The Oh, Hello and I have five spooky stories for you today and the last story comes from the 28th of November

2023 and stray number one comes from Andrew. I previously wrote in for 31 days

of terror about my shared house, dating habits and shadow drinking buddy.

To answer your question from that episode, I am no longer casually dating lots of witches because

I'm now married to one. I wanted to talk instead about

something creepy that happened to me when I was a kid. I grew up in a tiny farm town

in Ohio called Sunbury that has somehow already been mentioned on this

podcast before even though it seems like it only had 15 people when I was living

there. It was mostly a patchwork of corn, soybean fields and old growth forests left as windbreaks around the farms,

scattered with some houses. When I was about 12, a few friends and I decided to camp out for a night in one of those patches of old-grown forests and it failed spectacularly.

It was cold, rainy and creepy and we ended up abandoning our tent and making a midnight run through roughly a mile of corn stalks to get back to the house.

Thankfully none of us had yet seen signs or children of the corn. The next day we went back into the

woods in search of our abandoned tent and backpacks. And while we were walking did all the normal

stupid preteen boy things like throwing rocks and knocking sticks on trees and yelling obscene things to keep track of each other as our group spread out and came back together.

Someone in the group yelled Marco,

trying to find everyone else while we were spread out.

But we got the answering,

Polo from a far-off older voice that didn't belong to anyone in the group.

It shook us for a moment, but preteen boys get dumber in a collective instead of smarter and we decided to follow the voice.

I said earlier that the forest was old growth but certainly not untouched.

It wasn't uncommon to find things like beer cans, abandoned bicycles, rotting building materials, bits of cars and there was even a full fire engine crashed in a forest behind someone's house.

So when we started passing bits of moss-covered civilization, it didn't bother us. We followed the voice, mostly along an ancient broken-down barbed wire fence that was occasionally reinforced with cinder blocks.

...