Today, we have another special bonus video for you. It'll be a collection of five more fan favorite, nightmare-inducing stories. Don't worry if you've heard or seen these before, because we have totally reedited all of them, so the viewing experience will be all new. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Like Buttons house and reverse all their toilet paper rolls. So instead of feeding out from the top, they feed out from underneath like a serial killer. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories. In 2004, Mitch was in his final semester at a college in Louisiana when he met another senior, a wonderful young lady named Kayla. From the instant he saw her, he knew he was in love. She played hard to get at first, but after several months, he won her over. After graduation, the pair stayed in Louisiana and moved in together while they got their careers off the ground.

Two years later, the pair got married, and almost immediately, Kayla got pregnant. At the time, Mitch's career was really starting to take off, which allowed Kayla to stay at home and take some time off. By the time their daughter was born, Mitch was making so much money that Kayla decided to just stay home and be a full-time mom. A couple of years later, Kayla got pregnant again, and by the time their daughter was two years old, they had their son. Mitch adored his children. Every morning before he went to work, he would sneak into their room and he would watch them sleep. Then in the evenings, they would have these big family sit down meals and then play games together until bedtime. Mitch's life was perfect. Shortly after his son's birth, Mitch was lounging on the couch in move his body. He could only move his eyes. And even though he had never experienced sleep paralysis before, he instinctively understood this is probably that. He noticed the room was completely silent. There was no more crickets, no more hum of the light outside, no more traffic, just total silence. Then he started flashing his eyes around the room because he couldn't move his head or his body, and he started taking stock of the room. The bed he was in was positioned as far away from the door as he could in the back right corner. From where he was laying, if he looked to his right, in that corner was this big armoire, and then moving left from the armoire as he scanned the room, you'd come to the door, which is on the opposite side of where his bed was.And then if he kept scanning left, he would reach the foot of his bed, and just beyond the foot of his bed was a table and a chair. But because he was laying flat, he couldn't really look down and actually see the table and chair. And so with all of his strength, he managed to raise his head just enough that he had a line of sight to that section of his room, the only section he has not looked at yet. And he sees the table and chair, and he sees in the corner is this dark figure that's standing there looking at him. He's completely frozen with fear. His thought is, there's an intruder in the house. How did they get in here? What are they doing in here? And he managed to keep his head up just long enough to get a decent look at this dark figure, and he determined it was most likely a woman with a shal covering her face. And before his head fell back to the pillow, he saw her suddenly crouched down on the ground out of view. And then Nathan's head fell back, and now he knows there's just some stranger in his room, and he can't lift his head up anymore.And he's looking around with his eyes. He sees the Armoise, Now he sees the door, he can't see that table and chair. And then he hears the sound of someone slithering along the ground out of view. And he can hear her breathing as she's getting closer and closer to the edge of the bed. And he's laying there terrified. He's so scared, he can't even make a sound. And he's telling himself, this has to be a dream. Wake up, wake up, wake the room. The hallway is dark, and he's left paralyzed, knowing this woman is downstairs in the kitchen. As he's laying there, he hears her start running through the house. It sounds like an animal is barreling into things as she's running through the bottom floor, and she stops at the foot of the stairs.And he's thinking to himself, I know where she's going. She's coming up to my room. And so as he's laying there, he feels his heart racing, and he's staring at the open door. He knows she's going to come flying up those stairs, and she's going to come through that door. And instead of running up the stairs, he hears her take one step, two step. And as she's making her way up the stairs, he's just thinking, Please break out of this trance. Stop this paralysis. Wake up, wake up. And then he sees her head emerge, and she turns to look at him from the stairs into the room. And once she sees it's him, she bolts around and starts charging into the room on all fours like an animal. At this point, Nathan lets out a primal scream. He is scared for his life as this woman is charging towards him, and she stops dead in tracks right in the middle of the room. She looks at him, turns around, and crashes out of the room, charges downstairs, and then it's silent. As soon as she was downstairs, Nathan could sit up, except it did not feel like the first time he had sleep paralysis at his mom's apartment when he sat up and he had the sensation of relief.You've woken up, you were asleep before, now you're awake. This time, it was like he was always awake, but now he can sit up. He did not have a sense of relief. In fact, he was worried she was still in the house. And as he's sitting up in bed, his mother comes running into the room. She looks disheveled. She's half asleep. And she's like, Was that you? Were you running around the house? I could have sworn I heard someone running around the house. Was that you? Nathan's looking at her and he can't even process what he's been through, whether that was real whether it was a dream. He's trying to find the words to describe to his mom the dream he had. He can't process what's happening. He just says, Mom, we have to check the house. We have to make sure no one's in the house. The two of them flip on every upstairs. They're not even talking. At this point, it's survival mode. They turn on all the lights upstairs, and Nathan leads the way down. They're flicking on all the lights, and they manage to search the whole house, and there's no sign of a break-in.There's no one in their house. After the Coast was clear and they felt like they were not in immediate danger. They went into the kitchen to talk about what just happened. Nathan's like, Okay, Mom, I just going to tell you everything that I'm thinking right now. I can't really process what just happened. I think it was a bad dream, but I'm starting to think that it could be something else, or I'm just losing my mind. So a few months ago, I was sleeping in your guest room in your apartment, and I had an experience that I'm almost positive with sleep paralysis. I was laying there, I couldn't move, and this figure was in the room, and they were standing on me. It was terrifying, but it sounded an awful lot like sleep paralysis. But then a couple months after that, I talked to my sister, and I told her about it, and she told me that very recently, right before you moved into this house actually, she was in that room and she also had basically the exact same experience. She had never had sleep paralysis before. I had never had sleep paralysis before. So we basically had the exact same horrifying experience in the same room around the same time.And then just now, tonight, I had another sleep paralysis experience with the same woman who was running around the house, and you just said you heard her running around the house. His mom looked really concerned, but she wasn't shocked. She says to Nathan, I have seen this woman. I saw her in my apartment way long time ago, but I remember what you were describing. That's the experience I had. This woman showed up in the room and she stood on me. It scared the heck out of me, but I didn't tell anyone because I thought it was sleep paralysis. Nathan and his mom proceeded to spend the next several hours just talking through what this could be. How could they, all three of them, him, his mom and his sister, how could all of them have had the exact same experience. And how could tonight, when Nathan had this experience, how could his mom have heard those footsteps if that was indeed sleep paralysis? Because it wasn't Nathan, he was in the bedroom, and it wasn't his mom, she was in her bedroom, and she didn't have any pets. So who could it be? Nathan says he and his family are still totally rattled by this experience, and they don't have an answer.And this is a family of skeptics, so they're not looking for a reason to call this paranormal. They simply don't have the answers. Nathan has said that he, his mom, and his sister have not had any further experiences with the woman in black ever since that last experience Nathan had, and they're just hoping it stays that way. Hold on. We got one more very special story to cap off these five stories. It is special because this story is going to be included in our brand new graphic novel coming out October first. I actually told the story live recently on a YouTube live stream. And so if you missed that live telling, don't worry, because we pulled that story out of the live stream. We completely edited it. And now you all get to listen to it right here, right now. Enjoy.In July of 2012, there was a woman named Simone, who was 22 years old, who was living in this beautiful town in Southwestern Germany called Rudescham am Rhein. It's this winemaking village, and it's gorgeous. There's rolling green hills, there's vineyards as far as the eye can see. It's situated right on the Rhine River. It's this wonderful place. Simone had grown up in this village. That's where she lived, and she loved it there. Charmed childhood. She's 22 now. But this summer, she was feeling a little bit down because she was actually getting ready to leave this village and start the next chapter of her life in New York City. But Instead of dwelling on this sadness of moving away from home for the first time, she instead was really fixated on what she was going to do that summer, her final summer in Rudasham, Amreine. So Simone, one of her favorite memories of her entire life in this village is in the summer, she would go to the summer camp. There was this beautiful little camp in this forest that was not far from the town. From the time she was a little kid, she went as an attendee to this camp.There's all these counselors, and there's 200 kids that go to it, and they play games, and they put on stage plays. It's just this wonderful, wholesome camping experience. When she became a teenager, she basically was too old to go to this camp. And so she did what many of the other former attendees did, which is they eventually transitioned to becoming a counselor, like a volunteer counselor. And so she became a counselor and loved it, frankly, more than being an attendee. And for every summer after that, she was a volunteer counselor. And this summer, July of 2012, was no different. And she was going to be a counselor as well. So that was what she was going to do with her final summer before leaving for New York City. In mid-July of that year, Simone packs up her stuff, and she heads off to this forest to go be a camp counselor. The logistics of this camp is the attendees, the children, It's a two-week long camp, 200 kids. They would get dropped off by their parents in the morning, and then in the evening, they'd get picked up and go back home. But for the counselors, they would actually live at the campsite for the two weeks.It was like a two-week time. They were out in the woods together. The counselors had created that tradition, if you will. They told the staff, if you will, that the reason they were doing that is for efficiency's sake. We'll be there first thing in the morning because We're living there and we can set the camp up. When the kids go home for the day, we're all going to be there anyways, so it's easier to clean up the camp. There's all these reasons they had for it. But the truth was, the reason the counselors like to stay at this camp and live there is because after the kids would go home at night, all the counselors would retreat to their tents, which they stayed in for these two weeks. They put these tents out in the forest. So the camp is in a clearing, and then basically just into the tree line, they would set up their tents, and the counselors would live out there for the two weeks. But once When the kids were gone, they would just go out to their little campsite and put a little campfire together. And the drinking age was 16 years old, or it is 16 years old in Germany.And so they just like, party, basically. Not like crazy, but they had a good time out in the woods. So that was the real allure of the counselor side of being at this camp. So Simone, mid-July, she heads out to the camp. She gets there a day ahead of when camp starts, and she connects with all of the counselors she hadn't seen for so long, and they set up the camp. Then that night, they did not go out into the woods and have a party. They just set up their tents out in the tree line. Then the next day is day one of the actual camp, and the kids come along, and they got dropped off by their parents, and they have this wonderful first day of camp, doing their thing, doing camp stuff. Then in the evening, after the kids all left, Simone and the other dozen or so counselors, after doing all their chores to wrap up for the day, they excitedly grabbed beer and wine and