13. Phantom Files Vol. I - Mākara Beach, The Meth Demons & The Knocker

Welcome to The Phantom Files, a series within my podcast featuring paranormal stories from New Zealand; Cryptids, Ghosts, UFOs and everything else from beyond the veil. I'm a huge fan of the Monsters Among Us podcast and so have adopted the same format except focusing as much as possible on New Zealand. I highly recommend checking out Monsters Among Us, I have gotten so many hours of entertainment from that podcast. If you've got a story you'd like me to play on the podcast, all you need to do is record the story in your own words into your phone's voice notes and then email it to me at ruddlesphantomfiles@gmail.com and I'll include them in the show! This isn't a show about ridiculing, debunking or discrediting your stories, I just love a scary story! Once I collect another 3 or 4 good stories, I'll release another episode so if you want more of these episodes, I need your help encouraging the people in your lives to send me their tales! I literally couldn't make the pod happen without listener submitted stories.

0:00 Intro
1:48 The Mākara Beach Cryptid
8:25 The Meth Demons
18:56 The Knocker

Intro/Outro Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVRA6XnvYc

Horror Ambience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAspF0nxC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nD3Sp_saz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrRNj9gJezA

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Check out Beyond The Shadows Here!
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Intro Music:
Funky Retro Funk by MokkaMusic

Transcript

All right welcome everybody to episode one of the Phantom files I am Taylor Ruddle I am your curator of creepy Chronicles covering all things spooky but good old Aotearoa this is a podcast that I'm wanting to do for so long to spend many years in the making and I am beyond stoked to finally be sharing it with you I'm a huge fan of scary stories and especially scary podcasts I used to listen to a bunch of ones like creepy and the No Sleep podcast but then just last year I discovered one called Monsters Among Us which is a fantastic podcast I highly recommend you give Dad a listen to the thing I love the most about Monsters Among Us was the format of the show it's a scary stories show but instead of all of the stories being recorded like in a studio with sound effects it is just the people that the stories happen to telling the story in their own words and seem to invite a voicemail I absolutely love how raw and authentic the stories are the only thing was a lot of the stories happen and mainly in the United States and I thought to myself surely we must have some similar stories about Cryptids UFOs ghosts and anything like that here in our backyard in New Zealand so I put a bit of a call out for some stories I've had some fantastic stories submitted for the first episode and I'm even gonna tell one of my own potentially paranormal experiences right at the end of the show so with that I think it's time that we get into the first story of the evening the first story was submitted by Rebecca take it away Rebecca

