I know you like stories of the strange and unexplained, so I need you
to check out Jim Harold's Campfire. It's where real people share their true spooky
stories in their own words. The concept is simple. Jim talks to everyday
people about their strange encounters and publishes it as a ninety minute episode every week.
There's no exaggeration or anything. The stories basically speak for themselves. I
recently told a story on there, so let's see if you can spot it.
And there's more stories too, like the one about a child who had
vivid past life memories or the one about a woman who found a ghost in
her bed. Now, not all the stories are horrifying. Some are heartwarming,
like a visit from a past loved one or a peaceful near death experience.
Perhaps Regardless, they are true and fascinating, as told by ordinary people
who've had extraordinary experiences. Now do me a personal favor. Tune into Jim
Harold's Campfire on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listened true scary
stories again. You can find it by searching for Jim Harold's Campfire Welcome to
Scary Story podcast. The following story is simply an experience, no answers,
no conclusion, and if your mind completes the story, I would love to
hear about it. It's how longtime listeners might remember how this podcast used to
be. My name is Edwin and here is a scary story. You can
ask my friend Sarah and she'll tell you the same thing. I will never
go camping. During high school, the guys wanted to do this thing where
we would go and hang out by the lake, and I was excited about
it until I realized that we would have to drive into Lake Johnson, the
one at the edge of the woods. It wasn't normal anymore. Had I
thought about moving out to New York or Los Angeles to avoid the whole thing,
if I could only save up the money. I was still a teenager
and all these plans were only dreams. I needed to get away from this
area. Back then, it was not that big of a deal since I
could avoid it, although growing up I got made fun of a lot because
of it. I missed science cap and most summer camps for middle school.
No matter what my dad and mom said, I wouldn't go. I tried
to one time. It turned out to be a huge problem because I refused
to get on the bus. Once everything was ready, everyone was waiting for
me, and I just sat there and cried, holding up the bus until
the teacher called my dad at work to come pick me up. It's how
I got my nicknames, scaredy Annie, Annie Boo, the one who was
afraid of her own shadow, the one who needed someone to go take her
to the bathroom at night. It was a big deal writing all this down.
Things I couldn't remember were suddenly coming up left and right. I thought
my parents understood me, although they passed it off as me just being a
regular kid, one who was easily scared. But it wasn't until high school
when they realized that this wasn't normal, and they forced me to go see
a doctor, a therapist who could fix me. They said, was I
going to be a grown up and still be afraid of doing my own laundry
in the basement. All of these things I got to remember once I went
through my journals, the ones I wrote back when I was a kid,
I used to be afraid of the dark, and not in the sense that
you were imagining it, not that I could simply hide myself under the covers
and feel better. It was of what hit out there lurking. I could
not explain it to anybody else until I started reading a journal by this woman
who talked of something similar to me. It was because of her that I
started writing my own. Her story was the scariest I've ever read in all
of my research and trying to find out what these things are. I know
it sounds made up, and trust me, I struggled with this too,
but I've seen things in the dark. They move in the night quickly,
and they have their own unique set of behaviors that you start to identify.
It's as if you knew them at one point. You know, like when
you walk through the same alley that you used to walk when you were a
kid, and you remember the same garage doors with their different colors and shapes,
hoping that the neighbor's dog doesn't scare you this time. It's like that
you know, your mind remembers it, but you're not quite sure how.
The journals were in regular lined notebooks, up in boxes and along the book
shelves, behind the books of neatly organized school text books and work books for
my classes. I didn't want just anybody to find them had always been a
very private person, especially after being afraid of the world. I don't know
why, but I thought about turning it into a book, but I updated
it every once in a while, sometimes every day, and sometimes two or
three times per year, so I figured I had already broken the rule and
that it would never work. It started off with my description of my family,
four of them, my mother, father, and my older brother,
who eventually starts having trouble sleeping. Nothing happens, and I thought it would
just be me talking about my crushes and other things from school. But eventually
I found an entry when I talked about a conversation with my brother where he
told me what he suspects is keeping him awake. Then he asked me,
beg me to avoid the bedtime stories, say no to the bedtime stories,
and just go to sleep. And then I found the entry, the one
I called the origin story. I used to title my entries, and that
first one from nineteen ninety seven started off with I couldn't sleep last night,
just like my brother. In it, I mentioned thinking that he's staying up
at night or sneaking into the living room to watch TV, and that maybe
that's where he's getting the bedtime stories, perhaps some creepy show like the ones
he used to like. I then go on and on about things that I
did that day, including how we named my friend's new dog, and I
kept updating that journal. About a week later, I said the same thing,
that I couldn't sleep, and then I began to explain my day,
mentioning how I got locked in the basement by accident and I had to wait
for my dad to come home from work to let me out. You could
imagine the sense of relief knowing that I had found a possible explanation for my
fear of the dark. Then I mentioned mom and her bedtime stories. How
I heard noises outside my bedroom and watched the door creak open as my mom
peeked inside the room and asked if everything was okay. When I told her
that I couldn't fall asleep, she offered to tell me a bedtime story.
