Bonus: The Darkest Chapter - In Full

The Dark Paranormal

This episode presents a compilation of terrifying paranormal encounters shared by Claire, spanning from her childhood to her adult life. The

Key takeaways

• Claire experienced 'the nasty thing' pinning her to her bed in her childhood home.
• Her twin sister, Denise, also experienced similar physical manifestations of being pinned down.

Main topics

• Paranormal hauntings
• Childhood experiences

Notable quotes

A skeptic is only a skeptic until something happens to them.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a chilling testament to how paranormal activity

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:24) everyone, and welcome to your bonus episode number one for the break-in season. As I mentioned, what we're doing for both Fridays that we're not releasing new episodes before the start of our full video season of Season 26 is on this occasion, for this episode, we're putting together two episodes that were two separate episodes about the one story that made up our Season 13 Halloween special. Now, what is special about this special is not only did we receive one of the most terrifyingly believable stories we've ever received, I also received photographs which validated each and every incident of what you're about to hear. Also, what we learned from going back through our archive is just how good it is to get right in to the story. And that's what we'll be doing from season 26 onwards. So, without any further ado, this is the season 13 Halloween special. And this is Claire's story. And believe me, I've seen the evidence. This is as real as it gets. Speaker 3 (1:51) This needs no grand introduction. To quote Claire, the submitter of the story. This story began with small, unexplained noises, and led to being followed by this thing to three different addresses. I've been bruised and physically scarred by something, with no rhyme nor reason. I didn't mess with a Ouija board. I don't dabble in seances or the occult. We didn't move into an old house. The house was built brick by brick by my parents. This true paranormal experience shows just why, sometimes, we should fear the dark. That creak on the stairs. That bang on the ceiling. Why we should trust that feeling of needing to run up the stairs when we've turned all the lights off for the night. Because something may be watching you. And for absolutely no reason, it may one day decide it's your turn to experience the dark paranormal. Speaker 3 (3:22) Over the next two nights, we will regale to you one of the most paranormally terrifying tales of recent times. So please, lower the lights, make yourself comfortable, and of course, leave your disbelief at the door, as we head over to Ireland to begin the Dark Paranormal, the Darkest Chapter. Speaker 3 (3:55) I grew up in a home where there was a healthy dose of scepticism. Not full-on believers or anything like that, no. However, there were some superstitions. We didn't mess with fairy rings. We hoped we'd never hear the banshees wail outside our door. And we believed in an afterlife. Because we all have loved ones there, right? And I think there's an innate comfort in believing that our loved ones can watch over us after they're gone. I remember my dad telling me a few stories of his own over the years. Such as one about when he'd heard the banshees wail when he was a young man. And another story where he'd seen an apparition of his own mother after she'd passed away. Where she'd shown up at the end of his bed, just to let him know things would be okay. Sweet that, isn't it? Yeah, we'll all take that type of weird stuff, and we're all fine with that of course. Other than that, we enjoyed the idea of the paranormal. We were one of those families who used to watch Most Haunted every week, even if only to laugh at Derek's Mary Loves Dick moments of alleged possession. making bets and guesses on how long it would take them all to freak out because something touched me or someone had seen a shadow. Anyhow, you get the idea. We had a healthy dose of scepticism in our house and a firm belief that if we were ever in a situation like that, there was no way we would overreact in the same way all of those folk on TV did. Speaker 3 (5:47) But I guess a skeptic is only a skeptic until something happens to them. For me, that thing happened when I was 16. My parents had converted the attic space to make two bedrooms and a bathroom, so that myself and my identical twin could have our own rooms. At either side of each room there was a small door, cubby holes essentially, that allowed access to the remaining attic space, where we kept all the usual stuff, Christmas decorations, bits and pieces. When we first moved into our brand new bedrooms, the doors hadn't yet been put on the cubby holes, which didn't bother me, because the novelty of having my own room at long last, outweighed any aesthetic issue. Speaker 3 (6:43) I don't know how long I was in the room before the first strange thing happened, but I think it might have only been a week or two. I was laying in bed, drifting off to sleep when... a noise came from somewhere in my room. Like when you chink two empty pint glasses together. Not exactly groundbreaking paranormal activity, and it barely even registered on my radar. I just pegged it up to being the pipes. Which was a reasonable explanation when you considered that the doors hadn't yet been put on the cubby holes. And there was actually a new water tank in the attic space. That had been put in for the new bathroom that had been built the same time. So, yeah, totally logical for it to be the pipes. Except, this