I can see why people might think that Balgruuf killed his wife, after all there's a daedric artifact that gets stronger if you kill people who trust you locked up in his basement.
More on that! Nelkir one of Balgruuf the Greater’s sons mentions that he knows he doesn’t have the same mother as his brother and sister, Frothar and Dagny, information given to him by the Whispering Lady, this could be Mephala trying to turn him against his family but it could also be true!
@@OkayTorey Well, in the creation kit Nelkir is tagged as being the son of Balgruff's brother (forgot his name). It could very well be a mistake but it could be remnants of an earlier version of Mephala's quest.
I played Skyrim around when it came out, and I was about 8. I was too young to really play it 'properly', and the vast forests and wilderness surrounding Riverwood scared me. So, I'd pretty much exclusively wander around Riverwood and Whiterun, usually just attacking NPCs and mucking about. This went on for probably a year. To younger me, that tiny stretch of land along the river between Riverwood and Whiterun WAS Skyrim. My greatest gaming memory of all time was climbing the mountains around Bleak Falls Barrow, and suddenly, seeing the vast plains of Whiterun Hold unfolding beneath me absolutely blew my 9 year old mind. I wandered down into the plains, met a giant for the first time, and actually started exploring all over Skyrim. I was still too scared to venture into any dungeons, but I trekked up towards Solitude, through the swamps of Morthal, all across the northern coast before coming back to Whiterun and heading east to the tundra. I miss the days when I was young enough for videogames to be able to contain real genuine mysteries and adventure.
Loved this comment ♥for me, I had that experience with Ocarina of Time - I was a little older than you were with Skyrim and, at that time, nobody had seen anything like it. Well, I hadn't anyway. I spent so many hours being amazed by the size of THAT world! And many more trying to explore further than the game would allow, because my young mind didn't think the game bounds existed 🤣
@shadesofslay Yes! I had exactly the same experience, trying to reach beyond the limits of the game world. Seeing that old fake light temple video on TH-cam, thinking it was real. Or how you'd play Banjo Kazooie and spend hours trying to get to the other side of that door in the alcove in Goobis Desert... Also, you can still KIND of get a similar experience with Skyrim, as long as you mod it with new discoverable stuff, quest/npc/dungeon mods you know nothing about so you discover things organically, and really force yourself to get immersed by disabling fast travel, playing with the UI hidden, and so on.
@@diagonal_leg hey yeah!!! That was video gamer x I think! Odyssey of hyrule website? There’s a mirror of it somewhere - talk about going down memory lane!
@shadesofslay Yeah I think so! I don't remember exactly, I can't find it on TH-cam right now. The one I remember vividly was one where the sky temple was basically just big box shaped rooms, the wall texture was that animated blue texture you see in the sages cutscenes, and young link was doing some block pushing puzzle I think. Maybe it's that one?
@ yep I pretty much think it’s the same thing - I also think someone went and recreated it from beta demos or something, which is also really interesting to look into!
It really is incredible how Skyim's glitchiness just naturally creates a lot of creepy moments, especially in the early days. I miss when Skyrim still felt so mysterious. But losing that is a natural part of the game being a decade old.
i absolutely adore playing a creepy little breton named the oracle every so often, who searches out these anomalies. she often takes credit for them, spouting nonsense about how shes chosen by the gods to bring chaos to skyrim. not to mention because shes dovahkiin, it even furthers her case. i recently downloaded that one grey quarter apartment mod just so shed be living in slums, instead of in “palaces” like shed said she was living in. its really fun to roleplay these creepy little glitches!
Thats always been a big double edge sword wish of mine with childhood games. The ability to forget EVERYTHING about them and re-experience them as if it were the first time. The bright side is obvious. The downside is that with each game you do this with, you are effectively deleting parts of your childhood and losing those memories. With each game your childhood nostalgia loses more and more of itself, leaving you with the basics and for somebody like me, that is very detrimental. Another risk is the fact that my brain is just different. Short of childhood games, I dont have a big interest in gaming anymore, hardly at all even. Who's to say that when I delete my memories I would even have the drive to play those games or even enjoy myself when playing them? Nostalgia is a disgusting drug. You dont crave the object or the game. The show or the movie. You crave the memory and desperately wish you could re live it in its entirety, but you cant. Those days are gone forever and that is that. No amount of replaying that childhood game will ever bring the magic back, not fully
The Lydia one is definitely true. It seems like she always has a way of returning to Whiterun after her death. In my first playthrough, she died to a giant, only to fall from the sky during the civil war battle of Whiterun. I like to think that someone launched her corpse out of a catapult during the siege.
Had that with other things like dead dragons. Go into a building come out and a dragon's body you killed on the other side of the map appears infront of you.
Yoo this reminds me of how unsettling the Throw Voice shout was for me. I usually play a mage so i dont experience stealth play too much; so i decided on a playthrough as a thief. I decided using throw voice would help position sneak attacks or just walk around them. After a while using the throw voice, i began to hear the taunts without even using the shout. I was like k, programming is off a bit. I was playing a male, but then the taunts started coming from an imperial females voice. I eventually stopped that save file because every time i was alone, id hear the lady call out, "Hey, cheese head!"
The bug jar content is just crazy to me. Some dude was just wondering, and randomly looked at a grass patch to see a couple of darker patches, then posted about it. Then, people figured out the bug jars matched the size, and found all variations, then concluded this was cut content. This game is crazy lol
@@GuckFoogle-pk6nsnope, you may be thinking of the collectible items in thieves guild quests which go onto the shelf near Mercer’s desk, as there’s a bee in a jar and one of those collectible items in the same room in the bee hive place on the island outside of Riften
@@GuckFoogle-pk6nsnah devs had an idea in mind for a quest involving them but someone at Bethesda called it a “half-baked idea” and they scrapped it and kept the jars in for players to stumble across
I've always assumed the ring in the well was a nod to Oblivion. A ring with a weight enchantment next to a mage's guild. One person drowned trying to retrieve it
That was done on purpose to kill that guy to get rid of him. I never beat the mages guild on oblivion. Never had the spells to beat that ayleid ruin quest puzzle thing. My friend was gonna help me one day when I got the game again. But he decided to be a punk and fuck up his life then chickened out of life altogether. Men are pussies.
To be fair, "at home" is as much about how you're feeling as it is about a specific place, or even specific people. You could live your whole life not meeting a person, but talking with them can make you feel like you've known each other your whole life.
One of my favorite moments that happened to me playing Skyrim was one time i was walking around Morthal and i just killed a spider a little before walking into the town. I was by the jarls house when a gaurd turned to me and said "Watch the skys traveler" and then the corpse of the spider fell from the sky right in front of me as the guard walked away. I'm glad my mom and little brother were watching cuz the timing was so funny. I was on the Xbox one. We all still reference it and laugh today haha. Good video :o)
There's a sort of charm to Bethesda urban legends compared to other games. There's so many things in the games you can't be sure it's either intended, a bug, or just cut content.
My first play through of Skyrim, I had bought breezehome and fully furnished it. Aela the huntress was my follower and wife and she had met her untimely demise, ending up headless. It happened in Breezehome, then the companions started coming into Breezehome unannounced in a hostile manner but weren’t marked enemies or with any hostile dialogue just weapons drawn. They met their untimely demise, the same way as Aela gone from the neck up again within Breezehome. Days went by, everything was normal until one day. I came back to whiterun, entering breezehome and there’s Vilkas. Walking around with no clothes and no head, he met his second untimely demise. The next in game day, Aela and Vilkas again up and walking as if nothing happened but I couldn’t speak to them. Breezehome is cursed
I am glad Im not alone with that. I had Alea for a wife she met an end thanks to a Dwemer big boi (forgot the name) and returned to Lakeview, Farkas showed up weapon drawn but non hostile but couldn't get him to leave or talk to him at all. Killed him, then had his angry corpse sliding around under my floor and could only see him halfway thanks to the basement
Skyrim holds a very special place in my heart. I got it less than a week after release, and it kinda became almost like a safety blanket for me when I was going through a rough time of my life as a young teen. In playtime I’ve put in over sixteen thousand hours. I’ve done every quest, stood in every vista, and spent countless hours simply existing in the world. I enjoyed this video. In some ways it brought back some of the old feelings I used to experience while playing. Sub earned.
The skeleton under the bridge in Whiterun is has been rumored to be a guy named Christophe, in the Bannered Mare there is a note from Maven Black-Briar to him saying she was sending someone to pick him up, and at Maven's home in Riften there are more notes making it seem like they had a falling out and Christophe wanted to get back in Maven's good graces
For the Riften npc's all gathering in the graveyard, my best guess would be that to flee from the combat all of them had decided that the thieves guild entrance under the crypt was the safest spot but obviously they couldn't reach it so they were stuck standing in the graveyard. No clue how likely that is but that's my guess
Interesting theory! There was another commenter who said that in actual fact it IS a thing, it’s just very rare and on a very specific calendar date! Waiting for a bit more detail of course. You should be able to find what they said in the comments - was pretty interesting!
Ive had it happen a few times, two of them were after dragon attacks. The graveyard is the only place the dragon could land so I assumed it was that at first
I'd heard the fox rumor but knowing it's all a programming quirk rather than intentional is still really neat. I don't think it lessens the magic of it at all :D
I feel like it makes it a little more magical tbh. It's like finding out the "pressing a button to guarantee capturing a Pokemon" thing was true, but because of Missingno existing, y'know?
I get what you mean. But imagine being around a 1000 years ago and hearing someone from your village saying "I saw a flying horseman at night in the fields outside the city" you'd put them in the local lock up quickly 😂😂😂
@Dil-DoeShaggings IDK wasn't it like a hundred years ago that some little girls supposedly had a Devine being give them a prophecy and everyone believed them and they became part of the church. Been a while since I looked into it so the details are fuzzy. *Had to look it up. Church didn't believe them, but the locals did. "Garabandal apparitions" is what it is known as and took place in the 60s in northern Spain.
when I was about 14 I was playing Skyrim on the PS3, which is infamously buggy I know. I came across a Khajit merchant guard outside windhelm carrying an invisible torch, it didn’t give off any light and even in his inventory the torch didn’t have a model or text and when I pickpocketed it the torch was nowhere to be found in my inventory. When I reloaded the save I tried equipping it directly from his inventory and it worked but what followed was the most bizarre experience I’ve had playing Skyrim. I could stun lock enemies with my fist, it seemed like enemies from entirely too far were aggro’d onto me and without warning while I was jumping into a small lake outside falkreath I was suddenly put into a load screen that placed me in a dungeon on solstiem.
9:00 Skyrim does have a wierd bug where a part of a skeleton can follow you, like a random bone. Can happen sometimes when you fast travel after fighting skeletons or fast travel after exiting a cave. Same for 38:00
Every time I got Frost I'd end up with like 5 of them half way into the ground. They one vanished when the random encounter where he's killed by a hired thug sent by Maven made the clones despawn.
Something humorous that happened to me when I was playing, was this little kid in Morthal got stuck behind a staircase. He kept trying to talk to me while walking into the steps, and for fun, I decided I'd jump on his face, since he was sticking out between two steps. As one does, of course. As I did this, it apparently dislodged him, because he went flying horizontally, before getting caught on something in the water, which must have stopped him; he then proceeded to, while still talking to me, *moonwalk into the sun.* I'm not joking, he kept walking, but he was going backwards.. and upwards, too. I managed to record some of this last part, thankfully, otherwise nobody would ever believe me. Another thing that happens to me quite often is the bones of dragons follow me sometimes when I fast-travel. Ivarstead just has Paarthurnax's bones there and nobody questions it
@@4Redwall I'll try to; it was a screen recording on the console, and I'm not very knowledgeable on how to upload it from there, but I really want to, it was such a funny moment
The Letrush bug is a nice throwback for me, because my oldest screenshot on steam is just of 3 Letrushs in front of the stable building just standing there. Skyrim is one of the first games I had for PC and i still have the physical copy and the map that they gave you with the game.
Actually just had a mystery answered recently, every so often I would find a dead whiterun guard in i the city with no idea how they died. In my most recent play through I came out of dragon’s reach at night and saw a torch floating over the city before it dropped, went down to look and lo and behold dead guard with a torch, they’ve just been spawning in the sky.
