The Final Breath: A Strange Presence Before a Family Death

We both stopped dead in our tracks because we didn't know what it was. Again, it could have been being hunted by a mountain lion or something. She says that she has seen strange shadows attached to people since childhood. But one encounter during her great uncle's final days left her wondering if she had witnessed death itself. My name is Edwin, and here's Jet's true scary story. My name is Jet. This story starts back in 2011. We had gone to Georgia one Christmas because my great uncle was not doing well. He was in the end stages of dementia and was just not doing his best. So we decided to come out during our Christmas break and spend Christmas with the family and be there if he did happen to pass, or even if he didn't, at least get to. See him one more time. This particular story, I have not shared with anybody outside of family, so this is my first time really sharing it with anybody. I remember when we first got there, the whole environment just felt heavy. We had left Colorado super early in the morning. My younger brother and I were super excited because we're going to Georgia. We get to spend our first Christmas in Georgia. You know, it was going to be a fun trip regardless of the outcome. We get there, we get in the car, we drive to the town, which is called Fort Valley. It's in central Georgia. We get to my aunt's house or my great aunt's house. And like I said, the environment's just really heavy. We greet my great aunt. My grandmother was there. Both my great aunt's daughters were there. All the whole family. We gathered. We ate a bunch of food. And my aunt sent us to the back to go say hello to my great uncle who was passing. He was not conscious. He was not awake. But, you know, he could tell we were there. He would move his fingers, you know, when we squeezed his hands. And he acknowledged our presence. And that was a really scary time for me because, again, I was only about 11 years old. I didn't really have any kind of concept of death or dying or anything like that. So this was really my first brush. And he stayed available. comatose like that for a couple of days until about two days before Christmas. He is up and moving and wanting to get into his wheelchair and talking and all the adults are confused. All the adults are confused and me and my brother are just like, Uncle Bill's up and doing great. Wow, this is cool. This trip's going to be even better than we thought. You know, he ate a bunch of food and He laughed and made jokes with us the best way he could. His communication wasn't great, but he was doing a lot better than he had been. And then the next day it took that turn that usually happens when someone's not doing so good. They get a burst of energy and they deteriorate a couple days later. He was basically comatose at that point. We had a preacher come and pray over the family. When this preacher came, the whole household energy shifted from that heavy, like, you know, somebody's dying feeling that was in the air. It became a lot lighter and a lot happier. My mom and her cousins were actually at ease, which my mom's side of the family, they're always at each other's throat. I love them to pieces, but they are. They... don't get along. And the fact that everybody was calm and getting along and just having a good old time was really surprising to me. But we get into the room. We're all standing around my great uncle. We're holding hands. We close our eyes for the prayer. And about halfway through, something in my mind just told me I needed to open my eyes. Like I could not focus on keeping my eyes shut. So I opened them. And when I opened them, there was a shadow that was cast over the whole room. It was daylight outside. It was not cloudy. It was really sunny, you know, nice Georgia, 75 degrees in the middle of winter. Everybody else is still standing there with their eyes closed. And I'm looking around and I look above my great uncle and I see What I can only describe is a big, dark, shadowy mass. It didn't have a form. It didn't take a shape. It just was a big shadow standing over my uncle's deathbed. And I remember seeing this and my whole body going into panic, like I shouldn't have opened my eyes. I did something wrong. I stared at this figure for a few minutes. before I realized that it acknowledged me. It turned itself towards me like, what. Are you doing? Why are you, why are you able to see me? And I got nervous and I closed my eyes again. A couple of seconds later, the preacher ended the prayer and everybody let go of hands and I opened my eyes and the room was back to the normal brightness. And there was no kind of anything in the air. I remember being so shaken after seeing that because again, I'm an 11 year old girl and I'm sitting here like, what in the world did I just see? I had absolutely no clue. Completely like flabbergasted over this. Everybody leaves the room and I'm still standing in there and I stand there next to my uncle in the spot where the thing that I had seen was standing. I stood there for a minute trying to see if I could feel anything or if I could make sense as to what possibly could have caused that shadow. I looked outside the