Our Personal Experiences with the Strange and Unexplained

The inspiration for wartime stories didn't exactly come from some pre existing fascination I had with the paranormal.

I don't know if I ever really gave much serious thought to it until after I got out of the military. Which is a shame, because I sometimes wish I'd been able to ask more of the Marines I knew if they had any strange stories.

I've since noticed an interesting effect that sharing these kinds of stories has on people. You could know someone for years, or maybe you just met them.

But let's say you're having a typical conversation and you casually bring up the subject of the unexplained.

All of a sudden they say something like, yeah, I saw something like that one time. You ask them to elaborate and then they nonchalantly tell you about the most bizarre thing that's ever happened to them.

They seem almost surprised at themselves for talking about it, as if they don't expect you to believe them.

As if they don't really believe it themselves. It was so weird. And they never understood it, so they just forgot about it.

Maybe for years. Decades. And it wasn't until something reminded them that they suddenly remembered it.

Well, as it turns out, it's the same case for everyone currently working on the show. Jake, Alex, sort of Picata and myself.

Everyone was hired because of their talent, so it's only a coincidence that they happen to have these experiences.

And in my case, I only started remembering some of the stranger things that happened to me. The deeper I went down this rabbit hole.

Anyway, for your consideration, here are our personal stories. The true unexplained experiences. The Wartime Stories team has.

Foreign.

I'm luke lamanna

and this is wartime stories.

Oh, you want to tell me more about this place you keep talking about? It's in Virginia, right? Oh, dude, it's perfect for us.

You know that new setup you were talking about? The one with multiple amps and delay pedals? Yeah, you could easily do it there.

The place is completely empty, so we won't have to worry about noise complaints. And we can record as long as we want.

And since my dad owns the building, he can cut us a sick deal on rent. I mean, that all sounds pretty good to me.

What's the catch? Well,

there is one thing that I should warn you about before we agree to anything. Yeah, what's that?

Do you believe in ghosts, Alex?

It is hard to find good people, they say. Well, Alex Carpenter is good people. He's our resident audio producer and video production manager.

He has a background in music production and his skill as a producer is evident in the soundscapes that you hear in the dramatized vignettes in each episode.

He also mixes the music for each episode, which I have found is a very important part of storytelling when you're going to use it.

Music sets the tone for every scene. There was a long time on the show when I had to produce everything on my own, which is exhausting, and I'm happy to say Alex is now carrying that torch and keeping the channel in line with the style you have all enjoyed.

In many ways, he's improved it. One interesting thing about our team is that no one hails from the same country.

We are an international conglomeration of storytellers. Our friend Alex happens to come from Down Under.

This story takes place not long after Alex left Australia and move to the US to pursue a career in music and possibly to escape all of the wildlife that they have in Australia.

Anyway, Alex writes,

so I'm a musician. When I moved to New York from Australia in the late 2000s, I was looking for a way to create these rich, immersive compositions without relying on large groups of instrumentalists, as I had been doing back home.

My answer came with a setup of mine involving a solo guitar, multiple amplifiers, and a few delay pedals.

Without getting too deep into the technical aspects of this, the delay pedal creates what I like to call a blank audio canvas.

This canvas allows you to build on small cells of sound in an unplanned and sometimes unpredictable way.

It's a great tool to use if you're trying to break out of old habits as a performer. As you might imagine, this setup wasn't exactly economical when it came to the amount of equipment needed to pull it off.

It would typically involve four large guitar amps, a sizable effects pedalboard, my guitar, and a trunk load of cables.

I performed with this setup a good amount, but I also wanted to record with it. But my New York City apartment was small as hell, and the idea of recording in a professional studio with dollar signs accumulating by the minute, it didn't lend itself well to a relaxed performance on my part.

So I started asking around, and eventually my friend Nick came through with an idea. He said that his dad owned an abandoned building in Alexandria, Virginia, and wouldn't mind if we set up and recorded there for as long as we wanted.

