The 4 Hours That Were Taken

G'day mates, it's B-Buster here, and before the episode begins, I would just like to let you know that Be Scared, which is produced along with Studio 71, features scary stories from around the globe on a weekly basis that aim to fuel your nightmares with a smile. And if you enjoy the podcast, it would be great if you could hit that subscribe button and drop a review. But thanks for listening guys, and without further ado, let's begin. This happened back in late 2021, during the second COVID wave. I was 12 at the time, and because schools were closed, my mother sent me to stay with my cousin's family. My cousin's dad, he ran a small delivery business with an old pickup truck. He'd take me along sometimes to help load and unload stuff, and so I'd get familiar with the roads in the area there. Most nights too we would get back at around 10pm, but one night a delivery ran late, and we left the last drop off at around 11. The roads were empty and pitch dark, except for our headlights obviously. These rural roads are pretty narrow when winding and flanked by dense forest on both sides. Normally it was maybe a 40 minute drive to get back, but that night it felt way longer, like the road just sort of kept going on and on. My cousin's dad was quiet too, but I could feel his unease. He wasn't saying anything, probably not trying to freak me out. About 45 minutes in though, fog started rolling in. Not just a little bit of mist too, this was thick, low, and completely covered the whole road ahead. Headlights were barely penetrating it, and I remember a weird smell, like damp earth mixed with something metallic. I tried to focus on the road, but that's when I noticed a shadow, or something at least, standing just beyond the edge of the fog on the right. It wasn't a person, but it was huge. It was humanoid shaped, but dark and featureless, almost like a solid shadow. Its limbs were way too long for a normal human, and it didn't move like a person too. The longer that I looked at it, the more that it seemed to blend into the fog, and I swear that it was watching us. My cousin's dad didn't see anything at first, but when I pointed, he froze. And then, here's the weird part. So the next thing that I remember is waking up in cold water. My shoes were soaked, my legs were aching, and my head felt like it was filled with lead. My cousin's dad was beside me, fumbling for his phone and turning on the flashlight. That's when we realized that we were sitting in a shallow river now, water barely above our ankles, but somehow our truck was upstream of us in the water, untouched and completely intact. Looking behind us, there was a cliff maybe 50 feet up, and apparently we had gone over it somehow, but the truck hadn't flipped, and either of us were hurt. Not a scratch in fact. No broken bones, nothing. My uncle checked his phone as well, trying to get a signal, and the time said 3.10am, which means we had lost over 4 hours. Also there was no signal anywhere. We decided to walk upstream against the current, and it took us almost an hour before we found lights from a small cluster of village homes nearby. One family let us stay the night without asking questions, seeing how shaken that we were. Morning came and my cousin's dad called for help. A small group of men with a tow truck showed up, and when we got back to the river and daylight, the pickup was still in the exact spot that it had been, as if somebody had placed it just sort of gently in the water there. It took a while, and 10 or 15 men to get it hooked up and dragged out, but eventually we got it out, and before leaving an elder in the village came up to my cousin's dad, looked at us, then at the path that we had walked, and said, you went upstream, if you hadn't, the river would have carried you straight to the old cemetery in the hospital morgue, you know. I still don't understand what happened that night. That shadow in the fog, the truck surviving a cliff drop like that, without even a scratch on it. All the lost hours that we experienced, and the fact that we were completely unharmed, none of it makes any sense, but I know that I'm alive, and I'll never forget the way that the forest and whatever was in it felt like it was watching us, like it wanted to make sure that we didn't reach the other side. That night, it still haunts me every time that I see fog, or drive down a narrow dark road now, and I'll never forget it. This started back in late 2020, when my family bought a cheap apartment in a suburb outside of Pewton, India. It wasn't meant to be our main place, more like an extra property that we could use when needed. The reason that it was so cheap was because the previous owner, an elderly guy, had died there, and his wife wanted to sell quickly and move in with some relatives. At the time, none of us really cared about that detail, to be honest, but we just thought that we got a good deal. For the first few months, nothing really unusual happened, too. I was actually the one using the place the most, because I had just gone through a break-up and wanted somewhere quiet to stay alone. During the Covid period, especially, I'd go there by myself, sit in the dark, play games for hours, and basically just sort of zone out. I kept most of the lights off except for a small lamp, because I liked the place feeling pretty empty anyway. Now, after a while though, I started noticing small things that didn't make sense, but weren't dramatic enough to immediately freak me out. Like the temperature inside would suddenly drop, even when all the windows were closed. Sometimes