I can't explain the elk but the NPCs acting alert will be the result of a despawned Dragon. It's actually quite common in Riverwood. The sabertooth will have followed the player into the building and began attacking NPCs. There is a small window where this is possible when entering a new area. I also have my own uban legend, on my second playthrough every NPC, animal, enemy etc. aggroed on me out of nowhere and began attacking (if they could) on sight, I had no bounty and wasn't a Vampire. Even Rabbits and Foxes would just run at me. Being level 70ish I didn't want to lose the save but I tried everything and no matter what I couldn't fix it. The whole game felt like GTA with the Riot Mode cheat activated lol
@@shadesofslayCheers lol. Good video btw. If I had to guess I would say the game had me labeled as a Vampire even though I wasn't one. I had recently completed the Dawnguard Quest because I had the Ancient Falmer set, so perhaps an obscure bug from the DLCs release combined with how aggressive NPCs used to be toward Vampires resulted in the world hating me lol. Idk about the Rabbits though, probs thought they'd just get in on the action
No problem. Also the weirdest glitch that happened to me in Skyrim was over a decade ago now back on the PS3 version of that game. not long after I finished the companions quest line one of the companions kept following me around the hall engaging in dialogue without me interacting with him. I eventually got tired of him interrupting me so I attacked him and my character decapitated him since I had the savage strike perk. I later leave to do other quests but when I return the companion is alive again only he's walking around without his head bloody stump and all. he continued to try and engage in dialogue with me only his voice lines didn't play. I killed him again and the glitch ended but it was still weird.
@ ya know, I saw a glitch like this recently in another video but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was! The game I mean, or the video. It was a “losing their head” moment and the body just kept on going. If I remember I’ll swing by and say what it was!
@@shadesofslay I know there is a glitch where if you manage to heal at just the right moment when an enemy is decapitating you you'll survive and be able to play the rest of the game without a head. But I'm getting *ahead* of myself.
on my very first playthrough of skyrim, after getting off the cart and that one guy runs, the captain yelled “archers!” but instead ran and killed the guy herself. i still have no idea how this happened
Back on the 360, I had an encounter with a Troll covered in the green Spriggan energy like when the Spriggan causes animals to aggro. I don't know if that's a bug but it never happened to me again.
I have an abandoned save file (abandoned cause of this glitch) where Isran, inside the dawnguard stronghold, is mirroring my characters every move. He even jumps and will unsheathe his weapon if I do. Iirc he won't attack, however. He does every action in synergy with my Dragonborn. No mods except for a small one that allows unarmed kill cams vs. certain enemies (dragons, bears, wolves, to name a few)
this is one of my favourite videos on youtube. And ive been watching youtube since i was 9, dude. I wait a couple weeks so i forget everything and then i rewatch and fully binge ur videos man its so much fun
the whiterun skeleton has pretty much been solved for years now as one of Mavens victims. With evidence in the bannered mare being a letter from Maven.
I love urban legends 👍 Back in 2002, me & the boys documented a glitch in Vice City where a distant black square would follow the player in the sky. We thought it was a UFO 😂 I've never seen it discussed online, so probably a scratched disc or something.
@@shadesofslay Your urban legend videos do numbers, and you put in the effort to find lesser known stories. I'd say it's worth a shot if there are other games & series you're interested in 👍 For sake of full disclosure, the "UFO" was not unlike the sun in Minecraft, albeit solid black. It was always low in the sky, so to be on the horizon and peaking out from behind the city skyline. If you ever cover Vice City, feel free to do a brief entry :]
@@shadesofslay Same, but I wouldn't know where to begin. I do think showing source content & demonstrating glitches/rare occurrences adds a lot of value to your vids. If things can't be preproduced, staged examples (w/ disclaimer) are also good
33:00 the thing about glitches recorded back in 2011 is that theres been so many updates and changes and dlc added to the game since then then that it wuld almost be impossible to recreate the circumstances for these glitches to happen again without buying a fresh copy of a 13 year old game game, so you almost have to take his word for it
@@shadesofslay It would make for an interesting video, even if nothing would happen. I think some of these glitches and "sightings" would be possible to replicate with some modding knowledge as well, might take a crack at the Riverwood 'shaking pale creature'. This and especially New Vegas' day one PC release are probably so full of strangeness that went undocumented.
As someone who played this game for thousand of hours and know the engine very well, I can safely say some of those stories are most probably real. A lot happened during my time with Skyrim but the one creepy moment I remember well was when I still played Skyrim on my PS3 way back when the game first released, and this one time I was checking one of my ingame homes, maybe the one in Riften, and as I went down to the basement area I noticed that the manikins had moved around. Back then I didnt know that this is one of the infamous bugs, so I was pretty spooked and confused, and I didnt even wanna use that house anymore. Unfortunately most of my playtime with Skyrim was after I started modding it on PC so most of my spooky moments were usually related to a mod i installed.
@@shadesofslaysame thing happened to me but in Bloodchill Manor. It happened right after the dinner fight. Some of the mannequins were positioned in such a way that they appeared poised to attack me. This paired with the overall spooky ambiance of BM gave me more than a few goosebumps. The mannequins reset after interacting with them. It happened a few more times in that save, but they reset after interacting exited and reentered the house.
I think I might know something that could be that chittering noise that one person described. There are trees ingame that release birds when you get close, playing a sound when it activates. Sometimes they glitch, causing the sound to persist. I’ve encountered it near the bridge in Riverwood that leads to Whiterun, it’s almost like a shimmering sound. With the environment they described, I can absolutely see that sound being unnerving.
Great video! Weyrd stories not easily explainable away by developer comments. Thank you so much for reviving my faith in Skyrim's ability to provide a sense of mystery, and reminding me of how alive and vibrant the community and culture is around Skyrim which doesn't have to do with Mods. I'm gonna put this on my Halloween playlist for next year.
When I was a kid playing skyrim one time I killed a orc companion you get from one of the strongholds, he died from me in a swamp. When I got married later, his corpse appeared at the wedding and caused my bride to hate me, making the marriage fail. So I'd kinda believe the Lydia story.
The glitch at 44:00 is basically this: When the player enters an instance, like an interior of a shop or cave the rest of the world switches to an unpopulated instance, to save on memory of continuing the NPC and AI animals animations and daily activities. The player got desynced whilst entering the interior and the game put him in this other world holder space, instead of back into the instanced interior.
Normally hearing mundane explanations for strange phenomenon makes them less scary, but knowing this is an actual thing that can happen made it more scary, lol. If something like this happened to me without knowing what was happening I'd be shitting myself
@@Sandstimes Sort of like imagining that happening in real life. Just walking out of a building to a world without a population. No animals, no humans, no signs of life outside of plants.
The fox navmesh thing could also create an organic byproduct! Dense navmesh spaces have a lot of interactive stuff in them, and lots of objects to walk around. A fox could be seen to seek a hiding place, or at least something to dart around to make the most of their agility! That's generally what humans are supposed to do if being actively hunted by a grizzly bear! You find a dense spot, try to hide or get away whilst the bigger thing is caught up in obstacles! Even if it was unintended, I like it. 😁
I adore this video, commentary is memorizing yet soothing, the stories are interesting, the photos and videos are fun, all I want to do now is to turn on the game myself and look for strange things lol
I love the Foxes lead you to Tresure one. Both because I love Foxes but also of an interaction I gave to my Nord Clevermen and Altmer Mage characters. The Nord ofcourse imparts this nugget of knowledge to the Altmer and she ofcourse writes it off as nonsensical Nordic Superstition. However she is further confused and baffled each time the Nord indeed finds treasures after finding a random fox. She absolutely can't wrap her head around it but the Nord just attributes the phenomenon to Shor.
This is my first time stumbacross your channel and I’m so glad I did. Your voice is beautiful and soothing - I could listen to you read Apple’s TOS and not get bored.
Everyone knows about the rabbit that "haunts" the mammoth graveyard just outside the rear entrance to Bleak Falls Barrow. It's uniquely bound to that location, and has been interpreted as an Easter egg hearkening back to the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I used to seek out and kill this particular rabbit deliberately after finishing BFB; after going through that dungeon hundreds of times, I guess I got a little ritualistic about it. So, anyway, this one time, I'm hunting it down, only to come upon its already-dead remains lying adjacent to one of the mammoth skulls. It took me forever, as it was nearly hidden under a tusk. I felt a little disappointed, like you do when any routine is disrupted, wondering if I'd killed it on an earlier pass by the area while heading to the Lady Stone. I've never seen any other predator kill that particular rabbit, though I'd not watched for such either -- it had just always been there when I was. I started heading back to Riverwood, and passed by "Wolf Rock" (not named, but y'know where I mean). There, I found another rabbit corpse. I went up into the woods to see if the wolves had re-popped, but the bodies of the ones I'd killed earlier were still there, and there was no howling or barking when I stopped to listen. It was still just a mildly curious thing. The "killer rabbit' aside, I'd never either deliberately hunted nor specifically avoided the game's rabbits, and wasn't paying it much mind. I went through Riverwood, and crossed the bridge. On a whim, I looked for the lone wolf that usually confronts one at the start of the path to BFB; I'd killed it already, but was casually curious. Its body was gone, and there was no live wolf there. I turned around, and continued down the road toward Whiterun. I reached the point where the wolf pack "ambushes" you, and killed them. I continued down the path, and after the dog-leg turn (where the path abruptly turns away from, then back toward Whiterun) I heard the sound of a rabbit being killed. There was no growling or snarling, just the rabbit's death-sound. It piqued my interest, so I left the path and entered the narrow strip of woodland at the top of the low cliff just behind Honningbrew (sp) Meadery. There, I found the body of the deceased rabbit, but saw no wolf or other predator. There were no hostile animal sounds, but -- as I approached the road in front of HM -- a passing Whiterun Guard went super-briefly on alert, that jerky interrupted animation where they start to draw their sword then, suddenly, aren't drawing it anymore, as the alert status had changed too quickly. For as long as I ran that playthrough, every rabbit I encountered was already dead, either in advance or dying as I approached. I never actually saw a live rabbit. It was more a curious phenomenon than honestly spooky; I've told it up here a bit, but the main thrust -- the dead rabbits -- absolutely went down as I've described.