We could even camp out in the building to maximize our work time. But this offer came with a warning.

The building was haunted.

Now I'm a little skeptical when it comes to ghosts, so I was curious to know what exactly had happened to convince Nick and his dad of this supernatural presence.

They told me they had heard singing in the stairwell, experienced strange visual apparitions, and just generally sensed another presence on occasion while in the building alone.

In other words, mostly the standard ghost story kind of stuff that could probably be attributed to other more logical factors.

Old fixtures, funky wiring, the wind outside, etc. But one incident they reported I found a little harder to explain away.

There was apparently a framed photograph of an elderly woman that kept appearing and reappearing in random places on the top floor of the building, despite several efforts to remove it.

Nick's dad told me he had rented the top floor to several short term commercial tenants over the years, and every time someone moved out he'd find the photo again.

While cleaning up for the next tenant,

I asked, are you sure the photo was removed each time?

His answer was pretty convincing. Yes. It always got taken down to the basement at the beginning of each tenancy, yet always somehow managed to find its way back up to the top floor every single time.

Obviously anything could have happened, I thought to myself. The tenants themselves could have easily found the photo and taken it back upstairs.

But then why would they do that? And why would every tenant over the years do the same thing? It was a little weird.

I asked Nick where we'd be recording, and I'll fully admit his answer gave me a little chill. The top floor.

We recorded over several weekends in the space, and each time I was there I embraced the idea of the ghost a little more.

I named her Alma and imagined that she had lived in the building sometime in the past, got trapped there, and was looking for a way to communicate.

I kept returning to that idea of the blank canvas of the delay pedal. If I was using this tool to let go of my learned musical vocabulary, what was appearing in this empty audio space?

Was I inviting Alma to step in and speak? Despite this playful communing with the idea of Alma, I never experienced any specific apparitions or weird noises.

But during our last weekend of recording, something really strange happened. I happened to open a cabinet, which I could have sworn I'd opened several times previously.

And I kid you not, I found myself staring straight straight at that framed photo. Alma. I honestly thought Nick had planted it there as a joke, but he swears up and down that he didn't.

I will say I had a great time recording there and came away with some music I really love. I later compiled those tunes into an album and book release I titled for Alma as the dedication to my imaginary companion, but was Alma really imaginary?

I still struggle with that question.

Weirdly enough, my favorite track on the album, the one you're listening to right now, is one I have no recollection of playing whatsoever.

To this day, I listen to this track with a profound sense of awe and curiosity and frequently find myself wondering if a better title for my album would have been From Alma.

I later found out that Alma means soul or spirit in Spanish.

So this is the barracks where the enlisted troops would have stayed. Jeez,

imagine living crammed shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other guys before bathing was a thing. Yeah.

Yeah, that would suck.

You all right, bud? Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just

that. This is gonna sound weird, but I could have swore someone was standing here just now, like right before we came in.

Really? Yeah. Like he was right here by the window, wearing a red jacket. I saw his hand and everything.

Huh.

Are there any soldiers still here that want to come talk to us?

Can you make that light flicker?

Well, it was worth a shot. Looks like they're not so shy around you though, huh?

Yeah.

This next story comes to us from our writer and researcher and resident Canadian, Jake Howard. I met Jake over email.

He reached out asking to write a script for a story. That script became what is now the Hound of Mons episode.

If you haven't seen that episode, I would highly recommend it. It's possibly one of the more un underrated episodes in my opinion.

Although I have occasionally enjoyed writing a story from time to time, Jake has since done the bulk of both research and writing for the show.

If there's one thing to know about Jake, it's that he's a big history nerd. And it was that love of history that brought him face to face with something he still can't explain.

He writes,

I consider myself a skeptic. Sure, I believe there are energies and powers at play that we don't quite understand.

But I think 90% of all paranormal encounters can be chalked up to one reasonable explanation or another.

