Things Wearing Human Faces

"Robertson, what?" "Can I bump a pouch?" "You still owe me 20 bucks from the last tin?" "Yeah, I know, I'm working on myself." "Here, catch." "You're a good man." "No, I'm a stupid man." "Hey, how long until the course gets here?" "Uh, not for another hour." "Roger." "There's only one sniper in this evolution." "Don't know why you're coming up here." "Humphrey, is that you?" "Humphrey." "Yeah, real funny, man." "Taylor, Winnick?" "Okay, who's in the hallway?" "What the hell?" Inside the empty concrete buildings of the Greningen mock village at Canadian forces base Gage Town, a handful of soldiers arrived early to prepare for the day's training. Just before dawn, they realized something else was in the village with them. It sounded like a person, but then they realized it wasn't. I'm Luke Lamana, and this is "War Time Stories." Hey guys, before we get started, I want to take a moment to quickly thank someone who helps make this episode possible, our sponsor. 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Your data is being sold right now, I'm not leaving me or my family vulnerable, and you shouldn't either go to Aura.com/WarTimeStories, that's Aura.com/WarTimeStories, or click the link in the description and pinned comment to try Aura free for 14 days. Canadian forces base Gage Town is located off Canada's East Coast on the island of New Brunswick. The base is massive, over 1100 square kilometers, 425 square miles, of dense forests, rivers, swamps, tank trails, live fire ranges, and mock villages. It was in one of those training villages that a Canadian soldier who shared this story under the username Flying Donkey was participating in a training evolution as part of the group acting as enemy soldiers. So his team arrived on site early in the morning, before the other group, to get set up in their enemy positions. They then sat around and waited for a while, but just before dawn, things got really weird. He writes, "A lot of the guys who have trained at CFB Gage Town have strange, even funny stories to tell, hearing weird noises from the woods at night, coming across old abandoned home steds, cemeteries, close encounters with the occasional pissed off black bear mousse, those kind of things." But in my opinion, there is something seriously strange, at home, in the base's urban training village, Greningen. It's apparently named after a city in Holland that us Canadians liberated during World War II. While being demo for an infantry section and commanders course, we got sent to Greningen to play up for the opposing force meant to challenge the training platoon. We were using semi-nition, which you're basically paintball rounds on steroids, so the rounds go into your actual gun, they look like live rounds, except for the, where the bullet is, round it's a paintball cartridge. So we got dispersed into several of the buildings to prepare for this upcoming battle. I took up a position in the town hall on the third floor and was tasked with playing the roll of a sniper. At that point, it was still early in the morning, that period just before dawn, where things were super dark. And since the buildings didn't have electricity, we were given headlamps, so we wouldn't kill ourselves, trying to navigate to place. We rolled in, got in position, and by the time we were all settled, we still had around two hours before the training course actually got there, so we just sat around, we visited with one another, shot the breeze, called each other from the windows, you know, just found little ways to kill some time. I was sitting in a room overlooking the town's main road, I was just chilling out. When I heard footsteps coming from the hallway, I figured it was a buddy coming up to smoke or joke around since we still had about an hour left until the course arrived. The footsteps stopped just short of the door, and I was just waiting for someone to pop around the corner. I waited, I waited, but nobody came, so after a few moments I called out, I'm like, who's in the hallway? And there was another minute of silence, and you could just feel the attention, slowly growing in the room. And then there was this voice, and I'm going to imitate it to the best of my ability. Who's in the room? Like, dude, the way the hair on the back of my neck stood up, this voice was just wrong. Imagine someone either forcefully distorting their voice or really drawing out each word to an unnatural degree. Like it was as if they knew what to say, but didn't quite get the hang of how to say it, if that makes sense. I responded with my name, and I heard this shuffling and scraping, like, bare skin on the concrete walls, and it was now inching closer to the doorframe. And I turned my headlamp off, I reached for my rifle, I got my simmerounds, and I'm looking at this open doorway, and something was there. I could just barely make out the silhouette of a head, starting to peek out from around the corner into the doorway. I gripped my weapon a little tighter, I called out a few names, thinking someone is screwing with me, but this thing didn't answer, this shadow, whatever it was, it didn't move. I couldn't make out any eyes, but I knew that this person, this thing, whatever it was, it was looking at me. I brought my gun up, and I planted it the doorway, and I don't know why I thought these glorified paintball rounds were actually going to save me from an actual threat, but anything felt better than nothing. And from there, I slowly reached up to my headlamp, and I clicked the button, illuminating the doorway in this dull red light. What I saw, this shit still gives me goosebumps. It was only for a second, but I got a glimpse of a bald head in this in the red glow, before whatever was in the doorway, ducked out a sight. I was honestly too stunned to even move, I just sat there with my gun pointed at the door as I'm listening to this thing, scurry back down the hallway towards the stairs. None of the fellows on the demo team were bald, and when I went asking around later