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The original was posted on /r/paranormal by /u/Coorslight2021 on 2025-07-31 05:30:08+00:00.
This is a true story I’ve never told out loud. A lot of inner turmoil and past trauma, I’ve just never wanted to revisit it. This year will mark 6 years that have passed and I suppose I’m finally ready to get it all off my chest. I typed it out for the first time today.. It’s a long one. Here it goes..
My dad was an interesting guy. He had a tumultuous upbringing that followed him through multiple careers, children, and women.. All the vices. Fast money, fast women and faster benders in no particular order. He lost everything in 2008 when my mom finally decided to get off his wild ride after 4 kids and ~25 years.
Dad spent the following 12 years trying to reinvent himself, most notably shacking up with a “fortune teller” or the closest thing to a modern day witch I care to encounter. And I am not saying that in the angsty “never gonna call her mom” sort of way. He met her through Alcoholics Anonymous, where I surmised most just learned to trade one crutch for another and become professional gaslighters, but I digress. She insisted she already knew myself and my siblings through and through via something she referred to as human design. She saw auras, performed sound healing treatments, the whole 9 yards. She painted it all as a source of “good” or “light”, but the creepy factor was undeniable in their home. Decor was mostly black and red. That was never my dad. My brother struggles with sleep paralysis and her take on that was nothing short of horrifying. Just a terrible vibe from the woman for the entire 4 years or so they were together.
Creepiest part was a lot of her “synopsis” of me tracked. Observant, reserved, empathetic/sensitive to shitty vibes (she could tell I didn’t like her), “needed to be invited multiple times to actually feel invited to something” stood out and hit home hard. And she was obsessed with my dad’s health. He was a tall, slender man with no pre existing conditions, yet she was just certain he was destined for an early departure. They split in 2014 - she moved cross country with his “help” and we never heard from her again. Bullet dodged, or so we thought.
Dad tried his best to save face after that chapter, admitting he hit a point of clarity where her witchy shenanigans were just too much, bleeding in to every aspect of their lives. He wasn’t one to be told what to do or how things were gonna be. In an effort to lay a foundation for better days and form some kind of healthier adulthood bond with my brother and I, now in our early 20’s and more removed from his day to day life that often left us confused and broken hearted… he did what any dad would do and took up big game hunting with us! It was always a passion of his, but it was more his own escape from reality that whiny, spoiled Xbox kids would have just ruined.. We enjoyed the jerky at the end of the season and the time outdoors, but neither of us the natural born killer type. We just wanted a normal relationship with our dad. Wanted to be wanted.
This went on every fall from 2014-2019. Deer and Elk tags are a lottery draw out here so it wasn’t every year, but the application strategy and build up was constant. It did help bring us together. Things were finally feeling more normal with him. More women came and went, but nothing like the fortune teller… He even remarried the polar opposite of a woman but we won’t get in to her here.
Winter 2017, I am at work and get the call he has had a stroke and we need to get to the hospital. He has a seizure right in front of us shortly after we all arrive, and is intubated later that night. 4 days we thought we were going to lose him. He made it, but it led to a quadruple bypass surgery… and ultimately a stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2019.
We drew a nice deer opportunity in 2019. Crazy old man was still putting in applications like he was fine. We drew the tags, just kind of shook our heads and actually went.. He had a chemo treatment the day we were to get to camp to slow the progression. Having just been diagnosed and being fully forthcoming that it was terminal, I was going through it and I could tell my brother was too. We were more concerned with his health and the lack of sanitation out in the AZ wilderness where we shit in a bucket for a week and a proper hand washing beyond a wet wipe only happened once or twice a day before meals back at camp.
I’m laying in my cot on the first night. Maybe crying.. feeling sorry for myself, for my dad, for my siblings.. All the nights as kids we were told to lock our doors so he didn’t come in drunk pass out in one of our beds and smother one of us in our sleep, the cheating scandals I caught him in when he was still married to my mom, watching everything we had get repossessed, and the “fortune teller” that predicted all this awful illness….. Things were finally looking up and now he is dying in his late 50’s. countless other heartbreaks just rushing to my head keeping me up until nature inevitably called. I grab the TP roll & flashlight around 2AM and head out to our designated bathroom for the week. I sit down to do my business, facing miles of open Yavapai national forest. And I hear to what is this day the most confusing and unsettling phrase I’ve ever heard. I hear my little sister’s signature mousey little voice she took infinite shit for in high school say “…Hello?”
Clear as day. It’s her, it has to be her. Of course she is not out here, not the hunting type and wasn’t as eager to forgive the old man at the time. But I swear to god I thought I was having a stroke of my own. I froze. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t think straight. People talk about fight or flight but there is a 3rd option I learned that night- freeze. The sense of confusion, dread, horror, you name it. I was not mistaken and there was nobody else out there for miles. Nobody awake back at camp to mess with me. I just accepted that something paranormal was going to come out of the tree line and scare me to death and that would be that. I sat, and sat and sat… until finally my heart rate leveled out and I could get my shit together to clean up and head back. But I could not take my eyes off of the tree line in front of me.
I never saw anything. Was never able to make any sense of it, never had anything like it happen again. The AZ wilderness is a strange place. Will burn you alive during the day and freeze you to death the same night. I’ve lived here long enough to hear the stories of skinwalkers, taking form of your loved ones to bait you in to the wilderness. Preying on emotional turmoil. I suppose fortunately, I knew well enough you aren’t supposed to respond or take the bait. We were outside of Congress, AZ after all in the Yavapai national forest. Lots of mining history, now ghost town. Or maybe it was something different entirely. Something to do with the fortune teller. Who knows. Just the perfect shit storm of emotion and paranormal energy to scare me out of my mind.
Dad passed away January 2021. I’ve been hunting multiple times since with nothing like this happening. I’ve accepted the past, all of my dad’s faults.. and have a son of my own now. I try every day to give him a better version of a father. I’ve had to accept there is a lot out there we will just never be able to explain or understand in more ways than one.