@@shadesofslay "Lund's Hut" is a small, isolated homestead in western Whiterun Hold. With the Creation Club/Anniversary Edition, it's the location where you find the silver armor, once you've started the associated "questline." This is a favorite suit of armor for my heavy-armor playthroughs, early to mid-game, and I usually acquire it. Prior to the incident in question, I'd begun a new two-handed warrior playthrough, and was once again off to LH to acquire the armor set. When I first arrived, I didn't notice anything amiss outside of the hut. Upon entering, however, Lund's body was not in his bed, where it always had been before. I didn't see the body anywhere, but I knew immediately what had happened, broadly: there was that tell-tale, staccato "thump-thump-thump" sound of a corpse stuck in the environment. However, when I checked under his body (I'm not above noclipping to resolve a glitch) I didn't see him. Also in the hut were Lund's skeevers. For those unfamiliar, Lund is a man who is only found dead by the player, having apparently decided to try and keep multiple skeevers in his house at some time before your arrival. This went predictably badly for him. The skeevers are, normally, immediately hostile to the player upon entering, as skeevers usually are. This time, while the skeevers acted hostile, and registered on my compass as enemies, they didn't attack me. Instead, they milled about in a corner of the hut, opposite Lund's strangely deserted bed. Nor were they alone: after I dispatched them, I found the source of the thumping noise, that being Lund's body under the floorboards. The skeevers had been clustered over it. One of his hands was clipping through the floor. I tried noclipping and dragging his body, a solution I've had work *and* had not work each on multiple other occasions. This time was one of the latter, but disabling/enabling Lund's body brought it back up onto the floor. At this point, I was more annoyed than anythiing; the playthrough had started off well, and this seemed ominously portentious of a subsequently glitchy run. Hoping for the best, and remaining in that odd sort of quasi-in-character state where I kinda act like my character but also treat it like a video game (kill everything, loot corpses, etc.) I sent Lund to Sovngarde with a double-barreled blast of firebolt. It seemed fitting. The skeevers did not get the same treatment, as they aren't worthy of Viking funerals. I left Lund's home, resplendant in my new silver armor, and dispatched the treasure-seeker types whose encounter concludes the armor's quest. While looting, I realized that I couldn't find their leader's body. I was annoyed, but I frequently lose track of bodies, so I simply continued on with the game. Now, I'm not usually a survival player, but I do usually make a half-hearted attempt to hold myself to a looser set of related standards: I eat regularly, sleep, and avoid fast travel much of the time, and this occasion wasn't an exception. I began walking back to Whiterun proper. As I went, I ran into bandits twice, killing each of them on both occasions. I also encountered the revelers, and the noble and his wife who seem to cross every inch of Skyrim trying to reach Vitoria's wedding in Solitude (sorry for the spelling; I'm awful with the names, even after thousands of hours). I also passed a guard on patrol, feeling as I did so that hewas slightly out of place, being almost dead-center in the plains west of the city of Whiterun. When I reached Whiterun, I saw Uthgert (sp) the Unbroken leaving the area, heading in the direction from which I had come. I thought that was strange, and it also occurred to me that everyone else I'd encountered on my way to Whiterun -- even the revelers, who are normally stationary -- was going the same way. The bandits hadn't attacked me from their usual positions, and I'd met everyone else coming toward me from the direction of the city of Whiterun. I waanted to browse the Khajiit caravan's merchandise, so I stayed outside the city for a bit. As I did, I noticed the stable master heading out in the same direction Uthgert had gone, taking the road that passes by the Western Watchtower and heading west. Shortly thereafter, Jenassa left the city, following the same road. It wasn't an exodus by any means, but several more NPC's followed in their wake: Sadia, whose quest I had yet to initiate, Ysolde, who I'd already acquired the mammoth tusk for, and Adrianna, for whom I'd delivered Balgruuf's sword to her father already. I tried talking to everyone. Though I had yet to interact with some of them by way of raising my standing with them, they all used the friendly "you helped me in the past" dialogue. Ysolde spoke to me as though we were married; on this playthrough, I hadn't married anybody. They all seemed very happy, on the whole. I went about my business. I was feeling increasingly disappointed with the thought that I'd have to restart this playthrough; it had otherwise gone well, but things now seemed to be a buggy mess. None of those departed NPC's had returned. I did what I could in the city, then left. I'd been going to head towards the Rift to acquire the Chrysamere CC addon, but I decided to go back the way I had come first. Along the way, I met nobody, aside from monsters and wildlife. THere were no human/elven NPC's to be found. Bandit lhaunts and the like were empty, and there were no patrols. The exterior of Lunds hut seemed normal enough. The bodies I had managed to loot were gone, but that wasn't unusual. When I re-entered the hut, though, I found myself in an extraordinarily chaotic scene. Every NPC I'd seen heading toward the hut was there, inside, packed into the room. There were so many that they were clipping into each other, the furniture, and the walls. THere were NPC's that I hadn't actually witnessed heading there, presumably because they'd come from other directions than Whiterun. And, there was a frenzied thump-thump-thumping sound. When I noclipped down through the floor, I found all of the missing dead bodies beneath it, as near as possible to where I'd initially found him. I continued that playthrough for a while. I moved my "base of operations" to Solitude. For the rest of that run, none of the NPC's in Lund's Hut left. They stimply stood there. THey didn't respond to being bumped or jostled, and didn't give random greetings or deliver any other proximity-based lines. If I engaged them in conversation, they would react with the warmest possible disposition, including lover/spouse lines if they were marriageable. The conversation would then immediately end, without giving me a chance to respond. After I crossed the map a few times, the slow migration of seemingly random people to Lund's hut stopped. However, every time I couldn't find a body I'd just dropped, for the remainder of that playthrough, there was a roughly 50/50 chance that I'd find it under the floor at Lund's home, the remainder presumably accounted for by the number of bodies I miss under normal circumstances.
@@simontheblind8417 Don't apologise for spelling mistakes when sharing such detailed stories! I absolutely love this one. I'd love to recreate it! But it may be a bit of a challenge. The image of all those NPCs compressed into that space is highly amusing. Thanks for sharing another incredibly detailed report!
I remember that a long time ago, i was playing necromancer with the dead thrall spell, so i reanimated a bandit chief, when i fast travelled away, the reanimated bandit chief became a "Blackblood Marauder".
I’ve ran into the Headless Horseman once after playing this game for close to 8-10 years on a constant, semi-constant rate. It was in 2011 when I was still a kid and discovering this world, it was magical and is a wonderful memory
Here's a fun one, one time I tried to use the grindstone when Adrianne Avenicci was on it and she just straight up died. The guards didn't become aggressive but passengers noted her body as they walked by.
I have my own Skyrim ghost story. On my first play through of Skyrim I completed the Companion's questline. During one of the quests a Companion leader named Skjor is scripted to die. I completed the questline and a few in game months went by before I went back Jorrvaskr. When I walked in, Skjor was standing there, alive and well, like nothing had ever happened. Spooky stuff.
@shadesofslay You could tie via headcanon that this references foxes in many cultures symbolizing or representing cunny and mischief as the fox in Skyrim can either lead you to a harmless point of interest or to bandits or something worse. I love foxes. They have the sass and personality of a cat with the energy and quirkiness of a dog.
You don't have to head cannon it lol cuz in skyrim the Nords represent the god Shor as a fox, if I remember right that was one of the reasons people believed it was true until that one guy figured it out 😂. Also I believe this theory is also in ESO as I was told by a player once to follow foxes 😂but idk he prolly was trying to mess with a noob😂
So many of these happened to me in the early days of the game! I swore I saw the statues move a few times. I saw strange cultish NPC gatherings where I couldn’t even get a dialogue tree to show up when I tried talking to the NPCs. I had the Throw Voice shout break and start taunting randomly. I had a rabbit at the base of the Bleak Falls Barrow tower aggro on me (it chased me and had a red dot, but couldn’t actually fight). I had two clones of Letrush attack me in the Bee and Barb after killing the original (I betrayed him for the horse and fast travelled back after running away a bit). I even had dead Lydia show up at my wedding. I told my siblings all of this, and we spent hours upon hours trying to figure out the mysteries. I was in college at the time but it felt like looking for Mew under the truck all over again. Thank you so much for this list, I’m definitely checking out the rest of your content. Cheers!
This is probably the weirdest thing I've had happen to me with the original version of skyrim. I had modded Skyrim via the steam workshop with a ton of mods and uninstalled a couple of them I was no longer using/needed; This was a horrible mistake as the game became a nightmare realm with the sky going from night to day rapidly and I was being chased and hunted down by men saying "I'm sorry!", disappearing like they were brought back to life with that resurrection spell. Everything was just glitched. I uninstalled all the mods and did a fresh reinstall of the game; However nothing ever felt right again, things were still oddly glitchy in small little ways, things just not acting right. This has continued even recently as when I tried playing it again in 2020, those odd quirks were still there.
This video has actually reminded me what made me stop a playthrough. Lydia and I had just barely survived a dungeon and were out of healing items. I didn’t have any restoration magic. We were bruised and burned when bandits intercepted us. Lydia saw them before I did and when she went to run ahead she was mown down by several arrows to the chest. But when I got back to breezeholm there she was standing by the hearth, wound textures and arrows still across her body.
You're very soothing to listen to! I wish I could disconnect a bit more, these honestly just have me going "ah, yeah, that's the Bethesda spaghetti code right there," haha But it's fun, I like this, it's harmless. I want to hear all sorts of silly creepy things about Skyrim
This video definitely inspired me to post my weird stories to Reddit, some of these I myself have encountered, like the bone rattles and breathing. I also have some unique ones that seemingly nobody relates to. Playing the game often results in a lot of these glitches.
I thought this was going to be a video of "oh, here's a list of canonical urban legends within the world of skyrim, like the Pale Lady" but NO this is so much better, i live for obscure video game lore and trivia and i love the concept of a digital campfire (shame i was too young when skyrim first came out to be on those types of forums in the moment, but that's what videos like this are for!)
I’d imagine the reason so many apooky happenings surround Riverwood and Whiterun is the same reason so many spooky happenings surround Lydia-all companions and all towns are loaded with crazy glitches, but those are the companion and towns that a vast majority of players have encountered.
All kinds of fun glitches happened to me during my no-dragons playthrough. I liked to push the limits of the game bending around the lack of the iconic dragons, and while most of it was stumbling across word walls and undefended chests, there were times when the game couldn't quite figure out what to do with some npcs and even quests. It was great fun.
As a PC player who regularly uses console commands, all these things seem so mundane and easy to explain away. The way they are framed however brings them to life and makes me remember being a kid with a vivid imagination and a poor undertanding of programming. Great stuff - I love the idea of code being somehow haunted, or at the very least having the programmers leave a ghostly mark themselves in the form of easter eggs or deliberate glitches.
When I first installed the Hearthfire DLC, I had a glitch with Lakeview Manor where any time I tried to load my save and leave the house, a random enemy would be directly outside my door and kill me. It wasn't just an increase of area spawn, it was any enemy in the entire game, anything from a skeever to various dragon priests would spawn and one hit me. My spouse would also come out and die immediately and my children would disappear from the game entirely even if I managed to go back inside before being hit (which would reset with a different spawn if I opened the door again). I lived in a horrific groundhog day loop of watching my family die every single day before being ragdolled to space
I recently played through three different playthroughs of Skyrim on PS5 and I encountered quite a large number of weird events, some notable ones were guards falling from the sky in major cities in the same few places, elderly npcs randomly tripping and dying, Stormcloak soldiers spawning in Bloodchill Cavern and then running out into the wilderness only to disappear after a little while, Getting a letter from inheritance from one of the minor hold Jarls (a different one in each playthrough) telling me about the death of an Ash Zombie when doing the Ghosts of the Tribunal creation, Lydia running off into the woods only to be seen again much much later, mutated nords on Solsthiem (werebears that never transformed fully into werebears and instead became contorted nord models), the most powerful bandit in history who rather than unsheathe his greatsword started hitting me with nothing, Hagraven corpses getting up and walking in place (including the headless ones), Sanguine deciding to leave his plane of Oblivion and kill everything in sight, Barbas being reunited with Clavicus Vile without me doing the quest, and a series of events around Dushnikh Yal where I fought a bunch of vampires that later got back up and started walking around passively until I killed them again, then the next time I visited all the npcs stopped talking and performing their routines just going "huh" or screaming (both fear screams and battle cries) when I got near them, then way later on the entire area turned into a bizarre void zone where trying to walk towards the stronghold would consistently crash the game.
@ I would say within the next couple months or something like that! Maybe sooner. With Christmas and new year coming up it kinda slows things up a little!
One of my favorite things about how common weird and insane glitches are in Skyrim is the fact that 1 it's honestly believable these weird things could happen, and 2 the fact that random glitches are so common the phrase "Just Skyrim being Skyrim" exists.
The headless horseman is such an interesting thing because the first time I ever played Skyrim I saw him just outside Whiterun, and in the hundreds of hours since I have never seen him again
I've had nocs agro onto non existent enemies. It's happened to me in fallout as well. It's really just an annoying bug. I've had dead NPCs show up randomly before as well. Also happened in fallout New Vegas were sometimes dead bodies would duplicate.
The Sabrecat Incident sounds like the Quirk of certain Enemy NPCs chasing the Player through the Fast-Travel/Cell Change. In Oblivion, I once got attacked by a Lich outside the Imperial Prison, who had chased me all the Way from a previous Dungeon, to the Imperial City (Where I got stopped right there for violating the Law). The Timeskip allowed them to spawn inside the City Walls. No doubt something like that can happen in Skyrim aswell.
9:16 Bethesda games get ghosts when you overplay them. I swear to god. Fallout 4 was my example, where it literally bricked my entire console. I don’t even remember what the broken gameplay I was experiencing at the time. Towards the end, it was all at least a little broken. More so than standard fallout 4. Also, for context, I don't trust console mods and never play with them. They're too unstable in my experience, and I just generally don't like them.
I have my own story of Lydia to share. Back in the day, I'd often play Skyrim alongside my childhood friend, handing over control of the Dragonborn every so often as we explored Tamriel together. Our Lydia seemingly perished very early into our journey, being sent to the stratosphere by a giant west of Whiterun. However, we never found her body (much to our chagrin as we wanted to recover the loot we had her hauling). Much later on, my friend took us to the Temple of Mara in Riften for our marriage to Ysolda. After the ceremony concluded and my friend turned to sprint out the door, i saw her. Lydia was there, sitting amongst the pews. I blurted out something like "Wait look there's Lydia!" But my friend either didn't believe me or didn't care as he rushed us off to the next adventure. That particular Dragonborn never saw Lydia again, and to this day I wonder whether the character in the pews was just an NPC I had mistaken for our long lost Lydia (and her loot) or if one of Skyrim's many bugs had forever seared itself into my consciousness.
