bloodborne

Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown?

“The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting?”

The creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you. Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events from Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and Beyond.

Each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with

mind-binding investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with sightings available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Simon asked you about the story, also this "smooth-lashback", just to find out what's on your mind.

“Paul, no, garney, like this story is so my safe space.”

Do you think you're all right? Yeah, exactly. This story is so deep story, which is just a story.

A garland studio, a job or a music...

...is a crime. It doesn't feel like a story. A story is a lie. Save! With this story. Yeah, I got a Christmas story. You're not going to believe it, so as long as we're clear on that. I'll tell you. I worked for a year in a blood bank attached to Lyman Hall University.

“Inventory control, actually, boring job, didn't pay much, lousy hours.”

One day I got a call from my boss that a single unit of frozen red blood cells was shipping in the next night.

It had to be repacked in more dry ice to keep the temperature stable. Then it had to be couriered to a plane headed for Korea to a private recipient. That was kind of rare. But once in a while certain properties in a blood donation are so unique that it gets frozen for research or set aside for a very specific reason. My boss mentioned it was a very expensive request paid for by some anonymous person, but that's all he really knew.

"Do not screw it up," he said. "Great guy, my boss." That was Christmas Eve that it came in. I was working alone overnight. That shift paid an extra $1 an hour. The box with the RBCs came in through FedEx. It was nothing unusual except the box was real beaten up. It was just a reinforced chipboard. I looked at the time frame and I started the transfer work on the computer right away, but something was very weird. Red blood cells can't be frozen for more than 30 years,

but the draw date on the record, the date the blood was originally taken from someone, was November 1941, that was 62 years. All the ID info was missing from the record, even the blood type. And it had a note from the University Medical Director that no matter what anomalies were there in the record or in the bag itself, this stuff had to be moved on to Korea within 12 hours. He even attached a digital medical clearance, urgent need. That NC wiped out about five or six obvious procedure violations with this box.

So whatever I was powerless, my plan was to get out another couple of stat orders and then repack the RBCs inside the box in about 15 pounds of new dry ice. Then call a courier to run it out to the airport. Be done with it by my break around 215 in the morning. Technically Christmas Day. Merry Christmas to me! Yay! The box just sat in the corner of the lab near some others. I was sitting there packing some platelets for the University Hospital. When I heard this weird kind of creaking,

didn't recognize it. I realized it was coming from the box with the red blood cells in it.

packed right on the first leg of the trip from Chicago. You have to vent the wrapping around the

dry ice. If you don't, that's liquid nitrogen. So the pressure inside the outer wrap can build and build. Then maybe it was a rough plane flight in. The box was down in the hole. Tribulence can play hell with the box like that. So by the time I got to the lab, ticking time bomb. And all of a sudden, the box basically exploded. There was this thwap and I felt something shoot past my face. It was a piece of the box. A little bit of dry ice hit my neck,

stung like hell. But also this warm liquid hit me. It hit my cheeks. My neck, my forehead, my ears. The computer monitor behind me broke. The box handle had shot off in the explosion and slammed into

“the screen. I think I screamed. Not like there was anyone around to hear me. The closest person was”

way down the hall in QC. For a second, I just sat there in shock. Shards of the box were everywhere.

Pieces of dry ice, stuff had gotten knocked over. I had a dry ice cut on the back of my hand, total disaster. And that liquid that had come out was everywhere too. On the wall behind me, all over the desks, the computers. I put a hand to my face and it came away black and wet. I was mystified by what this stuff was. I looked around. There were no icy chunks of dark red frozen blood, even though I found parts of the bag and the tubing. The thing is anything inside

that box couldn't have been warm like this black stuff was. Warm and kind of thick.

“Since there were 15 pounds of dry ice in the box, everything should have been frozen.”

I kind of staggered around for a bit, trying to regain myself. And I was so stunned. It was a minute before it sank into me. Jesus, I got to get this stuff off my face now. It was on my lips too. I'd heard horror stories about centrifuges breaking as they spun whole blood and showering people with it, getting into their mouths. I totally freaked out then. Rand of the sink started a splash water on me. My face was stinging from the dry ice. A big chunk of it hit my shoulder too and it

really hurt left a bruise. I collapsed into my chair again when at least I had my face clean. But the black stuff was in my hair still and all over my right ear. I had just gotten control of my

“breathing when I felt this tingling on my forehead. It was still a little liquid there and on my ear too.”