I'd feel this weird heaviness, like the air pressure in the room had changed. I'd also hear sounds from the dining area that were similar to furniture being slightly shifted. At first, I assumed it was neighbors upstairs, or just normal building noises echoing weirdly. But still, there were times when I'd get this sort of sudden urge to leave. Not a logical thought, more like my brain going, you need to go right now. I'd save whatever I was going through and doing and grab my keys and just sort of get out of there quickly without really understanding why. One night though, something happened that made it impossible to ignore anymore. It was around two in the morning, and I was sitting on the window ledge in my room with the lights off, just looking outside at the empty street. There was one streetlight and no people anywhere, and while I was sitting there I noticed a dark shape inside of the room behind me near the doorway. It looked like a person standing still. My first thought was that it had to be a shadow from outside, but when I leaned out the window to check, the street was completely empty. There was no movement, no cars, nothing. When I turned back though, the shape wasn't there anymore too. Before I could even process that too, my mother started knocking hard on my door from the hallway. She sounded panicked and kept telling me to come and sleep in the living room. That was really unusual because she normally wouldn't react like that over anything. I didn't argue though, just grabbed my phone and went there with her. The next day though, she told me that apparently she had seen something. You see, she had been sitting on the couch scrolling on her phone, and from where she was sitting she could see the dining area and the refrigerator, and she said that she noticed what she thought was my dad standing next to the fridge, just facing her and not moving. She asked him to bring her some water, but he didn't respond. She called his name louder, and that's when the figure moved quickly into the kitchen. She followed immediately, but when she got there, the kitchen was empty. Then she checked the bedroom and found my dad asleep, and that's when she realized that what she had seen could not have been him, and she came straight into my room. Even after that too, I still used the apartment because my entire gaming setup was there, so I just sort of changed my routine. I only went during the daytime and I never stayed after sunset. Even then though, I would feel uneasy for, well, no clear reason that I could put my finger on. Anyway, a few months later, another incident happened when I brought my ex over one afternoon to watch a movie. We had the lights off and just the TV on, and there were two glasses on a shelf near the bed, and one of them suddenly fell off by itself and shattered on the floor. We both jumped, but I still tried to explain it as maybe just unstable placement. I cleaned it up and I went to go and wash my hands, but when I came back, we were about to sit down on the bed again when we noticed something that made both of us stop instantly. There were dozens of like small metal pins scattered across the mattress, and I can assure you that they were not there before. Those pins were normally kept inside of a container in my parents room across the apartment. There was no way that they could have ended up on my bed without someone physically moving them. And it was right after that too that we began to notice what we thought was a dragging noise from the dining area, exactly like somebody pulling chairs across the floor. At that, my ex completely lost it and insisted that we leave right now. I didn't argue to be honest. We left within minutes and I didn't go back for weeks after that. Eventually, my grandmother got involved and she's very religious and insisted that we do a cleansing ritual. She brought someone that she trusted and they performed some prayers and burned some cleansing materials inside of the apartment. During that process, they asked me to hold a bowl of burning incense and to stand exactly where I had first seen the dark shape months earlier. And the moment that I stepped into that spot, I felt unbelievably dizzy, like the room was spinning for a few seconds. And then just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. After that day too, the atmosphere in the apartment noticeably changed. The heaviness feeling disappeared completely. The strange noises stopped. And as far as I can tell, nothing else has happened since then. We still own the place and these days it just feels like a normal empty apartment, but I personally don't stay there alone anymore. Not because anything is still happening, but because I just don't trust whatever explanation fits what we experienced back then. And I don't know, something says to me that this whole situation, it hasn't actually been resolved. This happened when I was about 19 years old. During my first year living away from home, actually. I don't think that I've ever actually written this down before, but lately I've been listening to a ton of really creepy encounters and it reminded me just how messed up this actually was. So, I was studying in a major city at the time and renting one of those cheap student share houses. If you've ever seen them, then you know the type. Old place chopped up into as many bedrooms as possible to cram students in. My room used to be the old living room, which meant two things. One, it was right at the front of the house, and two, the front door was literally about two meters from my bed. There wasn't ever a proper