Sep 17, 2026 · 43 min · 15 segments
This week’s Sinister Sightings has us asking all the important questions: Why are teenage boys always breaking into places they shouldn’t? Who is peeking around the corner? And can you accidentally…
Okay, the first one.
Yep, the story I'm about to tell you is absolutely positively true, bizarre, creepy, and unbelievable as it may sound.
No doubt I had a very strange and sometimes disturbing childhood, but somehow I lived through it and have now decided to recount my true life tales.
My name is Gary.
But along the way, still managed to see some pretty cool things.
Cool as in strange, peculiar, mind-boggling, unexplained, weird, frightening, and yes, sometimes even straight-up bizarre.
This particular childhood experience of mine, which I'm now going to walk you through, wasn't necessarily what I'd call freakishly scary or over-the-top horrific, but what I would say is that it is definitely plenty creepy and disturbing.
When I was in my mid-teens, a friend and I one day noticed that an old rickety house that we'd probably walked by hundreds of times over the years now suddenly stood boarded up and completely surrounded in bright yellow caution tape.
This ancient and somewhat decrepit structure stood alone at the edge of a heavy wooded public park, which had been around since like the 1910s.
And as we found out later, this quaint little dwelling had for many years housed the park's ground custodian along with his wife and elderly mother.
Being the curious and irresponsible young boys that we were, after just a couple of days, we decided to simply duck under the caution tape when nobody was looking and then entered the house through a poorly secured and slightly standing ajar back door.
For several weeks thereafter, we'd often go there just to hang out inside.
It was a neat place to escape to, you know, just to get away from everybody and everything and was kind of like having our own private clubhouse.
The entire structure, including the main and the second floor, we found to be completely empty, with there being no furniture or any other household items whatsoever.
As we soon discovered, it would be in that damn creepy basement where we'd get our oversized serving of the heebie-jeebies.
The very first time we descended those steps, noisy wooden stairs down into that dirt-floored cellar, and after having wiped cobwebs off our heads and faces, both of our mouths immediately fell open.
There, silently sitting upon row after row of crudely constructed wooden shelves, stood dozens and dozens of dust-covered mason jars, as well as some larger jars, all filled with an array of different contents, including some pretty freaky shit." A few jars held your typical things like pickles, onions, carrots, and what appeared to be boiled eggs, but many of them contained items that were far more disturbing.
Grotesque things like chicken heads, chicken feet, pig fetuses, cloudy clusters of forever-snaring eyeballs, which we guessed came from cows, as well as brains, intestines, lungs, tissue, and many, many other random bodily organs, which we just assumed must have all come from various animals.
And the kicker in this whole dark and creepy abandoned house equation was that we oddly and quite by accident unexpectedly discovered that we were not alone in this home.
They're sitting in the darkened corner of a tiny upstairs back room and barely illuminated by narrow slivers of light shining through a filthy window.
sat this tiny, frail, shriveled-up old woman rocking slowly back and forth in her wooden rocking chair, filling the room with a highly annoying and continuous god-awful creaking.
We tried to speak with her a few times, but she never even spoke a single word nor responded in any way.
We assumed that she must still live there and for whatever reason, just like nothing better to do than to sit and rock in that room.
And during our four or five visits to that house over the span of a month or so, she did nothing but quietly hum a creepy, repetitive little melody while continuously rocking and staring off into space, as if looking at something or someone that we couldn't see.
Okay, the first one.
Yep, the story I'm about to tell you is absolutely positively true, bizarre, creepy, and unbelievable as it may sound.
No doubt I had a very strange and sometimes disturbing childhood, but somehow I lived through it and have now decided to recount my true life tales.
My name is Gary.
But along the way, still managed to see some pretty cool things.
Cool as in strange, peculiar, mind-boggling, unexplained, weird, frightening, and yes, sometimes even straight-up bizarre.
This particular childhood experience of mine, which I'm now going to walk you through, wasn't necessarily what I'd call freakishly scary or over-the-top horrific, but what I would say is that it is definitely plenty creepy and disturbing.
When I was in my mid-teens, a friend and I one day noticed that an old rickety house that we'd probably walked by hundreds of times over the years now suddenly stood boarded up and completely surrounded in bright yellow caution tape.
This ancient and somewhat decrepit structure stood alone at the edge of a heavy wooded public park, which had been around since like the 1910s.
And as we found out later, this quaint little dwelling had for many years housed the park's ground custodian along with his wife and elderly mother.
Being the curious and irresponsible young boys that we were, after just a couple of days, we decided to simply duck under the caution tape when nobody was looking and then entered the house through a poorly secured and slightly standing ajar back door.
For several weeks thereafter, we'd often go there just to hang out inside.
It was a neat place to escape to, you know, just to get away from everybody and everything and was kind of like having our own private clubhouse.
The entire structure, including the main and the second floor, we found to be completely empty, with there being no furniture or any other household items whatsoever.
As we soon discovered, it would be in that damn creepy basement where we'd get our oversized serving of the heebie-jeebies.
The very first time we descended those steps, noisy wooden stairs down into that dirt-floored cellar, and after having wiped cobwebs off our heads and faces, both of our mouths immediately fell open.
There, silently sitting upon row after row of crudely constructed wooden shelves, stood dozens and dozens of dust-covered mason jars, as well as some larger jars, all filled with an array of different contents, including some pretty freaky shit." A few jars held your typical things like pickles, onions, carrots, and what appeared to be boiled eggs, but many of them contained items that were far more disturbing.
Grotesque things like chicken heads, chicken feet, pig fetuses, cloudy clusters of forever-snaring eyeballs, which we guessed came from cows, as well as brains, intestines, lungs, tissue, and many, many other random bodily organs, which we just assumed must have all come from various animals.
And the kicker in this whole dark and creepy abandoned house equation was that we oddly and quite by accident unexpectedly discovered that we were not alone in this home.
They're sitting in the darkened corner of a tiny upstairs back room and barely illuminated by narrow slivers of light shining through a filthy window.
sat this tiny, frail, shriveled-up old woman rocking slowly back and forth in her wooden rocking chair, filling the room with a highly annoying and continuous god-awful creaking.
We tried to speak with her a few times, but she never even spoke a single word nor responded in any way.
We assumed that she must still live there and for whatever reason, just like nothing better to do than to sit and rock in that room.
And during our four or five visits to that house over the span of a month or so, she did nothing but quietly hum a creepy, repetitive little melody while continuously rocking and staring off into space, as if looking at something or someone that we couldn't see.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
