Chapter 1: What are the three paranormal stories featured in this episode?
Today's podcast will feature three stories that are all about people who appeared to have a paranormal encounter. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called The Friend, and it's about a girl who gets lost hiking, and while she's lost, she makes contact with a very strange companion. The second story you'll hear is called The Midnight Man, and it's about a woman who wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a man just in her room.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called From the Field, and it's about a man who gets into a freak accident while riding his motorcycle, but no one can explain the series of events that happen next.
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've 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 replace the Follow Buttons 2026 calendar with a 2025 calendar that just has a 6 glued over the 5.
Okay, let's get into our first story called The Friend. On April 29th, 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega was on a hike with her grandparents in a very rural part of Arkansas called the Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area. For an area to be deemed a wilderness area, that means no vehicles of any kind can come through there, making it incredibly remote and incredibly wild, hence the name.
They had taken this trail that brought them up to the top of this bluff that was about 200 feet higher than where they started. And they got to this incredible overlook and they're looking down over this river. And at some point at about 11 in the morning, they turn around to head back.
On the return trip, by about 1130, they're making their way down and Haley spots a waterfall that's off the side of the path. And she wants to go to it. She asks her grandparents, can we go check out this waterfall? And the grandparents kind of scope it out.
And it seemed like the only way they could get down to view this waterfall would be by literally climbing a tree and descending over this cliff. And it was something that the grandparents just did not feel comfortable letting their granddaughter do. And so they told Haley, no, we need to keep going. We're not going to go check out that waterfall.
And Haley, being a six year old, she really wanted to see this waterfall and she wanted to get her way. And so she threw a tantrum and she sat down on the trail and she said, well, if you're not going to take me to the waterfall, I'm not going to move. You're going to have to carry me. And the grandparents were like, no, we're not going to carry you. You need to be a big girl.
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Chapter 2: What happens in the story 'The Friend'?
After Haley had regained some of her strength, investigators asked her, you know, what happened? And she said that she was walking behind her grandparents and that she looked down. And then when she looked up again, not only were her grandparents gone, but she was looking at this wall of trees like she was not on the trail anymore. She didn't know where she was.
And since she was only six years old, she didn't stop and look around or yell. Instead, she just kept walking in this direction that she didn't recognize. And she walked and walked and walked and she never found the trail again. She said pretty soon it got dark and she slept on top of that bluff. And then the next day when the sun came up, she walked down the bluff and she made it to the river.
Then she walked along the river until she found a cave where she slept for the second night. And then the next day when she got up, she was found. After she gave this explanation, investigators had a lot of questions. Like, if you were sleeping up on the bluff on that first night, then why couldn't the helicopter see you? Because that's all they were doing was flying over the bluff.
And they had thermal imaging. They could have very easily picked you up. And so they asked her, you know, are you sure that's where you were? And she said, yeah, that's where Alicia told me to stay. And they were like, who's Alicia? And she said, oh, she's my imaginary friend. I met her on the bluff.
And so immediately the investigators and the parents are like, okay, she's clearly coping with this traumatic event by creating this imaginary friend. And so they don't ask any more questions about the imaginary friend. Instead, they continue to ask questions about basically how she got from where she was lost to where she was found. And they say, okay, Haley, how did you get down the bluffs?
Because there's only one way down and it can be hard to find, especially if you're off the trail. And Haley said, well, Alicia brought me to a trail and she led me down the bluffs. And she stood in front of me and made sure that I didn't fall forward.
And so her parents and the investigators are now starting to think, you know, maybe this isn't an imaginary friend if this person is right in front of her kind of propping her up. And so they ask Haley, you know, can you describe what Alicia looks like? And Haley said, sure. She has black hair, brown eyes. She's a little bit shorter than me. She's four years old.
She likes to tell jokes and she likes to sing songs. And then Haley began singing songs that she had learned from Alicia and began telling jokes she had learned from Alicia. Even though Haley was giving this vivid description of this four-year-old girl named Alicia running around the bluffs, it just couldn't be possible.
And so Haley's parents and the investigators went back to treating Alicia as just an imaginary friend, just a simple coping mechanism. And so the investigators went back to just doing their interview with Haley. They got all the information about how she got from the bluffs down to the river as much as they could. And then because Haley was fine, they said, okay, you're good. See you later.
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