about this, none of them. Rogered up about coming into the town hall to pay me a visit. So what the hell did I see? Skinwalker? Something like a mimic? A crackhead who just happened to wander out in the middle of the range like what the hell? I honestly have no idea. Part of me doesn't really want to know. But I just couldn't shake this feeling. That I was not alone in that building for the rest of the time we were training there. This story comes from our email inbox. This gentleman asked me to share an account that was shared with him by his cousin, Nathan, who serves in the Indonesian Navy. At the time, Nathan was taking part in a joint training exercise with American sailors when one of them, a woman named Maria, woke up in the barracks screaming. She said there was an old woman standing at the foot of her bunk, an old woman with red eyes, a very angry face. And she was speaking in a language that Maria said she couldn't understand. That would have been enough on its own. But two nights later, during a jungle navigation exercise, Maria, this American sailor, disappeared into a river. And when Nathan helped search the water the next morning, he says he found her tangled in the roots. Alive, but she wasn't alone. He writes. I wanted to share my cousin's story about what he considers to be an encounter with a gin. For a bit of context, gin are these creatures or entities in Islamic belief that exist around us, but in a different unseen dimension. When presenting themselves to humans, they are said to be capable of taking on a human form, or even that of an animal. Why does gin suddenly sound like skin walkers? Gin, according to Islamic belief, are created by God. But unlike angels and demons, they are beings of complete free will. They can choose to be good or bad, but most stories paint them as something you should avoid at all costs. I think whatever my cousin saw in that river, whatever was following that poor woman, definitely falls into the latter category. My cousin, who I'll just refer to as Nathan, told me this story himself. As I write it, I'll do my best to do so from his perspective. So, okay, here goes. My name is Nathan. I'm 24 years old and I'm a member of the Indonesian Maritime Defense Forces. At the time this all took place, I was taking part in a joint training exercise with the United States Navy. It was Thursday at specifically 4.36 am. I remember that because my buddies and I were getting ready to form morning prayers when we suddenly heard a woman screaming from the US Navy barracks. Everyone immediately runs towards this screaming. There were at least 40 to 50 people all rushing into the building at the same time. When we got there, this woman, an American sailor named Maria, was just unconsolable. She was crying uncontrollably. When we asked her what was wrong, she tells us that she had woken up to find an old woman standing at the end of her bed. And she described this old woman as having glowing red eyes and kind of leering at her with this angry expression. Maria said that this old woman spoke to her, but she couldn't understand what was being said. What Maria said really just made my skin crawl because the beds in this barracks room were bunk beds and Maria was sleeping on the top one. The idea of just seeing this creepy old woman's head and shoulders peering at her from the foot of the bed just pure nightmare material. So after Maria calms down, the officers and NCOs ordered all of us to go back just return to our normal activities. But ultimately when we ended up going out into the jungle for training, things just got even worse. So it's now two days later, Saturday, it's around 8 p.m. And we are conducting a nighttime forest navigation exercise. There were 16 teams participating each made up of several people. My team consisted of two Indonesian military personnel and four US Navy sailors. The exercise was designed to teach tropical jungle survival and nighttime navigation. Our objective was to locate these 16 ribbons that were tied to tree branches and then we would gather them, return them to this meeting area, this gathering area. My team completed the course with that much difficulty. The hardest part was crossing a river that had a very strong current with all of our gear on. Fortunately, there were safety ropes which had been set up for us to hold on to. One by one, all the teams made it back, but eventually we realized that there was still one team missing. So we're waiting, we're waiting. An hour goes by after the last team comes in, we still have no sign of this missing team. Then we see these two US Navy personnel running toward us. They are breathless, they're screaming for help. So we rush over and they told us that one member of their team had gone beyond the designated river crossing and she had been swept away by the current and that was the same girl, Maria. So the alarm is immediately sounded. Search and rescue efforts begin. I was assigned to one of these rapid response teams. So now it's late and there's probably 20 of us searching this river, Indonesians and Americans. And I'm a strong swimmer, so I was actually one of those who got into the water, but it's dark. We are trying our best, but we can't find her. This river was approximately on average maybe five meters wide. It stretched for a couple of miles, about 4.2 kilometers. Its deepest point was maybe three meters, nine, ten feet. We searched roughly 200 meters, both upstream and downstream of where they saw her fall into the river. We can't find anything. Too dark, current is too strong and it's getting too dangerous for us to be in the water. We're getting tired, so we can't keep doing this all night. We can't continue the search, so we have to give it up. So with no results, we reported back to our headquarters and then we were planning on we're going to come out in the morning once it's light. We'll have helicopter support. There's going to be some people coming from a local village, about three kilometers downstream that are going to help us