It's my belief that what I'm about to tell you falls into that 10% that are a little difficult to write off as being shadows or tricks of the eye.

This story takes place in the winter of 2012, when I was about 15 years old. My dad had caught wind of this big outdoorsman show at Toronto's Exhibition place, and the two of us figured it would be a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Neither of us were avid outdoorsmen, but what the hell. So we drove into the city and hit up the event as we're having a good time checking out the RVs, tents and all kinds of outdoor goodies.

Someone goes and pulls the fire alarm. I'm not even sure if there was a fire, but we had to evacuate regardless.

Just like that, our Saturday plans had gone up in smoke. Pun intended. As we're trying to figure out what to do next, I asked my dad if he wanted to go check out Old Fort York, which is basically a stone's throw away from Exhibition Place.

My dad's the one who got me into history, so it didn't take him much convincing. I bore enough people with my history rants, so I'll try to keep this as short as possible.

Fort York is basically where the city of Toronto began way back in the late 18th century. Back then, the town of York was controlled by the British and served as the capital of Upper Canada.

During The War of 1812, an American invasion force set out across Lake Ontario in an attempt to capture York.

The attack caught the British garrison as well as the local militia and allied indigenous warriors off guard.

The defenders fought well despite being badly outnumbered and outgunned, but the Americans steadily pushed them back towards the walls of Fort York.

It was clear that York was about to be overrun, but as the British pulled their men and citizens out of the town, they left a nasty surprise for the approaching U.S.

troops. Just before they abandoned the fort, they set fire to the powder magazine and right as the first Americans were attempting to climb up and over the walls.

The blast was said to be the largest man made explosion at that point in history. It wouldn't be beaten until the Halifax explosion just over a hundred years later.

In 1917, the fort and most of the town were completely leveled and hundreds of British, Canadian and American troops were dead.

With so many men killed and later buried on the property, it's been said that Fort York is one of, if not the most haunted location in Toronto.

At the time I was already well aware of these ghost stories, but it was a little hard to be creeped out.

You couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. The sun was shining high in the afternoon sky and a fresh layer of snow blanketed the old walls and structures.

I guess winter isn't the peak tourist season for the fort because I think my dad and I were the only ones there besides two volunteers working the front desk and gift shop.

We purchased our tickets and basically had the whole place to ourselves, but it didn't take long for the weird stuff to start happening.

We entered the fort and hooked a left making our way towards the North Barracks, where the enlisted men and their families would have bunked.

As my dad headed to the door, I peered in through one of the windows.

Standing in the barracks, just off to the side of said window, was a man wearing a red British army jacket.

I didn't see his face or upper body, but I saw his arm in the red sleeve and a pale white hand, clear as day.

I figured there was a reenactor in there, dressed in full period kit, just waiting for someone to come along so he could tell them a bit about the building and the men that lived there.

But when I followed my dad through the door and glanced left to where the window was,

there was nothing. We were the only ones in the barracks. At a certain point, my dad must have noticed that I was just staring blankly at this window and asked me what was up.

I straight up told him that someone in a period British uniform was standing in this room right before we came in.

My dad believed in the supernatural, so hearing this intrigued him quite a bit. He actually tried calling out to any spirits in the room, asking if they could flicker the lights or move something.

Of course, nothing happened, but I was convinced that I may have actually seen an honest to God ghost.

Surprisingly, I wasn't all that freaked out. I remember thinking that the experience, as surreal and hair raising as it was, was actually pretty cool.

Like, hey, I just saw the echo of someone who existed over 200 years ago.

After that, we carried on with the rest of our tour, hitting up the exhibits and checking out the fortifications before calling it a day.

But as I reflected on my experience in the months and years that followed, I realized that there were other things I saw that day that I really shouldn't have been seeing.

At some point during the day, I broke away from my dad to go explore the far side of the fort. As I made my way back along the main path towards the front gate, I looked to my left towards the circular battery.