windows. There were no clouds, not a bird, nothing. There was nothing that could have created that much darkness in that room. I didn't tell my parent or my mom about it right away. My mom has always kind of known that I have sensitivities to these kinds of things. She said that it started. When I was really young, and I guess I didn't really acknowledge it until I was about 11. First thing she has ever told me when I brought this up was when I was about four years old. I was staring up at the ceiling, just looking around, and she asked me what I was looking at, and I looked her dead in the eye with a straight face and said, I'm looking at the spirits, Mommy. and she got immediate chills. That threw her through a loop. But when I told her about this, I got all kinds of questions as to, well, what do you think it means? Do you think it was bad? Do you think it was there to hurt? And I had no idea how to answer it because I didn't know what it was. I let that feeling pass and I tried my best to brush it off and ignore it and just be like, you know what? We're all stressed. This is a sad and scary time. Maybe I'm just seeing things. I went to bed that night praying that I didn't see anything like that again. I did have another little encounter within this Not too long before he actually passed, I was walking through the living room in the middle of the night trying to get myself something to drink. The bedroom that I was staying in was in the very back of the house. So I had to walk all the way from the back into this big living room and into the kitchen. The house itself, I'm not sure how old it is, but the property has been in my family for at least 100 years. It's in an area where there was a lot of Native American activity, so I'm sure there's probably, you know, that probably has a lot to do with it. But I remember walking through the living room, and as I walked by this old stereo system that they had, it comes on, full blast, playing Hark the Herald Angels scene. And I remembered jumping, because... I was not expecting that thing to come on. It's 3 o'clock in the morning, and I ran over to it to unplug it because I didn't want the rest of the house to wake up. I didn't want to get in trouble. You know, I got over there, I turned it off, I looked at it for a second, like, what the heck was that? And I carried on about my business. I remember my mom decided that he was still hanging, you know, my great uncle was still hanging on And didn't seem like he was going to be letting go anytime soon. And we needed to get back home to Colorado because my brother and I had to get back to school. So we booked a flight and got home a couple days after Christmas. My mom got on the phone with her cousin and told her that we had landed safely and that we were home. And she told my great uncle that. He took one last big deep breath and he was gone. And it's almost like he waited until we were gone to let go. And I sometimes wonder if maybe the thing that I saw was protecting him in a sense. And maybe he knew that. That's something I'll never have the answer to. I still think about it to this day, and I can't quite pinpoint it. And I still see things like that now, even as an adult. I'm 26 years old, and I still see these attachments, I guess is what you could call them. Some of them, I think, are protectors. Some of them, I think, are actual attachments, things draining our bodies. You know, draining our minds, creating illness. I have seen dark, heavy shadows over people that are on the verge of, you know, on the verge of the end of their life. And no, I can't exactly prove that to them, but I saw it with my grandmother when she passed. And I saw it with her brother when he passed as well, just this last February. They're ominous, but I don't think they're any kind of harmful. But ever since that experience, I've been really sensitive to those kinds of things. My dad doesn't believe it in that kind of stuff. My dad grew up in a strictly Mormon household. And I don't really know much about the Mormon beliefs or anything, but I know that he is a firm skeptic. You can tell him there's a ghost and he'll roll his eyes at you and just kind of kind of. You know, toss it aside. Like, that's not a thing. That's not real. You're just, you're overactive with your imagination. But when I told my mom about it, she had nothing but questions. Like, what did you see? When did you see it? How did you see it? And at that time, I couldn't really give her much of an answer. But now as an adult, I've seen things and I've experienced other things like this. I've experienced like full apparitions. I have helped Or at least I hope I've helped people move on from whatever they're stuck in. The more I do that kind of stuff and the more that I read into it, the more I start to understand. And actually listening to your podcast makes me feel a lot better because I hear a lot of people sharing the same experiences where they don't feel like anybody believes or understands. It's nice to have that knowledge that at least I'm not alone in this. Four years after the experience at my great aunt's house with my great uncle, my best friend and I, you know, we'd spent like an entire week together. And we decided