to, so we just, we never really had a lot of time to write letters. So this was one of the interesting things about boot camp is it trains you to get away with stuff that you're not supposed to be doing. It's like you're only in trouble if you get caught, you know, the Aladdin methodology there. So guys, after lights out, it was get in bed. The rule was get in bed. Don't be caught out of bed. You can go to the bathroom, but don't be caught goofing around out of bed. Don't, don't, don't eat anything. You know, eating in the racks was forbidden. You know, guys would steal the peanut butter from the chow hall, and they'd be caught eating in the bed, and then they'd get like put on two hours of fire watch as punishment, you know, just get slayed. But the rule was everybody in bed. So if you didn't have any time that week to write a letter, you know, you're going to the field next week, like, you know, you want to send out this letter to your girlfriend, your family, whatever. You'd have guys staying up after lights, and maybe they'd be under their bed. You know, I remember one guy, he got caught, you know, with a red light, you know, we had our flashlights. He got caught with a red light under the blanket, and, you know, writing a letter. And so the drone instructor walks over and just like pulls the blanket off and he's, oh, good, you know, I guess we don't want to sleep. We want to write letters. I write, get up, get dressed, you know, you can stand fire watch. So, and then the one guy got pulled off fire watch. You want to write letters? Okay, no, you go to bed and this guy can stand fire watch. And guess what? The guy didn't get to write letters on fire watch. So it was that kind of environment, but you'd always see guys trying to sneak a letter in here and there. Well, because you were, you were allowed to use the bathroom at night, and there was light in the, I was the only place in the whole squad bay that had light. That's where guys would end up. They would go in there, and they'd sit on the toilets and I don't, I think we didn't have doors in our bathroom like the, the toilets had some kind of like a wall where like the toilet paper wasn't stuff. It wasn't like just open toilets on the floor. Some, some squad bays were like that. I remember from, I don't know where, but in my bootcamp it, it, it, it, it, I'm CRD San Diego. They had barriers. They had like these, you know, walls. There were just no doors. And I was just as guilty as anybody else. I'm in the bathroom, you know, writing letters at night. So we had our, I had a recruit Bible, which was basically this, you know, about the size of a Bible. It was a green book, you know, Camel cover book, and it's just filled with all of your recruit knowledge. It's kind of a, a trapper keeper, a binder, with all of your, you know, pages and pages of like basic Marine Corps knowledge, rank structure, the, the current chain of command and the military all the way up to the president, medical stuff, you know, basic first aid, medical stuff. Basically this stuff, you would be studying throughout bootcamp and then you would be tested on. And in the back of it, I had my, my paper that I would write letters on. So I had come up with this sort of very, what I thought was clever system of I would bring my recruit Bible to the toilet and I, you know, you're, you become cautious, you become like very aware of like how to get away with stuff. And I would open it to the back pages and I'd be writing letters. But then if anybody ever came in, it was just really easy to like flip that book over to like some random page of knowledge right while I'm using the bathroom. Well, I'm, I'm in there one night and I'm in the last stall. If you walk in, it's the last stall on the right and it was this kind of closet I think in there. So I was the only toilet on that side. But I'm sitting on that far toilet in the corner and these two knuckleheads come in and these guys were stupid. I don't know. Like, if you're going to be dumb, you got to be like, okay, so they come in, you know, tweedle D and tweedle dumb. And they this is this me. I'm like, everything's in a book. Like everything is, you know, like you can pick it up and run if you need to. They come in and it's it's this whole affair. They have all their letters from home, from their girlfriends, their moms, whatever. They have all their mail and they have the writing material and everything is just like they're like sitting on the toilet. They're not actually using the bathroom. They're just sitting on the toilets and then they lay all of their stuff out in front of them, both of them. I guess one guy looked at the other guy, he's like, well, he's going to do it. And it's like a mess. It's like all their papers are on the floor and they're like reading letters and writing. It's this whole organized, disorganized thing. Well, what do you think happens? It was an arduous instructor, but it was this really big dude from one of the other platoons that he loved to get in my face and just make me shout, you know, and I, luckily I was able to scream loud enough to make him go away, but he always had this very distinct, okay, I guess we're just going to do like that. I guess we're just going to be like that. Kind of voice. I guess we're just going to shave our face while we stand in formation. Is that right? Recruit black as we do that. So the last thing these kids heard before their lives ended. Was this drill instructor walking into the barracks were connected? You know, the way the building was set up, like the squad bay on the other side was connected by a hallway. The last thing they heard was this guy singing, "Lip, right, luh, right, luh, right." And just like, it almost like he was like, what do you call it? Signalling. It was, he was giving an advanced warning to any of the idiots that were in the toilets doing something they weren't supposed to. And sure enough, he comes around the corner of our, you know, our platoons toilet and there's these two idiots like scrambling to like pick up their letters. I think one of the kids just even tried. He just kind of like gave up because he knew he didn't have time. The guys was way too close by the time he started singing the cadence. Me? I'm not trying to say I was smart, but I didn't get caught. I just flipped my book over and I was just sitting there like a good little crew reading my Bible and he walks in and he sees these two idiots and he's just like, okay, I guess we going to ride letters on the toilet at night. We gonna do it. Get your ass out, you know, he's there. It was a clear instruction. Like he's gonna go basically take him back and report this to to our drill instructors and I don't think they'd punish him that night. They'd punish him the next day, right? Because they're not gonna wake everybody up by making them do like a million pushups. But then he knows he sees probably the feet of my feet at the last toilet so he keeps walking. and he's expecting maybe to catch a third guy and he goes like, "And who do we have?" And I'm just sitting there like with my recruit Bible, you know, like a saint on the toilet, he's like, "Well, I guess we can recruit our recruit knowledge on the toilet, okay, we can do that, right?" And I was just like, "Yes, sir." And he's like, "That's right, we can read, can we do all this other stuff they're doing over here?" And I was like, "No, sir." "That's right, all right, he can keep walking, he left me alone after that, he walked out." But yeah, I don't know if you, I don't know how to end that story other than just to say those two guys got slaughtered the next day and I don't think they ever made that mistake again, but yeah. So I never saw any ghosts in the toilet, but those two guys look like they saw ghosts when they heard that guy screaming, "They have to cry, they're all right." (laughing) Oh man, that's the look on their faces is priceless. And that's why it's burned into my memory. But, all right, enough storytelling. Thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you for watching, subscribing, liking, sharing, commenting, anything and everything you guys do to help support this show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much from the guys over here at wartime stories. As always, a huge shout out to both our patrons, our YouTube members for your incredible support. May God be with each and every one of you no matter what you're dealing with. And I will see you in the next episode.