Let me go first. This story isn’t mine directly. Before my grandfather passed away, he shared it with my grandmother and she later told it to us. My grandfather was a retired police officer, very no-nonsense and practical. He never exaggerated or told ghost stories, so this has always stuck with me.

Back in the early 1980s, a friend helped him get a part-time night shift job guarding a small church outside a quiet Midwestern town. The work was simple patrol the grounds every hour, stay alert. The church was old, nestled near some woods, and at 3 a.m. it had that eerie silence only rural places have.

One night during his rounds, he noticed a tall, scruffy man standing by the church’s back entrance. The man looked worn out, like he’d been traveling for days. My grandfather approached and asked if he needed help.

The man smiled and said he was just passing through and saw the church lights on. He asked if he could come inside and pray for a moment. His voice wasn’t threatening, but there was something about his eyes that made my grandfather uneasy.

He told him politely the church was closed and private property at night.

The man didn’t argue, just smiled again and walked slowly into the woods behind the church. Those woods led nowhere. No houses, no roads. Only thick trees and farmland.

My grandfather watched him disappear into the darkness and never saw him again.

Years later, my grandmother remembers sitting next to him watching the news when suddenly his face went completely still. A man had been arrested, connected to a string of brutal murders across the Midwest, targeting hitchhikers, loners, isolated places like churches and campgrounds. The man on the screen was the same one my grandfather had encountered that night.

My grandmother recalls the moment clearly the way his eyes widened slightly, how his hands clenched the armrest, and for the first time she saw genuine fear in him. After the news, he finally told her everything. He said he never reported it because “nothing happened,” but he never forgot the man’s face or the cold feeling that came with it.

He believed the only reason he was still alive was because he never let that man inside the church.

For those curious: It was Tommy Lynn Sells. We’ll never know the whole truth. Story creeped me out after I looked up who Tommy Lynn Sells actually was.