Thanks so much for sharing this story - love that you shared a playthrough - also love that you used the word 'chagrin' (I really adore that word)! Well - I believe you saw Lydia - it lines up with lots of other accounts about her appearing at weddings after vanishing!
I was playing less than a week ago and I had that same Louie Letrush bug with Gabriella in the Dark Brotherhood. She had a clone right outside the Sanctuary entrance. Astrid was also outside and sneaking with her dagger out really slowly moving up against the clone, and I thought she might sneak attack her but she never did (I'm not even sure if skyrim npc's sneak attack at all). I couldn't hurt her either. I went in the Sanctuary and when I came back out the clone was gone and Astrid was on her way up to Lake Ilinalta for no reason. I actually ended up abandoning that save because it was new and Astrid refused to go back to the Sanctuary, and when I console commanded her back she just slowly snuck back to Lake Ilinalta. That's the risk you take when you mod your game straight to hell 🤷
I remember playing skyrim not long after release as a kid and coming across the headless horseman in my first blind playthrough, none of my friends believed me and it was absolutely infuriating.
I think I actually encountered that strange breathing mentioned at 38:00. It happened around Riften. It was specifically the bear sound effects, they played at max volume regardless of how far away the bear was and in wasn't affected by the in-game sliders. For a couple of hours anytime a bear was loaded in, I would hear their awkwardly lound breathing as if they were right new to my character.
Same! It specifically started as I was between the blacksmith and meadery. I was actually going to go into the meadery when suddenly I just heard a bear. I'm looking around but no one is reacting to a bear, and there was obviously no bear in sight.. It stopped when I went into the meadery.
I'm glad I found your channel, its been really nice listening this series and I'm looking forward to the Morrowind one if you are planning on doing that. Watching this also was very ammusing to me as my viewpoint of the things that happen to me in game are never on the creepy or "paranormal" side for a lack of a better word. I always chalk it up to the game being this whimsical and lovely glitchy mess. I had similar situations to what you described in some of these instances like sounds of certain enemies or things where they are not supposed to be (like the noise a skeleton makes randomly in a forest without there being one) or weird breathing noises in my cellar in lakeview manor which sounded like the noise skeever make but there was nothing there. Some of the funnier ones escape my memory right now, but one I had is whenever I fast traveled a dragon skeleton traveled with me and appeared wherever I went. Be it inside a city, to a cave, a village, it would follow everywhere. But again I never really thought it was creepy or unnatural, to me it was just skyrim being skyrim. A fun, goofy and glitchy game with a special place in our hearts. Thank you for the content, am definetly excited for more!
I really appreciate this, thank you! It sounds like you see the charm of the games over and above the creepy or weird side, which is kind of the same as me... but I love leaning into those areas for the campfire storytelling vibe!
28:45 I've had this happen a quite often with mods, usually caused by an npc dying from a DOT effect while paralyzed, though a few times ive had it happen on load/reload of a cell, in that case most likely the flag that sets the ragdoll didn't get set so they just stand up, but with their AI turned off so they dont do anything whether or not these relate to the same bug, i dont know
So it’s kinda the inverse of the mannequin glitch in which they’re *never* supposed to be alive but they’re basically just NPCs without the AI activated so the game sometimes forgets they’re not supposed to be *actual* NPCs whereas here it’s actual NPCs being frozen, almost like they’ve been taxidermied in action poses.
One of my favourite glitches that is odd is I was travelling a road near Solitude on Xbox 360 and a dragon appeared, a 2nd dragon appeared and the first just dropped dead, gave me the soul and everything, a couple of years later on PS4 in the same area the same thing happened
Oh man I love this. That makes me think crazy thoughts like maybe that concept was them actually stepping outside of our OWN simulation… cos how could they have known what virtual reality in a simulated world would look like??
I feel like this is a kind of above, so below situation. The most inner and outer levels of the simulation are the same with infinite levels of recursion in between @@shadesofslay
That's what I was thinking - maybe a glitchy game is the way to find the cracks in our own simulated reality? Like, simulating random glitches actually glitches the whole universe...
that dragon corpse that spawns endlessly has happened to me before i think the game is trying to give u the soul of the dragon but for some reason is still alive
I had more or less the exact same Letrush glitch during my very first playthrough, on the PS3. It started out with two Letrushes hanging out by the stables, talking and moving in unison. Both were unkillable and persistent across loading screens and reboots ... trust me, I tried killing one or both of them many times. It was really messing with my oh-so-precious "sense of immersion," after all. If I remember correctly, the Letrushes eventually multiplied further, though I couldn't determine what triggered this behavior. A third duplicate joined them many gameplay hours later, and by the time I was done with the save file in question (not because I had beaten it, but because it had become utterly unplayable due to the infamous "rimlag" stuttering and freezing issued), there were four Letrushes. I seem to remember returning to the stables with the Wabbajack to see if that could somehow circumvent their immortality, and finding that turning them into chickens or whatnot did, in fact, seem to make them killable again, ...but this last part might be a false memory, or a conflation with a different bug on a different playthrough. Never had him pop up anywhere else. Just clone himself right there at the stables.
I've been playing Skyrim since launch day. I've seen and experienced some of the stuff you covered in this video. And some stuff not covered. Some spooky stuff, some stuff that's just hilarious. But my favourite weird moment was seeing the headless horseman for the first time. I was wandering the road away from Riften. This was about 3 months after launch, so back in the days when the glitches were a regular occurrence. The NPC hadn't rendered in game properly, so all I had was the horseman from the waste down and the ghost of the horse chasing me along the road for about ten minutes. I went onto forums immediately after getting back to Whiterun. And read about other headless horseman encounters, and knowing Skyrim to be glitch ridden, I just assumed it to be the headless horseman. I've seen the headless horseman 9 other times since then. And I've read that others have experienced the glitchy headless horseman. With some only ever seeing the rider and not the horse. Great video dude, watched all your other Bethesda game urban legends videos. This one made me sub.
I come across the disembodied sound of skeevers, mammoths and saber cats breathing in the wilds of Skyrim so often that I just chock it up to audio glitch.
I can see why people might think that Balgruuf killed his wife, after all there's a daedric artifact that gets stronger if you kill people who trust you locked up in his basement.
Curiouser and curiouser eh!
More on that! Nelkir one of Balgruuf the Greater’s sons mentions that he knows he doesn’t have the same mother as his brother and sister, Frothar and Dagny, information given to him by the Whispering Lady, this could be Mephala trying to turn him against his family but it could also be true!
@@OkayTorey Well, in the creation kit Nelkir is tagged as being the son of Balgruff's brother (forgot his name). It could very well be a mistake but it could be remnants of an earlier version of Mephala's quest.
@@KaoruMzkhe’s actually tagged as being Bulgruuf’s brother!
@@KaoruMzkI believe Nelkir was Balgruuf's brother, not nephew.
I played Skyrim around when it came out, and I was about 8. I was too young to really play it 'properly', and the vast forests and wilderness surrounding Riverwood scared me. So, I'd pretty much exclusively wander around Riverwood and Whiterun, usually just attacking NPCs and mucking about. This went on for probably a year. To younger me, that tiny stretch of land along the river between Riverwood and Whiterun WAS Skyrim.
My greatest gaming memory of all time was climbing the mountains around Bleak Falls Barrow, and suddenly, seeing the vast plains of Whiterun Hold unfolding beneath me absolutely blew my 9 year old mind. I wandered down into the plains, met a giant for the first time, and actually started exploring all over Skyrim. I was still too scared to venture into any dungeons, but I trekked up towards Solitude, through the swamps of Morthal, all across the northern coast before coming back to Whiterun and heading east to the tundra. I miss the days when I was young enough for videogames to be able to contain real genuine mysteries and adventure.
Loved this comment ♥for me, I had that experience with Ocarina of Time - I was a little older than you were with Skyrim and, at that time, nobody had seen anything like it. Well, I hadn't anyway. I spent so many hours being amazed by the size of THAT world! And many more trying to explore further than the game would allow, because my young mind didn't think the game bounds existed 🤣
@shadesofslay Yes! I had exactly the same experience, trying to reach beyond the limits of the game world. Seeing that old fake light temple video on TH-cam, thinking it was real.
Or how you'd play Banjo Kazooie and spend hours trying to get to the other side of that door in the alcove in Goobis Desert...
Also, you can still KIND of get a similar experience with Skyrim, as long as you mod it with new discoverable stuff, quest/npc/dungeon mods you know nothing about so you discover things organically, and really force yourself to get immersed by disabling fast travel, playing with the UI hidden, and so on.
@@diagonal_leg hey yeah!!! That was video gamer x I think! Odyssey of hyrule website? There’s a mirror of it somewhere - talk about going down memory lane!
@shadesofslay Yeah I think so! I don't remember exactly, I can't find it on TH-cam right now. The one I remember vividly was one where the sky temple was basically just big box shaped rooms, the wall texture was that animated blue texture you see in the sages cutscenes, and young link was doing some block pushing puzzle I think. Maybe it's that one?
@ yep I pretty much think it’s the same thing - I also think someone went and recreated it from beta demos or something, which is also really interesting to look into!
It really is incredible how Skyim's glitchiness just naturally creates a lot of creepy moments, especially in the early days. I miss when Skyrim still felt so mysterious. But losing that is a natural part of the game being a decade old.
It’s a **Feature**
Now you can mod it to the point that other mysteries/bugs pop up :P
i absolutely adore playing a creepy little breton named the oracle every so often, who searches out these anomalies. she often takes credit for them, spouting nonsense about how shes chosen by the gods to bring chaos to skyrim. not to mention because shes dovahkiin, it even furthers her case. i recently downloaded that one grey quarter apartment mod just so shed be living in slums, instead of in “palaces” like shed said she was living in. its really fun to roleplay these creepy little glitches!
Thats always been a big double edge sword wish of mine with childhood games. The ability to forget EVERYTHING about them and re-experience them as if it were the first time. The bright side is obvious. The downside is that with each game you do this with, you are effectively deleting parts of your childhood and losing those memories. With each game your childhood nostalgia loses more and more of itself, leaving you with the basics and for somebody like me, that is very detrimental. Another risk is the fact that my brain is just different. Short of childhood games, I dont have a big interest in gaming anymore, hardly at all even. Who's to say that when I delete my memories I would even have the drive to play those games or even enjoy myself when playing them? Nostalgia is a disgusting drug. You dont crave the object or the game. The show or the movie. You crave the memory and desperately wish you could re live it in its entirety, but you cant. Those days are gone forever and that is that. No amount of replaying that childhood game will ever bring the magic back, not fully
The fact that people dismissed the Sovngarde statues as a myth is wild to me. You can just... Go there, and check. It's so easy to do.
I think dismissals were very early on - it was just hard to capture the statues actually moving, which to me was the most interesting part!
That would require 90% of the player base to actually go through the main quest
@@Akial2935 neverrrrrr 😂
@@Akial2935there’s a main quest? 😮
I played the main quest some 20 times and never noticed them moving. But then I just never looked behind me.
The Lydia one is definitely true. It seems like she always has a way of returning to Whiterun after her death. In my first playthrough, she died to a giant, only to fall from the sky during the civil war battle of Whiterun. I like to think that someone launched her corpse out of a catapult during the siege.
I've also read that she just randomly disappears frequently
LYDIA, I CHOOSE YOU! *catapults her at Whiterun*
There's something almost Monty Python-esque about your Lydia anecdote!
Had that with other things like dead dragons. Go into a building come out and a dragon's body you killed on the other side of the map appears infront of you.
"Release the prisoners!"
I kept the Stray Dog in my home in Whiterun for ages. One day I came home, and he had been permanently replaced with an elk.
😂
He evolved
Todds done it again 🎉🎉😂
Tis the work of wabbajack
Given the nature of the Elder Scrolls themselves, that is completely canon
Yoo this reminds me of how unsettling the Throw Voice shout was for me.