There, standing on his lonesome near the fort wall, was a man dressed as a period artillery gunner. Even now I can see him clear as day, decked out in his blue uniform, leaning on a ramrod while looking down at his feet as if something was stuck on his boot.

I was so sure he was a museum volunteer or living historian that I never thought about why he was just standing there all by himself.

I just kept on walking

from there. I looked in the opposite direction, towards the building known as the Officer's Blue Barracks.

Trudging through the deep snow towards the barracks was a woman in a bonnet and a gray dress. I even distinctly remember how she hiked up the front part of her dress to prevent it from dragging and getting soaked.

Look, I was a teenager at this point, so the critical thinking part of my brain probably wasn't fully formed yet.

But in the moment, these people were so vivid, so real, that I thought they were just, well, people.

But in the years that followed, I learned that the fort ran rarely, if ever, hosts historical reenactors.

During the winter months,

my dad and I checked out every building on site, and we never once crossed paths with any staff or volunteers in full regalia.

And as it turns out, one of the most commonly reported ghost sightings is that of a woman in a gray dress sighted in and around the officer's barracks.

Hey Dragic, I managed to snag you one of those pretzels before they sold out at the dude, are you seeing this?

Oh,

where did all these crows come from? It's like a scene out of a horror movie. Oh man, I have no idea.

Must be like a bad omen or something.

We really shouldn't look into all that too hard or tell the CEO about it.

Why are you talking like that? Do you know something about this?

Here, have a pretzel and let's pretend like you never asked me that question.

This next story belongs to Wartime Stories. Very talented Serbian born illustrator Picada. I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but Picada's work is incredible.

Before we had the good fortune to meet, after I posted a job listing on a freelance site, I was slogging through all of the artwork on the show myself.

Forever. Every episode. And if you didn't already know this, it wasn't really art in my opinion. It was more like scrapbooking.

I took random images and cutouts from dozens of images and pieced together all of these things to create scenes.

And then I rendered them all down into a black and white format. Nothing was hand drawn. It was more Photoshop editing than anything.

Very time consuming, frustrating work. Picata's first episode was the Kerzy Time Slip, another great story.

He writes comics and has a variety of drawing styles that he ultimately combined to create what you now see.

From the channel's inception, I knew it would be important to animate these stories because being able to visualize them is what gives life to what would otherwise be hard to imagine.

And speaking of imagine how happy I was to find an artist who could capture the aesthetic for this show that I could have never created.

It was mentioned in the episode about the Austrian army and the Vampire. So you may recall that Pkata is a veteran himself.

Serbia has, as many nations do, a mandatory military service requirement. Serbia is landlocked on all sides though, so I was initially very confused when Pokata said he served in the Serbian Navy.

It made more sense when he clarified that it was called the Serbian River Flotilla. Why do rivers need military patrols?

Well, Serbia's rivers act like a coastline in a landlocked country. The Danube and its tributaries are key borders and transport routes, especially around the capital city of Belgrade, so controlling them helps protect bridges, crossings and ports while stopping smuggling or hostile movement.

Rivers are still important terrain in both peace and war.

During his time in the military, Picada didn't really encounter much in the way of paranormal, but he did recall what he considers to be one of his stranger days on the job.

This happened in 2003, when I was pretty deep into my one year of mandatory military service. It was a perfectly lazy morning, which was great because because I was admittedly a bit hungover from the night before.

All was well until they

discovered that I wasn't doing anything productive at that current moment. So they decided to change that.

They set me up with a wheelbarrow filled with leftover barrels of food from the barracks mess hall and told me to go take it out to the cage, which was basically our dump.

The River Navy apparently had a top secret deal with a local farmer who would swing by the cage to collect our scraps to feed his pigs.

I really didn't want to do this. On top of being hungover, the temperature plummeted that morning and paved the way for a nasty blizzard.

