Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A worker had forgotten what it was like to
take the night shift, but he's about to discover why everyone hates it so
much. It's not for the reasons that you're thinking. My name is Edwin,
and here it's a Scary Story. It was eleven at night, two
more hours until my shifts started, and it didn't feel that way. I
had been texting with one of my co workers, Amanda, half the night,
complaining about Markman's Warehouse, the despised clothing store. We both hated and
work that. It's always kind of like that, isn't it With our co
workers. I've become friends. We always talk about work, even when we
don't want to. It's like a way for us to connect and bond complaining
about work. But we all had the reasons to do so. You see,
the place was owned by this man, Robert Markman, that had recently
passed away, and just our luck, he happened to die during a visit
to our store. I mean, he was pretty old, and it felt
like he was really pushing it by staying at work visiting his other businesses in
the area. At that age, the raisin some of us would call him,
and it probably felt bad for a little while for saying that. Pablo,
the security guard waited for us in the car when we came in the
week that the owner died. He's the one that told us, but he
also took out his phone and showed us how it happened. He was fixated
on an idea that it wasn't just a heart attack, at least not one
caused by only his age, but that he had seen something that quite literally
scared him to death, and he had the reasons to believe something like that.
Pablo was a big believer in ghosts and always had some type of video
or tweet to show us ghost caught on tape or whatever. I think that's
why he was so into his job. He got to look at the cameras
all day, but this time he was onto something. In the video,
you could clearly see the owner walking with one of his directors and the store
manager toward the warehouse. Mister Markmans points at something seeming kind of upset,
and the two women that were with him rush over and leave him standing there
for a little bit. He looks around and then looks briefly at the camera
and then stares directly toward the center of the store. He could tell that
he saw something that terrified him because he tried to run, but instead his
knees gave in and he dropped to the floor. The video has no audio,
but you could see him screaming, his face stretched in an unusual manner,
and then he tilts to the side and ends up sitting like that,
his hands curled up by his chest under his neck. He freezes up and
he just stays like that until the store manager comes back running. He just
finds him there completely still. She screams, and the director comes in,
and then two other people follow. From that day on, things started changing
around there. They started getting some new hires to work the night shift,
but no one would stick around long enough to be switched the daytime shift.
Of course, it was incredibly boring, but it was easy, and as
more and more people would come and go, Pablo started to notice a few
things. You see, he would get along with everyone, especially with him
being the only other person on site at night. They started talking with them
about previous co workers, leaving that he was trying to get to the bottom
of it. Not even the managers tried so hard, but Pablo was so
into mysteries and detectives and stuff like that that had fit them. He wanted
to figure it out, and I have to give him credit for that,
although some of the answers were hard to believe even for him. The person
before me on the night shift was this girl named Deborah, who had told
pretty much everyone that she wanted to get into sales, but was all right
with taking the night shift for now. Nobody liked it. I had enough
seniority that I could say no to taking it, but I really didn't mind
it. I probably should have kept my mouth shut about it, though,
because I was the one that took her spot. When she left, her
reasons were bizarre, and even though she seemed a little out there, I
don't know, maybe something about the way she'd look at you, everyone believed
her. Pablo once again showed us some footage on his cellphone of her running
out of the back storage area, right around where Robert Markman, the owner,
had died. You could see it. She looks off camera towards one
of the windows and towards the center of the store, and then in shock,
she tries to run away. She hits her knee on one of the
work tables. And keeps rushing towards the front of the store. The front
doors were locked by that time, but she used the emergency exit to get
out and set off the alarm. Deborah I had told Pablo that she didn't
quit, she was just suddenly off the schedule, so she stopped coming in.
She also told them that she regretted telling the management what she had seen
that night. Things had gotten tens around Markmans. Although it wasn't formally announced,
rumors had it that we couldn't talk about ghosts or anything of that paranormal
stuff around there. It's messing with employee morale. They said that after going
through a hard time keeping employees around, it was affecting everyone. If we
didn't stay quiet about it, we would all lose our jobs if it shuts
down. Pablo had several theories, and that's what we talked about that night
before work. When I showed up, I just started on the night shift
myself, and yeah, it was super easy. Had so many movies,
music, and podcasts loaded on my phone. It seemed like I was about
to take three twenty hour flights back to back. My job was to organize
a storage area and count items to receive the delivery from the trucks that would
start coming in between three and four in the morning, and also to work
on printing out price tags, labels, things like that. It was a
bunch of things that no one wanted to do, but they were super simple.