sound moved around a lot. And it only ever happened at night time. And only ever when I was just drifting off to sleep. I'd hear the chinking noise over at the far side of my room, near one of the cubby holes. But the next time I would hear it, and me a few seconds later, it would be over by the door to my bedroom. And then, right next to my ear whilst I lay in bed. Weird, right? Well, that's what I thought, but that was all I thought. My head was still disregarding it all as a bit odd, but I was by no means jumping up and down to, there's a ghost in my room. A noise is a noise, and it'd go away. I genuinely didn't think it was strange until one of my friends was sleeping over a few weeks later. She was laying on a fold-out bunk at the bottom of my bed. I heard her sit up in a rush and say, Oh shit, I think I've knocked over a glass. And I nonchalantly brushed her concern aside and told her not to worry about it. That it wasn't anything she'd done. She hadn't kicked over anything. That noise just happens all the time. And then... It started its usual routine of moving around the room at random intervals and varying distances, while I lay in bed as calm as you like. Meanwhile, to say she was freaked out was an understatement. She ended up in the bed next to me, shaking like a leaf, and I genuinely don't think either of us slept that night. Speaker 3 (9:22) Seeing my friends so freaked out and unnerved made me realise that this wasn't normal. This didn't happen to everyone, and not every house had weird noises like this. But what was I meant to do about it? To remedy the issue, I started to set a CD to play whenever I was going to sleep. I'd set the volume just low enough to be background noise, to drown out the chinking noise. And it worked like a treat for a while. But then my CD player started stopping. No, not stop. It would pause. Not stop, not skip, not turn off. It would pause. Speaker 3 (10:14) I would hear the click of the pause button being pressed, and then, after a while, just as again I'd be drifting off to sleep, it would click and unpause itself. This kept happening every night, and I was adamant there had to be a reasonable explanation for it. Perhaps the CD was scratched in that one specific place, or maybe there was a problem with the CD player, a setting I didn't know about perhaps. I soon stopped putting on a CD when I was going to bed, because it usually ended up keeping me awake with the pausing and the unpausing. And at this stage, the doors had been put on the cubbyholes, and the chinking noises seemed to disappear. So, happy days all round. If only that were the case. I used to have this massive inflatable armchair in my bedroom that I'd sit in whenever I was playing PlayStation. Speaker 3 (11:19) I was laying awake in bed one night. It was a fairly clear night. It must have been near enough a full moon and the window in my attic bedroom letting a lot of light as it had no blind. So the room was dark but not pitch black. I could still clearly make out the furniture and other items in my room. I was laying there staring at the ceiling when I heard someone sigh loudly and then heard the creaking of someone sitting on the inflatable armchair. It freaked me out and had me sitting up in bed, but when I looked at the chair I saw nothing. What I did see though was this darkness in the far corner of my room. Remember, as I said before, the room was fairly lit up with moonlight and no blind on the window, but this back corner of the room was a pure pitch blackness. Speaker 3 (12:22) I made my own excuses in my head. I told myself that I'd been about to fall asleep, so I must have imagined the sigh. Probably down to that in-between phase when your dreams overlap. And the darkness in the corner? Well, it was night time. Of course the room was going to be dark. It was probably just a shadow cast by the way the moonlight shone in. Grand job. Debunked. So I turned over and went to sleep, content in my denial. I don't recall anything of note happening for a few weeks after that. But the next thing that did happen, I vividly remember. Because it's what I usually use as my proverbial line in the sand that separates my life into the before and after the truly weird shit started happening. Speaker 3 (13:20) I was still 16, working part-time in the local super-value supermarket in town, and also doing an exam attendance job during the day for the school exam period. And I remember this so clearly, because the next day, I had to go and do both of these jobs on zero sleep, with my thoughts in mental free-fall as I tried to make sense of what happened this night before. Speaker 3 (13:52) Okay, so to explain the way my room was at the time. When you stepped through the door, there was a cupboard with clothed storage on the right, directly below the large skylight. Next to that door was one of the cubbyholes, and at the back wall was a computer desk. On the left was my bed, which blocked another cubbyhole as it was pushed against the wall. And at the end of my bed was a chest of drawers that had my CD player on top of it. But all you really need to know is that my bed was behind my bedroom door. I was asleep that night. That much I'm positive about. I was stirred from my sleep by something touching my leg. Again, I was in that in-between place, where you're kind of awake but still asleep enough to know what's going on. So some things make it into your dreams. So, in my dream, something's tickling my leg. But the more I wake up, the more I realise this isn't a dream. and whatever it was that was touching my leg was creeping higher and higher towards my underwear. That realisation alone