front yard to this place, just a sort of small concrete step and then straight onto the footpath. So if anyone did stand at the door, they were basically standing right next to my window. At first, it certainly felt weird too, but after a few months I think that I just sort of got used to it. You start recognizing sounds like people walking past versus someone actually stopping at your door. Anyway, one weekend both my housemates went away. That almost never happened at that same time, so I was alone in the house for about two nights. The first night was fine too, nothing unusual, but the second night is when this happened. It was around 12.30 or maybe closer to 1 in the morning, and I was lying in bed scrolling on my phone, not even tired yet, when I heard footsteps slow down outside. Not just someone walking past, that very specific sound of someone stopping right in front of the door. I froze for a second and listened. Then I heard the door handle move. Not aggressively, but just slowly turning back and forth like someone was testing it. At that point, my heart started going nuts. I told myself that maybe it was just a drunk person at the wrong house or something, but then it kept going, like they were patiently checking if it might suddenly unlock. I decided to look outside because I wanted to confirm that it wasn't someone who actually lived there or maybe even a neighbor or something. So I got up quietly and moved the curtain just a tiny bit. The second that I did that, I realized something was wrong immediately, because whoever was outside was already right there at the window, not standing back and not looking around. He was literally pressed up against the glass, face inches from where mine was. It was like we locked eyes instantly too. I didn't scream, I honestly couldn't. It was like my brain just sort of stalled. I just remember feeling this weird drop in my stomach like all the adrenaline sort of hit at once. He was wearing a dark hoodie and I couldn't see his face fully or clearly, but I could see his eyes staring directly into mine. The second that he realized that I could see him, he bolted, just turned and ran straight down the street. I stood there frozen for maybe 10 seconds before I even moved again. Then I called my friend first because my hands were shaking so badly that I could barely type. She told me to call the police immediately, which I did. They showed up about 20 minutes later and they took a statement, checked around the street but obviously the guy was long gone. And so there really wasn't much that they could do. There were no cameras, no clear description, nothing stolen and no forced entry. They basically said that it was likely somebody checking houses to see which ones were empty but the part that still freaks me out is this. So my bedroom light was on the whole time, which means that he absolutely knew that someone was inside. He didn't think the house was empty is what I'm getting at. He knew that someone was there. After that, I barely slept the entire weekend. Every small noise sounded like somebody at the door again. I kept replaying the moment in my head, how close he was, how long he must have been standing there watching before I even noticed and honestly, the worst part wasn't the door handle or the idea of a break-in even. It was the split second when I moved the curtain and realized that he was already waiting at that window like he was expecting me to look. Even now, years later, I still hate opening curtains at night. I always check from the side first, in fact, and I know that that sounds paranoid but once you've seen someone standing that close in the dark, you never fully forget it. This happened when I was in my early teens, maybe around 13. My mum had just moved into a small farming town after separating from my dad and the place that we moved into wasn't some creepy abandoned property or anything like that. It was just old and cheap really, which is why she could afford it. The land had one normal house and then this sort of separate concrete shed structure at the back too. It wasn't a barn exactly but more like a storage building that had been repurposed a bunch of times over the decades. At some point it had been used to keep animals, I think, and later it was just used for junk or storage. When we moved in though, the whole property needed work and the shed floor was uneven dirt so my mum's partner decided to dig it out and pour a proper concrete slab there. I remember being out there when they started because there wasn't much else to do in that town. At first it was just sort of normal digging too, rocks, bits of scrap metal, old nails, broken glass, typical stuff that you'd expect to be buried around an old property like this. But then they hit something that looked like a large bone. Not shocking at all honestly at first, it was clearly from an animal, probably livestock. There were actually several pieces like that scattered around, which made sense given the place used to be for farming and whatnot. But the weird part, that came later when they dug deeper near one corner. My stepdad uncovered something curved and smooth that didn't look like any animal bone that we'd seen. He picked it up, wiped the dirt off and immediately went quiet because it was a part of a human skull, specifically the upper back section. Not complete, just a chunk of it but it was no mistaking what it was. I personally didn't understand at first until my mum told me to go back inside and that's when I realised that this whole situation was something serious. She ended up calling the