It was all rolling downward. It was rolling downward all at once. It went down the ridge of my nose and it went down my neck. I felt it moving fast like it was being vacuumed. It felt like an insect presence as it traversed my flesh like it had sillia or something. The stuff on the back of my right hand, the big blotch but started to roll off too. It rolled off my hand and I looked down and all the black blood was skittering toward the same place. The front of my lab coat. It collected

there at about four seconds and then it rolled down down onto my panthleg and onto my shoes and onto the floor every bit of it and it had been on any part of me. I looked up and it was all coming off the walls too. The stuff on the monitors and the clock on the wall it was sliding down not just with gravity but with real propulsion and it left no trace of itself behind. It left the walls completely clean. It pulled on the floor in six or seven different places around the lab and then it

it all began to seek out the other pools. All those individual ones crawled across the floor toward each other toward the center of the room. Liquid pools moving on their own fast. Coming together until there was one big stain in the middle of the lab, two feet wide, black and dull and viscous. I may have screamed again. The stain started to move toward the north door of the lab.

It slid under the door. I ran and yanked it open and the blood was slithering down the hallway.

“Going toward the outer exit where the couriers pulled up outside into the cold and the dark”

and I swear there was no way to even get close to it. It was so determined. There was no slime or residue behind it as it went. It was like its own creature with a sensory system and an impulse to escape danger. It slid under the outer door. By the time I got there and opened it, it was a quarter of the way across the parking lot. There was an embankment and some tall reads and that's where the stuff went.

Almost gliding over the pavement. So smooth, so quiet. I stood there, watching it until it disappeared and the long after that too. I went into the bathroom nearby and looked at myself in the mirror. There wasn't a hint of the blood on me anymore.

Finally I went back into the lab and cleaned up a little. It was almost a half hour before I felt

calm enough to type an email to my boss. I said that I had done a visual inspection of the RBCs and the bag had failed it, so I marked the bag before discard and incinerated it. And the phone rang almost right away. It was him. My email, pinging him,

“woke him up at home. He started yelling, "How could you do that? Didn't I tell you?”

Didn't you look at the record? Do you know this was a very important research tool and someone really wealthy had made such and such arrangement? Why did you ignore the MC?" And I looked around me at the cracked monitor and the bits of dry ice I hadn't been able to, scoop up yet. And I realized that no explanation for all of this was ever going to work. And I hung up on him. I wrote a note saying that I was sorry but I quit effective immediately.

I left it on his desk and I walked out of there. Never went back. Not even to get my last check.

“It was two blocks to the bus all alone and the cold and the dark. I kept looking in every shadow”

for signs of something moving, but nothing ever revealed itself. I didn't realize it then, but what I'd been looking at when I was first outside chasing that trail was the perfect picture of life as I'd understand it from that bizarre moment on. Behind me over the exit door has been green, glowing string lights, spelling out happy holidays, dollar store cheap, but comforting, you know. The parking lot ahead of me was solid and stable enough, but cracked, pot-hold,

a little dicey in parts, and then passed the reach of the Lampost's glare, passed the stubbed out cigarettes and swirling McDonald's wrappers. The woods, dangerous in the dark.

I could try to never go past the string lights, but something would pull me across that border

sometime against my desires. Not that night, not on Christmas, but sometime to where reality cracked so easy, like a glass beaker and make no sound as the shards fell. Now receiving frequency transmission. One of the most interesting ideas about ghosts was proposed by Andrew Lang, who was a fascinating polymath and author. He was one of the co-founders of the society

for cyclical research. He took one of the the first sort of forensic and scientific approaches

volume called the Book of Dreams and Ghosts. And in the Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Lang proposed

“the unique idea that ghosts may be the effect or the emanation caused by a dead person dreaming.”

An in effect projecting into the mind of those living. And that's a fascinating concept

that when you encounter what seems to be a ghost, you may actually be making contact with a dead

person dreaming. Transmission complete stay tuned to Spectre Vision radio stay stay.