hi my name is Rebecca

I would have been 26. my boyfriend at the time and I our favorite thing to do was in the middle of the night go to one of the wildest beaches it's Rocky it's rough it's windy uh very dangerous and just sit there and be surrounded by this noise that's the ocean and I lived in Wellington at the time in a suburb called karori and the beach was Makara beach now it's a long drive down a windy Country Road with no street lights and houses sit far back you know surrounded by paddocks so there's no light coming from the houses either and about halfway down this road there is a natural tunnel formed by macrocarpa trees on both sides I have no idea if they're still there on the left was going towards the beach was a bank I'm going right up and on the right it was a drop off to a creek and paddocks and going through this tunnel you can only see what's in the headlights there's just it's just black out there and all of a sudden trying to hide between roots and and behind one of the macrocarpas there was this it's about the size of a three four-year-old child it was dark gray I don't know if that was the color because the headlights just showed so starkly there was no eye shine that wasn't an nocturnal animal it definitely I know my animals it was not a mangy dog it was not a cat it was not a goat it was not a lamb it was not a pig well a pig couldn't have got up that bank and it was trying to hide it was trying to press itself into the tree there was no eye shine just these black holes where the eyes should be and it was skinny trying to wrap its arms around itself and press itself backwards amongst these roots and it felt like it took forever to drive past we got past it neither of us spoke instead of going to the beach he took the turn off to Johnsonville which was another long windy dark Road and we went the back road to Johnsonville because we did not want to turn around and drive past it again and as soon as we got to Johnsonville we went to the first gas station we parked right outside the front doors under the brightest canopy lighting we looked out of the car and we actually checked under the car we checked all around it and neither of us have spoken a word and then he looked at me over the roofs of the car and he said what the bleep was that and I said I don't know babe I have got no idea and I never want to see it again that was the last time we even went to that Beach we broke up not long after and I have never been down that road at night again even when I have been to the to the beach afterwards with a girlfriend of mine it was during the day never went back to that beach as a couple with him and even during the day I get cold shivers if I go down that road it's been 20 years since I've been down that road now and even thinking about it it gives me the chills I don't know what it was I never want to see it again and yeah yeah so that's my story about cold Winter's Night not a lonely Country Road and I don't care who believes me and who doesn't that little animal humanoid thing is tattooed onto my brain and it still gives me chills when I think about it so that is my Cryptid story what an absolutely chilling experience that must have been I have never experienced anything like that myself and to be honest with you I've never even heard of a creature like that in New Zealand before sounds like it's an elf or a goblin or something like that if any of our listeners have ever heard of any folklore that would suggest a creature like the one Rebecca saw please write to us or leave us a comment on the YouTube channel and let me know I'd love to hear about it I do not blame One Rebecca for one second for not wanting to go back the way she came after seeing what she saw I suppose now is a good time to let you know that the Phantom files is not one of those podcasts where I'm going to try and debunk or discredit people's stories for me the Phantom files is all about collecting and documenting all of these paranormal experiences and then sharing them with the rest of the world so if you yourself listening now have a story about something unexplained something paranormal encrypted a ghost a UFO account or anything else Beyond the Veil I would love to play it on the show all you need to do is record it as a voice note on yourself phone many cell phones can do that these days and then I just need you to email it to me at ruddles phantomfiles gmail.com and I will handle the rest I'll leave the email address in the show notes Below in case you forget where to send it I was so stoked the first time I heard Rebecca's story because it's exactly the type of story that I was hoping people were gonna submit it's exactly like something that you would hear in the Monsters Among Us podcast our second story of the evening was actually submitted by a friend of mine and we are going to keep him anonymous because of the illicit nature of some of the activities that appear in the story he didn't feel super confident recording his story so I actually got another friend to record the story and send it to me we've omitted a couple of little details but for the most part it is entirely intact mainly to protect my friend's identity so with that let's get on with Story number two roll the tape so this is the story of how our flat became very dark and evil with odd things occasionally occurring this all happened around 2014 2016. Christchurch was very odd at this time post Quake one or two bars in the city were open one being that giant rugby ball and the other being an attempt on the Colombo and Hereford corner so as you can imagine there wasn't much for a bunch of 21-ish year olds to do we would always throw House parties at our flat in Addington and it was the spot where all the boys would show up on a Friday night with a box of pests and whatever they had planned to put up their noses that night but as the years went on the flat turned into something dark and very evil feeling the house that was located in a cul-de-sac in Addington was a four bedroom with two of the bedrooms with a weird door that led to a sunroom that got no sun a single small narrow lounge and one bathroom and toilet and being an all-boys flat it was Haggard the original flatmates were all my high school buddies and one by one they moved out and one of the other boys would take a room with only one of the original flatmates remaining pretty much till the end I think all up over the years we lived and hung out there 10 different people lived there I was the last of our friend group to live there before the house was sold so as you can imagine it was a potty house but slowly the party and caught up with a few of us and what started as a bit of beer with some MDMA on a Friday or Saturday night snowballed into harder drugs the worst one being met now the two main guys who were smoking meth hit it bloody well it wasn't until one day I got home from work and our garage was full of well over 200 liters of petrol and one of the guys is coming up to me and saying don't go to the gas station if you need to fill up bro I'll do a dollar a liter we got a gas card from work it was from that point where [ __ ] started going haywire and the crowd of people that were coming to the house weren't just our high school buddies but hectic drug dealers and junkie types trying to sell or commission all kinds of stolen goods now for the rest of our crew we were chillers smoking weed most nights playing PlayStation after work nothing too crazy so the occasional knock on the door with some junkie standing there with thousands of dollars worth of stolen goods was pretty [ __ ] draining so we decided [ __ ] these [ __ ] we need to find out if they're smoke and meth or shooting up or something so we can kick them out but we never as a group managed to figure out if they were until