Darkest Mysteries Online — The Strange and Unusual Podcast 2026
True And Unnerving Stories When You Work With Someone
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, and welcome to Stories All The Time. Glad you are here. Let's get into it. When I was 22, so what seems like a lifetime ago now, I landed myself a security job at a steel plant here in Pennsylvania. It was a pretty easy gig for the most part, but there were a lot of overnight shifts and depending on who you were working with, those shifts could either suck or be a whole lot of fun.
I'd been working there for about a year with the same team the whole time when one day one of the senior guys announced that he was throwing in the towel. He was moving someplace else to be closer to his family, so naturally the boss needed to replace him. We all hoped the replacement would be a good guy and a decent worker, but what we got was a guy named Parker.
A decent worker who seemed to have all the personality traits of a serial killer. We first met Parker on day ships because you had to complete your probation period before you were allowed to work nights.
Chapter 2: What unnerving experiences can arise when working with someone new?
He was about six feet tall with dark eyes, close crop, dark hair, and a rough beard. He also had a weird scar on the right side of his neck, like where a patch of skin was paler, pinker, and shinier than the rest. Then whenever he took his gloves off, you could see that he had the same patches of deep pink scar tissue on the outside of his fingers, like near his knuckles.
We figured that he'd been in some kind of accident, like a bad car wreck or something, but since it's not polite to bring that kind of stuff up, no one ever asked him. But then it wasn't Parker Scurs that freaked us out. It was the way he acted. He was quiet, real quiet, and whenever he'd speak, it was like English was a second language to him.
He had a distinct Northeastern Pennsylvania accent, and by that I mean like Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and the Peconos, that kind of area. But then when he spoke, it was like he was fratting over every little syllable. He'd talk, talk like this, as if stressing over every little word. He'd get real jumpy sometimes, too, like a skittish horse.
He wouldn't scream and dive under the table any time he heard a loud noise, and we guarded a steel plant so in the daytimes there were many, but you could see him subtly flinch or spin his head around any time something took him by surprise. The guy seemed like a turtle bowl of nerves, and the fellas even joked that he might kill a man if he snuck up on him and spooked him bad enough.
But then at the same time he was a good worker, so while we remained fairly cautious, we eventually accepted him as one of us. About six months since Parker working with us, I found out that I'd be working with him for a whole week's worth of night shifts, just me, him, and the supervisor needless to say.
I was not looking forward to that our super would be in a security office watching Thomas and stuffing his face with little pies, but it'd be up to me and Parker to patrol the grounds of the plant on foot, and like I said before, the few were with the right crew. Nice could be a dizzy you'd walk around talking about the birds or the flies, just shooting a breeze and all of it, and then with
Parvo, I got the feeling that the conversation wasn't exactly going to flow, and the idea of walking around at night with the bottom dent I could felt more of a risk than chasing junkies off the side hall in all it came down to two options, work the shifts or lose out on pay, and so I worked them.
I wish I could say walking those nights with Parvo was like a body cop movie or something of the nature that we slowly warmed up to one another and we've been pals ever since, but that was not the case. Whenever Parker was sitting in total silence staring off into space like he was watching a movie no one else could see he'd be muttering to himself.
He'd mostly only do it when he thought no one was around but I caught him doing it once or twice and when I did he sounded like he was real angry about something. And that's what got us all thinking he really was some kind of ticking time bomb. The kind of guy to just snap one day and go totally postal.
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Chapter 3: How did the narrator describe their uneasy first impressions of Parker?
I told him he should just lawyer up and that he could probably win millions if it was some kind of industrial accident, but he told me it wasn't like that and that the best thing he could have done is just move on.
Whatever it was, from the way Parker talked about it, it sounded bad, and with me not being a total jerk, I asked him nothing more about it and changed the subject as quickly as I could.
Parker didn't follow any sports, he wasn't into movies like me and some of the other guys there, and he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he didn't have any wife or kids or girlfriend, and it got to the point where I asked him, what the hell do you do when you're not at work? and he told me he either worked out, worked on his car, or read books.
I asked him what kind of books he read, and he started talking about a bunch of old Russian guys whose names I can't even pretend to remember or spell. I've never been much of a reader, and the last thing I read was Hoffman back in high school, but Parker didn't strike me as much of a reader either, so to hear him talking all fancy like that, it was kind of surprising.
He finally managed to find a topic of mutual interest in automobiles, and after Parker told me that he had a 2006 Pontiac GTO, that was all we talked about for the rest of the shift. It was the most conversation any of us had ever had with him and to me it was a sign he wasn't going to show up in a hockey mask one day and start chopping us all up with a machete.
That's what I told my supervisor too when he asked how working with Parker had been come the end of the shift. I really did everything I've been told about Parker getting hurt at the previous job and how in spite of him not giving me much detail I felt I had a rough idea of what had happened.