In that specific entry, I mentioned the warning from my brother to say no
to the bed time time stories, but it was mom and mother's rules are
stronger than brother's rules, or so I said in the journal entry, and
so my mom stepped into the room and sat at the edge of my bed,
looking right at me without turning on the lights because they would wake me
up even more. In a faint whisper, she began, And then I
wrote what I remembered of Mom's bedtime story. Surprised that I was even able
to do that. Although I'm not sure how accurate it is, given that
I was young and might have made a few things up to make the story
make sense, still, it was not something I could have come up with
on my own. No way. Anyway, here's what the story was about.
There was once a girl who lived in a house with her mother,
only her mother, who loved her very much. The girl wanted to go
outside to beat with her friends, but her friends were bad kids and wanted
her to steal candy and toys and bread from the corner store. Please mother,
let me go out and play, and I I won't misbehave, she
begged her mother. Her mother. Her loving mother agreed and let her go
outside, But the girl came back after a very very long time, long
after the lights on the street had turned on. The mother waited outside for
hours past midnight now, and she would not come home. So she gathered
her neighbors and asked them to go look in the woods behind her house,
quiet woods that silence all voices and screams, and they called the police and
people from the neighboring towns to look for the girl. She never came home.
The mother, in the same clothes she had been wearing that night,
wandered the streets looking for her daughter for weeks. Since she wouldn't eat,
she grew thin and weak, and one day collapsed in the middle of the
street and died. A year later, when the house was going up for
sale and needed to be cleaned up, they got rid of the rotten food
and spiderwebs and finally opened the basement door, only to find the dried up
corpse of a young girl leaning on the other side. Afraid of her mother's
wrath, she had tried to sneak back into the house without her mother finding
out. The basement window had been opened, easy for her to climb into,
too tall for her to climb out. It was a pretty bizarre story
in that journal, But I continued in the journal by saying, how I,
now, with my eyes wide open, was able to see the shadow
of my mother walking out the door and closing it. Good night. She
whispered as I turned my head over and heard the ticking of the clock until
the cold blue color from the window started lighting up my room. I could
remember it clearly, as though I had gone back in time. The following
entries, I would mention more and more bedtime stories. Some I could remember,
and others I simply mentioned, saying that I had made myself forget that
stories of a mother and a daughter who disappeared one day. Why my mom
would scare her child like that in the middle of the night was beyond me.
But I was obsessed with my journal, and although I didn't know if
it would help me figure this out, I knew it couldn't hurt. I
was tired of being afraid all the time, so I kept journaling. But
I was glad I did, because it was an eye opening experience reading something
like that, And I think that's why I started liking autobiographies and memoirs instead
of the typical novels my friends were reading in high school. There was more
to that. Whenever I would mention the creatures that lurked in the night,
I began to remember them again. It was although I was reading someone else's
journal at first, long lost memories coming right back to me. When I
was rereading everything, it felt like a secret, like this investigative reporting project
I was doing for myself to get to the bottom of it, a thing
that I could tell no one about, but needed to discover for my own
sanity. I started getting images flashbacks of these creatures very vaguely. I remembered
the way they would come through the doors, the cabinets and drawers that lined
the walls of it, crawling like groups of snakes toward my bed. Some
would stand and others would remain on the floor, and I could swear that
they talked to each other whole night, whispering and pacing around the room in
their own ways. Everything I found through books and websites at the library would
eventually lead to other worldly creatures, in depth studies of elementals and demons,
beings that did not belong to this realm. None of these theories pointed to
them being anything good. A lot of the words that used describe them I
needed to look up myself. They were all terrifying, but I felt like
I was saving the answer for later. As I finished and reread those old
journal entries, one question kept popping up in my mind. My brother had
warned me he wanted me to say no to the bedtime stories. Why And
even though I knew he would make fun of me for asking, I called
him anyway. It took a bit for him to realize that this was a
serious issue for me, and then he asked that I really want to know,
and then he told me the rest of mom and her Bedtime Stories is
coming up right after this. Stay with me. This episode is brought to
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That's why it's America's number one milk it. My brother was a logical
person. Anything having to do with science, math, or computer games.
He was into. It showed in his personality too, how he would brush
off anything that didn't make logical sense to him, like how colors match with
one another when you're picking your clothes, or why people cry so much over
dumb things. Knowing that about him made hearing his experience all the more bizarre.
You see, he had asked my parents to stay for twenty minutes more
after school because he needed to talk to his teacher about something. This was
back in middle school and I remember because it was when I first got to
see the school that I would be going to after leaving fifth grade. Dad
and I walked to the classroom after parking the car, and the teacher talked
to us about the importance of getting enough rest and if my brother played too
many games at night because he seemed tired during the day. He said it
was because of his games and the books he was reading, but I knew
it wasn't true. He had been more quiet than usual around the house too.