rushed out to the tents in the forest to have their first party night. They get out to the tents, and they're all having a good time, swapping stories, just enjoying summer.In virtue of it being the first day, a lot of the counselors were pretty exhausted. It was a full effort that first day, and so no one was really up for staying up super late. They wanted to crash and just go to bed. Simone wanted to stay awake, and so she was one of the last people to finally retire air into her tent. But she did eventually. It's well past midnight. You got to picture where this is happening, too. They're far enough away from the actual campground. They're well into the tree line that there's no light beyond whatever they have on them. If you sleep in these woods, it's like darkness, right? It's well past midnight. Simone, finally, is one of the last people to climb into her tent. They all slept on these cots that they would put inside of their tent, so they're elevated off the ground. Simone gets into her tent, and she gets on her cot, and it's just so hot. It was just really hot this time of the year, and she just felt like it was stifling in her tent. And so she decided she would pull her cot out of her tent and just basically set it just in the woods.Imagine if you wandered off into the woods with a cot, put it down, and lied on top of it. That's what she was doing. She's in the middle of the forest, completely exposed, and she's going to try to sleep because it's a little bit cooler out there. She wasn't the only one doing this. Some of the other counselors had also struggled able to fall asleep because of the heat. There was at least a few other people that had their cots outside of their tent. Simone, she puts her cot next to or near another counselor who's already asleep. Simone gets in her cot, and she's trying to fall asleep, but she's still struggling to fall asleep. She could only really hear the sounds of the other counselors that were snoring and sleeping away, but she couldn't sleep. She had this growing sense of dread as she was laying, again, in total darkness in the woods, exposed in this cot. I can imagine it I'm being a little bit stressful. But eventually, she falls asleep. I'm going to show you an image that we were going to prep and put on the screen, and I'm going to show you literally in the book.Once she falls asleep, Simone is thrust into a visceral nightmare, one that she remembered every detail of this nightmare. In her dream, she comes to in her dream, and she looks out, and she sees this post-apocalyptic skyline. It's like a desert city with all these buildings that have now basically fallen into disrepair. They're crumbling over. It looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off, and we're in the nuclear Holocaust, and humanity is being wiped out. And so she's looking off into the distance, and she sees this skyline of just broken down buildings, and it's just sand everywhere. And between her and these buildings, so in And on the foreground are all these people that are just standing there, shoulder to shoulder, maybe a couple of hundred feet away from her. Their clothes are in tatters. They look like some of them are naked, but they're just barely wearing any of these clothes. And they're standing there, shoulder to shoulder, just staring at Simone. It's hard to detail this and hold this, but there you go. That's the visual for the skyline. And so they're all staring at Simone. And so she instinctively is is fearful of these people, but they're not moving towards her.They're not doing anything. They're just standing there like zombies. And so she's taking stock of the scene, and she didn't know why it was scary, but it was. She's like, This is a nightmare, right? As she's looking at these people and as she's taking in the skyline, she takes stock of the fact that on either side of her are these two huge men, that she doesn't know how... They're not physically laying hands on her, but she can tell they are the reason that she can't move from the spot she's in. She's rooted to the spot. The guy on her left is not doing anything. He's just standing there. But the guy on her right is turned to the side like he's doing something with his hands, but she can't quite see what it is. Simone, she's looking over as best as she can at this guy, trying to figure out what he's doing. She's seeing these people in this horrible skyline. And then at some point, the guy on her right turns back around, and in his hand, he's holding what looks like a wreath, like a holiday wreath you would hang on your door during Christmas time, let's say.And so Simone sees this wreath, doesn't really know what to make of it. It's this weird nightmare she's having. But the guy, without saying anything, who's next to Simone, he raises the wreath, the wreath, over her head. He's holding it above her head. And at this point, the other guy on the left side of Simone, he grabs the other side of this wreath. So there's four hands holding this wreath above Simone's head. I don't know if I'm in frame, so I'm going to go straight on with the camera. So they're holding this wreath, and they begin to lower it towards Simone's head. And as they do, Simone can tell all these people, they're looking a little bit more intently in the direction of Simone, really taking into account what's going to happen here. And as soon as this wreath touches Simone's head, she feels this blinding pain, like an excruciating pain all around the crown of her head. And she realizes at this exact moment that this is not just some wreath, it's a crown of thorns. And the thorns are digging into her head. And these two huge men are pulling it down on her head as hard as they possibly can.And she wants to scream, but she can't make any noise. She wants to run. She can't. And so she's just stuck there feeling this excruciating pain, and blood is pouring down her face. And it's unreal. It feels real. It literally feels real to her. And so in the dream, this goes on for several seconds until finally it's like it's so much that she wakes up. She's out of the dream. And so Simone, she takes stock of the fact that she's in this dark forest, which must have been disconcerting at first. But she looks around, she's in her caught, she's surrounded by the counselor, she can't really see anything, but she's like, Oh, okay, it was just a bad dream. But instinctively, like we all do when we sometimes have, maybe not dreams like this, I hope not, but similar horrible dreams, you check just to make sure you really are not dreaming. And so she reached up and touched her head to make sure she was not, in fact, wearing a crown of thorns. And she touched her head and there was no crown of thorns. And so she's relieved. But when she brought her hand back down, she can't see her hand.It's too dark, but she felt like there was something on it, something sticky. And at the same time, as she's noticing that there's something sticky on her head, she begins to feel this pain bubbling up around her head that was very similar to the pain she felt in her dream. And so as this pain is ratcheting up and up and up, she catches out of the corner of her eye. Again, it's very dark, but maybe out of the sunlight or something, she could either hear something or barely see something running around in the tree line near her, scurrying off away from her. She has no idea what it is, but she can't even focus on it because now the pain, the real pain, not the phantom pain in her dream, but the actual pain into her head is so blinding, she can only focus on that. And it finally gets to the point where she starts to panic. She doesn't know what's going on. She's realizing this is blood. That's what I touched my head. There's blood on my head. And so she begins to scream. So she's screaming. And the girl who's next to her, the other counselor, wakes up because the girl is screaming right next to her.The counselor sits up, she sees Simone screaming. She's like, What's going on? What's going on? She can't see Simone. It's too dark. And so this other counselor fumbles for a flashlight, grabs a flashlight, turns around, and shines it on Simone's face. And the second Simone is illuminated, and this counselor can see her The other counselor begins to scream at what she sees on Simone's head. And so for the next 15 minutes, it is absolute chaos in the forest. As people are screaming, they're trying to figure out what's going on. The other counselors are waking up. Nobody knows what's going on. And in the course of those In the next 15 minutes, the other counselors grab Simone. They put her into one of the vehicles they had at the camp. And by this point, Simone is vomiting. She's still bleeding from her head, and they rushed her to the hospital. I wish I could pull right now and say, What do you think happened? But I'll tell you what happened. When Simone was having that dream, the dream where she sees the city skyline and she doesn't know what's going on, and then suddenly she felt the thorns being driven into her head, well, the pain she was feeling in her dream dream of something driving into her head was synced up with actual pain she was feeling in real life.There was something digging into her head, but for some reason, her body, her brain, didn't process the pain in real life the way you would think you would, like, Wake up because something's happening to you. Instead, the thing that was happening in real life to Simone's head manifested itself in this dream. We basically believe Simone was already having a nightmare. She's in this post-apocalyptic landscape, and something in real life began happening to her head, and it entered her dream. That was the Crown of Thorns. Well, the real thing that was happening was a fox had snuck into the camp or was living in the forest, wandered up to Simone, and began eating her scalp. And it sat there and ate her head and took at least 20 solid bites out of her head before the pain in real life that had manifested in her dream got so extreme that Simone bolted upright and her sitting upright scared the fox off. Almost certainly, that is the thing she saw scurrying off into the forest. She was rushed to the hospital. She would be saved. They actually were able to suture her scalp all back together again, and they hid the scars in her hairline.But I spoke to Simone, so I mentioned there was a connection to our community. She might even be listening to this, to be honest. Simone posted this story on our subreddit. It was about her and this experience. She described this whole story and how after it happened, she was so traumatized that she not only could not go back in that forest ever again, but she couldn't go into any forest anymore. I mean, it's a true PTSD. She said she still has phantom pain, where the fox bit her head. She also said that because it was a fox, she had to go through this insane rabies protocol. Rabies is a lethal disease you can get from animals that have it. It's treatable, but she had all these shots she had to get. I mean, it It was this horrible experience, but she lived, and she's one of our amazing members of the Strange, dark, and Mysterious Community. And so, yeah, that story is a wild one, and it's one of the stories in our graphic novel here. Just to show that image again. Pretty cool, huh? Pretty good. Go to cam 2, see if you can zoom in on that again.I can't show too much, but here's what you get to see. Pretty good stuff. Pretty cool.Hey, everybody. If you haven't heard yet, we announced some really big news recently. We are putting out a book, and it's amazing. It's called Mr. Ballon presents Strange, Dark, and Mystious: The Graphic Stories, and it's an amazing graphic novel we have been working on for over a year. And it's our very first book, so we're all very proud of this. We think it's going to be so amazing. So in this book, there are nine stories, five of which are of the old variety. So you've heard them on YouTube, and they've been remastered and put into this book. And then you have four full-length brand new stories, which are amazing, that have also been put inside of this book. And the way we made those four new stories is to have them replicate the feel of YouTube. In fact, I would say this whole book is like the written version of our YouTube channel. It's totally a throwback to our OG fans who found us on YouTube. This is the book for you. It's going to be so good. The book is not coming out until my birthday, October first, but you can pre-order it right now by going to book.Boleynstudios. Com. Also, after you pre-order, be sure to follow me on social media and all the other places that we put out content because we're going to be teasing stuff about this book before release. Things like sneak peeks into the book and some pieces of artwork and some behind the scenes stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on, but it all starts with pre-ordering that book. So again, go to book. Boleynstudios. Com and pre-order our first ever official book. It's going to be great. Enjoy. So that's going to do it. If you're looking for more Strange, dark, and mysterious content, remember, we have a whole slew of Strange, dark, and mysterious podcasts under the Balin Studio's umbrella. There is the Mr. Boleyn podcast, Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries, Runful, Bedtime Stories, and our newest edition, Wartime Stories, which everybody's raving about. And so these are all free podcasts with hundreds of hours of content that you can listen to right now. All you have to do is search for Balin Studios on any podcast platform, and boom, there they are, all the podcasts. You can start your bitch. Thank you so much. Until next time. See you.