I said no doubt whatsoever that Parker had a messed up past, but that I figured that he was way more of a threat to his former associates than he was to us, and it turns out I was right about that in ways that I could never imagine. On the fourth of what was supposed to be five nights shits together Parker and I stopped by the guard shack by the main entrance for some coffee.
It must have been around 1.30 in the morning. It had been a real quiet night and I planned on working my way through a bag of those many powdered donuts before we got back on our feet again.
I was sitting at the little desk where we kept the logbook, reading through a copy of the previous day's paper someone had left behind while Parker was standing by the shack's window, staring out into the darkness and muttering to himself.
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Chapter 4: What strange behaviors did Parker exhibit during their night shifts?
Nicholas' Catholic Church here in Winchcombe for the past three and a half years. Winchcombe is a small town here in rural Gloucestershire, and about 5,000 people are very proud to call it home. It's about as quaint a rural English town as you're ever likely to find, with a beautiful village green, a trio of timelessly charming pups, and even a 15th century Tudor castle on the town's outskirts.
There's nowhere on earth I'd rather be living or serving God. but it's also true that Winchcombe has a history steeped in strange and sometimes rather sinister occurrences.
Visit the local museum and you'll be told that Winchcombe started life as a Roman hamlet around the middle of the first century, but about three miles to the southeast, atop a place called Cleve Hill, you'll find traces of a Neolithic burial ground that dates back 5,000 years.
The area's inhabitants would take their dead to a chambered lawn barrow atop the hill, which was not only a place of reverence, but also a place of rite and ritual where the living could commune with the dead.
There was a focus on collective memory and kinship, emphasizing the dead as part of a community rather than isolated individuals, and befitting my profession, that's something I find profoundly moving. Yet I've often wondered how much influence those ancestral spirits have today, or if the strange events I've observed around Winchcombe are the echoes of much more recent events.
In the 16th century, scandal rocked a nearby monastery known as Hales Abbey. For hundreds of years, the monastery had been home to a religious relic known as the Holy Blood, which consisted of an ornately decorated wooden box containing a glass vial of Jesus Christ's blood.
Supposedly, the vial had filled with the blood which dripped from Christ's feet during his crucifixion and had been delivered from the Holy Land by a crusading knight sometime in the 13th century. The knight claimed the relic had been given to him by the monks of Hermitage somewhere near the Dead Sea after defending its occupants against a Saracen raid.
The monks guaranteed their very souls and the relics authenticity, claiming it had once belonged to one of Christ's apostles following his interment Hales Abbey, the monastery became one of the most prominent in all of England. But sometime in the 16th century, an inspection of the Holy Blood uncovered something deeply shocking. The vial containing Christ's blood had been stolen.
Following an investigation, the official story became that the Holy Blood had been stolen by a group of professional thieves at the behest of a wealthy benefactor. However, if someone was rich enough to finance the theft of such a relic, you can bet that they had a large house with a large staff.
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Chapter 5: What unsettling conversation did the narrator have with Parker about his past?
I shadowed Father Michael in preparing sermons and homilies, and then when it came to my own personal duties, I would organize Bible study groups or youth group meetings. I also had to manage the daily administrative duties of the church, which kept me very busy, I can assure you.
But that first month, aided by the warmth of the Christmas season, made for a very smooth transition into my new life. There were no signs of Father Michael's decline, none of his episodes, as people I'd taken to calling them, and at first it appeared the whole thing had been quite overblown. But then it happened.
One evening after dinner, Father Michael and I were enjoying a cup of tea and a few biscuits when the subject of parish funerals came up. A conversation on that topic then meandered into one about death in general, and while that might sound like a subject too heavy for tea and biscuits, discussion of the afterlife can be a rather common thing for those who take the cloth.
Father Michael and I had very briefly touched on the subject while discussing parish funerals on a previous occasion, but that marked the first time that we delved into the subject in depth. He mentioned how his time on earth was drawn to a close, and how he'd been pondering on what that meant for his eternal soul.
Father Michael knew he'd lived a good and decent life, one dedicated almost entirely to the church, no less, but he still found himself preoccupied by matters of faith. In a remark I thought was a passing one, Father Michael mentioned how he sometimes envied the holy martyrs, those whose dedication to the faith had cost them their lives.
He quite rightly said that while priests occupy a special place in heaven, martyrs, by virtue of their sacrifice, may bypass purgatory and enter heaven immediately as their suffering is considered a purification in itself. And it's this that was the source of his self-confessed envy.
The subject of the church's martyrs is something we're encouraged to reflect on often, but at the time I was only familiar with some of the more well-known martyrs. There's Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr who was stoned to death after preaching about Jesus. Then there's Saint Peter, who was crucified upside down as he felt unworthy to die in the same way as Christ.
But perhaps the most famous is Paul the Apostle, one of Christianity's greatest evangelists who was beheaded in Rome under Emperor Nero. Yet, although we touched on them, it wasn't as smart as Father Michael wanted to discuss. He asked if I was aware of Saint Sebastian, and I was, but I discovered I wasn't privy to the whole story.
