Episode 5 – The Doppelganger

 

What’s going on? Time Travelers, welcome to Paranormal Nightshift. Your fan submitted stories of all things that go bump in the night. I thought the doppelganger story I told last week was scary, but this one. This one got to me. Let’s get right to it.

This one comes from Rob and Susan from Appalachia, North Carolina. My wife and I were college sweethearts and we ended up working for the same company. COVID hit. And we both got laid off and decided that it was time for us to unplug, unwind. Go off the grid, you know? We both went to college at upstate and have been camping plenty of times. Boone’s beautiful this time of year, so we figured it would just be great to go hang out in the mountains. Friend of ours told us about this great camping site, probably about three miles into the woods.

So it just seemed like a great place to spend a week while we figured out what we were going to do next. First night was great. We saw plenty of other hikers on the trail, made some new friends, and was looking forward to going and hanging out by the creek next day. We had been camping plenty of times and yeah, there’s bears up in the woods, so we knew the powder packs up. But when we woke up that morning, everything was on the ground, rummaged through, but there wasn’t any food missing. In fact, nothing was missing. It was just like somebody had gone up there, pulled them down and threw things everywhere.

Didn’t think anything about it, and went down to the creek. But it became really clear that we were the only people there. There were so many people on the trail yesterday. Where did everybody go? We spent all day by ourselves. In the woods were eerily quiet. It was like nothing was around, just me and her. The next morning we woke up and just something felt off. My wife and I never argue, but we completely just were so irritable with each other, frustrated with each other.

We got dressed and I decided that I was going to go hang out by the creek by myself because my wife just wanted to sit in the tent and read a book. Maybe we needed a little bit of space. Both of us just lost our jobs and you could tell that we were just pretty frustrated in general. And now this spooky stuff happening in the woods wasn’t helping anything. I’m down at the creek for about 15 minutes and down the road comes my wife.

Hey, I thought you were staying behind. Did you not hear me? Did you change clothes so you could get wet? That’s the stuff you were wearing yesterday. I thought you were staying behind. You must still be mad at me. We’re going to play the whole silent treatment game. Well, the water’s great. Come on in. Deafening scream filled the air. I can still feel my ears ringing when my wife yelled at me. Run! Saying that the thing that looked just like my wife was charging right out. Me. But at the top of the hill, my real wife, she was there waiting, pistol in hand, darts filled the air and I saw my wife. Her head was bleeding.

That thing that that whatever it was, had attacked her and then started coming for me. And as fast and as hard as we could. All of the three miles. Never stopping, never looking behind us. My wife holding my hand, running down the trail as fast as we can, leaving all of our things behind or sitting out of breath. We finally made it to the car and just drove. Not a word said between each other. What was that thing? My wife finally answered. She said, Once you had left, a couple of minutes later, I heard your voice. You were asking me to come out and come with you. But when I opened the tent, you were nowhere to be found.

I turned around to go back to the tent, and something just hit me. It hit me so hard when I looked up, saw myself laughing, knew whatever it was was was coming for you. Next time I tried as quickly as I could to get down there to you. We stopped at this gas station to eat lunch and started noticing other weird things. Though my wife doesn’t look the same anymore. Something’s off. She wears your wedding ring on the wrong hand, and little things about her just doesn’t seem the same. I don’t want to say it out loud, but I’m not 100% sure that this is the right one. Love it. Such a good, scary story. Thank you for this. Fan submissions. I. Yeah, that’s. That’s enough of that. If you have a scary story, please send it in. We love telling them. Thank you so much. My time traveling night shifters. You all have a wonderful day.