out. So it's the following morning, Sunday, around 10am. The current has died down enough that we can actually get back into the water. I put my dive mask on. I grab my snorkel and I'm back in the water, probably diving for what must have been the seventh time since our search began. And not long after doing so, I noticed something tangled in a mass of tree roots beneath the water. It looked like a person, fully clothed, completely motionless, so I pop up, I call it out to the rest of the search team and I start swimming as fast as I can towards them. So I swim towards this body as quickly as I can and I grab hold of her. And I am pulling with everything I got to get her out of these roots, but it really just feels like something is trying to pull her back into the roots. And as I'm pulling on her suddenly, I feel something grabbed me and it yanks me into the roots, like trying to pull me deeper into them. Something else was in there. So now I'm panicking and I am fighting as hard as I can to pull away. And that's when I felt something bite my right hand. And I look down and I see the head of this old woman clamped onto my hand. She is biting me as though she wants to rip it off. And I just screamed like bloody murder. I was so frightened that I think I pissed myself right there in the river. And my buddies came up behind me and immediately start, they pulled me, both me and this girl, out of the roots and out of the water. And it was Maria and against all odds. However, she survived the whole night trapped in there I don't know, but she was alive. But that old woman, nowhere to be seen, I was the only one who saw her. A few days after all this, I started talking with some of the US Navy guys. And one of them told me that in addition to me knowing about the Nightmare experience, during the three days leading up to us doing this night navigation exercise where Maria fell into the river. Maria had repeatedly been telling her friends about seeing an old woman. And there was another woman that she would see that was dressed entirely in white. Another sailor, one who was with Maria, the night she fell into the river, said that at the time she fell, she didn't just fall, but Maria claimed that she had seen a child drowning in the river. And that's why she threw herself in trying to save this child. None of her team members saw or heard a child. According to the local villagers who helped us in searching for her, they told me that there's a gin that inhabits that forest. And they believed that it prays on people who become distracted or are lured away from their surroundings. And I guess they'd say that the gin traps them and then consumes their souls. Well, I don't know about all that, but to this day, I am still haunted by the face of that old woman that I saw on the water. I firmly believe that God protected Maria that night. That's the only way I can explain it. That river was cold. And none of us could explain how she'd managed to stay alive in it for more than eight hours. Wherever Maria is now, I pray that she is safe and doing well. Thank you for listening and God bless anyone who reads or hears this story. This story comes from a US Marine and was first sent to Nick over at Tales from the Gridsquare. I don't know exactly where this Marine was training when it happened. It sounds like somewhere in the States, but he doesn't give a base or a location. What he does say is that back in 2012, he was a boot machine gunner moving with his platoon toward Mount Town. After the first day, they set up a patrol base in the woods and he posted up his saw as a machine gun. At the edge of the tree line, while everyone else is digging in. And as the light starts to fade, he says he noticed what looked like another Marine, crouched in a bush about 200 meters out. And at first he's thinking this might be an officer, somebody from the exercise that's keeping an eye on him. But then this person disappears. And a few minutes later, he comes back. Only now, it's much closer. And when he finally gets a better look at it, he realizes that something about his face is. Well, I'll let him tell it. He writes. This was back in early 2012. I was a boot machine gunner, and our platoon was on a long movement from where we dropped to a Mount Town. After the first day's movement, we set up a patrol base in a forested area, got settled for the night. I set up the gun. I was on watch where everyone else is digging in. It's getting dark, but there's still a fair bit of natural light. It was just enough illumination for me to notice something kind of odd. There, crouched in the brush about 200 meters out, was another marine. Well, what I thought looked like another marine. And it definitely wasn't a trick of the light. I didn't have an MDO site on the gun, machine gun, deoptic, so I didn't have any magnification, but I was absolutely sure there was someone out there. I wasn't told about any opt-4, any role players, role-playing enemies out there, so I didn't want to start engaging this guy, start shooting at him or something. And then look like a moron, because I'm a boot, and I'm trying to embarrass myself. Well, pretty sure I ended up looking like an idiot anyway, because when I called my team leader to come over and have a look, well, whatever I was looking at, it was gone. Our exo or executive officer was former recon, so my TL said, "Maybe that's him out there watching us observing the squads as they moved onto the target." That made sense to me. It had to be him, or some other officer wandering around, making sure we were on mission, not doing anything dumb. But within a few minutes, this thing comes back. And now this time, it's much closer, and it's now staring at me from behind another bush, about 100 meters out. So, in a matter of just minutes, this thing, they had halved the distance between us, totally unseen, unheard by anyone else in the camp. And now that they're getting closer, I started to realize that this person, thing, or whatever, something is not right about them. Because