move his body. He could only move his eyes. And even though he had never experienced sleep paralysis before, he instinctively understood this is probably that. He noticed the room was completely silent. There was no more crickets, no more hum of the light outside, no more traffic, just total silence. Then he started flashing his eyes around the room because he couldn't move his head or his body, and he started taking stock of the room. The bed he was in was positioned as far away from the door as he could in the back right corner. From where he was laying, if he looked to his right, in that corner was this big armoire, and then moving left from the armoire as he scanned the room, you'd come to the door, which is on the opposite side of where his bed was.

And then if he kept scanning left, he would reach the foot of his bed, and just beyond the foot of his bed was a table and a chair. But because he was laying flat, he couldn't really look down and actually see the table and chair. And so with all of his strength, he managed to raise his head just enough that he had a line of sight to that section of his room, the only section he has not looked at yet. And he sees the table and chair, and he sees in the corner is this dark figure that's standing there looking at him. He's completely frozen with fear. His thought is, there's an intruder in the house. How did they get in here? What are they doing in here? And he managed to keep his head up just long enough to get a decent look at this dark figure, and he determined it was most likely a woman with a shal covering her face. And before his head fell back to the pillow, he saw her suddenly crouched down on the ground out of view. And then Nathan's head fell back, and now he knows there's just some stranger in his room, and he can't lift his head up anymore.

