Welcome this Scary Story podcast. In today's story, your family is falling apart
and the reasons are something that could never be explained. My name is Edmond,
and here it's a scary story. It was in the middle of the
night in November, my daughter's birthday, when I was woken up a scream
from down the hallway. The stuff of nightmares, right well, a lot
of parenting is. It was Ellie, probably having another nightmare. Laura didn't
even budge this time. Whether she was awake or not didn't matter. It
was my turn to check up on her. All groggy, I got up
and opened up the door, wondering how bad of a father I would be
if I just stopped by the bathroom now before heading to her room. Going
straight there would mean that I would have to wait those twenty minutes or so
up with her again for the third time this week. I took a deep
breath and walked over to her room. I could see the beam of the
flashlight from underneath the door. I stepped inside to the bright light of it
shining against my eyes, and another short scream that startled me. When she
moved it away, I could see that she was leaning against the wall by
the head of her bed, a blanket covering her up to her chin to
tear again. She screamed, throwing her blanket to the side and unscrambling her
legs to run toward me. When she finally managed to get off the bed,
I was already halfway to her, so I picked her up and put
her back on top of her tangled sheets. Poor Ellie, I could tell
she was terrified, but we had to do something about these nightmares once and
for all. But as always, I asked her what the matter was.
It had happened before, and I can't quite explain where she would have gotten
a story like that at such a young age, but she said that she
was trying to get to sleep. Was woken up by the floorboards creaking by
her bed. She opened her eyes slowly and was relieved to see her mom
walking over to the closet and standing by it. Curiously. Ellie looked over
to her mom, pretending to be asleep because she didn't want to be in
trouble for staying up so late, But after about a minute she noticed that
her mom hadn't moved. She was just standing there, staring at the closet
doors. Ellie pretended to wake up. She lowered down her blanket and called
out to her mom. But even with just barely in a flight coming in
through the window, she could tell that it was in her mom's face looking
back at her, her mouth open wide, her face completely destroyed. When
Ellie screamed, a thing simply vanished into thin air. No child should ever
describe the things she did. It still makes me sick to my stomach.
The way she explained everything, that part of her face was hanging off to
the side. The smell, she said, a thing she had never smelled
before, but described it similar to the time when we were fixing the toilet
at her old place. Well, there's a creepy image, for sure.
I was always a fan of horror movies, and I'm used to pretty gory
imagery, but this one made my blood run cold. Still. I knew
that horror was fun because it wasn't real, and she, of course had
imagined the whole thing. That's when he got her a flashlight to take to
her bedroom, and every night she would check the batteries of it. I
knew that no ghosts were going to hide in the closet, no hands were
going to come up crawling up the bed. No, no one put a
curse on the house to summon a demon to possess. You just couldn't and
wouldn't happen. And of course Zelly had sat around the living room to see
parts of those movies, with me sometimes falling asleep right over the screams and
flashing images of witches and creatures crawling out of haunted forest. Laura always warned
me that this would happen, but it wasn't the movie's fault. There were
just movies, and Ellie knew that. Plus Laura always found a way to
make me feel guilty for doing things that I liked, sometimes going the extra
mile to annoy me. We had been arguing for some time, mostly about
little things that added up fairly quickly, five good years of marriage quickly rotting
away in the span of several months. We thought of a separation that was
bound to happen, but neither of us wanted to make the first move toward
it. It seems like she always won these types of arguments, remaining still
until I moved, Just like this with Ellie's night terrors in recent weeks,
she had been getting up soon after I would fall asleep. She would turn
off the TV something that she knew that I I needed to fall asleep.
She would grab her blanket and pillow and go sleep in the living room at
the other end of the hallway. That was our thing now, pretending that
everything was all right for Ellie until we would fall asleep. Sadly, reality
has a way of seeping itself out, no matter how much you try to
hold it in. I would lie there awake for hours, sometimes wondering where
it all went wrong, wondering when we changed. Two nights after that,
I woke up again at the scream coming from Ellie's room. I sighed and
looked over at Laura, lying there completely still waiting for me to get up
again. There was no point in talking, not at that time anyway,
so I got up, dragging my feet, and ever so slowly, I
walked over to the door stepped out into the hallway. This time I was
going to go to the bathroom first. Ellie had stopped screaming by this point
on the light to the hallway, used the bathroom, and came back out
quickly before walking to Ellie's room a little bit faster. Now the door was
cracked open I got it. You can go back to sleep, Laura said,
in a stern voice. You would assume that she would be talking to
Ellie with that tone, but no, she was talking to me. Try
and distant, Ellie, you are right, I asked, completely ignoring Laura.