I look at the face, and this figure is completely featureless. I really don't know how else to describe it. I could see their face, both in the low light and through my NVGs, but I cannot actually make out eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin color. So yeah, that just really threw me off, and I just go screw it, and I called out contact front. And as everyone hits the line, my team leader gets to me first. He had his own rifle up, which was fitted with an ACOG site, and he sees this thing clear as day, probably even better than I did. So we're there, our gun's trained on this thing, and we're just, we just watched whatever, or whoever this was, casually stand up from its hiding spot, turn around, and walk away. Now, at the end of the exercise, we asked if our exo had been out, checking on the platoons. But no, he said he was never out there, and I don't even think he was on the base to begin with, turns out he was off taking care of some urgent family issue while we were in the field. And to make matters worse, we were the only unit training in that area that night. There was no op for, there were no other observers, just us. Since then, I have never spoken to anybody about this experience, but after reading through my notes and writing it all out, I ended up reaching out to my old team leader to ask if he remembered that field op, and the figure. We saw observing us from off in the brush, and he remembered it all, and he summed it up perfectly with, he said like, yep, that was some weird shit. To this day, I have no idea what the hell that was, but for it to have closed in on us, not once, but twice, completely undetected, just, man. Still gives me goosebumps. I grew up in the woods, hunting, camping, hiking, as did my team leader, who was an Afghan vet himself. We both knew that what we saw was not normal, and it wasn't nerves, it wasn't fatigue, it wasn't the woods playing with our heads. It was there, it was real. Speaking of former Marine Recon, this story was sent by a fellow Marine Recon vet, David Rose. After getting out, he, no less funneled his military service experiences into a creative profession. He's now a writer. He wrote a book called Lovecraft's Iraq. Now get this. The story follows a team of Recon Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as they ended up fighting both insurgents and these ancient cosmic forces tied to the land. I wonder where he gets these ideas, right? Lots of guys came back with weird stories, so I'm reading his book now. And honestly, if you'd like more time stories in the whole genre of military and paranormal tales from the Gridsquare, that kind of thing, I think you'd like David's books. I'll link them here. But this isn't a story from what we've seen. one of his books. This story was shared with him by one of his fellow Marines. The setting is Iraq in 2004, not long before the Battle of Fallujah. At the time, his platoon was working with an Iraqi interpreter, they called Sergeant Major, probably an inside joke in there somewhere. According to David, guy was a nut. He was strange from the beginning. He's jumpy, he's skittish, he's always looking over his shoulder, always asking the Marines for a weapon that they were never going to give him. And at first, they assumed he was just afraid of insurgents. But later, David started to wonder if Sergeant Major was afraid of something else, something tied to a cemetery, an old story about ghouls, and a white dog that only seemed to show up when that interpreter was around. David writes, "My name is David Rose. I'm also a former recon, second recon battalion, 2003 to 2006. And this story, as it was told to me, took place just prior to our push toward Fallujah in 2004. As you may already know, interpreters came and went with the coalition forces. One week, our platoon would have a Sudanese Muslim who we lovingly refer to as MC Hammer. The next week, we'd have someone different." I recall two interpreters in particular. One, an older gentleman in glasses who, if memory serves me correctly, was a CIA-vetted former teacher out of Baghdad. The other, we called Sergeant Major, and we called him this with far less endearment than we did MC Hammer because this guy was odd. Scrawney, a big, bushy, wiring mustache. He told us he was a former Sergeant Major in Saddam's army, hence the name. As you can imagine, with us just having beaten Saddam's army, this was a hard pill for many of us to swallow to believe that he was actually. Anyway, we worked with Iraqi military a lot in those days, and to be blunt, most weren't that impressive. Some, however, were, spectacular. A war officer in particular who, through broken English, explained to my platoon one night that he'd been trained by US Special Forces. We kind of laughed it off, but then he proceeded to show us some of the CQB close quarter battle that was honestly impressive, if not a little downright scary. Anyway, none of them acted like Sergeant Major. He was jumpy, skittish, always pleading with us to lend him one of our rifles that we just straight up refuse to give him. And as time has passed, I've come to a wonder if his pleading wasn't as prompted by a desire to defend himself against insurgents, as it was to defend himself against something else entirely. And that leads us to a night on the roof of a confiscated house. In the Zaidan, this was standard operating procedure for those days. We'd find a house, usually a two-story one and good location for observation and overwatch. Our platoon commander, interpreter at his side, would walk in, speak to the man of the house, slap some cold cash in his hand, and then the family would pack up and leave. The place was ours, usually for less than 24 hours. And on one such confiscation, I was pulling the first watch. I was up on the roof, happy to be there. Anyone who has ever pulled fire watch knows that first and last shifts, those are the best. Your sleep is interrupted, and in my case, I was being treated to a late evening sunset. Nothing wrong