And he's looking around with his eyes. He sees the Armoise, Now he sees the door, he can't see that table and chair. And then he hears the sound of someone slithering along the ground out of view. And he can hear her breathing as she's getting closer and closer to the edge of the bed. And he's laying there terrified. He's so scared, he can't even make a sound. And he's telling himself, this has to be a dream. Wake up, wake up, wake the room. The hallway is dark, and he's left paralyzed, knowing this woman is downstairs in the kitchen. As he's laying there, he hears her start running through the house. It sounds like an animal is barreling into things as she's running through the bottom floor, and she stops at the foot of the stairs.And he's thinking to himself, I know where she's going. She's coming up to my room. And so as he's laying there, he feels his heart racing, and he's staring at the open door. He knows she's going to come flying up those stairs, and she's going to come through that door. And instead of running up the stairs, he hears her take one step, two step. And as she's making her way up the stairs, he's just thinking, Please break out of this trance. Stop this paralysis. Wake up, wake up. And then he sees her head emerge, and she turns to look at him from the stairs into the room. And once she sees it's him, she bolts around and starts charging into the room on all fours like an animal. At this point, Nathan lets out a primal scream. He is scared for his life as this woman is charging towards him, and she stops dead in tracks right in the middle of the room. She looks at him, turns around, and crashes out of the room, charges downstairs, and then it's silent. As soon as she was downstairs, Nathan could sit up, except it did not feel like the first time he had sleep paralysis at his mom's apartment when he sat up and he had the sensation of relief.You've woken up, you were asleep before, now you're awake. This time, it was like he was always awake, but now he can sit up. He did not have a sense of relief. In fact, he was worried she was still in the house. And as he's sitting up in bed, his mother comes running into the room. She looks disheveled. She's half asleep. And she's like, Was that you? Were you running around the house? I could have sworn I heard someone running around the house. Was that you? Nathan's looking at her and he can't even process what he's been through, whether that was real whether it was a dream. He's trying to find the words to describe to his mom the dream he had. He can't process what's happening. He just says, Mom, we have to check the house. We have to make sure no one's in the house. The two of them flip on every upstairs. They're not even talking. At this point, it's survival mode. They turn on all the lights upstairs, and Nathan leads the way down. They're flicking on all the lights, and they manage to search the whole house, and there's no sign of a break-in.There's no one in their house. After the Coast was clear and they felt like they were not in immediate danger. They went into the kitchen to talk about what just happened. Nathan's like, Okay, Mom, I just going to tell you everything that I'm thinking right now. I can't really process what just happened. I think it was a bad dream, but I'm starting to think that it could be something else, or I'm just losing my mind. So a few months ago, I was sleeping in your guest room in your apartment, and I had an experience that I'm almost positive with sleep paralysis. I was laying there, I couldn't move, and this figure was in the room, and they were standing on me. It was terrifying, but it sounded an awful lot like sleep paralysis. But then a couple months after that, I talked to my sister, and I told her about it, and she told me that very recently, right before you moved into this house actually, she was in that room and she also had basically the exact same experience. She had never had sleep paralysis before. I had never had sleep paralysis before. So we basically had the exact same horrifying experience in the same room around the same time.And then just now, tonight, I had another sleep paralysis experience with the same woman who was running around the house, and you just said you heard her running around the house. His mom looked really concerned, but she wasn't shocked. She says to Nathan, I have seen this woman. I saw her in my apartment way long time ago, but I remember what you were describing. That's the experience I had. This woman showed up in the room and she stood on me. It scared the heck out of me, but I didn't tell anyone because I thought it was sleep paralysis. Nathan and his mom proceeded to spend the next several hours just talking through what this could be. How could they, all three of them, him, his mom and his sister, how could all of them have had the exact same experience. And how could tonight, when Nathan had this experience, how could his mom have heard those footsteps if that was indeed sleep paralysis? Because it wasn't Nathan, he was in the bedroom, and it wasn't his mom, she was in her bedroom, and she didn't have any pets. So who could it be? Nathan says he and his family are still totally rattled by this experience, and they don't have an answer.And this is a family of skeptics, so they're not looking for a reason to call this paranormal. They simply don't have the answers. Nathan has said that he, his mom, and his sister have not had any further experiences with the woman in black ever since that last experience Nathan had, and they're just hoping it stays that way. Hold on. We got one more very special story to cap off these five stories. It is special because this story is going to be included in our brand new graphic novel coming out October first. I actually told the story live recently on a YouTube live stream. And so if you missed that live telling, don't worry, because we pulled that story out of the live stream. We completely edited it. And now you all get to listen to it right here, right now. Enjoy.In July of 2012, there was a woman named Simone, who was 22 years old, who was living in this beautiful town in Southwestern Germany called Rudescham am Rhein. It's this winemaking village, and it's gorgeous. There's rolling green hills, there's vineyards as far as the eye can see. It's situated right on the Rhine River. It's this wonderful place. Simone had grown up in this village. That's where she lived, and she loved it there. Charmed childhood. She's 22 now. But this summer, she was feeling a little bit down because she was actually getting ready to leave this village and start the next chapter of her life in New York City. But Instead of dwelling on this sadness of moving away from home for the first time, she instead was really fixated on what she was going to do that summer, her final summer in Rudasham, Amreine. So Simone, one of her favorite memories of her entire life in this village is in the summer, she would go to the summer camp. There was this beautiful little camp in this forest that was not far from the town. From the time she was a little kid, she went as an attendee to this camp.There's all these counselors, and there's 200 kids that go to it, and they play games, and they put on stage plays. It's just this wonderful, wholesome camping experience. When she became a teenager, she basically was too old to go to this camp. And so she did what many of the other former attendees did, which is they eventually transitioned to becoming a counselor, like a volunteer counselor. And so she became a counselor and loved it, frankly, more than being an attendee. And for every summer after that, she was a volunteer counselor. And this summer, July of 2012, was no different. And she was going to be a counselor as well. So that was what she was going to do with her final summer before leaving for New York City. In mid-July of that year, Simone packs up her stuff, and she heads off to this forest to go be a camp counselor. The logistics of this camp is the attendees, the children, It's a two-week long camp, 200 kids. They would get dropped off by their parents in the morning, and then in the evening, they'd get picked up and go back home. But for the counselors, they would actually live at the campsite for the two weeks.It was like a two-week time. They were out in the woods together. The counselors had created that tradition, if you will. They told the staff, if you will, that the reason they were doing that is for efficiency's sake. We'll be there first thing in the morning because We're living there and we can set the camp up. When the kids go home for the day, we're all going to be there anyways, so it's easier to clean up the camp. There's all these reasons they had for it. But the truth was, the reason the counselors like to stay at this camp and live there is because after the kids would go home at night, all the counselors would retreat to their tents, which they stayed in for these two weeks. They put these tents out in the forest. So the camp is in a clearing, and then basically just into the tree line, they would set up their tents, and the counselors would live out there for the two weeks. But once When the kids were gone, they would just go out to their little campsite and put a little campfire together. And the drinking age was 16 years old, or it is 16 years old in Germany.And so they just like, party, basically. Not like crazy, but they had a good time out in the woods. So that was the real allure of the counselor side of being at this camp. So Simone, mid-July, she heads out to the camp. She gets there a day ahead of when camp starts, and she connects with all of the counselors she hadn't seen for so long, and they set up the camp. Then that night, they did not go out into the woods and have a party. They just set up their tents out in the tree line. Then the next day is day one of the actual camp, and the kids come along, and they got dropped off by their parents, and they have this wonderful first day of camp, doing their thing, doing camp stuff. Then in the evening, after the kids all left, Simone and the other dozen or so counselors, after doing all their chores to wrap up for the day, they excitedly grabbed beer and wine and rushed out to the tents in the forest to have their first party night. They get out to the tents, and they're all having a good time, swapping stories, just enjoying summer.In virtue of it being the first day, a lot of the counselors were pretty exhausted. It was a full effort that first day, and so no one was really up for staying up super late. They wanted to crash and just go to bed. Simone wanted to stay awake, and so she was one of the last people to finally retire air into her tent. But she did eventually. It's well past midnight. You got to picture where this is happening, too. They're far enough away from the actual campground. They're well into the tree line that there's no light beyond whatever they have on them. If you sleep in these woods, it's like darkness, right? It's well past midnight. Simone, finally, is one of the last people to climb into her tent. They all slept on these cots that they would put inside of their tent, so they're elevated off the ground. Simone gets into her tent, and she gets on her cot, and it's just so hot. It was just really hot this time of the year, and she just felt like it was stifling in her tent. And so she decided she would pull her cot out of her tent and just basically set it just in the woods.Imagine if you wandered off into the woods with a cot, put it down, and lied on top of it. That's what she was doing. She's in the middle of the forest, completely exposed, and she's going to try to sleep because it's a little bit cooler out there. She wasn't the only one doing this. Some of the other counselors had also struggled able to fall asleep because of the heat. There was at least a few other people that had their cots outside of their tent. Simone, she puts her cot next to or near another