This was when I had made that entry about my brother having trouble sleeping,
although I didn't know why, and I turned into a whole family thing
with all of us making rules about when we could use the TV, peopul,
turn off the lights at a certain hour, and even changed our dinner
time to earlier in an attempt to help him. As my brother was explaining
this to me over the phone, he asked if I remembered him asking me
to say no to the bedtime stories. I said, yeah, I remembered
what I told him that one time. Mom came in to tell me one
My brother grew quiet over the phone and started asking me questions about it.
What had Mom told me? And when had it happened. I tried to
explain everything to him, but he seemed to grow even more impatient with what
I was telling him. What had she told me, and what had Mom
been wearing that night, how she had come into the room, and what
her voice sounded like. He stayed quiet for a moment, until finally he
started telling me about his experiences. He had been laying in his bed one
night, again having trouble sleeping. Suddenly he started feeling very tired out of
nowhere, and so he turned around to finally try to get some rest.
And after a few minutes, he heard a tapping at the door, and
then it cracked open slowly. He saw Mom at the door and watched her
come in and sit at the foot of his bed, saying that a bedtime
story would help him if he couldn't fall asleep. Even I was getting too
old for bedtime stories at that age, and he was older than me,
so I understood when he said that it was strange for her to do that.
Not knowing what to say to her question, he stayed quiet as he
started telling him the same story that she would eventually tell me, the one
about the woman who lost her daughter, who was later found dead in the
basement, and just like that, the way she had done with me,
Mom simply walked to the door and shut it, leaving him creeped out that
night, if anything, making it more difficult for him to fall asleep.
Several nights after that, Mom came into his room again, offering another bedtime
story. My brother, not knowing what to say, did not answer,
and Mom started telling him another one, this one even more bizarre. From
the foot of his bed, he explained, Mom started telling him the story
of a woman who was a rope maker. She would spend her time on
the machines in the back of the house, twisting and collecting material to make
ropes that would get sent throughout the state, and had made a big business
out of it until she learned that a man from one of the prominent families
one in the area had hanged himself using her rope. The mention of the
newspaper made the rope sell even more, and soon she went from two employees
to twenty, until one day she saw the ghost of mister Gilbert sitting in
the living room by the fire, deep bruises in a ring around his neck.
Frightened by the whole thing. She rushed to the bedroom and waited awake
until morning. She went straight into town and got hold of one of the
offices of the business people Associations. She then put the business up for sale,
and then sold it a week later, but it was too late for
her. Thoughts of mister Gilbert, and suddenly other people with bruises on their
necks kept visiting her at night, so she couldn't take it anymore and ended
her life with the last of her remaining inventory. The whole time I was
listening to my brother speak, I could tell that he had been affected by
this as much, if not worse than I had. Perhaps I had been
the only one to manage to forget the whole thing, and needed my old
journals to remember everything. My brother had lived with the memories this whole time,
but the stories kept coming, he said. There were many more terrifying
bedtime stories. I would keep them awake for hours that would eventually start affecting
his grades at school. Eventually all of us, aside from the daughter in
the basement the ropemaker, there was also one about the cook in the kitchen,
the mouse traps, and the one about the tall creature from the yard
until he was finally able to say no to the bedtime stories. It was
at that point when Mom stopped coming of his room. That's when she went
into mind. All of those stories had long been forgotten. I mean,
having to go through my journal to remember them was one thing, but it
felt terrible knowing that Mom had been responsible for my fear of the dark all
this time, and for my brother's trouble sleeping. Knowing what had happened the
cause of all of this seemed to help, even though I didn't understand what
her reasoning could have been, And even after changing up our entire lives to
help us sleep at her and Mom, the same mom that would make us
change the channel whenever a scary movie would come on, also told the scary
stories at night. Just didn't make sense. Still, I noticed I was
less afraid in general, and soon things started improving overall. By the time
I had gotten to college, I had forgotten about the whole thing, and
just like with my brother, it didn't seem to affect me at all.
Time passed, and eventually I graduated, got married, and moved to a
city nearby. But it wasn't until I went to visit my parents' house with
my own family. Years later, when everything came back to the surface,
it was like I was a child all over again when I heard the tapping
on the door and then the creek. Mommy, mommy, I heard,
in a faint whisper. I'm scared, I'm scared. My daughter had come
into the room. She crawled into bed, explaining that a woman had come
into her room to tell her a bedtime story. Was it, Grandma,
I asked her as she shook her head. My daughter had a night light
in that guest room, the one that had been my brother's old room,
and it was thanks to that light that she was able to see what she
looked like, short and dark hair, long arms, and a smile.
But what really scared her or what should call the woman's friends? Small creatures,
she said, that crawled out of the closet door and out of the
drawers and the cabinets. Some crawled under her bed, others simply seemed to
be talking to each other. And then she told the story of the mother
and her daughter. Do me a favor and follow this podcast to get next
week's story. You can get a hold of me by email if you have
any questions, and you can also reach out via social media. I'll leave
my contact info in the description of this episode. Story ideas and suggestions are
welcome. Thank you very much for listening. Let's see you soon. Here
are some scary news. We're throwing away an estimated five billion plastic hand soap
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