with a little beauty during an armed conflict, right? Not far away from our building was an old cemetery. Arabic headphones aren't always like ours. Many lay flats. Others are small and primitive, like the grieving family had just enough time to chisel at a rock and then put it in its place before having to get back to their life. Or they didn't have time because they had to take cover from whatever gun of light was happening at whatever point in history. So I'm up on the roof, and I'm looking out at the cemetery, and I hear someone coming up the stairs. Sergeant Major, I said, and my brow is now furrowed with confusion. Interpreters weren't obliged to pull watch and even if they did, this squirrely Iraqi was probably the last one that any of us wanted up there. "Ise up here," he said. "It is," I replied, watching him. He seemed happy to be up here, too. The fall, the autumn, time in Iraq isn't bad, especially at sunset, and this fading sunlight in the sunset is now caught in his eyes, and for a brief moment, I didn't see an Iraqi or an interpreter. I just saw a man, like me, enjoying the evening. And then he saw the cemetery. If I remember correctly, the routes we took to this house had been from the other direction, so we had not been able to see this cemetery until we got up on the roof, but now he sees it. So he walks the edge of the roof, and he says to me, "This is not good." And when he turned back, I can see that his entire demeanor has changed. He wasn't scared. But it was obvious that he didn't like this graveyard, or just didn't like graveyard's period. And so I'm like, what do you mean? And he then proceeds to tell me something that I could not forget, even if I tried. As a child, he said he lived in a village that bordered a large cemetery. Other villages had once butted up against its edges, but time, conflict, disease, and families leaving during the industrialization of Baghdad, withered those villages to nothing. The cemetery bloated, and soon only one village was left standing. When he was a boy, there was a man who lived there, who was obsessed with ghouls. Now, I didn't know this until years later, but the concept of the ghoul, these demon-like eaters of the dead, originated in the Arabic world. In their myths, ghouls haunt deserts and graveyards, often lurking beneath them, or when topsoil they turn into dogs, and they stalk living prey like that. Their introduction to Western literature I found was in 1786, with the novel That Heck by William Beckford. I have read that book since leaving the military eye. For the life of me, I cannot remember much about it. Other than it does take place in the Islamic world, and ghouls are most certainly in it. I say all that not to lend credibility to what comes next. I only mention the history of ghouls in that part of the world, because if there is one scenario on Earth where someone may think ghouls are real, it's a lone Iraqi villager who lives at the outer edge of a sprawling Iraqi graveyard. This man indeed lived alone, and from the Sergeant Major's recollection, he reportedly boasted about how he was going to one day bring a ghoul back to the village, and it would be kicking and screaming. It would be angry that it had been caught, and he would put it out on display, something like that. And so one night, for whatever reason that the Sergeant Major is with him, the Sergeant Major is watching this man set out into the graveyard carrying a rope and a large knife. And so this man turns around. There's a full moon that's rising because, of course, it would be a full moon. And he wiggles his knife and tells this boy our Sergeant Major to be that ghouls fear iron. So Sergeant Major said that he spent the rest of the night on the roof of his house watching this graveyard, and that at times he would see this slouching silhouette among the graves, like in about two in throw. Then a figure, a lighter smudge in the twilight was there. There was the briefest noise, and then nothing more. So the next morning, unable to resist our Sergeant Major, he tiptoed out to where he thought that he had last seen this crazy man. And not far away, behind some headstones, there is the rope, his knife, lying in the sand, and a pool of dried blood. But what freaked him out the most, the Sergeant Major said, was not the blood, but there was this odor that he said was simply indescribable, really bad. And when I pressed him to offer me more details, the Sergeant Major made like a clawing gesture with his hand. He said like that, attacking your nose. So anyway, bringing this all back to center. We're up on this rooftop. I'm on first watch. We're back on the roof. Not terribly far from the city of Fluxia, or far in time from its bloody retaking. And Sergeant Major turns away from the cemetery beneath us, and he says, I swear the ghouls were watching me then. Naturally, I ask, again, this guy's strange. So I'm engaging with him. The whole thing is strange up to this point, but I'm engaging with him. So naturally, I ask him why he thinks that, like, why he thought that the ghouls were watching him. And his response to that was that ever since then, He will. be followed by dogs. With that he went back down the stairs until all I heard was boot steps and then he was gone. Now I'm not stupid that this guy was weird from the jump and he also grew up there so it isn't too far fetched to surmise that he took in all that ghoul lore and just ran with it. I can explain all that, but what I can't explain, okay well let me back up a bit. Anyone who deployed to a rock will tell you about the dogs. Vietnam had tunnels, World War I had trench foot, operation rocky freedom had packs of roving dogs. Most inconvenient for clandestine work as they would often follow us and bark non-stop. When we had the interpreter emcee hammer, there were dogs. When we had the older guy the teacher from Baghdad. Yep, dogs too. But when we had Sergeant Major and only when we had Sergeant Major, did we see this large white one? It never barked and it was often there. Just watching our platoon or maybe it was watching this guy our interpreter Sergeant Major. Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. Complete coincidence entirely possible. All I know is that when Sergeant Major got reassigned elsewhere, I never saw that white dog again. This story hits a little different. I found it a while back in the comments of one of our older videos. It creeped me out enough that I took a screenshot, saved it for future use, figured I'd eventually use it in an episode like this. The only problem is when I went to pull it back up, I realized that the screenshot I had taken had cut off the username. And I tried digging back to the comments because you can search keywords and things like that I could not find it again. So either the guy deleted his comment or I don't know. So I don't know who originally posted this and I'm sorry. If you're listening my apologies. But for now we will call him Ben. And full disclosure, this one is not a military story at least Ben never overtly stated that it was a military story. But the account he shared which was told to him by his Iranian flatmate Amad might be one of the creepiest mimic stories I've I've read. Ever. Because according to Amad when he was a kid, something walked out of the dark during a camping trip that looked exactly like his uncle. He writes. About 15 years ago, I had a flatmate called Amad who was a refugee from Iran. He had hidden next to a ship's boiler and snuck into my country with the hope of getting a job and eventually bringing his wife and children over. He was very religious, incredibly warm and honest, genuinely, lovely man. I once bought him a small Arabic inspired carpet for him to pray on. He broke down in tears thanking me. He couldn't afford to buy anything other than food and secondhand clothes. His English was quite broken but we still communicated just fine. We would stay up late sometimes talking about the world. We really just enjoyed each other's company. But one night while we were talking and I asked him if there were any famous ghost stories legends or anything from Iran or his neck of the woods. And as soon as I said that his entire demeanor changed. He's usually a smiling polite kind of guy and his face just kind of dropped. He became very serious and he said we have many stories but I only ever saw one thing. And when I asked him about it, he went on to tell me the following story. When he was about 11 years old, he, his brother and two cousins were accompanying their older uncle on a camping trip. They built an open air fire at their camp spot. They were brewing tea and eating some snacks and the sun goes down. At around 9 pm when it was dark, they heard a noise on the edge of the campsite and they turned to look and that's where it got strange. Merging from the bushes and walking towards them was their uncle. He's staring at them with these wide, crazy eyes get this big smile in his face. Now, Ahmad knew that his uncle was sitting right next to him at the fire. He knows that this stranger is not his uncle but it looks just like him. This person walks up to them, takes a seat and just stares at their uncle across the fire. Big smile in his face just always smiling. Ahmad then looks at his uncle, the real one and apparently his face is deadly serious. And everything his uncle did, the stranger copies it. He pulls on his beard. So to the stranger, he takes a sip of tea, the stranger not holding anything but mimicked the action of drinking. This goes on for a few minutes. Ahmad tells me and suffice it to say, Ahmad, his brother's cousins, they are terrified. They said nothing and he said they just couldn't even move. Then his uncle sets his cup down, staring at this thing across the flames before he slowly reaches out and puts his hand into the fire. This other uncle does the same thing and the scream that this thing made was unlike anything Ahmad said he had ever heard. It jumped up and darted back into the darkness at what Ahmad described as incredible speed. Sometime after this camping trip, Ahmad asked his uncle about what they saw that night and he just told him to never ask about such things and that was it. Nobody noticed brother's cousins ever talked about it again. Let me tell you, his story scared the hell out of me. Whether it was true or not, I know Ahmad believed everything it's seen beyond a shadow of a doubt. If I'd heard that story from anyone else, I'd probably be very skeptical. But this guy is like one of the most stand-up honest dudes I've ever met. And according to Ahmad, stories like his aren't really uncommon in certain parts of Iran. Over the last few years, the more stories that I've found and read and received, and I'm still going through, we've done our darntest over here to organize and compile these into some sort of sensible place. How are we going to present these stories? So some episodes you're going to get more of a single location, single entity, multiple different reports. And other times you're going to get something like this, which the thing that tied these stories together wasn't that they were all describing the exact same thing. But what stood out was the idea that something showed up in a form that made these people hesitate, something that sounded close enough to being human or looked close enough to something familiar. That for a second, the person involved has to stop and take a moment to think, you know what am I actually looking at. At Gage Town, Robert, he was alone in a concrete training building before Donnie, here's footsteps coming down a hallway very human. He assumes it's one of the other guys messing around with him. And he tries to talk to it, doesn't respond. And then he sees this bald head just pop out from the door. In Indonesia, Maria woke up to see a scary old woman to put her bunk and then two nights later, it sounds like this same old woman mimicked being a drowning child, lured her into the river, and when Nathan then tried to pull Maria out, it attacked Nathan. you