The only bad thing was a lack of sleep, obviously, but other
than that it was fine. Well except for the thing about the ghost,
or at least I thought it was a ghost. Being in a place where
someone had died so mysteriously was definitely going to be creepy. But I remember
hearing somewhere that people have probably died everywhere. Ever, thought about the streets
to drive, in the sidewalks you take to work. At one point a
car might have gone off the road, or someone might have taken out a
weapon, drive by, trees falling, I don't know lightning strikes. But
Pablo knew something that I didn't. You see, he had worked at Markman's
for a while, and he had met the owner several times. He knew
of some of his strange requests around the stores. He was very into keeping
a hierarchy going, for example, made everything slower, but he liked to
feel at the very top in charge. He didn't like being questioned even for
his odd orders. Pablo showed me the video again of the footage of Robert's
death. It was hard to see, both emotionally and quite literally, because
he recorded the security footage on his phone from the TV monitor. But again
we watched as Robert pointed to something, scolded the director and store manager,
and them rushing over to fix it. That's when he stands around for a
bit and again sees something by the center of the store, and then screams.
People aren't quitting because of the ghost of Robert, Pablo said quietly.
We were sitting in his old truck parked by the entrance of the delivery area
of the store. The rest of the shopping center was empty by now,
except for the security patrol car that did their rounds every half an hour or
so. Even before you came in, Man, people have been complaining about
something else. I waited for him to finish, and I didn't point this
out to him, but I noticed the hand holding his phone was beginning to
shake nervously. No one would be bringing this stuff up to anyone, you
know, Gil and Debbie. He was referring to the director and general manager.
No one could tell them anything either. They even went against me.
At one point, Pablo continued, I almost got fired because of it.
My alarm went off at that point I had two minutes to clock in.
I'll tell you about it. Man. You're gonna be at the back storage
area, right, Pablo asked, I'm still on the clock. I'll leave
at four, but i'll stop buy a little later after I do my other
rounds. I don't know why this guy had to ask. I mean,
he could see literally everything inside the store and warehouse to do the security cameras
well. I later found out that it wasn't exactly every corner of the place.
Some of these areas were off limits, and I think on that night
we found out why I didn't turn on any of my podcasts that night.
Usually there might go to when I'm by myself, but since I listened to
a lot of scary stories, I decided to hold off for a bit.
I had actually started working the night shift a few years before this. Right
there at Markman's. There was another coworker with me at the time, and
lots more to do since it closed a little later and open earlier than it
did now. But with theft and everything, they changed their hours. We
rarely had to step onto the sales floor during our night shifts. There was
almost nothing for us to do out there. Plus you were just setting off
the secondary alarms, the beeping alarms. Who would call them. They were
basically a soft beeping noise that sounded when a detected movement, I guess had
some slack between something small like headlights casting shadows in the store, or the
AC knocking something over and a window breaking or someone running across the floor,
which would set off the real alarm. Either way, that alarm had been
set that way for the longest time. When I first started, I didn't
want to risk it because it's what security would see, and then they would
report that to the owner, and he always had something to say, although
he wouldn't tell us directly. Debbie would normally do that. I remember one
time the AC wasn't working and I went in with basketball shorts and had to
explain myself, even though we had no uniform, and it was well within
store policy for us to do that. It's respect for the workplace, Debbie
said, I don't know how I stayed there for so long, And so
I got to work, getting used to the new roles by myself, everything
written down in this makeshift manual that other coworkers started years ago. They even
added their own notes to a book on things that we needed to do,
what was important, what to ignore, and how long things would normally take
to finish. There were several boxes to put the price tags on, so
I got started with that, slowly getting into the groove of things, and
suddenly I heard the beeping sounds from the secondary alarm. After a few seconds
it stopped. The phone started ringing from the desk behind me. It was
probably PABO. I walked over to it answered the call by pushing the blinking
button. That thing had been upgraded in over a decade. Hey man,
you were on the sales floor, no, I answered, I'm the only
one here, right, I asked him. Yeah, Okay, no worries,
you're good man. Don't worry. I'll tell you about it later.