Also, this duty put on hold my plans to run to this nearby bakery that had become well known amongst us sailors for their weirdly large but delicious pretzels.

They sold out quickly, so I was keen to get out there as soon as possible.

So there I am, pushing this heavy ass wheelbarrow through a blizzard and deep snow. Fed up with this BS assignment and with my mind filled with thoughts of pretzels, I said screw this and decided to take a shortcut.

Instead of going all the way out to the cage, I went to the big field that separated our two barracks.

From there, I opened the barrels and chucked the food scraps onto the ground, which were quickly buried beneath fresh layers of snow.

Satisfied that all evidence of my crime would be covered up, I wheeled around and went back to the barracks.

Told my commanding officer that it was all done and dusted, and just like that, I was off to get my pretzel.

So I haul ass to the bakery and get my prize. But as I was leaving, I got the distinct feeling that I was being watched.

I looked up, and perched in a nearby tree was a crow. The thing had one eye, and it was using it to stare into my soul.

Or at least it felt like it. As this thing was eyeballing me, I realized something. The sun was out, and the snow that had fallen that morning had started melting.

The same snow that I was relying on to cover up the food that never made it to the kitchen cage.

Well, shit. As I walked back to the barracks, I knew I was in for an ass chewing. I was basically praying that the snow hadn't melted enough to expose the evidence of my dereliction of duty.

But when I got there, the sight that greeted me was surreal. Scattered all over the field between the barracks and circling high overhead were hundreds of crows squawking and fighting over the food scraps in the melting snow.

It was insane, like something straight out of an Edgar allan Poe or H.P. lovecraft story.

This naturally got the attention of some of the other guys who came out to watch. From the edge of the field, I heard some of them speculating about what could have caused the crows to gather there.

Were they picking at the remains of a dead animal? Was it some kind of bad omen? Meanwhile, there's me trying to fade into the background like that meme of Homer Simpson.

Stepping back into the bushes, I alone knew the truth, and the crows helped me to get rid of all the evidence.

I scarfed down my pretzel and went right back to bed to sleep off the rest of my hangover.

Just like another day in the Serbian River Navy.

Okay,

almost. Almost to the top.

Hey. Hey, bro.

Cedar,

what are you doing?

Hey. We're in a staggered column. Gotta move back, man. Get back.

What's up,

Cedar?

You okay, man? You hurt,

bro? You gotta move back. Instructor's right there. He'll see you. Sergeant. Who the hell are you talking to,

huh?

Cedar,

What the hell?

You all right, Sergeant?

What's going on? Who are you talking to?

I could have swore.

Never mind. Let's just keep moving.

I've told this story before, just never inside of an actual episode. It takes place in 2013. I was going through what was then a three month long basic reconnaissance course at Camp Pendleton, California.

First phase, they drown you every day in the pool. Most people quit in the first two days. A few. Ruck runs up to a max of 12 miles with 70 pounds of weight.

Then they take you out for land navigation where A few more guys break their ankles trying not to get eaten by mountain lions and bitten by rattlesnakes while looking for their grid points.

Second phase, they take you down to San Diego Coronado island where they train you on the Navy base down there alongside the Navy seals.

Couple guys stepped on stingrays, had to pull the barbs out of their feet. I felt like I drank a quart of diesel swimming in that bay full of wastewater.

There are actual harbor seals swimming around in the water. Scares the life out of you when they come up alongside you in the dark or try to jump into your boat.

It's just this dark mass. You don't know what kind of animal this is. I'm poking fun at my Navy SEAL friend, John Ballin, John B.

Allen when I say that for all their prestige, the little yellow rubber boats that the SEAL candidates had to carry up and down the beach when they were training, they looked awfully light.

Our black combat rubber raid crafts that the recon guys were using, we called them cricks. They weighed a ton of with the engines and fuel bladders back breaking, carrying those things in and out of the water.