Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. If you've listened to my stories before and want
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the charts. In today's story, a young couple lost in life choose to
embark on their own version of an adventure. I'm sure of what they'll find
out on the road. My name is Edwin. Then here it's a Scary
story. I think we were out by the Yosemite area When we talked about
getting a van. It was like a dream when I talk about it now.
We were two losers. I think our tents and the camping stuff we
had were the only things to our names, you know, the stuff that
we could actually sell if things went south. Really had a few things at
our parents' house, but they never got along too well. Thinking of going
to pick up her jacket, the one she needed for this trip, required
organizing with her sister, who she still kept in touch with. The decision
we made to move out and live together came pretty easily and also sounds like
a dream. To me. Construction was slowing down at the time, and
I was one of the first to be let go from Mark's construction before the
whole company went down for not getting enough projects. We saw that for rent
sign along one of the dark streets while walking home from the park a typical
Thursday night for us. She was supposed to be sneaking back into her house
through her window, and then I would walk through the alley and to my
place where I lived with another roommate. As we passed one of those houses,
Lily stopped and looked at the lamppost room for rent, responsible couple,
edge of town, then a phone number. We laughed at the edge of
town part it made it sound like an outsider's thing, an outsider's thing,
and an adventure. But we both wanted, or at least wanted our lives
to include But everything we did was with that. We liked to dream and
talk about how things would be different once we got our things in order,
maybe once Lily finally wrote her young adult novel, or when someone bought one
of my prints. I think that's what we get, you know, as
artists or want to be artists, we all somehow end up at the edge
of town. But this felt different. It was like we were committing to
each other, even though lots of boyfriends and girlfriends move in together. It
was almost ten at night and Billy got her old phone out and dialed.
The woman on the other end said that it was available and to come check
it out the next morning. Lilly was very excited about it, and that
next morning we took a bus as far as it would take us, and
then we walked the rest of the eight or so blocks. When we saw
it, it was the only house by the broken down factories. We stayed
there for about two months before we decided to move, but it taught us
a lot about sharing such a tiny space. Sharing it along with its strange
noises at night that came with so many stories. For Lily. Can you
imagine a werewolf coming out of one of those gates? She asked me that
one night, while looking out toward the abandoned factories, there was one gate
that had been opened ever since we got there. A werewolf pushing a stroller.
I shot back, and then she pushed me, laughing at how I
would ruin her stories. I wasn't one to get scared easily, but that
was because I hadn't experienced many scary things back then, but now things are
different. I think that's where the story starts. When we were out camping
looking at this van that was not far from our tents, the couple that
was driving it offered us her bag of bags and cream cheese. Too much
food, they said, and they didn't want it to go bad. Accepted,
and without saying a word, we both thought about how wonderful it would
be to be able to do what they do. I live in a van.
This thought about getting one to travel around made me wonder how we could
ever make it sustainable. Gas money, maintenance, insurance, you know,
all that stuff that comes along with living like hippies out on the road.
But I wanted that. I needed that. I had nothing left. But
it was that couple from somewhere in the Midwest who told us about how they
make it work. They get jobs during the winter months and they save it
all and then they travel for the rest of the year. And those jobs
would be regular ones too, things like fast food and deliveries, warehouse stuff,
places where well, you're replaceable, the girl said. I remember thinking
that, in fact, we're all placeable, but I didn't know it could
be a good thing and work in our favor. I could tell that a
plan was forming in Lily's mind, and I was happy about it. It
was like a light at the end of the tunnel for us. We wanted
to be together, but had no place, no plan, no money,
and so with not much in our mind or much in our pockets, we
started looking Our hikes, turned to walks around town, looking at lots and
following used car listings online. Not even a month after that, we found
an old van that needed a new radiator and a water pump, but everything
else was fine. I checked it myself, and I'm handy with that kind
of thing, so when I saw it available as is for fifteen hundred dollars,
it was basically free and that was right. That was the only issue
with it. We didn't even have to get new tires, and so we
added a mattress on the inside, nothing like one of those fancy ones you
see on YouTube. Now. We would cook as though we were camping with
a tiny gas stove and drove around from lot to lot, camping out in
cities, in parks, and anywhere where they wouldn't kick us out from right
away. It was like we were playing house, except without one. Lily
got to work on her books, and I would step out with my old
camera, sometimes not sure what I was doing, perhaps going back to construction
work, or maybe a course to become a mechanic would be better than this,
But I also didn't want to give up the chance of having an amazing
adventure, something to talk about later. If we certainly had some stories.