Don't worry about it. He hung up abruptly. But that was one don't
worry too many. I think it was the way he said it. It
was disturbed, and so I kept labeling away for a couple of hours and
I finally got into it. So I started listening to my music, making
time pass a little bit faster. I took off my earphones to go back
to read the manual. I remembered that thing that made some notes on it
too at one point, and forgotten all about it. Working in the front
was a whole other world compared to this one. Part two of Nancy is
coming upward after this, stay with me. Every once in a while,
one of the shift leaders would leave a set, which was a few clothes,
all in the smallest sizes available, to be brought up near the door
and put on hangers so they would get unwrinkled overnight. I don't know if
it worked, but hey, that's what the note said. The clothes would
then get put up on the mannequins in the morning, and there was another
set, an individual one that would be in a different size. It was
very specific size fourteen pants, medium top, and usually had to search several
boxes to find the perfect unseam length of it. I knew exactly of the
mannequin they wanted it for, and everyone had at least two jokes about it.
Although we were all pretty much creeped out, nobody really found out why,
but for a while we had stopped getting the sets for some of the
mannequins only kept the larger one. I never questioned anything. It just felt
like there was no point to it. Plus, all the mannequins were creepy.
They weren't the usual ones you see nowadays. I feel like they've gotten
more stylish and even headless, handless and featless. But the owner was an
old school kind of guy, and his obsession were these ultra realistic things that
would scare even some of the customers. But there was one that even Pablo
remembers from back when he started that everyone called Nancy's, the one with the
specializing. The owner always wanted it front and center with the most recent arrivals,
and no one knows for sure, but the workers used to say that
the owner lost his wife or something and they felt bad for him overlooking his
creepy obsession with it. One of my co workers joked that they looked like
they would have made a good couple if he took off, like fifty years
from him. I wouldn't hear a lot of those things too, but I
never put much attention to them. I looked at the list and found the
set request, but it didn't have a date on it. One of them
was requesting a red top and the other a yellow one, so I had
to open the door carefully in order to not set off the beeping alarm to
glance at the mannequin, and I was able to see its dark hair tied
up in a ponytail, the head looking straight ahead and away from me.
For some reason, I felt a little bit better seeing that. But okay,
so she wants the yellow set to myself, taking a note of it
on the notebook they would leave for me. I finally found the set that
the shift leader wanted for the morning and set it aside. I was about
to continue with everything when my alarm went off again, scaring the heck out
of me. It was break time already. I went out toward the back
gate and found Pablo sitting in his truck looking at his phone. You ready,
he said, as I got in the passenger seat. Yeah, so
what happened? I asked, as he prefaced the story by saying he would
have to go back to when he started. He didn't waste any time.
Robert Markman was set in his own ways, but he didn't want security cameras
at first because he thought that it would make people rely on them and therefore
make them less vigilant. But soon the store started experiencing people stealing things.
They would always blame the shoppers, but employees can be guilty of that too.
There anyway, the point was that in order for the insurance to cover
things like that, they needed alarms and security cameras. A guard would be
a good thing too, and that's where Pablo came in. There were two
security guards, one more on the floor while the other was overlooking the cameras
and equipment. But this is where things started to get a little bit strange
because Pablo, no matter how much he loves the ideas of the paranormal,
he doesn't believe that it's a ghost creeping everybody out. You see, for
a time, employees that would stay laid pass their shifts or by themselves near
the sales floor would complain of hearing noises. At first, they blamed the
rats, but since there was never any food there and the past control people
were pretty good with their jobs, they dismissed it to just saying that it
was the store settling. Things get moved around a lot during the day,
they explained, so it made sense that maybe something wasn't placed properly on the
shelves and they would shift. But it took one person, a young man
that had been hired recently, to say that he saw Nancy the Mannikin move
an arm, that it was clear as day, and that his reasoning sounded
crazy. He admitted it, but the arm moved up and not down,
which could be easily explained by gravity or a loose joint or something. It
just wouldn't move in that direction. And we talk about it as normal now.