counselor who's already asleep. Simone gets in her cot, and she's trying to fall asleep, but she's still struggling to fall asleep. She could only really hear the sounds of the other counselors that were snoring and sleeping away, but she couldn't sleep. She had this growing sense of dread as she was laying, again, in total darkness in the woods, exposed in this cot. I can imagine it I'm being a little bit stressful. But eventually, she falls asleep. I'm going to show you an image that we were going to prep and put on the screen, and I'm going to show you literally in the book.Once she falls asleep, Simone is thrust into a visceral nightmare, one that she remembered every detail of this nightmare. In her dream, she comes to in her dream, and she looks out, and she sees this post-apocalyptic skyline. It's like a desert city with all these buildings that have now basically fallen into disrepair. They're crumbling over. It looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off, and we're in the nuclear Holocaust, and humanity is being wiped out. And so she's looking off into the distance, and she sees this skyline of just broken down buildings, and it's just sand everywhere. And between her and these buildings, so in And on the foreground are all these people that are just standing there, shoulder to shoulder, maybe a couple of hundred feet away from her. Their clothes are in tatters. They look like some of them are naked, but they're just barely wearing any of these clothes. And they're standing there, shoulder to shoulder, just staring at Simone. It's hard to detail this and hold this, but there you go. That's the visual for the skyline. And so they're all staring at Simone. And so she instinctively is is fearful of these people, but they're not moving towards her.They're not doing anything. They're just standing there like zombies. And so she's taking stock of the scene, and she didn't know why it was scary, but it was. She's like, This is a nightmare, right? As she's looking at these people and as she's taking in the skyline, she takes stock of the fact that on either side of her are these two huge men, that she doesn't know how... They're not physically laying hands on her, but she can tell they are the reason that she can't move from the spot she's in. She's rooted to the spot. The guy on her left is not doing anything. He's just standing there. But the guy on her right is turned to the side like he's doing something with his hands, but she can't quite see what it is. Simone, she's looking over as best as she can at this guy, trying to figure out what he's doing. She's seeing these people in this horrible skyline. And then at some point, the guy on her right turns back around, and in his hand, he's holding what looks like a wreath, like a holiday wreath you would hang on your door during Christmas time, let's say.And so Simone sees this wreath, doesn't really know what to make of it. It's this weird nightmare she's having. But the guy, without saying anything, who's next to Simone, he raises the wreath, the wreath, over her head. He's holding it above her head. And at this point, the other guy on the left side of Simone, he grabs the other side of this wreath. So there's four hands holding this wreath above Simone's head. I don't know if I'm in frame, so I'm going to go straight on with the camera. So they're holding this wreath, and they begin to lower it towards Simone's head. And as they do, Simone can tell all these people, they're looking a little bit more intently in the direction of Simone, really taking into account what's going to happen here. And as soon as this wreath touches Simone's head, she feels this blinding pain, like an excruciating pain all around the crown of her head. And she realizes at this exact moment that this is not just some wreath, it's a crown of thorns. And the thorns are digging into her head. And these two huge men are pulling it down on her head as hard as they possibly can.And she wants to scream, but she can't make any noise. She wants to run. She can't. And so she's just stuck there feeling this excruciating pain, and blood is pouring down her face. And it's unreal. It feels real. It literally feels real to her. And so in the dream, this goes on for several seconds until finally it's like it's so much that she wakes up. She's out of the dream. And so Simone, she takes stock of the fact that she's in this dark forest, which must have been disconcerting at first. But she looks around, she's in her caught, she's surrounded by the counselor, she can't really see anything, but she's like, Oh, okay, it was just a bad dream. But instinctively, like we all do when we sometimes have, maybe not dreams like this, I hope not, but similar horrible dreams, you check just to make sure you really are not dreaming. And so she reached up and touched her head to make sure she was not, in fact, wearing a crown of thorns. And she touched her head and there was no crown of thorns. And so she's relieved. But when she brought her hand back down, she can't see her hand.It's too dark, but she felt like there was something on it, something sticky. And at the same time, as she's noticing that there's something sticky on her head, she begins to feel this pain bubbling up around her head that was very similar to the pain she felt in her dream. And so as this pain is ratcheting up and up and up, she catches out of the corner of her eye. Again, it's very dark, but maybe out of the sunlight or something, she could either hear something or barely see something running around in the tree line near her, scurrying off away from her. She has no idea what it is, but she can't even focus on it because now the pain, the real pain, not the phantom pain in her dream, but the actual pain into her head is so blinding, she can only focus on that. And it finally gets to the point where she starts to panic. She doesn't know what's going on. She's realizing this is blood. That's what I touched my head. There's blood on my head. And so she begins to scream. So she's screaming. And the girl who's next to her, the other counselor, wakes up because the girl is screaming right next to her.The counselor sits up, she sees Simone screaming. She's like, What's going on? What's going on? She can't see Simone. It's too dark. And so this other counselor fumbles for a flashlight, grabs a flashlight, turns around, and shines it on Simone's face. And the second Simone is illuminated, and this counselor can see her The other counselor begins to scream at what she sees on Simone's head. And so for the next 15 minutes, it is absolute chaos in the forest. As people are screaming, they're trying to figure out what's going on. The other counselors are waking up. Nobody knows what's going on. And in the course of those In the next 15 minutes, the other counselors grab Simone. They put her into one of the vehicles they had at the camp. And by this point, Simone is vomiting. She's still bleeding from her head, and they rushed her to the hospital. I wish I could pull right now and say, What do you think happened? But I'll tell you what happened. When Simone was having that dream, the dream where she sees the city skyline and she doesn't know what's going on, and then suddenly she felt the thorns being driven into her head, well, the pain she was feeling in her dream dream of something driving into her head was synced up with actual pain she was feeling in real life.There was something digging into her head, but for some reason, her body, her brain, didn't process the pain in real life the way you would think you would, like, Wake up because something's happening to you. Instead, the thing that was happening in real life to Simone's head manifested itself in this dream. We basically believe Simone was already having a nightmare. She's in this post-apocalyptic landscape, and something in real life began happening to her head, and it entered her dream. That was the Crown of Thorns. Well, the real thing that was happening was a fox had snuck into the camp or was living in the forest, wandered up to Simone, and began eating her scalp. And it sat there and ate her head and took at least 20 solid bites out of her head before the pain in real life that had manifested in her dream got so extreme that Simone bolted upright and her sitting upright scared the fox off. Almost certainly, that is the thing she saw scurrying off into the forest. She was rushed to the hospital. She would be saved. They actually were able to suture her scalp all back together again, and they hid the scars in her hairline.But I spoke to Simone, so I mentioned there was a connection to our community. She might even be listening to this, to be honest. Simone posted this story on our subreddit. It was about her and this experience. She described this whole story and how after it happened, she was so traumatized that she not only could not go back in that forest ever again, but she couldn't go into any forest anymore. I mean, it's a true PTSD. She said she still has phantom pain, where the fox bit her head. She also said that because it was a fox, she had to go through this insane rabies protocol. Rabies is a lethal disease you can get from animals that have it. It's treatable, but she had all these shots she had to get. I mean, it It was this horrible experience, but she lived, and she's one of our amazing members of the Strange, dark, and Mysterious Community. And so, yeah, that story is a wild one, and it's one of the stories in our graphic novel here. Just to show that image again. Pretty cool, huh? Pretty good. Go to cam 2, see if you can zoom in on that again.I can't show too much, but here's what you get to see. Pretty good stuff. Pretty cool.Hey, everybody. If you haven't heard yet, we announced some really big news recently. We are putting out a book, and it's amazing. It's called Mr. Ballon presents Strange, Dark, and Mystious: The Graphic Stories, and it's an amazing graphic novel we have been working on for over a year. And it's our very first book, so we're all very proud of this. We think it's going to be so amazing. So in this book, there are nine stories, five of which are of the old variety. So you've heard them on YouTube, and they've been remastered and put into this book. And then you have four full-length brand new stories, which are amazing, that have also been put inside of this book. And the way we made those four new stories is to have them replicate the feel of YouTube. In fact, I would say this whole book is like the written version of our YouTube channel. It's totally a throwback to our OG fans who found us on YouTube. This is the book for you. It's going to be so good. The book is not coming out until my birthday, October first, but you can pre-order it right now by going to book.Boleynstudios. Com. Also, after you pre-order, be sure to follow me on social media and all the other places that we put out content because we're going to be teasing stuff about this book before release. Things like sneak peeks into the book and some pieces of artwork and some behind the scenes stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on, but it all starts with pre-ordering that book. So again, go to book. Boleynstudios. Com and pre-order our first ever official book. It's going to be great. Enjoy. So that's going to do it. If you're looking for more Strange, dark, and mysterious content, remember, we have a whole slew of Strange, dark, and mysterious podcasts under the Balin Studio's umbrella. There is the Mr. Boleyn podcast, Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries, Runful, Bedtime Stories, and our newest edition, Wartime Stories, which everybody's raving about. And so these are all free podcasts with hundreds of hours of content that you can listen to right now. All you have to do is search for Balin Studios on any podcast platform, and boom, there they are, all the podcasts. You can start your bitch. Thank you so much. Until next time. See you.