have them. in the tree line. From a distance, he said he saw what appeared to be another marine, crouched in a bush, maybe an officer. But years later, reflecting back on the experience, it never became, yeah, that was just a marine. That was just somebody else creeping out there in the woods. It was still something unnerving to him. Something without a face. David Rose's story is a little different, but still fits the general idea. Sergeant Major grows up in this little village next to a graveyard and there's some strange guy that lives in the village that goes out there to procure a ghoul in whatever manner he would do so. And because he happened to be nearby, I guess, the ghouls of that graveyard targeted. This young boy who then became the interpreter years later. This strange guy with all the weird habits. And then the dog, the strange coincidence about the dog following him and only him that white dog. And then a mod story is probably the most direct version of all of this, what we would think a doppelganger or a mimic in a more common sense would be. Family is on a camping trip in a run. Thing walks out of the tree line, sits across from them, looks exactly like the man sitting at the fire. Mimics everything he does, literally. And then burns his hand on the fire, runs back into the woods. So I don't think these stories prove the same thing, whatever that might be. I do think they all hit the same nerve, the fear of something, pretending to be human. A person, an animal, a child, a family member, something familiar enough that you might let your guard down before realizing that there's something wrong with it. And maybe that's why stories like this show up in so many different places. Different countries have different names for them. Jins, ghouls, skinwalkers, shapeshifters, mimics, whatever else. But underneath the names, the fear is basically the same. It's not just monsters, it's the fear of being deceived. Because a monster in the open is one thing, at least then you know what you're looking at. But something that calls from the hallway and a voice that almost sounds human or stands in the brush, wearing the shape of another marine, walks out of the dark, wearing the face of someone else, someone you trust, that's a different kind of unnerving sensation, fear. And sure, there could be normal explanations for some of these accounts, bad lighting, stress, exhaustion, people playing pranks. Just years later, bad memory could have been a weird hallucination or a dream that became a false memory, cultural beliefs, shaping the way people understand something years later. All of that's possible. But I also think there's a reason these stories stick with people. Because most of us know that feeling, even if we've never seen anything like this ourselves, that moment when something feels off before you can explain why. Something sounds wrong. A person is where they shouldn't be. A shape in the dark looks familiar, but not enough. And in the real world, most of the time that instinct probably has a normal explanation. But in these stories, that feeling is a moral warning. Maybe that's the part that leaves people unsettled, not just the idea that something strange might be out there. But that if it ever does show up, it may not look strange at first. It may look close enough. [Music] Ortime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke 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 Howard and myself. Artwork by Pekata and Ratamere is Garovic. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around here for the after-action in the credits. I thought this one was interesting. Kind of a hodgepodge of. I think under different circumstances, these stories could have all kind of been fit into their own categories of. strange things in Iraq, or Indonesian. If we have enough stories, Indonesian stories, you know, strange Indonesian encounters, gins. I mean, that story itself will find its way into a gin compilation at some point. The marine story, I have found myself at times exercising on military basis, like going for a run, up the tank trails or something like that, and you do run across skies during field training. And it's kind of a cool feeling, or a very, you feel happy that you're not in the field, that you're not the one marching into patrol and doing all the the grunt work. You're just out for a jog, so you're out there sweating because you want to, but then these guys are out there. So I don't. the night vision thing, I was a little bit. You can't really see facial features on night vision past a certain distance. It's not very precise. It's very grainy. So in the dim lights, as I was reading his story of all the stories, I was like, "Well, it's entirely possible that it was a person. It just lacks the explanation where did that person come from? What was he doing out there if nobody else rochered up to it?" So, entirely something that could be explained. But yeah, my my lieutenant was always probably creeping around out there, looking for reasons to just, what do you call it, just bug us, and just find things to be upset about. So it could have been, and that's honestly worse, in my opinion. I would have rather had some ghoul or some faceless entity out there that just kind of left us alone, but creeps us out, because my lieutenant's were, you know, I'll tell you about my my first lieutenant on that note. So when I got to third radio battalion, I'll know why, and I picked, and I started up in this rickie recon, radio recon thing. I don't know if I ever told the whole story, but I got there. I heard another, like, signal intelligence guy, given his story about joining the Marine Corps, and his recruiter basically told him he would be like James Bond. And that is the memory I have about why I picked that MOS. So that must, my recruiter probably told me the same thing, because I enlisted thinking this job is going to make me like Jason Bourner, James Bond. And then you get to a radio battalion, and it's like just sheer nursery, just