one of the last days we were hanging out together before school started, we were going to go to this park behind her house. Now, this area has Native American, is Native American land as well in Colorado. It belonged to the Ute tribe. This neighborhood is just notoriously creepy because of where it is. It's up on the side of a cliff, kind of like on the outskirts of the town. So there's a lot of like wooded area. There's mountain lions and bears and those kinds of things. So going and playing in the park is always kind of a gamble out. There. But we decided to go to the park one day. We went on our roller skates, brought our shoes with us so we could, you know, play on the swings and whatever. And we get to the park and we're both taking our skates off and we both just get this really off kind of eerie feeling like something wasn't right. And we're both thinking there could be a mountain lion nearby. Cause sometimes when you feel like that, that could be the case, you know, but we just started not feeling great about it. And then we look over towards the playground itself and there's a swing, you know, there's a swing set. One of the swings is swaying. There's no wind. It's nice outside. So there was no explanation for the swing to be swaying, especially because there was another one right next to it that was completely still, not moving at all. We both got really creeped out by that and said, let's get out of here. We started putting our skates back on, and... That feeling just gets more and more intense. We both get this wave of panic that runs over us. She's trying to put her skates on as fast as she can and I'm almost in tears and couldn't figure out why aside from I was scared. I have my skate, one skate on about part of the way and all of a sudden the trash can in the pavilion behind us starts rattling. Now again, could have been an animal, could have been a raccoon or something. But with the swing doing the thing it was, we were not taking any chances. So we bolted. I only have one skate on, so I'm like run skating down this hill behind her house trying to get back. And we get about. Maybe halfway down the path. And we see something like run by us. This thing was too fast to possibly be an animal. It had no color to it. It just looked like the wind was blowing, but visibly. And we both stopped dead in our tracks because we didn't know what it was. Again, could have been being hunted by a mountain lion or something. We're standing, like. Looking around, listening, just trying to see if there's anything we can see or hear. And it runs out onto the path in front of us, maybe about 10 feet. I really don't even know how to explain what it is other than it looked like it was wearing like an animal's pelt on its head. But it didn't have much of a face. It looked humanoid. But it didn't at the same time. It turned towards us. And I swear it screamed so loud. But the thing about the scream is I couldn't decide if that was me and her or if that was whatever it was that we saw. But it bolted off to the side and we started running again. And we didn't stop until we got to her house and got down into her basement and hid in her sister's closet. Because her sister has this like. Massive walk-in like military style closet. She comes home. We're both in tears and she's like, what? happened what did you guys do why are you hiding in my closet and she like calmed us down and took us back out to the park and the swing was completely stopped again there was no trace of any kind of anything and she she just brushed us off as being a couple of annoying preteens But that one stuck with me, especially because I knew somebody else had seen it and not just me, which was kind of a first for me. My mom and I have had these conversations and she was a little bit of a skeptic before too, but a little more open-minded on it. We were standing in my younger brother's room one day and we were like arguing about, I don't remember what we were arguing about. We were arguing about something and there was a little tube of ChapStick sitting in the middle of his bed. And my mom and I both watched this tube of ChapStick like launch itself across the room. And she looked at me. And I remember looking at her going, I told you, I told you we had a ghost in this house. I knew it. She looked at me like that did not just happen. But after that point, she was solid in the fact that I was in fact not lying and Not giving her some kind of BS, you know, story for attention. Because she had seen something now too. All of this started after that first initial experience. You know, I started having weird things like that, hearing voices. There was a time when I was in, like, maybe, I don't even know, my senior year in high school, I think. where I was hearing like scratching on my bedroom wall at night. My dad just kept telling me, you know, we probably got like a mouse or something. And I'm like. That would make a lot of sense if I could find evidence of a mouse anywhere. Like I can get behind that wall. There's nothing. I used to be a part of a women's group out in Colorado that did like little, little investigations and stuff. We'd go to like, you know, little hotels and, local cemeteries and that