the room. The hallway is dark, and he's left paralyzed, knowing this woman is downstairs in the kitchen. As he's laying there, he hears her start running through the house. It sounds like an animal is barreling into things as she's running through the bottom floor, and she stops at the foot of the stairs.

And he's thinking to himself, I know where she's going. She's coming up to my room. And so as he's laying there, he feels his heart racing, and he's staring at the open door. He knows she's going to come flying up those stairs, and she's going to come through that door. And instead of running up the stairs, he hears her take one step, two step. And as she's making her way up the stairs, he's just thinking, Please break out of this trance. Stop this paralysis. Wake up, wake up. And then he sees her head emerge, and she turns to look at him from the stairs into the room. And once she sees it's him, she bolts around and starts charging into the room on all fours like an animal. At this point, Nathan lets out a primal scream. He is scared for his life as this woman is charging towards him, and she stops dead in tracks right in the middle of the room. She looks at him, turns around, and crashes out of the room, charges downstairs, and then it's silent. As soon as she was downstairs, Nathan could sit up, except it did not feel like the first time he had sleep paralysis at his mom's apartment when he sat up and he had the sensation of relief.

You've woken up, you were asleep before, now you're awake. This time, it was like he was always awake, but now he can sit up. He did not have a sense of relief. In fact, he was worried she was still in the house. And as he's sitting up in bed, his mother comes running into the room. She looks disheveled. She's half asleep. And she's like, Was that you? Were you running around the house? I could have sworn I heard someone running around the house. Was that you? Nathan's looking at her and he can't even process what he's been through, whether that was real whether it was a dream. He's trying to find the words to describe to his mom the dream he had. He can't process what's happening. He just says, Mom, we have to check the house. We have to make sure no one's in the house. The two of them flip on every upstairs. They're not even talking. At this point, it's survival mode. They turn on all the lights upstairs, and Nathan leads the way down. They're flicking on all the lights, and they manage to search the whole house, and there's no sign of a break-in.

There's no one in their house. After the Coast was clear and they felt like they were not in immediate danger. They went into the kitchen to talk about what just happened. Nathan's like, Okay, Mom, I just going to tell you everything that I'm thinking right now. I can't really process what just happened. I think it was a bad dream, but I'm starting to think that it could be something else, or I'm just losing my mind. So a few months ago, I was sleeping in your guest room in your apartment, and I had an experience that I'm almost positive with sleep paralysis. I was laying there, I couldn't move, and this figure was in the room, and they were standing on me. It was terrifying, but it sounded an awful lot like sleep paralysis. But then a couple months after that, I talked to my sister, and I told her about it, and she told me that very recently, right before you moved into this house actually, she was in that room and she also had basically the exact same experience. She had never had sleep paralysis before. I had never had sleep paralysis before. So we basically had the exact same horrifying experience in the same room around the same time.

And then just now, tonight, I had another sleep paralysis experience with the same woman who was running around the house, and you just said you heard her running around the house. His mom looked really concerned, but she wasn't shocked. She says to Nathan, I have seen this woman. I saw her in my apartment way long time ago, but I remember what you were describing. That's the experience I had. This woman showed up in the room and she stood on me. It scared the heck out of me, but I didn't tell anyone because I thought it was sleep paralysis. Nathan and his mom proceeded to spend the next several hours just talking through what this could be. How could they, all three of them, him, his mom and his sister, how could all of them have had the exact same experience. And how could tonight, when Nathan had this experience, how could his mom have heard those footsteps if that was indeed sleep paralysis? Because it wasn't Nathan, he was in the bedroom, and it wasn't his mom, she was in her bedroom, and she didn't have any pets. So who could it be? Nathan says he and his family are still totally rattled by this experience, and they don't have an answer.