Ellie's eyes opened up wide. I saw her again. She said,
about to get out of bed and start walking toward me. Laura held her
back and looked at me dead in the eye. Go back to sleep.
Sleep. I'll take care of this too too. There was something in the
tone of her voice that I didn't like ever since we started having problems.
Indifference, I think, is the word saying things without realizing that they hurt.
Something I knew I would never admit to her. Ellie looked over at
me until I turned around and stepped out of the door frame and flicked off
the light to the hallway. I could hear Laura whispering to Ellie. For
the rest of that night, Laura stayed out, probably sleeping in the living
room or with Ellie a bit of a relief. To be honest, I
could turn on the TV if I wanted to. It wouldn't annoy anybody,
but I decided against it, even though I couldn't sleep the whole night.
It was absurd to me that Laura would believe things the neighbors talked about,
most of them old and already losing it. By that point, ghost stories,
hauntings in their homes, and strange noises had been heard apparently for decades.
Laura's argument was at the cemetery behind the alley by the house made her
uncomfortable. When she was helping with the Christmas light, she spotted tombstones,
something that the high walls wouldn't let you normally see. But who goes up
on the roof anyway? We couldn't see them from the window. The area
was quiet all day and night. But I think there was more to that.
A couple of my close friends I spoke to about these problems told me
that it might have been more about the way we got the home, something
Laura never felt a part of. The previous owners did a direct deal with
me, owner to owner. They had purchased a home recently too, but
had to move due to one of them moving out of state for work,
and just over a week we had most of the paperwork done. We were
just waiting for the money to be transferred to them. It's true Laura had
practically no say in it. I could understand that, but if we really
wanted to, we could sell again turn a profit. The place was a
steel compared to the houses in the surrounding areas. Thanks to these stories from
the neighbors, the previous owners knew that, which is why they had such
a tough time selling. Laura rarely talked to me about it, although when
I look back now, I don't think I was ever open to it,
but it was bound to happen eventually. Not sure when, but she changed.
I lost her. Her eyes would sometimes be aimed at mind, but
I could tell that she wasn't looking at me. She became quiet, distant,
and would spend an abnormal amount of time sitting on the couch by the
living room, no phone in hand, the TV shut off. At times,
I would come back home from work and she would be standing by the
window, been there for god knows how long, and then she would go
back to the couch. She found the time to do things around the house,
though everything was tidy, organized and dead. Conversations were one sided,
but I didn't realize it back then. It wasn't like I wanted to revive
them anyway. I think that was part of the problem. The rest of
the story is coming up right after this, stay with me. A few
days later, I was woken up by a scream in the middle of the
night. Once more, I opened up my eyes wide and stared at the
ceiling for a bit. I took a deep breath while looking over at Laura,
her dark hair now all over the place. The screams got louder.
Of course, Laura had to hear it, and yet she wouldn't budge.
It was that level of indifference I was talking about, and it was with
everything she knew that I needed the television sounds in the background to fall asleep.
She said that I helped her too. At one point we would set
it on sleep mode to turn off after an hour, and at one point
she started getting up to turn it off while I was still trying to fall
asleep. Little things like that that turned into a large pile of and I
wasn't sure exactly when it happened. I of course think of this now,
but not back then. The level of hate I felt for her was hard
to define. I wanted to shake her awake and tell her that her daughter
was screaming that it was her responsibility too, that fixing everything was not going
to fall only on me. She had no ideas, never any new ones
about how to move our family forward. It was up to me to decide
on something and get criticized if I got it wrong or silence if I got
it right. It was just up to par just what I should be doing
anyway, No decisions, zero from her. How could you be wrong that
way? I remember the time when she told me in front of Ellie that
the strange things around the house were my fault, telling her about the cemetery
just behind the house. Why would she scare our daughter with that? Wasn't
it just adding to her night terrors. At one point, Laura was afraid
of staying in the house, talking about a woman that roamed around it,
that she would hear her own voice calling her name, and at other times
it would call mine. I tried to piece a story together for a while,
when I realized that the whole thing was just a waste of time.
I had never seen anything, and the cemetery behind the house was well kept,
looking more like a park. But I didn't know how serious it could
get, and I don't mean the ghost stuff, but Laura's state of mind.
She started talking to people online, communities on Facebook or whatever, of
people who were into this kind of thing, people with answers. Someone was
trying to communicate, she would say, back when Laura was somewhat normal,
an entity trying to find its way back, trying to find the light.