Sebastian was murdered by being shot full of arrows, but bizarrely, and unbeknownst to myself, he'd survived this phase of his execution. His ostrich killers, who had never seen such corporeal resilience, then had him cut from the stake he was tied to and then beaten to death with clubs.
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Chapter 6: How did the night shift take a dangerous turn for the narrator and Parker?
The approaching Christmas season gave him something to focus his mind on, something that wasn't as ghastly or gory as his former fixations, and that I most warmly welcomed. Yet after New Year's Day came and went, things changed dramatically. The isolation of the January lockdowns and the desolation of the bleak British winter proved devastating to Father Michael's state of mind.
His conversations with that angel went from being a weekly to an almost nightly affair, which in turn meant his sleep hygiene was atrocious. He became irritable, angry, sometimes even violent, and he smashed household items, snapped at parishioners, and in one instance I had to physically intervene during a mass after he took a disturbing diversion relating to communing with angels.
I began to wonder if I could survive another year of Father Michael's tutelage, and I used the word survive in a literal sense. Little did I know, but he'd be gone within a month. Throughout most of February 2021, Father Michael had been taking a break from his parochial duties.
He had refused previous suggestions he undertake a period of rest, but following the cessation of the Christmas period, his mania had been replaced by a rather crippling depression. His public absence was relatively easy to explain, and I was experienced enough to effectively replace him during that period.
But then one Sunday morning, the 28th of February to be exact, I worked to find Father Michael dressed, composed, and ready to administer Mass. It was like always, depression and mania had suddenly evaporated, and not only did he seem perfectly fit and well, but he seemed positively excited to perform Mass.
The service itself went impeccably, and the parishioners were positively beaming to see him up and about again following his absence. Then afterwards, over a pot of tea and a few custard creams, I began asking Father Michaels about his rejuvenated state. I asked a few gentle but probing questions. His responses were quite direct.
He told me that over the previous 12 months, he'd asked God many, many questions, none of which he'd received an answer. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, he'd finally received a response from the angel he'd been communicating with. The angel told him how that very night, Father Michael would be given a sign, and he would not know where, how, or exactly when, but he would be given a sign.
Again, I did nothing but worry. He had peaks and then troughs, and then higher his peaks, the lower his troughs. And if his so-called angel failed to reappear that evening, if he didn't receive his so-called sign, there would be a change in his mood, and it might plummet toward unmanageable or even dangerous lows.
All I could do was hope for the best and be ready for anything, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened that night. Nothing. Father Michael's usual bedtime, the one he stuck to when he wasn't feeling manic, was usually around 9.30 at night.
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Chapter 7: What shocking event occurred during the altercation at the guard shack?
I knew he lived on my route home, close to it anyway, but I knew he knew that too. So turning him dumb wasn't going to be easy without coming across as rude or selfish. Side note, this also might seem like a perfectly normal exchange and I might seem selfish in not giving him a lift home, but this was not a normal exchange.
This guy couldn't take the hint that I wasn't into him, so he clearly wasn't playing with a full deck, and now he's blocking me from getting into my car in a dark car park after making sure that there's no one else around but me and him.
I'm not trying to use this to slag off men, so please don't think I'm doing that, but sometimes guys just don't appreciate how punch-shittingly terrifying that kind of behaviour is to girls. He was quite capable of overpowering me if he wanted to, which is why I had to stay on my best behaviour and keep him sweet.
But he made that very, very difficult for me, and part of me thinks he did it deliberately. In the nicest voice I could possibly muster, I told him I was too busy to give him a lift and then made up some excuse about having to pick up my mom from her friend's house. I just really didn't want to be alone in the car with him.
I had visions of dropping him off his flat, asking me to come inside and then making a big scene and refusing to get out of my car after I rejected him, none of which I am emotionally equipped to deal with. And so quite naturally, I didn't want him anywhere I couldn't physically remove him, especially the passenger seat of my car.
I gave him my excuse, and he seemed to take it on the chin, but then made a sharp segue into the ignored Instagram follow request. And when he asked me if I'd seen it, I lie. I told him I hadn't, and that I'd been taking a bit of a mental health break from social media, which was partially true.
He then countered that since we were colleagues, it'd be nice to be able to keep in touch on social media. I tried the path of least resistance and told him I checked my answer the first chance I got, but then instead of leaving me alone, he started asking about my phone number and why I wasn't answering my phone.
I had to tell him I got a new number and hadn't memorized it yet, but he smelled a lie in an instant. And in that moment, the way he looked at me chilled me to the bone. Upon detecting the light, the smile was immediately wiped from his face. He went cheerful and warmed a frighteningly cold and it took just a second for it to happen. I started to feel very unsafe around him.
He said the calls weren't connecting but that the little robotic voice didn't say the number wasn't in service. It said the person wasn't available and apparently my now not so cheerful stalker understood the difference. He started asking if I blocked his phone number and then, before I could even answer, he asked, why did you do that?
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