one night I stumbled in on something I wish I hadn't it was the middle of winter and all the boys decided they would go to Dunedin to go party I was broke and so it was my best mate so we decided to stay behind with the other two guys the suspected crackheads they shot off all skits you like to go do some Secret Squirrel business as usual and me and the Bro decided let's go get some magic mushrooms and walk the train tracks and just lurk around the city so that's what we've done we walked to Middleton straight down the train tracks and bought some mushrooms ate them and started walking back to the flat pretty much within five minutes the mushrooms kicked in full swing probably because our bodies started burning them as soon as we put them in our mouths because of the long walk it was overwhelming though because the visuals were getting quite intense straight off the bat like everything would all of a sudden turn a shade of yellow then a few more steps a shade of blue and the bro was visibly having a bit of an internal meltdown quietly we went to the skate park worst idea ever by the way and the Bro said I gotta go home man I need to be in my room so here I was tripping balls on mushrooms thinking [ __ ] [ __ ] now I'm all alone so I scurried back home as well I got to the driveway of the flat after a long walk home and walked inside shut the door and turned left into the lounge where I see my two mates the crackheads on a two-seater couch in the corner very shocked that someone was home holding a meth pipe and a lighter I could see this dark black evil Shadow consuming around them I assumed I was hallucinating so I panicked and turned around and went and locked myself in my room as everyone else was in Dunedin now the thing is around this time me and my best mate the one who just bailed on me got into a YouTube rabbit hole about magicians that are actually demons and demonology and all sorts of occult stuff and had been obsessed with the whole ghost hunting demon stuff that's all over YouTube him a lot more than me as it turns out so I'm freaking out in my room about this Shadow consuming my crackhead mates and trying my hardest not to psych myself into a mental hospital so I decided to just do my best to take my mind off it play some Skate 3 on the Xbox just wait till the mushrooms wear off the next day I'm over my mushroom experience and all the other boys arrive home from Dunedin and I decided I wouldn't say anything to them about the Two Smoking myth in our Lounge because I didn't want to snitch them out a few weeks go by and my best mate rolls around but this time he's all Juiced up he comes straight to the room and says Yoji check what I got he opens his backpack and pulls out a Satanic Bible I was pretty shocked and all I said was [ __ ] your hectic I opened the first page and started reading quickly realizing that what I was reading wasn't invoking so I instantly stopped reading it and said [ __ ] don't know about that hey bro gave it back to him and nothing more was said about it a few nights go by and I'm having a pretty bad insomnia unable to sleep just laying in my room looking at the outline of my set of drawers where I notice a massive [ __ ] rat appear out of seemingly nowhere the size of a small cat I was crippled with fear just laying on the bed unable to move the room was so dark that all I could see was the outline of it and it seemed to be just sitting there staring in my direction I gathered the ability to move again and the courage up to flick on the light as soon as I turn it on nothing's there so I get up looking around thinking it's going to jump out but there's nothing to be seen anywhere I was still peeking out though I knew I had seen something like a rat silhouette but I couldn't see the rat so I turned my TV on and turn off my light again got into bed and just watched TV till I fell asleep another couple of weeks go by and I'm in my room again after a standard issue week of work and a standard weekend of shenanigans at the flat I'm laying on my side trying to drift off to sleep facing the window that faces away from the door when I feel this paralyzing fear come over me and a voice in my ear that didn't say any words it was more of a feeling that left me with the sense that something had just talked into my ear right up against it but hadn't said anything that had made any sense such a hard feeling to explain but it was [ __ ] terrifying I couldn't move like I was paralyzed for a while once I managed to get up I grabbed my [ __ ] jumped in my car and drove to my parents house where I said I'm sleeping on your gaps tonight something [ __ ] up happened in my room and I can't really explain it I go back to the flat the next day where I tell my mate what happened and he said he's been getting a real bad Vibe about the house as well and can't handle being there on his own anymore he keeps getting that feeling of when you walk down a long dark hallway and it feels like something is chasing you as it turns out one of the other flatmates has been getting some weird things and feelings come over him as well like a sense of dread and the feeling of being watched so we decided [ __ ] what's the worst a bit of sage could do we shot down to a local shop and got some sage and done all the doorways with burning sage and as silly as it was to watch a bunch of bogan's sage a house it gave us a sense that the house had been cleansed and we won't have any more issues with whatever is happening from this point on the meth use from my flatmate and his buddy who pretty much just locked away in his room most nights had hit a new height they were doing some pretty serious fraud and shoplifting along with now stealing cars to siphon gas out of and keep their backyard gas station going and getting super casual about it dumping all the cars once they were done less than 50 meters from our house the sense of dread and being watched came back pretty quickly for me and my two other flatmates whether that was from fear of being raided by the police or paranormal stuff it's hard to know now thinking back we all wanted to move out and we're actively looking for new places to live but during this time the weird [ __ ] started ramping up super violent dreams big changes of temperature in the house and of course the feeling of dread and being watched when you're home alone happening more and more now and we had all started thinking we were seeing shadows moving in the house out of the corner of our eyes so the stress of the house had finally got to me and I had to move out and the others done the same and that was the end of the flat haven't had any weird [ __ ] happen since then maybe it was the myth contamination maybe it was paranormal but the paralyzing fear of that voice whispering in my ear like that still gives me goosebumps thinking about it now and we're back what an unsettling experience that must have been that is the worst kind of fear when the place that you're supposed to know as your home a place of safety isn't even safe I'm really glad I never had to live through anything like that and I'm glad my friend has moved past it and is doing better to this day I have actually spoken to that friend since he sent me his story and he himself is still not sure if his experience was truly paranormal or if it was just the perfect storm of meth theorems and then the idea of Satanism being put into his head by the flatmate that had the book The Mind really is a powerful thing isn't it so this brings us to the final story of the evening and I figured given that it was the first episode of a new series of the podcast it was only fear that I pone it up and told a story of my own so in the spirit of the show I recorded this into my own cell phone and I've used that audio I hope you enjoy the story take it away past me