police because she didn't want to take any chances. A couple of officers showed up along with someone from the local medical office and they looked at it for maybe 10 minutes total. One of them even said that it looked old and weathered, not something recent. What really stood out though was just how quickly they lost interest. They basically concluded that it wasn't tied to any case and said that it was probably decades old, could have been from medical use, could have been from a burial site that got disturbed at some point. They threw out multiple possibilities but they never really committed to anything. And then just like that, they left. They didn't take the bone, didn't open an investigation, nothing. After that though, my mum tried to figure out if there was any explanation by asking neighbours about the history of the property. That's when we learned something that made the situation a whole lot more unsettling. So apparently before we moved in, the shed had been used years earlier by a guy who ran a pest control and animal disposal business. According to the locals, he would sometimes bury animal carcasses on the property temporarily before transporting them away or something. People also said that he wasn't exactly known for following regulations and the theory that made the most sense was that the skull fragment may have come from a medical waste or illegally obtained remains that were disposed of improperly along with animal remains. Basically, not some hidden crime scene, just extremely irresponsible handling of biological material decades earlier. But still, that explanation didn't really make it less disturbing. What stuck with me too wasn't just finding the skull piece, it was realising just how easily something like that could end up buried somewhere random and just sort of forgotten like that. Even now years later, I think about it sometimes when I see construction crews digging up land, because you never really know what's sitting underground until someone happens to just hit it with a shovel like that. This happened a couple of years back now and I don't really tell this much because, honestly, most of it just makes me look like an idiot who didn't know how to say no, but it still sticks with me because of just how weird it got toward the end. So I decided to take a solo day trip to a big theme park. It was one of those last weekends before they shut down for the season sort of thing and I figured that it would be quiet enough to just walk around, ride some stuff and keep it to myself. That was the whole point too. I like doing things alone sometimes, no planning, no coordinating with anyone, just me. Everything was normal at first too. I got there mid-afternoon, parked, went through into one of the longer coaster lines and after maybe ten minutes, a guy standing ahead of me started talking to me. At first it was just sort of normal small talk about the ride, wait times, whatever, but then he shifted into asking more personal stuff pretty quickly, like where I lived, what I did for work, if I came alone often. Nothing super alarming individually, but it was non-stop questions and he wasn't really answering much about himself. At that point, I should have just kept responses vague, but I didn't. I gave general answers, nothing specific, but enough that he knew that I was from out of town and thereby myself. Well, after the ride he immediately asked if we could just go around together for a bit. I told him no politely, said that I planned to just do some of my own thing and he really didn't accept that at all. He kept pushing in this really awkward way, like he'd act, hurt and say people always ditch him, that nobody ever sticks around and it turned into this sort of weird guilt thing instead of a normal conversation. Eventually I agreed to one more ride, just to end the situation without making a scene. That was my first mistake though. While we waited in the next line, he kept escalating the personal questions, stuff like whether I lived alone, what my daily routine looked like, how often I went out at night. It didn't feel like casual curiosity anymore too, it felt more like he was trying to build a bit of a profile or something. I started giving shorter and more vague answers after that, and when we got off that ride I told him again that I was leaving to go and do other stuff. Same reaction though, he immediately went back to acting upset, saying that I was abandoning him and asking what he did wrong. At this point I wasn't just uncomfortable too, I was starting to feel stuck. It's hard to explain but he wasn't acting aggressive, just sort of persistent in a way that made it feel like if I pushed too hard that this whole thing might escalate. So instead of cutting it off properly I kept compromising. One more ride turned into another, and another, and each time he'd promised that it was the last and then restart the same conversation. By early evening I was exhausted and just wanted to get away from him. That's when things shifted from awkward to actually unsettling too. While we were walking toward the front of the park, he suddenly started talking about how he sometimes watched people from a distance. He described sitting in his car outside of people's houses just observing them. He said it so casually too, like he thought that it was normal behavior. I asked if he meant neighbors or maybe friends or something, and he just shrugged and said something like, whoever I'm interested in at the time. That was the moment that I realized too that I needed to get out immediately. I stopped engaging, told him