had me wake in an instant. I reached for my bedside lamp, but something pinned me down. I'd been lying stomach down on the bed, and it felt as if something heavy was sat on my back. It wasn't like a knee or a central weight, but a weight pressed down on every inch of my body, and I couldn't break free for love nor money. I was alarmed and starting to freak out. I didn't understand what or how this was happening, and my brain went into free fall, trying to make sense of all this. I tried to sit up, but I just got pushed down further. And then, my whole bed started to shake. In my head, I'm screaming for help. But in reality, I couldn't make a sound. Not even a whimper. This could have lasted ten seconds or ten minutes. I don't know which one it was. All I know is that it felt like an eternity. Speaker 3 (16:22) Eventually the weight lifted and the shaking stopped, and I was free to move in my bed again. Up until this point in my life, I thought I'd known what fear was. But that night, I wholly understood what it meant to be frozen in fear, in its most visceral meaning. I was terrified. Every time I worked up the courage to try and turn on my bedside lamp and make a run for the door, something would touch my leg, or the corner of my mattress would dip, as if someone had sat on its edge. But there was only me in the room. I sat there, with my knees pulled up against my chest, with my back against the wall all night, absolutely terrified to move until daylight finally broke, and then I ran for it. I went to work. I didn't say a word about what had happened because what was I meant to tell anyone? I didn't even understand what happened to myself. So how could I find the words to explain it to someone else and expect them to know what to do or even to believe me? I eventually did tell my mom a few days later. But to be fair, I think I did a rather poor job of trying to explain what happened. Plus, what does a mother even do with that information? Speaker 3 (17:57) I think I should make it clear at this point that my parents built the house. It hadn't been a house that they'd bought from someone else. They'd bought the land and built the house themselves, and we'd lived in the house for nine years without so much as a light flickering. Nothing had happened in the house prior to us converting the attic. So for me to trot downstairs one morning with a story like this, well, it sounds far-fetched even now as I write it. So I think it's fair to say my parents didn't believe me. And I don't hold any grudge for that. Like I said, it was a house they'd built. A house we'd all lived in for nine years. And no one else in the house had ever mentioned anything weird happening. So we just put it in a box and put it on a shelf, which would be fine, except it kept happening to me. If not every night, then every second or third night. I'm now 30, and to this day I won't sleep on my stomach for fear of being caught off by what I came to call the nasty thing. Speaker 3 (19:20) This continued at this level for months, and before someone suggests sleep paralysis, I'd like to strike that off the list of possibilities, because my identical twin actually suffered from sleep paralysis, and had gone to the doctor about it, gotten scans, etc, and this happened to her too. Yes, getting pinned down in her bed, and her bed shaking, happened to her too. and it took a very long time for us to tell each other about it. But it seems like when I wasn't paying attention to the chinking noise, it migrated across the landing to her room. And when I started getting pinned down, it happened to her a week or two later, and kept happening to her too. This continued this way for months and years, to the point where it became almost normal for me. At one stage, I refused to sleep in my room. I slept instead on a fold-out bed in my twin's room for a month, which is fucked up looking back now, because we'd wanted our own room for so long. But I eventually went back to sleeping in my own room, and I learned how to sense when it was going to happen. I learned to recognize the feeling of danger I felt before getting pinned down. And I got very good at getting up and out of harm's way before it got me. But in all honesty, I was terrified of that room. The feeling was just different in there. Even my sister and other people mentioned it. It was heavy, oppressive, cold. and it always felt like you were intruding, or someone was watching you in there. I used to sleep with my light on, and I would refuse to enter the room until the light switch was on, which was a bit awkward because the light switch was inside the room, so I had to reach in across the threshold to turn on the light. I remember doing this one day, and feeling fingers dance across the back of my hand. I ran back downstairs and slept on the couch that night. I refused to go into my room alone after that. One day after school, I needed to change out of my uniform and I didn't want to go upstairs alone. So my five-year-old brother, Aiden, came along with me. I was tugging on a hoodie and he was sitting on the edge of my bed and I noticed that he was looking uncomfortable. So I asked him what was wrong. He told me, I don't like the bad man, but the butterfly man's nice. Needless to say, I grabbed his hand and we both ran out of there ASAP. And I slept on the couch again that night. Around this time, Dad used to tell me off for making so much noise in my bedroom when he was on a night shift. Mam and Dad's room was directly under my bedroom. But I always said I hadn't been doing anything. He would be adamant that it sounded as if I'd been moving furniture that night or pushing