This one took place around two in the morning, and I was behind the
wheel. We were in the Valley area of California, along one of those
routes that takes you northbound where you cross several small towns. The signal there
was all talk radio about politics, and that's what we were listening to,
And suddenly Lily, who I thought was asleep, turned to the windshield and
pointed at it. Look, she said, sounding worried and frightened at the
same time. It took my eyes a bit to adjust to what she was
seeing, but there was no doubt in either of our minds that we weren't
imagining it. It was a light dimmer than a car head light but stronger
than a break signal to the right side of the road. But the cars
don't drive it was supposed to be all dirt. I immediately thought it was
the reflectors of a broken down car out in the middle of nowhere, but
as we got closer, it seemed to be moving, bouncing around the area
with strange blueish white color. It was still far enough that it was only
just a dot, but I could tell that Lily was nervous about it.
Her imagination would get away from her sometimes. I slowed down even more as
we approached it and realized it was a person unbothered by our high beams,
walking in the same direction we were going. They just didn't turn around,
simply kept walking. Lily relaxed a bit and started rolling down her window,
but I told her to stop, that we didn't know that guy and that
we should be careful. Still. I kept the van going and we got
closer to the person, But I must have gotten nervous once we approached them,
because I barely slowed down to ask him anything. I pulled up a
little farther as Lily shot me a glance for not stopping in time for her
to ask him if he needed help. She was that type of person,
even to a fault, trusting everyone and not accepting that the world could possibly
house evil people, people who wanted to harm us for no reason. Still,
I knew what I had to do, so we waited for the guy
to catch up to the van, but I lost sight of him in my
side view mirrors. The moon was out that night, so the entire area
was illuminated. It vaguely reminded me of the movie Aladdin for some reason,
with the desert scenes and bright skies. It was probably because I spent an
hour of the day with Lily that my mind started connecting odd stories to what
was happening. I turned to Lily and asked what she wanted to do,
and she said she would ask him if he needed help, and that was
it. Maybe he was exercising or doing some type of meditation that required him
to be out in the middle of the night, and she didn't want to
bother him either, but she wanted to make sure. I told her that
maybe he was out bearing a body, and she chuckled a bit before lifting
her hand to push my shoulder away from her. It was her thing pushing
me away when she was pretending to be angry, And so we waited in
the van as a strange silence loomed over us, expecting to hear the sound
of boots against gravel coming up behind us, but instead nothing. The patterned
sounds of insects battling in the distance was all we could hear. We both
scrambled to look out our side view mirrors that also let us see behind us,
but everywhere we looked, all we could see were the grass fields and
dirt for miles and miles against that moonlight. I knew Lily wanted to step
out of the van, so before she could, I put the van in
gear and told her that I would turn her around and take a closer look.
Maybe he started going the other way, and it could have been possible
that he started walking toward the barren area instead, And so I did.
I turned it around and flashed the high beams, and again we were the
only set of lights in the entire valley. We didn't say anything to each
other at that moment. I think we both needed the van to be running
and us to be on our way in order to talk about it. What
had we just seen, Dude, we just saw a ghost? Really said
to me. Once we were on our way, I decided to follow along
this time, and we talked for a good while about it until ahead in
the distance we'd see something strange blueish light once again, and my face went
cold. I was slowing down as we were approaching it once again when it
realized that the light was a reflection off of this man's shirt. I drove
by slowly, this time, both of us in silence, wondering how this
person could have possibly been ahead of us. Take a look at him,
I asked, Lily, he's on your side. Just don't roll down your
window. I had to remind you of these things, and so we passed
by this man, who didn't seem to notice us. As Lily pressed her
head against her window to get a closer look, she unbuckled her seatbelt and
turned her body. I kept a close eye on her as we passed by
the man on the side of the road and waited drive, drive, drive.
She yielded without questioning her. I step on the gas and sped off.
I asked her what or why what has she seen in shocks? She
tried to catch her breath and started crying uncontrollably, and in between those quick
breaths, I could tell the words she was trying to get out, and
I never thought I'd believe something so bizarre coming from Lily that these words will
never leave me. He has no face. Part two of Lots is coming
up right after this. Stay with him. This episode is brought to you
by Better Help. It was something so simple, giving myself the time to
sit down and write in a new place, when I realized how distracted I
had become with day to day life, something I had never thought about.