kind of stuff. I grew up about 45 minutes from a hotel in Colorado called The Hotel Colorado. It's been around since Teddy Roosevelt's time when he was in office, and he spent a lot of time at that hotel. So it's got a lot of haunted history. It started off as a hotel, turned into a hospital for soldiers, and then went from hospital to asylum and then back to hotel. And that was where I met one of my really good friends. Her name is Willow. She is what people would consider a psychic medium. You know, she doesn't particularly, doesn't specifically read people's futures or any kind of anything like that. She mostly just, she does like the tarot cards and she reads energies and can kind of give you a guideline to follow, you know, for the path that you should be on in life, if that makes sense. I was a little skeptical about it at first, but at the same time, knowing some of the things that I've seen and felt that I know others didn't, you know, it started making a little bit more sense. I remember right before we were about to do the investigation, Willow was staging the whole group, just making sure everybody had some kind of protection on them. And I remember she handed me the stick of sage and the smoke went from the gray, you know, the grayish black that it's supposed to be. And it turned almost like a blue tint. And she took it away from me and she looked at me and she shook her head and she said, that's not for you. And I never figured out exactly what that meant. But I remember the look on her face and I remember like it was it was a combination of shock and fear. She had mentioned that she thinks that I have attachments, but she can't pinpoint what they are, who they are, what they resemble, or where they could possibly have come from. And I wouldn't. Believe that theory because I feel like just about anywhere I've ever been, I've encountered something. Jet, thank you so much for telling us your story here on True Scary Story. And by the way, you who are listening here, there is something additional that Jet told us about. And it's kind of, I guess, a second part to the story. It's an additional little thing that we talked about near the end. Another one of these strange occurrences. So we're going to get to hear that right now. But I'm going to leave you here, right? So in case you want to keep listening to it, stick around, check it out right now. I just want to say thank you to Sarah Voorhees Wendell from VW Sound for doing the editing and sound design for this episode. Also, some production was made by me, Edwin Covarrubias, and the Scary FM team. And if you have a story that you want to share, please go to truescarystory.com. There's a form there. You fill it out, and then we get a hold of it, send you an email back. And if it's a good fit, we can schedule a call so that we can get your story out here on the show. Anyway, thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon. I'm about to play Jet's story here. Fortunately, unfortunately, I don't really know. My almost 10-year-old daughter, I think, also has some of these abilities, and we just haven't really acknowledged it much yet, but when she was about a year old, our front screen door used to creep her out so bad. She was sitting by at one time just playing and you know, being a baby and pounding on the window and just having a good time, laughing, giggling. And all of a sudden she like dropped, like her face drops, like she sees something and she starts screaming at the top of her lungs. Like somebody just hurt her. Like, you know, when a baby falls and hits their head or something and that, that blood curdling scream that they give you, that was the sound she started making. And so naturally I got up and I went running and I'm like, what in the world? I pick her up. I'm looking outside and Because she's very clearly startled by something she saw out there. But there was nothing out there, no animals, no nothing. She would not walk out that front door from the time she was a year old until she was about four. She would not go out that door. She also suffered really bad night terrors when she was around that age as well, and I think that has to do with whatever she saw outside that day. She doesn't do it anymore, but it used to be like her waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, you know, no mommy, no, no, just completely inconsolable. And the weirdest part about it was her eyes were open. After she'd calmed down, she'd knock back out. Like she wasn't even awake in the first place. My mom sages the house once in a while. I keep an obsidian pendulum in her bedroom just tied on her dresser. Obsidian is supposed to be like a protecting crystal, a protection stone. That seems to have helped with the nightmares, at least from what I can tell, because like I said. She doesn't do that anymore. It can be lonely. It really can. You know, I can talk to my mom about it a little bit. I can talk to my fiance about it as well. You hear people talk about the more negative energy you feed, the more likely it is to cause you harm. And I just feel like if you acknowledge it, but tell it that it can't bother you, that it's not allowed to bother you, you know, maybe you won't get hurt.