I usually play a mage so i dont experience stealth play too much; so i decided on a playthrough as a thief.
I decided using throw voice would help position sneak attacks or just walk around them.
After a while using the throw voice, i began to hear the taunts without even using the shout. I was like k, programming is off a bit. I was playing a male, but then the taunts started coming from an imperial females voice. I eventually stopped that save file because every time i was alone, id hear the lady call out, "Hey, cheese head!"
The bug jar content is just crazy to me. Some dude was just wondering, and randomly looked at a grass patch to see a couple of darker patches, then posted about it. Then, people figured out the bug jars matched the size, and found all variations, then concluded this was cut content. This game is crazy lol
*Bethesda is crazy😂
I love them for it
Wait, the bug jars don't do anything? I could have sworn they were something to do with the thieves guild
"concluded"
the devs told us, dude.
@@GuckFoogle-pk6nsnope, you may be thinking of the collectible items in thieves guild quests which go onto the shelf near Mercer’s desk, as there’s a bee in a jar and one of those collectible items in the same room in the bee hive place on the island outside of Riften
@@GuckFoogle-pk6nsnah devs had an idea in mind for a quest involving them but someone at Bethesda called it a “half-baked idea” and they scrapped it and kept the jars in for players to stumble across
I've always assumed the ring in the well was a nod to Oblivion. A ring with a weight enchantment next to a mage's guild. One person drowned trying to retrieve it
That was done on purpose to kill that guy to get rid of him. I never beat the mages guild on oblivion. Never had the spells to beat that ayleid ruin quest puzzle thing. My friend was gonna help me one day when I got the game again. But he decided to be a punk and fuck up his life then chickened out of life altogether. Men are pussies.
RIP Vidkun...
@@Lenn869He shoulda breathed better! 😂
@@sleepysartorialist the knee was on his neck...
Or Fargoth's ring. It's an ongoing trope in Bethesda games
Its kinda Crazy that i feel homesick to a Place that only exists in a digital world
Did you know this is the real definition of nostalgia? :)
Digidestined type comment
To be fair, "at home" is as much about how you're feeling as it is about a specific place, or even specific people. You could live your whole life not meeting a person, but talking with them can make you feel like you've known each other your whole life.
Fleeing Draugr Ghost is probably the Ancient Nord Ghost that runs to Kjenstag Ruins and can’t be interacted with 👍
Can however be killed for a full set of ancient nord armor
Just ran with him lmao
Actually, that's a great shout!
Yeah I went looking for that guy just for the armor
Exactly what I thought. I was checking the comments to see if anyone had already said this.
One of my favorite moments that happened to me playing Skyrim was one time i was walking around Morthal and i just killed a spider a little before walking into the town. I was by the jarls house when a gaurd turned to me and said "Watch the skys traveler" and then the corpse of the spider fell from the sky right in front of me as the guard walked away. I'm glad my mom and little brother were watching cuz the timing was so funny. I was on the Xbox one. We all still reference it and laugh today haha. Good video :o)
Ha that’s perfect! And yeah having witnesses is important cos normally people don’t believe these stories when they’re told!
😂😂😂
@@shadesofslay Exactly haha
There's a sort of charm to Bethesda urban legends compared to other games. There's so many things in the games you can't be sure it's either intended, a bug, or just cut content.
💯 - charm is the word!
Legendary algorithm pull
It has been doing its job lately :)
Subscribe i was waiting for my Scottish dad to drop another lore vid on games I haven’t played since a teen 😂
@ Scottish dad 😂 love it!
@@shadesofslay frankly glad it brought you to me. I do be loving my lore
@@sleepysartorialist I’m glad too!
Skyrim: the gift that keeps on glitching
My first play through of Skyrim, I had bought breezehome and fully furnished it. Aela the huntress was my follower and wife and she had met her untimely demise, ending up headless. It happened in Breezehome, then the companions started coming into Breezehome unannounced in a hostile manner but weren’t marked enemies or with any hostile dialogue just weapons drawn. They met their untimely demise, the same way as Aela gone from the neck up again within Breezehome. Days went by, everything was normal until one day. I came back to whiterun, entering breezehome and there’s Vilkas. Walking around with no clothes and no head, he met his second untimely demise. The next in game day, Aela and Vilkas again up and walking as if nothing happened but I couldn’t speak to them. Breezehome is cursed
😨 wtf
You cursed it bro
I am glad Im not alone with that.
I had Alea for a wife she met an end thanks to a Dwemer big boi (forgot the name) and returned to Lakeview, Farkas showed up weapon drawn but non hostile but couldn't get him to leave or talk to him at all.
Killed him, then had his angry corpse sliding around under my floor and could only see him halfway thanks to the basement
Skyrim holds a very special place in my heart. I got it less than a week after release, and it kinda became almost like a safety blanket for me when I was going through a rough time of my life as a young teen. In playtime I’ve put in over sixteen thousand hours. I’ve done every quest, stood in every vista, and spent countless hours simply existing in the world. I enjoyed this video. In some ways it brought back some of the old feelings I used to experience while playing. Sub earned.
Thanks for this I really appreciate you sharing that personal journey - I’m really glad the video evoked some of those old positive feelings 🙂
The skeleton under the bridge in Whiterun is has been rumored to be a guy named Christophe, in the Bannered Mare there is a note from Maven Black-Briar to him saying she was sending someone to pick him up, and at Maven's home in Riften there are more notes making it seem like they had a falling out and Christophe wanted to get back in Maven's good graces
For the Riften npc's all gathering in the graveyard, my best guess would be that to flee from the combat all of them had decided that the thieves guild entrance under the crypt was the safest spot but obviously they couldn't reach it so they were stuck standing in the graveyard.
No clue how likely that is but that's my guess
Interesting theory! There was another commenter who said that in actual fact it IS a thing, it’s just very rare and on a very specific calendar date! Waiting for a bit more detail of course. You should be able to find what they said in the comments - was pretty interesting!
Ive had it happen a few times, two of them were after dragon attacks. The graveyard is the only place the dragon could land so I assumed it was that at first
I'd heard the fox rumor but knowing it's all a programming quirk rather than intentional is still really neat.
I don't think it lessens the magic of it at all :D
I still love it :)
I feel like it makes it a little more magical tbh. It's like finding out the "pressing a button to guarantee capturing a Pokemon" thing was true, but because of Missingno existing, y'know?
I tried following a fox to test the theory myself. Eventually it turned around and agro’d on me. 😅 Not the treasure I was hoping for.
@@Subconscious.Sarah. Whatttt! Fox must not have liked being followed!
Imagine living back 1000 years ago, these types of stories were about real life.
I get what you mean. But imagine being around a 1000 years ago and hearing someone from your village saying "I saw a flying horseman at night in the fields outside the city" you'd put them in the local lock up quickly 😂😂😂
@Dil-DoeShaggings IDK wasn't it like a hundred years ago that some little girls supposedly had a Devine being give them a prophecy and everyone believed them and they became part of the church. Been a while since I looked into it so the details are fuzzy.
*Had to look it up. Church didn't believe them, but the locals did. "Garabandal apparitions" is what it is known as and took place in the 60s in northern Spain.
Lol, try 20 years ago, hehe 😅
when I was about 14 I was playing Skyrim on the PS3, which is infamously buggy I know.
I came across a Khajit merchant guard outside windhelm carrying an invisible torch, it didn’t give off any light and even in his inventory the torch didn’t have a model or text and when I pickpocketed it the torch was nowhere to be found in my inventory. When I reloaded the save I tried equipping it directly from his inventory and it worked but what followed was the most bizarre experience I’ve had playing Skyrim. I could stun lock enemies with my fist, it seemed like enemies from entirely too far were aggro’d onto me and without warning while I was jumping into a small lake outside falkreath I was suddenly put into a load screen that placed me in a dungeon on solstiem.
Absolutely love this! Never heard of anything like this before!
This happened to me, excep the torch was named something in parenteses like (no data) and it didnt go out even on water,
9:00 Skyrim does have a wierd bug where a part of a skeleton can follow you, like a random bone. Can happen sometimes when you fast travel after fighting skeletons or fast travel after exiting a cave. Same for 38:00
So uniquely bizarre eh!
@shadesofslay Yeah, happened mostly after fighting skeletons not too far from Whiterun, and not too far from a Giant camp
I would assume it's on the likes of talking to an npc and walking through a door, which will bring them with you.
@@TVHammond Similar to that yeah
The Letrush glitch is why I stopped getting Frost until I got the PC version. Pain in the ass going back to Whiterun and seeing more of him.
Almost like Tribbles from Star Trek!
Every time I got Frost I'd end up with like 5 of them half way into the ground. They one vanished when the random encounter where he's killed by a hired thug sent by Maven made the clones despawn.
Something humorous that happened to me when I was playing, was this little kid in Morthal got stuck behind a staircase. He kept trying to talk to me while walking into the steps, and for fun, I decided I'd jump on his face, since he was sticking out between two steps. As one does, of course.
As I did this, it apparently dislodged him, because he went flying horizontally, before getting caught on something in the water, which must have stopped him; he then proceeded to, while still talking to me, *moonwalk into the sun.* I'm not joking, he kept walking, but he was going backwards.. and upwards, too. I managed to record some of this last part, thankfully, otherwise nobody would ever believe me.
Another thing that happens to me quite often is the bones of dragons follow me sometimes when I fast-travel. Ivarstead just has Paarthurnax's bones there and nobody questions it
Ha that’s absolutely fantastic! I’d love to see that clip!!
Can you upload the recording to your channel please? thanks xD
@@4Redwall I'll try to; it was a screen recording on the console, and I'm not very knowledgeable on how to upload it from there, but I really want to, it was such a funny moment
The weirdest thing about this comment is that partysnax is bones… you monster
Yeah why would you kill Paarthurnax? You should delete your save and try again but do it the right way
The Letrush bug is a nice throwback for me, because my oldest screenshot on steam is just of 3 Letrushs in front of the stable building just standing there. Skyrim is one of the first games I had for PC and i still have the physical copy and the map that they gave you with the game.
Love it! Nostalgia trip!
Actually just had a mystery answered recently, every so often I would find a dead whiterun guard in i the city with no idea how they died. In my most recent play through I came out of dragon’s reach at night and saw a torch floating over the city before it dropped, went down to look and lo and behold dead guard with a torch, they’ve just been spawning in the sky.
Some luck eh!??
BRUH that is DIABOLICAL 😭
@@sleepysartorialist Remember it's not a bug it's a feature.
Thank you, that explains that for me at least. Now to figure out why I keep finding dead npcs in piles right outside candlehearth hall
@@ph6251 Well that's clearly the Butcher, just ask Viola.
I can't explain the elk but the NPCs acting alert will be the result of a despawned Dragon. It's actually quite common in Riverwood.
The sabertooth will have followed the player into the building and began attacking NPCs. There is a small window where this is possible when entering a new area.
I also have my own uban legend, on my second playthrough every NPC, animal, enemy etc. aggroed on me out of nowhere and began attacking (if they could) on sight, I had no bounty and wasn't a Vampire. Even Rabbits and Foxes would just run at me.
Being level 70ish I didn't want to lose the save but I tried everything and no matter what I couldn't fix it. The whole game felt like GTA with the Riot Mode cheat activated lol
Ha!! What do you think caused the mass agro?? Also, love the limmy thumbnail.
@@shadesofslayCheers lol. Good video btw.
If I had to guess I would say the game had me labeled as a Vampire even though I wasn't one. I had recently completed the Dawnguard Quest because I had the Ancient Falmer set, so perhaps an obscure bug from the DLCs release combined with how aggressive NPCs used to be toward Vampires resulted in the world hating me lol. Idk about the Rabbits though, probs thought they'd just get in on the action
@ thank you! And - I know it was a pain but at the same time it’s a highly amusing tale!
I've had that happen to me too. Just get bum rushed by every deer, fox, and rabbit in my vicinity
I've heard that there's this rumored Cloud District, somewhere in Whiterun. I don't know exactly where, but there's this one guy that knew about it...
Ha! Yeah I've heard similar rumours...
Ah who am I kidding, of course there isn’t
Nono it's definitely there. I've been there. I think you guys just haven't. Ahah who am I kidding ofc you haven't
wait you mean nazeem?ignore that guy ,he just made up that story to say how rich he is,but in reality he is just lonely and delusional
I once heard the cloud district is where the Jarl's palace is, but that makes no sense.