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we grow. What works for you today might not work tomorrow, and I'm
glad that Better Help is there to help you with that journey of self discovery
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the right questions like multiple light bulbs turning on over your head. And if
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box Ship's free to try America's number one mil kit. What could she have
meant by saying that he had no face other than he had no face?
Had it been too dark or had her imagination gotten the most of her finally
and convinced her that a face was not where it should have been. I
tried to get her to talk during the ride, and she managed to tell
me a few things through her shock. At first, with his head exposed,
we could see the back of it and that dark hair. I had
seen that part too, But through the illuminated road and the yellow lights on
the side of the van, she said to have seen a hollow void where
his face should have been. She wasn't expecting it, She said, she
hadn't made it up. There were some stories that she read at one point,
right around the time when we met that she used to tell me about
all the time. She was very into ghost stories, and we would talk
about these things sometimes before going to sleep. She would tell me about sightings
of doppelgangers, and how her family was broken because of something having to do
with the supernatural energies were off, her parents fought too much, or something
like that. It was unusual for her to talk about her family at all,
so it also caught me by surprise. It was tough to get her
to think of other things when she got obsessed like this. It was in
her blood. It was like our hobbies and the million little startups that she
had tried before meeting me, graphic design, jewelry, and her current thing
with writing, which honestly fit the best. It was her thing now she
could only write fast enough to keep up with her imagination. I felt guilty
that I was thinking already about how much she would go on and on about
this encounter. It scared me even more than the thing we saw on the
side of the road, though I guess it makes sense since I wasn't the
only one who saw it, although having it to show up two times a
large distance away while he was on foot was impossible. My explanations were that
there had been a different person, just someone else walking along the side of
the road, and all of this, I told Lily, But what about
the strange glow, and what about the way he was limping, the way
he ignored us? All these questions she asked me, Over and over she
came up with her own theories, until eventually she asked her friends, the
ones that were very into this stuff a little too much, if you asked
me. They told her of issues with finding out who she was, suggesting
that it may have been an hallucination. It had been late at night,
and our brain has strange ways of interpreting things when we're tired. She denied
it completely. She had been fully awake, and even more so with the
adrenaline rush after seeing that first person. And I felt that same feeling too,
and she's right, it wakes you up. But there was one theory
that she couldn't get rid of, and unfortunately that's what finally took her.
Faceless people went from philosophical or dream interpretations to omens, a sign that the
end of her life was near. I don't know why I felt so disappointed
about this. It was maybe because being around someone so passionate about something anything,
and then clinging myself to that to finally feel something too that watching her
kill it that passion she once had being left to rot in the van with
us. Her writings turned to sketches the figures. She wouldn't talk to me
about them like she used to, but I would see them and wonder what
the meaning behind her obsession with dark figures on infinite parallel lines. Wise looking
back now, I know that she was looking to connect meaning to something without
it. It was only a man on the side of the road that was
it. One day she asked for help to go to the hospital, something
we had avoided for a couple of weeks because we didn't have the money for
it. We made an appointment near her hometown to check on the sudden pressure
on her chest and other things she was feeling. That appointment turned into another
one for surgery. The next time I had to go was to make arrangements
for her funeral. Her family showed up for a bit. Her mother was
the one that cried regret, probably, but I had been the one that
saw her die that way slowly after her mind got away from her, she
got to rest. After how unfairly life treated her all of this time,
I wonder if she thought of me before she passed, Just like I replayed
every single minute I spent with her. She was buried on a Friday morning,
and I spent all night at the cemetery by myself. The place had
no closing hours, although for a person who had a van parked in the
lot, the guards would soon think that I was there trying to camp out.
So sometime around one of the morning, I got in and went straight
to the gas station. I added twenty bucks to that tank. In a
sudden rush of anger and hopelessness, I yelled, now, I don't remember
what, but I wanted to head back to that road in the valley.
For two hours, I drove right there, lost in that dark road,
a symbol of my life. Until the sunrise. I was angry, what
at that thing we saw on the side of the road, that the way.
I didn't stop to question Lily and her imagination. Sometimes a person on
the side of the road is just a person on the side of the road.
I thought of how much I had fallen for that girl, and the
sense of responsibility I felt for her, willing to defend her against the cruel
way life treated her. One of those kind hearts that's just too naive in
front of the monsters that's around us. I had told her that I loved
her for the first time, and how she stayed quiet for a bit.