computers, and wires, and land cables, and building antennas, and radio frequency theory, and all this, I was just like, bro, like this is nowhere. So then I got approached, and they're like, hey, do you want to join the recon platoon? And I was like, well, what's that? They're like, well, you do all the same stuff, but you jump out airplanes and helicopters and stuff like that. Sounds a heck of a lot more fun, than so that's how I ended up in the recon platoon. I did the selection, I did the whole, you know, I qualified for it. But anyway, we get started, the lieutenant that was in charge of that platoon. He had a stick up his butt about just about everything. Our first field exercise, we get out there, one of the antennas, it was called the donkey deck. It was a big, I think it was a UHF antenna, it's kind of this short fat chubby antenna. Well anyway, he loses it, and he's freaking out, and he's mad at everybody. We're going through a gear, like somebody dropped, you know, he's blaming everybody. Turns out he had in his bag, and somebody observed him taking it out of his bag later. He was feigning stupidity and feigning like anger the whole time, but then eventually, because it wasn't his bag, he took it out, and he, I think, snuck it into another guy's bag. He was that kind of guy, and then he totally let that guy take the fall for it, but it's like we all knew, but he was lieutenant, so he couldn't say anything, that kind of guy. He's like an admin, like, back off guy. We would go on patrols all night, and we're learning how to patrol, but this is East Range in Hawaii. It's like the most godless part of the island that you could possibly imagine. Steep ridge lines, muddy, wet rains every night, and it takes us a long time with all this heavy gear, and they gave us a much heavier loadout than we possibly needed just to make the training, you know, harder. I knocked half my tooth out, you know, trying to climb this muddy hill, my rifle came up, hit me in the face, like it was miserable. And we would get to our height side, we'd get to the location that we're supposed to set up observations in. And the next morning, this lieutenant, he would take the roads, and he would get there in like 30 minutes. And so he would show up, and he'd say, "Why did take you guys so long to get here?" He took you guys 12 hours of patrolling, took me 30 minutes. And we're just like, "Yeah, bro, you use the roads, like, can you please?" I mean, if there was ever a mutiny in my military career, would have been with that guy. During that same first field exercise, there was also a staff sergeant that he had the other end to stick up his butt. And we were loading up the trucks, we're leaving East Range. And it's three in the morning or some crazy. We just got done patrolling. We have not slept in like a couple of days at this point. We're very tired. We just get back from our last patrol and they're wrapping up the camp, they're packing all the tents, they're packing everything up, putting into the trucks. So we just join the working party, even though we're exhausted, because we had no choice. And the staff sergeant he's screaming at everybody to hurry up and he guys are moving slow. We were tired, like extremely tired, and we hadn't been yelled at like children since boot camp, like from, you know, drill instructors. So I'm with my buddy Will, the phantom pooper, which is a story for a future time, but Will, and I'm walking away from the seven-ton with him after we just helped load something, and I turn him on like, he turns to me, he's like, what the hell is this guy's problem, referring to our staff sergeant? And I said something pretty. I said something in fact that's, I don't know man, like he's probably just tired like the rest of us and pissed off, or something like that. I didn't say anything to her obitory. I was just, I was almost trying to be understanding, and I feel somebody grabbed my shoulder and pull me around, grabs me by the scruff of my, you know, my, he grabs my collar of my shirt and he's pulling it up. And now the staff sergeant is screaming in my face about wanting to fight me, and I'm a corporal. I just picked up corporal, but I just got promoted to corporal. And he's screaming and spitting, you're like, I'll take off my rag, you want to, what the hell do you say about me LeMont? You want to go? I'd never had this hat, and I made my drill instructors never grab me like this. So I, I just, you know, and I'm like, no, staff sergeant, no staff sergeant, you know, staff sergeant. I was, I'm tired. I'm kind of over it. I'm not reacting. Anyway, he lets me go. He's pissed off and he goes to find his favorite buddy, which is this lieutenant. So I get, I'm, I get called into the, the CP-10 command tent, which is now empty, save for now, a very angry lieutenant. He's about a foot short of the nine. And he has me at parade rest. And he's yelling at me in his very lieutenant way of yelling. I don't remember much of what was said other than like the, who the hell do you think you are? He asked me that. He's like, who the hell are you? And I said, I'm corporal LeMont. Corporal LeMont. Corporal LeMont. And it's, I don't know what he was pointing. He was trying to, basically, he's just saying, you don't, you don't talk to my staff sergeant like that, that, that, that, or whatever. I took my, took my butt chewing and I, I said, yes sir, no, sir, I, sir, I walked out of the tent and, and the rest is history. We all wanted to mutiny. We all wanted to quit at some point during that training cycle because these people were just idiots. But join, join the Marine Corps. It's a lot of fun. You'll love every minute of it. I look back fondly on all these memories. All right guys, well thanks for listening, thanks for watching, for subscribing, liking, sharing, commenting, anything and everything you guys do. We really appreciate it over here wartime stories. As always, a huge shout out to both our patrons or YouTube channel 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.