clearly that I was leaving, and started walking toward the exit without waiting for a response. He didn't argue this time too, he just stood there watching me. I remember looking back once and seeing that he had moved. He was just sort of standing still in the crowd, staring directly at me. I didn't run but I walked fast the entire way to the parking lot. I kept checking behind me because I genuinely thought that he might follow me, and when I got to my car I blocked the doors immediately and just sat there for a minute trying to calm myself down. It sort of hit me all at once though, how much personal information I'd casually given a total stranger earlier in the day like that. Thankfully, nothing ever really came of it. He never contacted me, never showed up anywhere, nothing like that, but for weeks afterward I was so paranoid any time that I saw a smaller car near my apartment or noticed someone lingering nearby. Looking back now, I know that it was stupid of me to do this, but it's hard to explain how you justify things in your head at the time that things go down like this. But it certainly taught me pretty bluntly too that being polite to strangers has its limits. Once someone starts ignoring boundaries, it's not rude to walk away immediately. In fact, it's necessary. Alright so this is still pretty recent and I'm honestly still trying to figure out how to process it, because it escalated way past what I thought was just awkward ex-behavior. For context, I'm a uni student and about a year and a half ago, I dated someone from my course for a few months. The breakup itself wasn't dramatic, she basically told me that she'd been questioning things and realized that she wasn't actually into women long term. It sucked at the time, but it wasn't a fight or anything. We just sort of stopped talking and we moved on. After that though, we barely crossed paths and we had originally shared one lecture, but she stopped attending pretty early in the semester. I assume that she either dropped it or maybe switched to an online one like a lot of people do. But then, around last autumn, she started randomly appearing in classes that she was never enrolled in. At first, it didn't even register as creepy because, well, uni buildings are open and people sometimes sit in on the lectures. But the pattern was what got really weird. She only ever showed up in rooms where I had classes and she would sit somewhere in the back and just sort of watch quietly. She never spoke to me, never approached me, nothing. I tried to rationalize it for a while. I figured that maybe she just liked the subject or had friends in those classes or something. But the thing is, is that she never attended any of her actual registered courses anymore. Just mine. Then it moved beyond campus. I work part-time at a small grocery store three days a week, always the same shifts. One of my coworkers casually asked me one night if I knew that girl who keeps coming in to stare at you. That's when it clicked that she only ever came in when I was working. He said that she never bought much and sometimes just grabbed one cheap item and then lingered around the aisles watching the checkout area. I still didn't confront her though. Honestly, I just sort of hoped that she would lose interest. But this went on for about two months. And then the part that actually scared me happened. So I live in a small apartment building with a hallway camera connected to my phone. And one night at around 3.45 in the morning, I got an emotion alert. At first I thought it was someone just sort of coming home late. But when I checked the footage, she was standing directly in front of my door. Not knocking, not moving, just standing there looking straight into the camera lens. She wasn't dressed normal either. Just a t-shirt and shorts. No shoes. Almost like she just walked out of her place in the middle of the night or something. I froze when I saw it. It didn't feel like a normal ex being weird situation anymore. It felt unpredictable and stalkerish. I woke up my current partner because I wasn't going to open the door myself. I went to the door and told her though that she needed to leave and that we would call the police if she didn't. She didn't respond verbally at all too. According to my partner, she just sort of stood there silently for a few seconds and then started laughing quietly. Not loud and not hysterical but just this sort of low, steady laugh. That's when we actually called the emergency services and by the time that the officers arrived she was gone. They checked the building in the surrounding area but they couldn't find her and we did show them the footage and they took a report but because she hadn't really forced entry or threatened us directly or anything, there really wasn't much that they could immediately do besides log it. But the next part is when I actually made it sink in to just how unstable the situation really was. To the following day Campus Security contacted me because apparently she'd been reported multiple times by other students for sitting in random classes without permission and refusing to leave when asked. They ended up suspending her pending a mental health evaluation and I haven't seen her since then. That was several months ago and nothing violent ever happened I suppose but I don't know, it wasn't dramatic and it was how quiet and persistent the whole thing was that really got under my skin. There was no confrontation, no messages and no yelling, just this slow pattern of showing up everywhere in my routine and then eventually standing outside of my door in