myself from one side of the room to the other on my computer chair. This went on for years. Like I say, it started when I was 16. I went to college when I was 18 and it was only then that my parents realised that maybe something was not right in the house. Dad was laying in bed one night and got woke up by the sound of my computer chair rolling from one side of my bedroom to the other. He was understandably irate as he'd just finished a night shift. He came charging into the sitting room like a bull and let rip at my sister and brother, only for them all to realise that I was in college and wouldn't be home until Friday. Mam was at work and Aidan was at school. Dad, Denise and Anthony were the only three people in the house, and no one was upstairs. At this stage, we knew something was off in the house, and it seemed to have emanated from my bedroom. As I was in college Monday to Friday, the rest of the family decided to put my room under lockdown. They borrowed a camera from my uncle, and my dad and my twin sister, Denise, set it up in my bedroom. The camera itself had a battery life of about three hours, so they plugged it into the socket to keep it recording for the night. They shut the bedroom door, made sure no one else went up into the room, and the next day they went upstairs to see what the camera had captured, only for them to find the camera where they'd left it on the sideboard, but the charger had been pulled out. Okay, not a big deal. The camera should still have a few hours of recording on it. So they turned it on to review the footage. And it showed Dad and Denise setting up the camera, exiting the room, and then it just turned off, the battery going completely dead. At this stage, I'm in college, and whatever it was that was tormenting me upstairs got bolder. Personally, I believe that it got bored when I wasn't there, as it had no one to torment, and it wasn't getting the attention it craved. And so it decided to venture downstairs and to the rest of the house to see what it could stir up. My mother runs her own bookkeeping business from home and has a small personal office in the spare room. One day she was working away, the radio playing lowly, a cup of tea on her desk and a pile of invoices she's working her way through, when she hears my youngest brother, who would have been about six or seven at the time. yelling down the hallway. Mam acted on reflex and was halfway up the hall when she stopped in her tracks, realising that Aidan was at school. He was at school, I was in college, Denise was in college, Anthony was in school and Dad was at work. She was the only person in the house. She quickly grabbed her car keys and drove to my auntie's house in town. A few weeks later, I recall coming home from college on a Friday evening. A man was sitting at the kitchen table, looking a bit uneasy. I asked what was wrong, and she brought me into the living room and showed me my framed prom photo. The stand it was on was now broken, and the photo had been moved inside the frame in such a way that it had torn the photograph. Speaker 3 (26:50) She explained that she'd been hoovering the living room when the photo had simply swiped itself from the mantelpiece. Not at her or anything, but she'd been the only one there, and she'd been stood over by the doorway, a good ten or twelve feet away from the mantelpiece. Yet something had thrown this from the mantel to the floor. Speaker 3 (27:18) Unsettling, but Mam told herself it must have been a breeze, seeing as she'd had the windows open to air the place, even though none of the other framed photos on the mantle had moved. So that was the explanation that she'd settled on, and one she wholly believed. Until later that same day. She'd been working in her office down the hall again, and... Speaker 3 (27:47) She hears this massive noise. Going to investigate, Mam found that the large mirror that had hung in the hall was now on the ground. At this point, I feel the need to explain that this mirror is huge. It's about a foot and a half tall and probably four foot wide. That had hung on the wall in the hallway for ten years. And here's where it gets weirder. If a mirror falls, it falls down, right? Gravity. So, if it were to fall down, there's a whole table with a vase of flowers directly below it, neither of which were knocked. When Mam found the mirror, it had been placed neatly on its side, leaning against the wall to the right of the table, unscathed and uncracked. The wire that hung it was unbroken, and the hooks that held it in place were still in the wall, undamaged, not even bent or stretched. We were confused. Even with all the paranormal stuff going on at this stage, we still tried our best to find a logical reason for this, rehanging the mirror and trying to debunk what had happened, but to no avail. Speaker 1 (29:10) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore, because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began, turning dreams into direction. Speaker 1 (29:27) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. So, where will your journey take you? Etihad, beyond borders. Speaker 3 (29:41) Another aspect I should clear up now is that, like I mentioned, I was in college at this point of my life. I was staying on campus Monday to Friday, and nothing ever happened to me whilst I was at college. I never got pinned down in my bed. I never had anything unexplained or strange happen to me whilst I was sleeping on campus. The next major thing that happened still chills me to my core to this day. Quite frankly, pardon the language, but it's fucked up to put it lightly. I'll hold my hand up and admit that if