So I asked her if she loved me back lots. She said, lots
so so so much. I remember the way we drive around looking for walmarts
to park and sleep in. Those parking lots were the home of those who
had nowhere to go, or we're looking for an adventure. We hadn't decided
which category we fell into. It was one of those lots where we got
our simple dinners together, where we counted the bills that we had left,
and where we decided if that week would have a motel day or not.
The showers at the gym were fine. It was that old matches that we
had in the van that was getting to us. We didn't have to share
our attention with the road in those lots, and we both looked forward to
them every night. And now that I remember, there was a ghost we
saw in one of them. This was before the thing on the side of
the road. It wasn't a big deal, but Lily wrote up a story
about it. Someone knocked on the back door one night. We could see
their silhouette from the inside. It wasn't too common to get knocks on the
doors by the security guards that would patrol the parking lots back then, you
know, when they wanted us to leave, Lily thought it was to make
sure we were still alive. Anyway, when we opened up the door and
looked around, there was nobody there and nowhere for someone to hide in that
parking lot. I wanted to go to another lot, just one last time,
but was one right on the edge of town, immediately after the valley
where we saw the thing on the side of the road. But my mind
wasn't fully there. You see, as I drove in that straight line,
seeing maybe four or five cars driving in the opposite direction, I kept an
eye out on the side of it for any glowing objects or anything resembling that
thing we had seen. And it was a little past two in the morning
when I saw something. It flashed along with the thoughts of that night,
the way Lily had been sleeping, or at least how I thought she was
when we saw that light. In my head, I could see her next
to me, leaning forward and pointing at it, rolling down the window and
asking me to slow down. There was no doubt in my mind that there
was something there. I got to see it even better than last time.
It was indeed blue, flickering between bright blue and white. It was hard
to miss even if you wanted to. We had seen campfires on the side
of the road, and we had seen hikers walking along those dirt paths in
the dark, and this was not either of those. I was getting closer
to it faster than I wanted to, and I pulled through the emergency lane
to slow down to a walking speed. The light had turned into a shape,
slowly bobbing up and down along the side of the road, Slightly different
than last time. It was smaller. I thought of stepping on the gas
pedal and running the thing over to say bye to it once and for all.
But there was something different this time. The thoughts of helping the person
there overtook me, unusual of me, to be honest with you. I
was pulling up to them until my high were right on their back. It
was a slim figure, a person with its hands in its pockets, ignoring
me, driving right behind them, and I honked lightly two times sounds when
unnoticed. I looked behind the van to make sure no cars were behind me,
and looked ahead once again, deciding to pull up next to this person
ignoring me on the side of the road. It was so close that I
felt I could push them lightly on the left arm with the front of the
van. The person just kept walking. The more I think about it over
the years and the many times I've told this story, I'm still sure that
I saw a person there. Ghosts are supposed to be see through or scary,
but not this one. My heart was beating. As I pulled up
a little more from the side. I could tell this was a woman,
woman walking on the side of the road by herself at night, and I
was sure. I was so sure that this was real. And that was
until her head started turning slowly toward the passenger side window. Her face.
It was Lily, I swear all I could hear right then, and there
were her words when she was in the van with me, Drive Drive Drive.
As I stepped on the gas pedal and swerve to get back in the
lane, I could see that figure starting to fade in the side view mirror.
When I changed my mind, I slowed down and pulled over. I
hit the brakes. There was no reason to run. Lily was the one
who reacted that way on impulse, not me. It was like I was
trying to become her. I looked to her for all this type of thing
when my life became the same stuff every single day. And so I waited
there, the engine idling, for more than fifteen minutes, and I was
too nervous to look back, but hopeful to see her one more time.
I realized then just how lost that would be without her. She lived the
life of a lost artist, convincing herself of things that weren't there because she
couldn't see them. She looked everywhere for them, and everything she encountered and
everything we talked about, but couldn't piece it together, a life that seemed
to be functioning properly without a name, without a face. We can only
see what we're looking for, if we're lucky enough to know what that is.
I shut off the engine and waited in that dark road, confusing the
headlights of passing cars for the signs of life I wanted. And so Carr
started passing by without them. And now to my right was a soft blue
of another light that would soon turn to orange and then yellow, rising from
the horizon to the sky. If you like this and my other stories,
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