the middle of the night without even saying a word. How weird is that right? Even now I still get tense when my camera sends a late night alert like that. It's not that I think she's coming back, it's more that it made me realise just how easily someone can track your daily habits like that if they decide to focus on you long enough. Anyway, hopefully this is the end of it but somehow I don't think that it is. So this happened last winter when I was travelling for work. I was in a mid-sized city, staying at a pretty average business hotel for about a week. Nothing fancy, nothing sketchy either. The area was one of those places where it's quiet at night but not dangerous by any means. Like you'll still see people walking dogs or grabbing food after dark here. About two blocks from the hotel there was a small late night bakery cafe that stayed open until around 10 or 11. I ended up staying there almost every evening because it was close and I hated eating alone in the hotel rooms. Usually I would go before I got dark but one night I got stuck finishing a work report and didn't head out until maybe about 9.30. The walk there was normal, just a slightly uphill sidewalk with a few street lights that were spaced way too far apart. Some parts were bright but then you'd hit a sort of stretch where it was almost completely dark. I grabbed a drink, went to sandwich, stayed about 20 minutes and then eventually I headed back. By the time that I left the cafe there weren't many people out anymore. The street was basically empty and as I was getting close to the hotel there's this sort of side area near the parking lot where they kept big industrial dumpsters. That section had zero lighting. Like it was just a black patch between two working street lights and right when I got to about level with it someone stepped out from that dark area. It was a guy, maybe late 40s or 50s, wearing a long coat that looked dirty and way too heavy for the weather. He didn't rush me or anything, he just sort of walked straight toward me at a normal pace and I immediately felt the internal alarms going off. The ones where you know that something isn't right, even if nothing technically threatening had happened yet. Then I noticed that he was holding something in both hands. At first I thought it was a bag but when he got closer I realized that it was a chunk of concrete or stone or something. Not huge but definitely big enough to do some serious damage. He stopped about maybe three or four meters away from me and held it up slightly like he was showing it to me. Then he said very calmly, can you tell me something, does this look valuable to you? I didn't answer at first, I was trying to process what he even meant. He took a step closer and repeated it like he was genuinely asking for an opinion. I think there might be metal inside, do you think it's worth something? At that point my brain finally kicked into survival mode. The hotel entrance was maybe 30 seconds uphill from where I was standing and I realized that if he swung that thing there was no way that I would react fast enough. Now instead of running immediately, I did something that I always do when I get a bit scared. I got blunt and loud. I just said no, I don't know, I don't care, leave me alone. He paused like he didn't expect that reaction. Then he tried again, stepping slightly sideways like he was trying to block the path. You don't want to look closer, it could be something important. That's when it really clicked that this wasn't about a rock, it felt like he was trying to get me to move closer into that dark area. I cut him off again, louder this time. No, move. We stared at each other for a few seconds that honestly felt way longer than it was. He didn't raise the rock, didn't yell, didn't threaten. He just stood there staring at me with this really weird blank expression. Then he slowly stepped backward toward the dumpsters and kind of blended back into the dark area. I didn't wait to see what he did next. The second that he moved away, I walked fast uphill to the hotel entrance, then basically jogged a last stretch. Once I got inside, I realized that my hands were actually shaking pretty badly. I told the front desk what had happened and they said that they had issues before with someone hanging around the parking lot, asking strange questions to guests but he usually left when he was confronted, although he had attacked some people. Thankfully, nothing else happened after that and I never did see him again during the rest of my stay. It was weird though just how calm and, well, casual he was about the whole thing. Like he was trying to act nonchalant and he was trying to get me to step closer to where there were no lights and no cameras. That much I'm certain of. Which really begs the question, right? What would have happened if it was someone else who wasn't as blunt as I was? G'day mates, it's B-Buster here. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Be Scared podcast, and please don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode too. Also, it would be much appreciated if you could share this new podcast with your friends and family and on social media too. Thanks again for listening guys, and I'll see you mates in the next one. On the beach, on the beach, on the beach. Bucking hero! It's time to swap your beanie for a bikini and get out of blighting. On the beach you've got you covered with tons of last minute deals on sunny destinations. Stop bucking around and search it on the beach.co.uk for last minute beach and city breaks. After an atoll protected. On the beach!