all right so in the spirit of the format of the show I'm gonna tell my possibly paranormal experience into my phone so I apologize for the audio quality is a little weird but here we go so this story happened in about 2018 I was living in Japan at the time and I was living in a city called Fukuoka the night in question was a Friday night and I was staying over at my girlfriend's house and a piece of information that's relevant to the story is her apartment was in a sort of upside down U shape or like a horseshoe shape and when you walked up to it it would be like you were looking at the prongs of the Horseshoe if that makes sense and in the middle of the Horseshoe was where people would leave their bikes and there was uh you know mailboxes and that kind of thing and on either of the prongs was a staircase and both of these staircases were so noisy you heard people go stomping up and down them all day long it was really rare to not hear somebody come up the staircase and on the night in question it was about one in the morning I think we were just about to turn in to go to sleep and I was downstairs about to shut her cat into this little kitchen area because at the time for whatever reason he'd taken to waking me up at silly hours of the morning with a slap to the face which as you can imagine I didn't appreciate too much so we'd set up a little bed put some food in the kitchen for him and kind of shut him in there so that he couldn't um couldn't wake me up and I was just getting ready to shut him into the kitchen when I heard this boom on the front door and I thought what on Earth was that like the hit was hard enough that I heard the handle and the hinges rattle so it definitely wasn't imaginary it was the door shook from the force of the strike and my girlfriend was up in the Loft when this happened so she peeked over the edge of the Loft and we kind of looked at each other like what the heck was that and then there was another boom and then another and another and it just sounded like somebody was striking the door as hard as they could with what sounded like either like the base of your fist like like a hammer fist an MMA or with an open Palm it wasn't with Knuckles like there's a sharpness to Knuckles striking a door it was definitely a meaty part of the hand but it was so hard it was like someone throwing their hand as hard as they could at the door it was crazy I couldn't believe that someone was like actually not getting a sore hand from how hard the door was being hit and it just kept going on and on boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom like that kind of tempo and we sort of just looked at each other and silence like what the hell is going on here who is who could be knocking at the door and being that I was like I'm very I looked very foreign in Japan I'm I was taller than on everybody and I'm quite heavy set so I stood out in the area a lot of her classmates she went to University in the area had actually recognized me walking around and my first thought was that I'd had friends that were foreigners living in Japan and they said that they'd been harassed by neighbors or you know older traditional people in the neighborhood that weren't super happy about foreigners like like immigrating I guess and so I thought maybe it was an attempted intimidation it was somebody from the neighborhood trying to send a message of like you know go home Foreigner but the only times I've heard these happen it was very old people and there was no way that an elderly person could be striking the door that hard and that fast and for that long it was just it just kept going so then my next thought was maybe it's a university student that has was drinking with some friends and has gotten locked out of or gotten lost and they were trying to get back into what they thought was their friend's apartment but if that was the case why weren't they calling out that was the thing that still to this day doesn't really sit well with me is the fact that aside from the strikes on the door whatever the hell was on the other side was completely silent and uh I I walked up to the door and I stood about a foot from it and I was just kind of standing there watching it rattle uh under the strikes and I reached to the handle and I was about to open it in a way that I thought maybe could hit the person and kind of stun them and and I don't know what I thought was going to happen next I kind of thought that was a bad idea because who knows what they might have that butcher's knife or something and it looks back at my girlfriend and she was shaking her head like no so I walked back over and we had a very quick whispered conversation her logic was we should just kind of pretend we pretend we don't hear it and hope it goes away because she was concerned that if I got into an argument with someone or got into some kind of altercation that they would then come back when I wasn't there and so I feel fair enough like you know it's her house if that's what she wants I won't um you know I won't do it that's a very Japanese attitude is to kind of not uh not make a scene we were considering looking at the Japanese houses have these intercoms that's connected to a camera so you can see who's standing at your door and we walked over to the intercom I really didn't want to push the button because I had this thought in my head that a little red light would come on on the intercom outside or there would be a chime or something and then whoever or whatever was outside wouldn't know that we were watching and I felt like that would make it worse I also was expecting to see someone you know with a horrible mask or with their face pressed up against the camera waving at butcher's knife around I don't really I just I just didn't want to know what was in this on the other side of the door and then as suddenly as it started it just stopped and given the rickety staircase that I mentioned at the start of the story we figured that if they were going to run off like it was a prankster or something we would have heard them go stomping down the stairs or they would have jumped over the balcony and landed on the gravel beneath or something but we heard nothing and so the only conclusion that I could have drawn from that is that they were just standing in silence outside the door so very reluctantly I pushed the uh the camera button the camera flicked on and there was nothing outside