But Brandon, the guy that saw it, wasn't shocked when it happened.
People didn't call ambulances as easily as they do now, but the paramedics
arrived in everything. He was dismissed or quit. No one really knows what
happened. The story faded as it got passed down from co worker to co
worker, and only Pablo claimed to know the truth. I mean he was
there. Of course, back then, cameras weren't always in our pockets,
and tape would be recorded over frequently, especially with security footage, so there's
no record of it. Although Pablo saw it with his own two eyes.
It was subtle if he admitted to that, but clear the thing had moved
I smiled as he told me that, wondering if he would just admit to
lying about his story, but he looked at me, reding the eye,
his lips trembling as he continued in order to not hear more about it.
Mister Markman had the cameras angled away from the center display where Nancy was,
and when Pablo brought it up that the insurance needed a camera covering a certain
percentage of the floor, they had several meetings with him about what he had
seen and who he had told about it. Paulo had just had a baby
back then and needed his job, so he kept quiet about it. But
that beeping alarm had a different meaning to him now. It detected subtle movements.
It would label them on a map on the floor. They always came
from the center display, which was an area where the mannequin was along with
some other clothes lying on special shelves for viewing. Does it still happen,
I asked him, kind of believing him by now, Well, that's the
thing, he continued. It's been picking up. One of the theories many
of the coworkers had, and had them for the longest time. Was that
ever since a new set of Mannicheans was brought in. The motion detector kept
going off at night from the center display. Nancy, by the way,
had been kept all this time in the same spot. Became so obvious that
it only happened after the new ones were installed around the store that mister Markman
demanded that they be removed immediately, which they were, and suddenly everything was
fine. For years, no one complained about it, and the story sort
of became a rumor, a tall tail around the store. But you know
what Pablo said quietly, the day the owner died, some of the new
anakins had been set up around the store. That's what he was angry about.
The direction where he turns his head. Look, it took out his
phone. The position of the video was right before mister Markman screamed. Look,
Pablo whispered, he's looking right towards the center display. I think it's
Nancy Man, I'm telling you, he said. Whenever there are other Mannekins
around the floor, even just one, this thing acts up. I can't
find any other explanation for it. We talked about how bizarre it sounded,
and now with this whole theory being thrown out the window considering the Mannikins were
in storage and not on display. My alarm rang, My brake was over,
and I had two minutes to head back inside. I'll go with you,
man, to show you, Pubblo said, as we shut the doors
to the truck and walked up the side entrance to the back. We stepped
inside, and he casually pointed at the storage closet for the mannequins were I
wanted to see them, so I opened it up and saw them, realistic
in the style that mister Markman liked them, five of them leaning on the
wall. Pablo went inside and turned on the light, looking behind the door
on the high shelves. He stepped outside and into the other storage closet,
turning on that light and then looking around the warehouse. It was freaking out.
He walked up toward the door that led to the sales floor. He
opened it up slowly to not set off the beeping alarm, and then he
turned around and back toward the exit. There are supposed to be six Mannikins
stored in here. There's one on the floor aside from Nancy. He looked
at me and then turned around to head to his booth. He was out
for about two minutes before rushing back, saying that he had checked the footage,
that he noticed that there was one mannequin off camera by one of the
corners, that maybe the changes in staff caused some confusion, that they put
one out there after years. I'm not doing so I stayed quiet the whole
time he spoke. I didn't want to scare him anymore. It was time
for him to do his rounds on the outside of the building, and the
delivery truck was about to arrive, so I told him we would talk about
it later. I didn't want to tell him. When we looked out towards
the cells floor, Nancy her profile, her stiff collar bone showing as she
no longer looked directly away from me now her head was turned to the right.
I didn't know what to think of it. It was a complete sense
of loss of reality. It's going to be happening, and so I sat
there about myself. Once Pablo left, with the new boxes opening, sorting,
stacking all in that silent storage area, I had two more hours to
go. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kobarugaz. To
stay in touch with what we're doing, follow our account at scary dot Fm,
on TikTok and Instagram. Can also find me over there on at edwin
Cove that's E d W I N c o V. And if you want
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scary Plus. You can try it out for free. Scaryplus dot com links
to everything or the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening,
Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.