And this is a family of skeptics, so they're not looking for a reason to call this paranormal. They simply don't have the answers. Nathan has said that he, his mom, and his sister have not had any further experiences with the woman in black ever since that last experience Nathan had, and they're just hoping it stays that way. Hold on. We got one more very special story to cap off these five stories. It is special because this story is going to be included in our brand new graphic novel coming out October first. I actually told the story live recently on a YouTube live stream. And so if you missed that live telling, don't worry, because we pulled that story out of the live stream. We completely edited it. And now you all get to listen to it right here, right now. Enjoy.

In July of 2012, there was a woman named Simone, who was 22 years old, who was living in this beautiful town in Southwestern Germany called Rudescham am Rhein. It's this winemaking village, and it's gorgeous. There's rolling green hills, there's vineyards as far as the eye can see. It's situated right on the Rhine River. It's this wonderful place. Simone had grown up in this village. That's where she lived, and she loved it there. Charmed childhood. She's 22 now. But this summer, she was feeling a little bit down because she was actually getting ready to leave this village and start the next chapter of her life in New York City. But Instead of dwelling on this sadness of moving away from home for the first time, she instead was really fixated on what she was going to do that summer, her final summer in Rudasham, Amreine. So Simone, one of her favorite memories of her entire life in this village is in the summer, she would go to the summer camp. There was this beautiful little camp in this forest that was not far from the town. From the time she was a little kid, she went as an attendee to this camp.

There's all these counselors, and there's 200 kids that go to it, and they play games, and they put on stage plays. It's just this wonderful, wholesome camping experience. When she became a teenager, she basically was too old to go to this camp. And so she did what many of the other former attendees did, which is they eventually transitioned to becoming a counselor, like a volunteer counselor. And so she became a counselor and loved it, frankly, more than being an attendee. And for every summer after that, she was a volunteer counselor. And this summer, July of 2012, was no different. And she was going to be a counselor as well. So that was what she was going to do with her final summer before leaving for New York City. In mid-July of that year, Simone packs up her stuff, and she heads off to this forest to go be a camp counselor. The logistics of this camp is the attendees, the children, It's a two-week long camp, 200 kids. They would get dropped off by their parents in the morning, and then in the evening, they'd get picked up and go back home. But for the counselors, they would actually live at the campsite for the two weeks.

It was like a two-week time. They were out in the woods together. The counselors had created that tradition, if you will. They told the staff, if you will, that the reason they were doing that is for efficiency's sake. We'll be there first thing in the morning because We're living there and we can set the camp up. When the kids go home for the day, we're all going to be there anyways, so it's easier to clean up the camp. There's all these reasons they had for it. But the truth was, the reason the counselors like to stay at this camp and live there is because after the kids would go home at night, all the counselors would retreat to their tents, which they stayed in for these two weeks. They put these tents out in the forest. So the camp is in a clearing, and then basically just into the tree line, they would set up their tents, and the counselors would live out there for the two weeks. But once When the kids were gone, they would just go out to their little campsite and put a little campfire together. And the drinking age was 16 years old, or it is 16 years old in Germany.

And so they just like, party, basically. Not like crazy, but they had a good time out in the woods. So that was the real allure of the counselor side of being at this camp. So Simone, mid-July, she heads out to the camp. She gets there a day ahead of when camp starts, and she connects with all of the counselors she hadn't seen for so long, and they set up the camp. Then that night, they did not go out into the woods and have a party. They just set up their tents out in the tree line. Then the next day is day one of the actual camp, and the kids come along, and they got dropped off by their parents, and they have this wonderful first day of camp, doing their thing, doing camp stuff. Then in the evening, after the kids all left, Simone and the other dozen or so counselors, after doing all their chores to wrap up for the day, they excitedly grabbed beer and wine and rushed out to the tents in the forest to have their first party night. They get out to the tents, and they're all having a good time, swapping stories, just enjoying summer.

In virtue of it being the first day, a lot of the counselors were pretty exhausted. It was a full effort that first day, and so no one was really up for staying up super late. They wanted to crash and just go to bed. Simone wanted to stay awake, and so she was one of the last people to finally retire air into her tent. But she did eventually. It's well past midnight. You got to picture where this is happening, too. They're far enough away from the actual campground. They're well into the tree line that there's no light beyond whatever they have on them. If you sleep in these woods, it's like darkness, right? It's well past midnight. Simone, finally, is one of the last people to climb into her tent. They all slept on these cots that they would put inside of their tent, so they're elevated off the ground. Simone gets into her tent, and she gets on her cot, and it's just so hot. It was just really hot this time of the year, and she just felt like it was stifling in her tent. And so she decided she would pull her cot out of her tent and just basically set it just in the woods.

Imagine if you wandered off into the woods with a cot, put it down, and lied on top of it. That's what she was doing. She's in the middle of the forest, completely exposed, and she's going to try to sleep because it's a little bit cooler out there. She wasn't the only one doing this. Some of the other counselors had also struggled able to fall asleep because of the heat. There was at least a few other people that had their cots outside of their tent. Simone, she puts her cot next to or near another counselor who's already asleep. Simone gets in her cot, and she's trying to fall asleep, but she's still struggling to fall asleep. She could only really hear the sounds of the other counselors that were snoring and sleeping away, but she couldn't sleep. She had this growing sense of dread as she was laying, again, in total darkness in the woods, exposed in this cot. I can imagine it I'm being a little bit stressful. But eventually, she falls asleep. I'm going to show you an image that we were going to prep and put on the screen, and I'm going to show you literally in the book.

Once she falls asleep, Simone is thrust into a visceral nightmare, one that she remembered every detail of this nightmare. In her dream, she comes to in her dream, and she looks out, and she sees this post-apocalyptic skyline. It's like a desert city with all these buildings that have now basically fallen into disrepair. They're crumbling over. It looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off, and we're in the nuclear Holocaust, and humanity is being wiped out. And so she's looking off into the distance, and she sees this skyline of just broken down buildings, and it's just sand everywhere. And between her and these buildings, so in And on the foreground are all these people that are just standing there, shoulder to shoulder, maybe a couple of hundred feet away from her. Their clothes are in tatters. They look like some of them are naked, but they're just barely wearing any of these clothes. And they're standing there, shoulder to shoulder, just staring at Simone. It's hard to detail this and hold this, but there you go. That's the visual for the skyline. And so they're all staring at Simone. And so she instinctively is is fearful of these people, but they're not moving towards her.

They're not doing anything. They're just standing there like zombies. And so she's taking stock of the scene, and she didn't know why it was scary, but it was. She's like, This is a nightmare, right? As she's looking at these people and as she's taking in the skyline, she takes stock of the fact that on either side of her are these two huge men, that she doesn't know how... They're not physically laying hands on her, but she can tell they are the reason that she can't move from the spot she's in. She's rooted to the spot. The guy on her left is not doing anything. He's just standing there. But the guy on her right is turned to the side like he's doing something with his hands, but she can't quite see what it is. Simone, she's looking over as best as she can at this guy, trying to figure out what he's doing. She's seeing these people in this horrible skyline. And then at some point, the guy on her right turns back around, and in his hand, he's holding what looks like a wreath, like a holiday wreath you would hang on your door during Christmas time, let's say.