so I really have no idea what that was we definitely would have heard them run off and run go stomping down the stairs if there was somebody standing outside I didn't want to open the door in case they were crouching down like next to it and they could sort of rush me from the side or whatever but then I went upstairs and I opened the window that was in The Loft and I looked down onto the balcony and there was nothing outside and so we were really shaken up by that as you can imagine we sort of just laughed nervously and then you quadruple checked that the door was locked the door was bolted we shut every possible door between us and the front door and then we kind of just turned in and went to sleep we let the cat sleep in with us as well because as you can imagine he got a hell of Afraid from all the knocking and he saw it in his good graces not to wake me up with a slap to the face which I was very appreciative of because I you can imagine the scream I would have let out if after that experience something woke me up in the middle of the night where touching my face

so that was my weird unexplained experience I don't know whether that would fall under ghost Cryptid or extraterrestrial or maybe it was just somebody in the neighborhood playing a prank and if that's the case this person was the master of stealth because we didn't hear them leave at all so anyway that's my story I well I got a little bit of chills going down my spine just talking about it out loud but I hope you enjoyed it and uh let's get back to the shower so that was my potentially but I think it was paranormal experience I've been really lucky to not have many of these happen to me during my time in this world but that one still gives me the creeps to this day I actually asked my girlfriend if she or my ex-girlfriend now if she remembered that experience and she does so I wasn't imagining it and she's just as creeped out as I was so that brings us to the end of episode one of the Phantom files I'm gonna try and keep these short and sweet in the beginning I hope you enjoyed the stories and a massive thank you to everybody that submitted a tale I literally could not have made the show happen without you don't forget if you or someone you know has a tale that they'd like to submit record it on your phone and email it to me as an attachment to ruddles phantomfiles gmail.com I'd like to extend a thank you to Mark and the team at haunted Auckland or paranormal NZ for welcoming me so warmly into their community and helping me spread the word when I was looking for people to sub admit their stories in the beginning I really appreciate it guys and go and check out some of this stuff they they do good work you can follow me online on all social media platforms except for Twitter at Taylor ruddlecomedy visit my YouTube channel and check out my mini comedy special all makeover jokes for free if you like so like I said I've been a huge fan of paranormal podcasts for a long time this has been many years in the making I am absolutely stoked to be finally releasing this and I'd love for it to become a regular show so if that's something you want to help make happen you can give me a five star review and whatever podcast service you're using or you can share it with a friend or you can encourage the people in your lives to submit their stories to the show thank you for listening to the Phantom files I look forward to seeing you next time and until then safe travels [Music]

thank you [Music]

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