The fact that man comes from a place where the national animal is a unicorn makes this video 100x better.
Deep irl lore cut!!
"And another one"
Keep up this series. Its great.
Thank you :) I will definitely keep it going!
No problem.
Also the weirdest glitch that happened to me in Skyrim was over a decade ago now back on the PS3 version of that game.
not long after I finished the companions quest line one of the companions kept following me around the hall engaging in dialogue without me interacting with him. I eventually got tired of him interrupting me so I attacked him and my character decapitated him since I had the savage strike perk.
I later leave to do other quests but when I return the companion is alive again only he's walking around without his head bloody stump and all. he continued to try and engage in dialogue with me only his voice lines didn't play.
I killed him again and the glitch ended but it was still weird.
@ ya know, I saw a glitch like this recently in another video but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was! The game I mean, or the video. It was a “losing their head” moment and the body just kept on going. If I remember I’ll swing by and say what it was!
@@shadesofslay
I know there is a glitch where if you manage to heal at just the right moment when an enemy is decapitating you you'll survive and be able to play the rest of the game without a head.
But I'm getting *ahead* of myself.
@@UNSCMarine117 🤣
on my very first playthrough of skyrim, after getting off the cart and that one guy runs, the captain yelled “archers!” but instead ran and killed the guy herself. i still have no idea how this happened
Not even following her own instructions!
Back on the 360, I had an encounter with a Troll covered in the green Spriggan energy like when the Spriggan causes animals to aggro. I don't know if that's a bug but it never happened to me again.
Happened to me once after leaving Helgen running to Riverwood, rare right across the river
@@andrewplays2084 My encounter was right outside Falkreath on the road near where you meet Barbas.
I've experienced this. In the forests near Riften. It was really odd.
Ah yes, 50min video of Elder Scrolls lore. Can't never get enough. Great one!
Love you accent btw❤
Thanks so much, I’m glad you enjoyed the video ❤️
I have an abandoned save file (abandoned cause of this glitch) where Isran, inside the dawnguard stronghold, is mirroring my characters every move. He even jumps and will unsheathe his weapon if I do. Iirc he won't attack, however. He does every action in synergy with my Dragonborn. No mods except for a small one that allows unarmed kill cams vs. certain enemies (dragons, bears, wolves, to name a few)
PLEASE get me some footage of this!
this is one of my favourite videos on youtube. And ive been watching youtube since i was 9, dude. I wait a couple weeks so i forget everything and then i rewatch and fully binge ur videos man its so much fun
the whiterun skeleton has pretty much been solved for years now as one of Mavens victims. With evidence in the bannered mare being a letter from Maven.
I love urban legends 👍
Back in 2002, me & the boys documented a glitch in Vice City where a distant black square would follow the player in the sky. We thought it was a UFO 😂
I've never seen it discussed online, so probably a scratched disc or something.
I LOVE this. Ya know, I focus on Bethesda games of course, but I wonder if I should branch out the urban legends series into other games...
@@shadesofslay Your urban legend videos do numbers, and you put in the effort to find lesser known stories. I'd say it's worth a shot if there are other games & series you're interested in 👍
For sake of full disclosure, the "UFO" was not unlike the sun in Minecraft, albeit solid black. It was always low in the sky, so to be on the horizon and peaking out from behind the city skyline. If you ever cover Vice City, feel free to do a brief entry :]
@@jjrussell_gallery thank you! I may well do! I’d love to try and capture the phenomenon if possible!
@@shadesofslay Same, but I wouldn't know where to begin.
I do think showing source content & demonstrating glitches/rare occurrences adds a lot of value to your vids. If things can't be preproduced, staged examples (w/ disclaimer) are also good
@ absolutely! 💯
33:00 the thing about glitches recorded back in 2011 is that theres been so many updates and changes and dlc added to the game since then then that it wuld almost be impossible to recreate the circumstances for these glitches to happen again without buying a fresh copy of a 13 year old game game, so you almost have to take his word for it
That's a very good point!
You can still get a perfectly good day 1 copy of the game. If I had time for it, I would definitely try these out
@ I may have to do this…
@@shadesofslay It would make for an interesting video, even if nothing would happen. I think some of these glitches and "sightings" would be possible to replicate with some modding knowledge as well, might take a crack at the Riverwood 'shaking pale creature'. This and especially New Vegas' day one PC release are probably so full of strangeness that went undocumented.
@ definitely! You probably saw the limits of my abilities to try and recreate things in this video!
I'm addicted to your videos, love to play skyrim while watching it on the second monitor, you are doing the lords work my man
Really appreciate this :) I hope you enjoy the upcoming Morrowind Urban Legends video!
Always love the campfire vibes in these urban legends videos! Got the notification of the upload earlier so I was super excited to get home to watch 😆
Ah, thank you! I hope you enjoyed the video :)
As someone who played this game for thousand of hours and know the engine very well, I can safely say some of those stories are most probably real.
A lot happened during my time with Skyrim but the one creepy moment I remember well was when I still played Skyrim on my PS3 way back when the game first released, and this one time I was checking one of my ingame homes, maybe the one in Riften, and as I went down to the basement area I noticed that the manikins had moved around. Back then I didnt know that this is one of the infamous bugs, so I was pretty spooked and confused, and I didnt even wanna use that house anymore.
Unfortunately most of my playtime with Skyrim was after I started modding it on PC so most of my spooky moments were usually related to a mod i installed.
Yes the mannequins one happened to me too before I knew it was a thing, years ago, and it creeped the heck out of me!
@@shadesofslaysame thing happened to me but in Bloodchill Manor. It happened right after the dinner fight. Some of the mannequins were positioned in such a way that they appeared poised to attack me. This paired with the overall spooky ambiance of BM gave me more than a few goosebumps. The mannequins reset after interacting with them. It happened a few more times in that save, but they reset after interacting exited and reentered the house.
I think I might know something that could be that chittering noise that one person described. There are trees ingame that release birds when you get close, playing a sound when it activates. Sometimes they glitch, causing the sound to persist. I’ve encountered it near the bridge in Riverwood that leads to Whiterun, it’s almost like a shimmering sound. With the environment they described, I can absolutely see that sound being unnerving.
I’d be interested to hear the specific sound that glitches - I may need to dash around Falkreath hold again!
Great video! Weyrd stories not easily explainable away by developer comments.
Thank you so much for reviving my faith in Skyrim's ability to provide a sense of mystery, and reminding me of how alive and vibrant the community and culture is around Skyrim which doesn't have to do with Mods. I'm gonna put this on my Halloween playlist for next year.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate this because this is a huge part of what I’m hoping to achieve with these videos!
When I was a kid playing skyrim one time I killed a orc companion you get from one of the strongholds, he died from me in a swamp. When I got married later, his corpse appeared at the wedding and caused my bride to hate me, making the marriage fail. So I'd kinda believe the Lydia story.
Ah the old post-death wedding gatecrasher!
The glitch at 44:00 is basically this: When the player enters an instance, like an interior of a shop or cave the rest of the world switches to an unpopulated instance, to save on memory of continuing the NPC and AI animals animations and daily activities. The player got desynced whilst entering the interior and the game put him in this other world holder space, instead of back into the instanced interior.
Thanks for sharing this. Ya know this comment section is gold.
Normally hearing mundane explanations for strange phenomenon makes them less scary, but knowing this is an actual thing that can happen made it more scary, lol. If something like this happened to me without knowing what was happening I'd be shitting myself
@@Sandstimes Sort of like imagining that happening in real life. Just walking out of a building to a world without a population. No animals, no humans, no signs of life outside of plants.
The fox navmesh thing could also create an organic byproduct! Dense navmesh spaces have a lot of interactive stuff in them, and lots of objects to walk around. A fox could be seen to seek a hiding place, or at least something to dart around to make the most of their agility!
That's generally what humans are supposed to do if being actively hunted by a grizzly bear! You find a dense spot, try to hide or get away whilst the bigger thing is caught up in obstacles!
Even if it was unintended, I like it. 😁
Yes - I absolutely love it as well!
I adore this video, commentary is memorizing yet soothing, the stories are interesting, the photos and videos are fun, all I want to do now is to turn on the game myself and look for strange things lol
Thank you - I really appreciate that! Glad to inspire the mystery hunting!
I love the Foxes lead you to Tresure one. Both because I love Foxes but also of an interaction I gave to my Nord Clevermen and Altmer Mage characters.
The Nord ofcourse imparts this nugget of knowledge to the Altmer and she ofcourse writes it off as nonsensical Nordic Superstition. However she is further confused and baffled each time the Nord indeed finds treasures after finding a random fox. She absolutely can't wrap her head around it but the Nord just attributes the phenomenon to Shor.
I love that :) emergent gameplay becomes a story in itself!
This is my first time stumbacross your channel and I’m so glad I did. Your voice is beautiful and soothing - I could listen to you read Apple’s TOS and not get bored.
Much appreciated, thank you! It’s nice to be told 🙂↕️🙂
43:00 This story really got me. When you mentioned the disembodied voices saying "what's that? who's there?", I got actual goosebumps
Yeah it seemed proper spooky, especially when acting it out! Or, recreating it I mean!
Bro Skyrim is so timeless we are still watching and making videos on it years after release
100%. I’d argue the same for pretty much all the other Fallouts and Elder Scrolls games too.
Everyone knows about the rabbit that "haunts" the mammoth graveyard just outside the rear entrance to Bleak Falls Barrow. It's uniquely bound to that location, and has been interpreted as an Easter egg hearkening back to the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I used to seek out and kill this particular rabbit deliberately after finishing BFB; after going through that dungeon hundreds of times, I guess I got a little ritualistic about it. So, anyway, this one time, I'm hunting it down, only to come upon its already-dead remains lying adjacent to one of the mammoth skulls. It took me forever, as it was nearly hidden under a tusk. I felt a little disappointed, like you do when any routine is disrupted, wondering if I'd killed it on an earlier pass by the area while heading to the Lady Stone. I've never seen any other predator kill that particular rabbit, though I'd not watched for such either -- it had just always been there when I was. I started heading back to Riverwood, and passed by "Wolf Rock" (not named, but y'know where I mean). There, I found another rabbit corpse. I went up into the woods to see if the wolves had re-popped, but the bodies of the ones I'd killed earlier were still there, and there was no howling or barking when I stopped to listen. It was still just a mildly curious thing. The "killer rabbit' aside, I'd never either deliberately hunted nor specifically avoided the game's rabbits, and wasn't paying it much mind.
I went through Riverwood, and crossed the bridge. On a whim, I looked for the lone wolf that usually confronts one at the start of the path to BFB; I'd killed it already, but was casually curious. Its body was gone, and there was no live wolf there. I turned around, and continued down the road toward Whiterun. I reached the point where the wolf pack "ambushes" you, and killed them. I continued down the path, and after the dog-leg turn (where the path abruptly turns away from, then back toward Whiterun) I heard the sound of a rabbit being killed. There was no growling or snarling, just the rabbit's death-sound. It piqued my interest, so I left the path and entered the narrow strip of woodland at the top of the low cliff just behind Honningbrew (sp) Meadery. There, I found the body of the deceased rabbit, but saw no wolf or other predator. There were no hostile animal sounds, but -- as I approached the road in front of HM -- a passing Whiterun Guard went super-briefly on alert, that jerky interrupted animation where they start to draw their sword then, suddenly, aren't drawing it anymore, as the alert status had changed too quickly.
For as long as I ran that playthrough, every rabbit I encountered was already dead, either in advance or dying as I approached. I never actually saw a live rabbit. It was more a curious phenomenon than honestly spooky; I've told it up here a bit, but the main thrust -- the dead rabbits -- absolutely went down as I've described.
It's getting hard for me to respond to comments properly now cos there's so many, but I LOVED reading this :) thank you. Love the stories I'm seeing.
@@shadesofslay Thank you! I've got more. I don't want to spam you here, but I'll look for an appropriate forum to share them in.
@@simontheblind8417 feel free to share here! I love reading these stories and I’m sure others do too!
@@shadesofslay "Lund's Hut" is a small, isolated homestead in western Whiterun Hold. With the Creation Club/Anniversary Edition, it's the location where you find the silver armor, once you've started the associated "questline." This is a favorite suit of armor for my heavy-armor playthroughs, early to mid-game, and I usually acquire it. Prior to the incident in question, I'd begun a new two-handed warrior playthrough, and was once again off to LH to acquire the armor set.