I held my mouth shut, quite literally when I came home one day to
see a group of women by the center table in the living room, flowers
and leaves directly in front of them, barely visible through the smoke and strong
smell of pine and seeds. The sands was spreading around the house. I
looked over at them, smiled awkwardly, and rushed to the bedroom. How
much was that thing costing her? And when were they going to leave?
She never asked me about that, She never brought it up in conversation.
We just ignored it, pretending everything was okay. Or the time when she
got this crazy group of people from the community center to come by with their
cameras in audio recorders, poking around her house, shouting at the walls in
attic space. The proof they showed me was hilarious. A fly or something
had gotten in front of the camera. Literally a four second clip of this
thing moving there, or how about this other thing of the wind moving the
curtain of the living room. A ghost? They said, that's proof.
And don't even get me started on the hissing sounds. The recorded and played
back that the phrase was saying, Teresa's back, Teresa's back. I couldn't
hear anything, but yet they said it was a whisper from something paranormal.
At least they never charged just anything. I don't think they did. If
anything, the only time I was doubtful and maybe ready to admit that there
was something there was when this little old woman visited the house. She wore
a flowery dress and was drinking tea at the kitchen table with Laura. When
I got home from work on a Friday night. I sat with Laura and
this woman for a couple of hours, talking about what we were going through.
Nothing ghostly or paranormal, but about how our marriage was at risk of
dying. Places sometimes take the energy out of you, she said, looking
directly at Laura. I never admitted it, but she was right about more
so the things she said. Laura was changing. She would stay up late
sometimes or get up very early, spending all of her time looking up things
about the neighborhood, talking to everyone about the house, hearing more and more
stories about how there were things around there, things that were haunting the entire
neighborhood, that our house was not the only one. Laura and I were
still talking somewhat normally when she learned about a certain type of entity, a
mimic. She called it a thing that would look and sound like her,
trying to get her to follow its instructions. It matched what she was talking
about, and I was certain that it was her telling Ellie about it.
That's what made these night terrors worse for her. A thing that looked like
Mom was going into her room at night. Oh my goodness, Ellie,
I whispered to myself. She had screamed again, and I rolled out of
bed, upset about everything, this time angry not at Ellie, but about
what I had let myself turn into. There wasn't anything at the house.
The waste of time and energy talking about these ghosts that were ruining my life.
I don't know how I would ever explained to a lawyer the reason for
our divorce. Ghosts broke us up. My wife sees ghosts and it bothered
me. So yeah, let's divide our assets evenly. Made no sense.
I looked over at Laura again, upset. I could never think properly when
I was angry, and this time I wanted to turn on the light and
set the TV at the loudest volume annoy her just the same. The whole
thing was over. It was decided already, and I was going to be
the one to make the first move. I looked at Laura on her side
of the bed. Once I got to the door and grabbed the doorknob as
hard as I could and swung it open. It was completely dark except for
the light coming from the street shining into the living room. My eyes were
all aready adjusted to the dark, thankfully, as I saw the switch on
the wall just three steps ahead. When I looked up at it, I
saw something move by the end of the hallway. Hey, I said,
rushing toward the switch and flicking on the light. I saw it turn the
corner and get into the living room. I rushed straight ahead, my heart
beating faster as I thought about what I would do to confront this intruder in
the house. I thought for an instant about the ghost. Laura had talked
about the thing in Ellie's bedroom. What if someone had been sneaking into the
house, some weirdo living in the attic, or something a velly sleepwalking of
some other person investigating the house late at night. Laura wouldn't tell me if
it was another one of her friends. We're just two strangers sharing a house
now, each with their own decisions, their own plans. I turned the
corner and saw the silhouette of the figure against the white sheets on the couch.
What it said it was Laura fixing the pillow. I took care of
it already, at least fine. If Laura was in the living room,
who was lying on the bed? I rushed back toward our bedroom and turned
on the light. The bed was empty. In the weeks that followed,
we placed the house up for sale, sold for much lower than I was
expecting, But I got so much more out of it. Laura and Ellie
only them in our new house now. Scary Story podcast is written and produced
by me Edwin Kovarubias. You can find out more about all of our shows
on TikTok and Instagram by finding our username Scary dot Fm. You can also
get in touch with me with my username Edwindcove. That's E. D w
I n coov. Scary Story podcast is also on YouTube now in case you
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even link to it in the description of this episode. Thank you very much
for listening, Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.