And so Simone sees this wreath, doesn't really know what to make of it. It's this weird nightmare she's having. But the guy, without saying anything, who's next to Simone, he raises the wreath, the wreath, over her head. He's holding it above her head. And at this point, the other guy on the left side of Simone, he grabs the other side of this wreath. So there's four hands holding this wreath above Simone's head. I don't know if I'm in frame, so I'm going to go straight on with the camera. So they're holding this wreath, and they begin to lower it towards Simone's head. And as they do, Simone can tell all these people, they're looking a little bit more intently in the direction of Simone, really taking into account what's going to happen here. And as soon as this wreath touches Simone's head, she feels this blinding pain, like an excruciating pain all around the crown of her head. And she realizes at this exact moment that this is not just some wreath, it's a crown of thorns. And the thorns are digging into her head. And these two huge men are pulling it down on her head as hard as they possibly can.

And she wants to scream, but she can't make any noise. She wants to run. She can't. And so she's just stuck there feeling this excruciating pain, and blood is pouring down her face. And it's unreal. It feels real. It literally feels real to her. And so in the dream, this goes on for several seconds until finally it's like it's so much that she wakes up. She's out of the dream. And so Simone, she takes stock of the fact that she's in this dark forest, which must have been disconcerting at first. But she looks around, she's in her caught, she's surrounded by the counselor, she can't really see anything, but she's like, Oh, okay, it was just a bad dream. But instinctively, like we all do when we sometimes have, maybe not dreams like this, I hope not, but similar horrible dreams, you check just to make sure you really are not dreaming. And so she reached up and touched her head to make sure she was not, in fact, wearing a crown of thorns. And she touched her head and there was no crown of thorns. And so she's relieved. But when she brought her hand back down, she can't see her hand.

It's too dark, but she felt like there was something on it, something sticky. And at the same time, as she's noticing that there's something sticky on her head, she begins to feel this pain bubbling up around her head that was very similar to the pain she felt in her dream. And so as this pain is ratcheting up and up and up, she catches out of the corner of her eye. Again, it's very dark, but maybe out of the sunlight or something, she could either hear something or barely see something running around in the tree line near her, scurrying off away from her. She has no idea what it is, but she can't even focus on it because now the pain, the real pain, not the phantom pain in her dream, but the actual pain into her head is so blinding, she can only focus on that. And it finally gets to the point where she starts to panic. She doesn't know what's going on. She's realizing this is blood. That's what I touched my head. There's blood on my head. And so she begins to scream. So she's screaming. And the girl who's next to her, the other counselor, wakes up because the girl is screaming right next to her.

The counselor sits up, she sees Simone screaming. She's like, What's going on? What's going on? She can't see Simone. It's too dark. And so this other counselor fumbles for a flashlight, grabs a flashlight, turns around, and shines it on Simone's face. And the second Simone is illuminated, and this counselor can see her The other counselor begins to scream at what she sees on Simone's head. And so for the next 15 minutes, it is absolute chaos in the forest. As people are screaming, they're trying to figure out what's going on. The other counselors are waking up. Nobody knows what's going on. And in the course of those In the next 15 minutes, the other counselors grab Simone. They put her into one of the vehicles they had at the camp. And by this point, Simone is vomiting. She's still bleeding from her head, and they rushed her to the hospital. I wish I could pull right now and say, What do you think happened? But I'll tell you what happened. When Simone was having that dream, the dream where she sees the city skyline and she doesn't know what's going on, and then suddenly she felt the thorns being driven into her head, well, the pain she was feeling in her dream dream of something driving into her head was synced up with actual pain she was feeling in real life.

There was something digging into her head, but for some reason, her body, her brain, didn't process the pain in real life the way you would think you would, like, Wake up because something's happening to you. Instead, the thing that was happening in real life to Simone's head manifested itself in this dream. We basically believe Simone was already having a nightmare. She's in this post-apocalyptic landscape, and something in real life began happening to her head, and it entered her dream. That was the Crown of Thorns. Well, the real thing that was happening was a fox had snuck into the camp or was living in the forest, wandered up to Simone, and began eating her scalp. And it sat there and ate her head and took at least 20 solid bites out of her head before the pain in real life that had manifested in her dream got so extreme that Simone bolted upright and her sitting upright scared the fox off. Almost certainly, that is the thing she saw scurrying off into the forest. She was rushed to the hospital. She would be saved. They actually were able to suture her scalp all back together again, and they hid the scars in her hairline.

But I spoke to Simone, so I mentioned there was a connection to our community. She might even be listening to this, to be honest. Simone posted this story on our subreddit. It was about her and this experience. She described this whole story and how after it happened, she was so traumatized that she not only could not go back in that forest ever again, but she couldn't go into any forest anymore. I mean, it's a true PTSD. She said she still has phantom pain, where the fox bit her head. She also said that because it was a fox, she had to go through this insane rabies protocol. Rabies is a lethal disease you can get from animals that have it. It's treatable, but she had all these shots she had to get. I mean, it It was this horrible experience, but she lived, and she's one of our amazing members of the Strange, dark, and Mysterious Community. And so, yeah, that story is a wild one, and it's one of the stories in our graphic novel here. Just to show that image again. Pretty cool, huh? Pretty good. Go to cam 2, see if you can zoom in on that again.

I can't show too much, but here's what you get to see. Pretty good stuff. Pretty cool.

Hey, everybody. If you haven't heard yet, we announced some really big news recently. We are putting out a book, and it's amazing. It's called Mr. Ballon presents Strange, Dark, and Mystious: The Graphic Stories, and it's an amazing graphic novel we have been working on for over a year. And it's our very first book, so we're all very proud of this. We think it's going to be so amazing. So in this book, there are nine stories, five of which are of the old variety. So you've heard them on YouTube, and they've been remastered and put into this book. And then you have four full-length brand new stories, which are amazing, that have also been put inside of this book. And the way we made those four new stories is to have them replicate the feel of YouTube. In fact, I would say this whole book is like the written version of our YouTube channel. It's totally a throwback to our OG fans who found us on YouTube. This is the book for you. It's going to be so good. The book is not coming out until my birthday, October first, but you can pre-order it right now by going to book.

Boleynstudios. Com. Also, after you pre-order, be sure to follow me on social media and all the other places that we put out content because we're going to be teasing stuff about this book before release. Things like sneak peeks into the book and some pieces of artwork and some behind the scenes stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on, but it all starts with pre-ordering that book. So again, go to book. Boleynstudios. Com and pre-order our first ever official book. It's going to be great. Enjoy. So that's going to do it. If you're looking for more Strange, dark, and mysterious content, remember, we have a whole slew of Strange, dark, and mysterious podcasts under the Balin Studio's umbrella. There is the Mr. Boleyn podcast, Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries, Runful, Bedtime Stories, and our newest edition, Wartime Stories, which everybody's raving about. And so these are all free podcasts with hundreds of hours of content that you can listen to right now. All you have to do is search for Balin Studios on any podcast platform, and boom, there they are, all the podcasts. You can start your bitch. Thank you so much. Until next time. See you.