When I first arrived, I didn't notice anything amiss outside of the hut. Upon entering, however, Lund's body was not in his bed, where it always had been before. I didn't see the body anywhere, but I knew immediately what had happened, broadly: there was that tell-tale, staccato "thump-thump-thump" sound of a corpse stuck in the environment. However, when I checked under his body (I'm not above noclipping to resolve a glitch) I didn't see him.
Also in the hut were Lund's skeevers. For those unfamiliar, Lund is a man who is only found dead by the player, having apparently decided to try and keep multiple skeevers in his house at some time before your arrival. This went predictably badly for him. The skeevers are, normally, immediately hostile to the player upon entering, as skeevers usually are. This time, while the skeevers acted hostile, and registered on my compass as enemies, they didn't attack me. Instead, they milled about in a corner of the hut, opposite Lund's strangely deserted bed. Nor were they alone: after I dispatched them, I found the source of the thumping noise, that being Lund's body under the floorboards. The skeevers had been clustered over it. One of his hands was clipping through the floor. I tried noclipping and dragging his body, a solution I've had work *and* had not work each on multiple other occasions. This time was one of the latter, but disabling/enabling Lund's body brought it back up onto the floor. At this point, I was more annoyed than anythiing; the playthrough had started off well, and this seemed ominously portentious of a subsequently glitchy run. Hoping for the best, and remaining in that odd sort of quasi-in-character state where I kinda act like my character but also treat it like a video game (kill everything, loot corpses, etc.) I sent Lund to Sovngarde with a double-barreled blast of firebolt. It seemed fitting. The skeevers did not get the same treatment, as they aren't worthy of Viking funerals.
I left Lund's home, resplendant in my new silver armor, and dispatched the treasure-seeker types whose encounter concludes the armor's quest. While looting, I realized that I couldn't find their leader's body. I was annoyed, but I frequently lose track of bodies, so I simply continued on with the game. Now, I'm not usually a survival player, but I do usually make a half-hearted attempt to hold myself to a looser set of related standards: I eat regularly, sleep, and avoid fast travel much of the time, and this occasion wasn't an exception. I began walking back to Whiterun proper. As I went, I ran into bandits twice, killing each of them on both occasions. I also encountered the revelers, and the noble and his wife who seem to cross every inch of Skyrim trying to reach Vitoria's wedding in Solitude (sorry for the spelling; I'm awful with the names, even after thousands of hours). I also passed a guard on patrol, feeling as I did so that hewas slightly out of place, being almost dead-center in the plains west of the city of Whiterun.
When I reached Whiterun, I saw Uthgert (sp) the Unbroken leaving the area, heading in the direction from which I had come. I thought that was strange, and it also occurred to me that everyone else I'd encountered on my way to Whiterun -- even the revelers, who are normally stationary -- was going the same way. The bandits hadn't attacked me from their usual positions, and I'd met everyone else coming toward me from the direction of the city of Whiterun.
I waanted to browse the Khajiit caravan's merchandise, so I stayed outside the city for a bit. As I did, I noticed the stable master heading out in the same direction Uthgert had gone, taking the road that passes by the Western Watchtower and heading west. Shortly thereafter, Jenassa left the city, following the same road. It wasn't an exodus by any means, but several more NPC's followed in their wake: Sadia, whose quest I had yet to initiate, Ysolde, who I'd already acquired the mammoth tusk for, and Adrianna, for whom I'd delivered Balgruuf's sword to her father already. I tried talking to everyone. Though I had yet to interact with some of them by way of raising my standing with them, they all used the friendly "you helped me in the past" dialogue. Ysolde spoke to me as though we were married; on this playthrough, I hadn't married anybody. They all seemed very happy, on the whole.
I went about my business. I was feeling increasingly disappointed with the thought that I'd have to restart this playthrough; it had otherwise gone well, but things now seemed to be a buggy mess. None of those departed NPC's had returned. I did what I could in the city, then left. I'd been going to head towards the Rift to acquire the Chrysamere CC addon, but I decided to go back the way I had come first. Along the way, I met nobody, aside from monsters and wildlife. THere were no human/elven NPC's to be found. Bandit lhaunts and the like were empty, and there were no patrols.
The exterior of Lunds hut seemed normal enough. The bodies I had managed to loot were gone, but that wasn't unusual. When I re-entered the hut, though, I found myself in an extraordinarily chaotic scene. Every NPC I'd seen heading toward the hut was there, inside, packed into the room. There were so many that they were clipping into each other, the furniture, and the walls. THere were NPC's that I hadn't actually witnessed heading there, presumably because they'd come from other directions than Whiterun. And, there was a frenzied thump-thump-thumping sound. When I noclipped down through the floor, I found all of the missing dead bodies beneath it, as near as possible to where I'd initially found him.
I continued that playthrough for a while. I moved my "base of operations" to Solitude. For the rest of that run, none of the NPC's in Lund's Hut left. They stimply stood there. THey didn't respond to being bumped or jostled, and didn't give random greetings or deliver any other proximity-based lines. If I engaged them in conversation, they would react with the warmest possible disposition, including lover/spouse lines if they were marriageable. The conversation would then immediately end, without giving me a chance to respond. After I crossed the map a few times, the slow migration of seemingly random people to Lund's hut stopped. However, every time I couldn't find a body I'd just dropped, for the remainder of that playthrough, there was a roughly 50/50 chance that I'd find it under the floor at Lund's home, the remainder presumably accounted for by the number of bodies I miss under normal circumstances.
@@simontheblind8417 Don't apologise for spelling mistakes when sharing such detailed stories! I absolutely love this one. I'd love to recreate it! But it may be a bit of a challenge. The image of all those NPCs compressed into that space is highly amusing. Thanks for sharing another incredibly detailed report!
I remember that a long time ago, i was playing necromancer with the dead thrall spell, so i reanimated a bandit chief, when i fast travelled away, the reanimated bandit chief became a "Blackblood Marauder".
I think the ring @ 21:50 comes from the Ring Of Burden in Oblivion lol
Love it
That's what I think it is
I always thought it was just a reference to the ring but they couldn't exactly make sadako in the well
I’ve ran into the Headless Horseman once after playing this game for close to 8-10 years on a constant, semi-constant rate. It was in 2011 when I was still a kid and discovering this world, it was magical and is a wonderful memory
And I’ve only come across a pack of Werewolves 3-5 times, those were always creepy and exhilarating experiences
The scarcity of it adds to the value eh!
Here's a fun one, one time I tried to use the grindstone when Adrianne Avenicci was on it and she just straight up died. The guards didn't become aggressive but passengers noted her body as they walked by.
Just another day at the office to the NPCs I suppose, with all the chaos in Skyrim!
I have my own Skyrim ghost story. On my first play through of Skyrim I completed the Companion's questline. During one of the quests a Companion leader named Skjor is scripted to die. I completed the questline and a few in game months went by before I went back Jorrvaskr. When I walked in, Skjor was standing there, alive and well, like nothing had ever happened. Spooky stuff.
I'm not long from replying to another commenter who shared a very similar story!
Fox is literally a huge coincidence that it leads you to valuable places. It was not intentionally coded to do that.
Yeah! I absolutely love that sort of thing. It's funny cos while recording the fox led me right to that point of interest.
@shadesofslay You could tie via headcanon that this references foxes in many cultures symbolizing or representing cunny and mischief as the fox in Skyrim can either lead you to a harmless point of interest or to bandits or something worse.
I love foxes. They have the sass and personality of a cat with the energy and quirkiness of a dog.
@@ajflink I'm gonna add this to my own headcanon!
You don't have to head cannon it lol cuz in skyrim the Nords represent the god Shor as a fox, if I remember right that was one of the reasons people believed it was true until that one guy figured it out 😂.
Also I believe this theory is also in ESO as I was told by a player once to follow foxes 😂but idk he prolly was trying to mess with a noob😂
I could gladly watch these lore videos about Skyrim for an hour and stay engaged with no complaints ! Plz keep it up :)
Thank you for the kind words - I really appreciate that :) and - I will do my best!
I have been playing Skyrim since 2011 and am just now learning of the gold ring in the well.
A few people have said the same in the comments!
So many of these happened to me in the early days of the game! I swore I saw the statues move a few times. I saw strange cultish NPC gatherings where I couldn’t even get a dialogue tree to show up when I tried talking to the NPCs. I had the Throw Voice shout break and start taunting randomly. I had a rabbit at the base of the Bleak Falls Barrow tower aggro on me (it chased me and had a red dot, but couldn’t actually fight). I had two clones of Letrush attack me in the Bee and Barb after killing the original (I betrayed him for the horse and fast travelled back after running away a bit). I even had dead Lydia show up at my wedding.
I told my siblings all of this, and we spent hours upon hours trying to figure out the mysteries. I was in college at the time but it felt like looking for Mew under the truck all over again.
Thank you so much for this list, I’m definitely checking out the rest of your content. Cheers!
This is probably the weirdest thing I've had happen to me with the original version of skyrim. I had modded Skyrim via the steam workshop with a ton of mods and uninstalled a couple of them I was no longer using/needed; This was a horrible mistake as the game became a nightmare realm with the sky going from night to day rapidly and I was being chased and hunted down by men saying "I'm sorry!", disappearing like they were brought back to life with that resurrection spell. Everything was just glitched. I uninstalled all the mods and did a fresh reinstall of the game; However nothing ever felt right again, things were still oddly glitchy in small little ways, things just not acting right. This has continued even recently as when I tried playing it again in 2020, those odd quirks were still there.
That really does sound nightmarish! Are you still playing on the same computer?
"things were still oddly glitchy in small little ways, things just not acting right"
to be fair that's skyrim at baseline
@@ltcaphide it’s why we love it
@@shadesofslay Yup. I'm tempted to check it again to see if it's still acting like that, though I fear what I might unleash as a result, lol.
@@ltcaphide In this case it's more like reality is barely holding itself together and is on the brink of just blinking out. It's hard to describe.
This video has actually reminded me what made me stop a playthrough. Lydia and I had just barely survived a dungeon and were out of healing items. I didn’t have any restoration magic. We were bruised and burned when bandits intercepted us. Lydia saw them before I did and when she went to run ahead she was mown down by several arrows to the chest. But when I got back to breezeholm there she was standing by the hearth, wound textures and arrows still across her body.
I can imagine that would be a tad immersion breaking
You're very soothing to listen to!
I wish I could disconnect a bit more, these honestly just have me going "ah, yeah, that's the Bethesda spaghetti code right there," haha
But it's fun, I like this, it's harmless. I want to hear all sorts of silly creepy things about Skyrim
This video definitely inspired me to post my weird stories to Reddit, some of these I myself have encountered, like the bone rattles and breathing. I also have some unique ones that seemingly nobody relates to. Playing the game often results in a lot of these glitches.
Glad to inspire :) maybe I'll come across some and share them in the future... keep an eye out!
Great videos dude I had no idea that ring was there and I’ve been playing since 2013 !!! I love Skyrim
Thank you! And - there ye go - there's always something new to find out eh!
Im in hospital and i listened to this last night to help me fall asleep. Your voice is so relaxing
I'm glad it helped you - I hope you feel better
@@shadesofslayi do, thank you. Im out of hospital now and much better
@@Prongsie1999 Brilliant, I'm glad to hear it!
These videos are so well made. Love them
Thank you, really appreciate that :)
I love your videos man, very unique and well done with sound effects and a soothing voice.
Can't wait to see more!
Thank you! Morrowind one coming soon ;)
The Skeleton is pretty well known to be hinted as the casualty of Uthgerd the Unbroken. Not the Jarl
I thought this was going to be a video of "oh, here's a list of canonical urban legends within the world of skyrim, like the Pale Lady" but NO this is so much better, i live for obscure video game lore and trivia and i love the concept of a digital campfire (shame i was too young when skyrim first came out to be on those types of forums in the moment, but that's what videos like this are for!)
I’d imagine the reason so many apooky happenings surround Riverwood and Whiterun is the same reason so many spooky happenings surround Lydia-all companions and all towns are loaded with crazy glitches, but those are the companion and towns that a vast majority of players have encountered.
