Today's stories are about real people who try to control fate, and what they end up doing is just causing historic levels of destruction.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format,

then you come to the right place, because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week.

So, if that's of interest to you, please offer to rearrange the Follow Button's pantry.

But instead of actually doing that, just remove all the labels from their canned goods.

Okay, let's get into our first story, which is called The Inn. On the morning of June 26, 1826,

38-year-old Samuel Willie Jr. stepped out of his house in a remote area of New Hampshire's

White Mountain Range called The Notch. His wife, Polly, was at his side, and together they looked around in shock,

because the land surrounding their home was almost completely destroyed. There had been a huge

storm the previous night, and so Sam and Polly had been expecting some damage. But what they

were seeing now was far worse than they had imagined.

The heavy rain had caused the river in front of their home to completely overflow,

so half of their property was now completely submerged in water.

The deluge had also triggered a rock slide from one side of the mountain slopes behind them,

so there were also rocks and mud and entire trees that were now kind of littering their yard and adjacent fields. Sam saw, luckily, the slide had missed their house in the barn where they kept their livestock, but only barely.

And there was damage to those structures from the storm itself that he would have to repair.

So Sam began calculating how much time and money it was going to take

to clean all this up. And next to him, he heard Polly kind of mumbled to herself that this had all

been a really bad idea. Sam sighed because he knew that Polly was referring to their decision

to move to the notch in the first place. And right now, staring at all this awful destruction right in front of him,

he had to agree with her. This might have been a terrible idea. So up until about a year ago,

Sam and Polly and their five kids had lived on a farm about 20 miles away from where they were right now,

...