All kinds of fun glitches happened to me during my no-dragons playthrough. I liked to push the limits of the game bending around the lack of the iconic dragons, and while most of it was stumbling across word walls and undefended chests, there were times when the game couldn't quite figure out what to do with some npcs and even quests. It was great fun.
Great work man. I haven't heard of a lot of these, must taken sometime to find these.
It’s one of my FAVOURITE things, to dig around for bizarre and obscure stories! And thank you 🙂
Bro caught his statue demon lacking
Yes! Even more to watch!
As a PC player who regularly uses console commands, all these things seem so mundane and easy to explain away. The way they are framed however brings them to life and makes me remember being a kid with a vivid imagination and a poor undertanding of programming. Great stuff - I love the idea of code being somehow haunted, or at the very least having the programmers leave a ghostly mark themselves in the form of easter eggs or deliberate glitches.
Yes, you get it totally! It's fun to allow ourselves to imagine...
When I first installed the Hearthfire DLC, I had a glitch with Lakeview Manor where any time I tried to load my save and leave the house, a random enemy would be directly outside my door and kill me. It wasn't just an increase of area spawn, it was any enemy in the entire game, anything from a skeever to various dragon priests would spawn and one hit me. My spouse would also come out and die immediately and my children would disappear from the game entirely even if I managed to go back inside before being hit (which would reset with a different spawn if I opened the door again). I lived in a horrific groundhog day loop of watching my family die every single day before being ragdolled to space
Lmfao you had to break the loop
This one had me in stitches!
I recently played through three different playthroughs of Skyrim on PS5 and I encountered quite a large number of weird events, some notable ones were guards falling from the sky in major cities in the same few places, elderly npcs randomly tripping and dying, Stormcloak soldiers spawning in Bloodchill Cavern and then running out into the wilderness only to disappear after a little while, Getting a letter from inheritance from one of the minor hold Jarls (a different one in each playthrough) telling me about the death of an Ash Zombie when doing the Ghosts of the Tribunal creation, Lydia running off into the woods only to be seen again much much later, mutated nords on Solsthiem (werebears that never transformed fully into werebears and instead became contorted nord models), the most powerful bandit in history who rather than unsheathe his greatsword started hitting me with nothing, Hagraven corpses getting up and walking in place (including the headless ones), Sanguine deciding to leave his plane of Oblivion and kill everything in sight, Barbas being reunited with Clavicus Vile without me doing the quest, and a series of events around Dushnikh Yal where I fought a bunch of vampires that later got back up and started walking around passively until I killed them again, then the next time I visited all the npcs stopped talking and performing their routines just going "huh" or screaming (both fear screams and battle cries) when I got near them, then way later on the entire area turned into a bizarre void zone where trying to walk towards the stronghold would consistently crash the game.
Sounds like you've been playing the Bizarro world version of Skyrim - I could do a whole video alone on that list of occurrences!
Can't wait for the Morrowind urban legends lots mysteries in that one.
I'm really excited to share that one :)
@@shadesofslay Any eta on that one because I'm pretty excited for it
@ I would say within the next couple months or something like that! Maybe sooner. With Christmas and new year coming up it kinda slows things up a little!
One of my favorite things about how common weird and insane glitches are in Skyrim is the fact that 1 it's honestly believable these weird things could happen, and 2 the fact that random glitches are so common the phrase "Just Skyrim being Skyrim" exists.
Aaaaaaaabsolutely. And with this mindset, I reckon folk can truly suspend disbelief and enjoy listening to the stories!
Ayeee another banger! So atmospheric, especially with the music! 🤍🏰
Thank you 🙌
The headless horseman is such an interesting thing because the first time I ever played Skyrim I saw him just outside Whiterun, and in the hundreds of hours since I have never seen him again
Amazing that you saw him the first time!!
I've had nocs agro onto non existent enemies. It's happened to me in fallout as well. It's really just an annoying bug.
I've had dead NPCs show up randomly before as well. Also happened in fallout New Vegas were sometimes dead bodies would duplicate.
The Sabrecat Incident sounds like the Quirk of certain Enemy NPCs chasing the Player through the Fast-Travel/Cell Change.
In Oblivion, I once got attacked by a Lich outside the Imperial Prison, who had chased me all the Way from a previous Dungeon, to the Imperial City (Where I got stopped right there for violating the Law). The Timeskip allowed them to spawn inside the City Walls.
No doubt something like that can happen in Skyrim aswell.
The stalking Lich!
9:16 Bethesda games get ghosts when you overplay them. I swear to god. Fallout 4 was my example, where it literally bricked my entire console. I don’t even remember what the broken gameplay I was experiencing at the time. Towards the end, it was all at least a little broken. More so than standard fallout 4. Also, for context, I don't trust console mods and never play with them. They're too unstable in my experience, and I just generally don't like them.
I have my own story of Lydia to share. Back in the day, I'd often play Skyrim alongside my childhood friend, handing over control of the Dragonborn every so often as we explored Tamriel together. Our Lydia seemingly perished very early into our journey, being sent to the stratosphere by a giant west of Whiterun. However, we never found her body (much to our chagrin as we wanted to recover the loot we had her hauling). Much later on, my friend took us to the Temple of Mara in Riften for our marriage to Ysolda. After the ceremony concluded and my friend turned to sprint out the door, i saw her. Lydia was there, sitting amongst the pews. I blurted out something like "Wait look there's Lydia!" But my friend either didn't believe me or didn't care as he rushed us off to the next adventure. That particular Dragonborn never saw Lydia again, and to this day I wonder whether the character in the pews was just an NPC I had mistaken for our long lost Lydia (and her loot) or if one of Skyrim's many bugs had forever seared itself into my consciousness.
Thanks so much for sharing this story - love that you shared a playthrough - also love that you used the word 'chagrin' (I really adore that word)! Well - I believe you saw Lydia - it lines up with lots of other accounts about her appearing at weddings after vanishing!
I was playing less than a week ago and I had that same Louie Letrush bug with Gabriella in the Dark Brotherhood. She had a clone right outside the Sanctuary entrance. Astrid was also outside and sneaking with her dagger out really slowly moving up against the clone, and I thought she might sneak attack her but she never did (I'm not even sure if skyrim npc's sneak attack at all). I couldn't hurt her either. I went in the Sanctuary and when I came back out the clone was gone and Astrid was on her way up to Lake Ilinalta for no reason.
I actually ended up abandoning that save because it was new and Astrid refused to go back to the Sanctuary, and when I console commanded her back she just slowly snuck back to Lake Ilinalta. That's the risk you take when you mod your game straight to hell 🤷
Mods are risky but as I always say, mods are life :)
I remember playing skyrim not long after release as a kid and coming across the headless horseman in my first blind playthrough, none of my friends believed me and it was absolutely infuriating.
Ah the old "that could never happen" thing eh! Bet you felt vindicated when it was proven to be true!
I think I actually encountered that strange breathing mentioned at 38:00. It happened around Riften. It was specifically the bear sound effects, they played at max volume regardless of how far away the bear was and in wasn't affected by the in-game sliders. For a couple of hours anytime a bear was loaded in, I would hear their awkwardly lound breathing as if they were right new to my character.
Nothing worse than invisible heavy breathing nearby… imagine that in real life!
Same! It specifically started as I was between the blacksmith and meadery. I was actually going to go into the meadery when suddenly I just heard a bear. I'm looking around but no one is reacting to a bear, and there was obviously no bear in sight.. It stopped when I went into the meadery.
@@Glitchdful Almost like a bear acting like Predator with the stealth field on
I'm glad I found your channel, its been really nice listening this series and I'm looking forward to the Morrowind one if you are planning on doing that.
Watching this also was very ammusing to me as my viewpoint of the things that happen to me in game are never on the creepy or "paranormal" side for a lack of a better word. I always chalk it up to the game being this whimsical and lovely glitchy mess. I had similar situations to what you described in some of these instances like sounds of certain enemies or things where they are not supposed to be (like the noise a skeleton makes randomly in a forest without there being one) or weird breathing noises in my cellar in lakeview manor which sounded like the noise skeever make but there was nothing there.
Some of the funnier ones escape my memory right now, but one I had is whenever I fast traveled a dragon skeleton traveled with me and appeared wherever I went. Be it inside a city, to a cave, a village, it would follow everywhere. But again I never really thought it was creepy or unnatural, to me it was just skyrim being skyrim. A fun, goofy and glitchy game with a special place in our hearts.
Thank you for the content, am definetly excited for more!
I really appreciate this, thank you! It sounds like you see the charm of the games over and above the creepy or weird side, which is kind of the same as me... but I love leaning into those areas for the campfire storytelling vibe!
28:45 I've had this happen a quite often with mods, usually caused by an npc dying from a DOT effect while paralyzed, though a few times ive had it happen on load/reload of a cell, in that case most likely the flag that sets the ragdoll didn't get set so they just stand up, but with their AI turned off so they dont do anything
whether or not these relate to the same bug, i dont know
Creepy as anything though, isn't it!
So it’s kinda the inverse of the mannequin glitch in which they’re *never* supposed to be alive but they’re basically just NPCs without the AI activated so the game sometimes forgets they’re not supposed to be *actual* NPCs whereas here it’s actual NPCs being frozen, almost like they’ve been taxidermied in action poses.
One of my favourite glitches that is odd is I was travelling a road near Solitude on Xbox 360 and a dragon appeared, a 2nd dragon appeared and the first just dropped dead, gave me the soul and everything, a couple of years later on PS4 in the same area the same thing happened
The VR rendering bug is pretty much the definition of the Buddhist concept of Indra's net from the Avatamsaka Sutra
Oh man I love this. That makes me think crazy thoughts like maybe that concept was them actually stepping outside of our OWN simulation… cos how could they have known what virtual reality in a simulated world would look like??
I feel like this is a kind of above, so below situation. The most inner and outer levels of the simulation are the same with infinite levels of recursion in between @@shadesofslay
@@maljakotilo love this sorts thing honestly. I’m gonna do a deep dive reading of these concepts tonight.
That's what I was thinking - maybe a glitchy game is the way to find the cracks in our own simulated reality? Like, simulating random glitches actually glitches the whole universe...
that dragon corpse that spawns endlessly has happened to me before i think the game is trying to give u the soul of the dragon but for some reason is still alive
Could well be!
I had more or less the exact same Letrush glitch during my very first playthrough, on the PS3. It started out with two Letrushes hanging out by the stables, talking and moving in unison. Both were unkillable and persistent across loading screens and reboots ... trust me, I tried killing one or both of them many times. It was really messing with my oh-so-precious "sense of immersion," after all.
If I remember correctly, the Letrushes eventually multiplied further, though I couldn't determine what triggered this behavior. A third duplicate joined them many gameplay hours later, and by the time I was done with the save file in question (not because I had beaten it, but because it had become utterly unplayable due to the infamous "rimlag" stuttering and freezing issued), there were four Letrushes.
I seem to remember returning to the stables with the Wabbajack to see if that could somehow circumvent their immortality, and finding that turning them into chickens or whatnot did, in fact, seem to make them killable again, ...but this last part might be a false memory, or a conflation with a different bug on a different playthrough.
Never had him pop up anywhere else. Just clone himself right there at the stables.
What IS it with Letrush and basically cloning himself to take over the province!?
I've been playing Skyrim since launch day. I've seen and experienced some of the stuff you covered in this video. And some stuff not covered. Some spooky stuff, some stuff that's just hilarious. But my favourite weird moment was seeing the headless horseman for the first time. I was wandering the road away from Riften. This was about 3 months after launch, so back in the days when the glitches were a regular occurrence. The NPC hadn't rendered in game properly, so all I had was the horseman from the waste down and the ghost of the horse chasing me along the road for about ten minutes. I went onto forums immediately after getting back to Whiterun. And read about other headless horseman encounters, and knowing Skyrim to be glitch ridden, I just assumed it to be the headless horseman. I've seen the headless horseman 9 other times since then. And I've read that others have experienced the glitchy headless horseman. With some only ever seeing the rider and not the horse.
Great video dude, watched all your other Bethesda game urban legends videos. This one made me sub.
Hell yeah love your videos man.
I appreciate it! Hope you enjoyed it :)
I come across the disembodied sound of skeevers, mammoths and saber cats breathing in the wilds of Skyrim so often that I just chock it up to audio glitch.