Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's story is a bit of a mystery.
It's about a group of people who may have more in common than they know.
My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. I held the
flyer tightly in my hand as the rest of the group sat comfortably in a
circle right on those foldable chairs. I don't know how they were able to
do it, especially after knowing that the announcement said that we would be there
for a full ninety minutes once a week for six weeks. It was a
sort of research study from Radford University, a pilot program for a study that
we're going to be starting. It was not the first of its kind,
not at all. Investigators, journalists, and curious people would come up with
quote formal studies, and coincidentally, they all lined up a few months before
Halloween, but this one was different. It was early January and freezing in
that large dark room. A table had been set up with snacks and bottled
juice. Free cheap notebooks and pencils with the enormous Ratford U logo were in
a cardboard box next to everything. It wasn't sure how many times I had
told this story but I told it whenever I could because of how vividly I
could remember it up until a certain point. And I don't know why,
but every time I did, I would remember a new sound or smell or
shadow, something that was hiding deep in those memories for my young mind.
Perhaps they would help me solve this mystery. A man with thick glasses called
the five of us over to the circle. Nervously introduced himself as David Jackson,
and he explained the rules. This was more formal than the other meetings,
for sure. We had signed papers and everything in order to to participate.
The rules here were set about what we would do if we bumped into
each other out on the street, but we would say to explain how we
knew each other, along with explanations of what confidentiality means. About ten minutes
in the guy David pointed to a short, thin woman sitting silently on the
chair that was slightly out of the rest in the circle. She uncrossed her
arms and looked at her hands, placing them on her lap, looking down
at the floor. She looked at all of us fairly quickly and then began
talking. Her name was Anna. She had gotten in her own words tied
up with the occult. When she was in high school, like with most
of us, she had a phase of dressing up in all black, listening
to rock music, writing poetry, or sketching things that were out of this
world. Some of her friends had tried other things, reading texts about different
beliefs from the odd Ones in Town. For some reason, the others in
the circle all knew what she meant when she said that. They sort of
nodded and gave her their full attention, leaning into what she was saying.
The odd Ones in Town were a group of people that probably never talked to
each other, but lived on the edges of the city, over the hills
and completely on their own. Every once in a while you would see them
shopping for tools at Hills Hardware or buying sand or soil for their fields.
For years, rumors said that they practiced evil things and were to be avoided
at all costs. I had learned of these people not long before that meeting,
and it was thanks to one of those other investigators that I had met
up with who mentioned them as he pushed for me to take them to the
place where I had seen the church. But I'm getting ahead of myself,
so I'll finish telling you what happened at the meeting. And it continued with
her experience, telling us that she had visited one of those odd ones in
town along with and other one of her friends, and that they had arrived
just in time for a meal they were preparing outside they had killed some game
that same day. They were all gathered around a fire outside of the barn
when they all heard a guttural scream. Her friend grabbed her backpack and took
off, running back to the dirt road. She was too nervous to run
with all those eyes staring at her, so she stayed waiting in the silent
field with only the sound of the crackling fire. As the sun was beginning
to turn to golden orange. Her mind went blank, she said, and
I knew exactly what she meant here, so I nodded in agreement when she
mentioned it. She only remembers sitting and holding a warm vinegar drink in her
hands, and was then trying to forget the image of a severed head and
a bowl, an image that had arrived to her memory almost ten years after
the whole ordeal. In silence, they we all ate, she told us
with tears in her eyes, before the sunset chance started. What followed for
her were years of confusion. Where do we go when we die? Why
can't everyone see what we see? Why do we only know of the good
half of the scriptures that were left for us? What about the bad half?
She learned to live with it, just like we all had, going
to work and coming home preparing food, keeping those stories to ourselves. When
she was finished, the moderator David was visibly stunned by her story. I
think it was at that moment when it actually hit him that all this was
real, and that the odd ones in town were not just an urban legend
meant to keep teenagers within the borders of town. It took him a bit
to get his senses back and speak up, and he knew it he quick
He looked down at his clipboard and then up at another man. Cole was
his name, history involved the game he had played when he was a kid,
And suddenly even more vivid memories of how everything started with me flashed in
my mind. As he continued, I'd try to hold on to my thoughts.
I know how easily they tend to fade, So I rushed for the
box of notebooks and pencils to write down what I was thinking. Everyone paused
for me and sat in silence as I walked back to the chair. I
was not minding the awkwardness at all. Cole continued with his experiences, explaining
how he got to the old water tank at the top of Turnip Hill,
the one that had been abandoned for as long as I could remember, and
not far from where my grandpa lived. He said, he was met by
an older boy, the teenager back then, who asked if he had ever
played X Marks the Spot, a type of treasure hunt game where they would
make lines out of objects they would see and try to get the other and
the treasure. He could tell that the game needed more players in order to
work, so he mentioned it to the guy, but his response and a
chill down his back. Oh there's another team, all right, we just
can't see them. He agreed to play, and they went around the tower,
eventually stumbling upon a wrapped up cloth, its contents he refused to share,
but as his voice started trembling, he sort of froze up. Next
thing, he remembers, he was walking down the hill and back to his
house. We all looked at each other, and then David, who was
again with his mouth open and blank stare, not knowing whether to believe the
stories or not, was interrupted by Cole. Sometimes. Cole managed to say,
sometimes I'm not myself again. Everyone nodded, including myself. Lilted her
hand upward as if raising her hand without raising her arm. Call nodded at
her, and she spoke up, I'm sometimes not myself either. What does
it feel like for you? Voice changes? I feel heavier, angrier,
he said. Everyone again, including myself, nodded in agreement. David,
still unaware of what was going on, looked at his clipboard, then his
watch, and said, we have time for one more and we will continue
with our introductions next week. As he looked at me in the eye and
then nervously turned away. It was going to be my turn to share what
had happened to me. Part two of odd Ones in Town is coming up
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free shipping. Hello Fresh, America's number one milkit. I was about seven
years old when I stumbled out of my grandpa's yard chasing butterflies with a net.
We had gotten at the dollar store earlier that day. A friend had
come over to spend the day. It was near the end of summer break,
one more weekend in school will start again. My backpack had been picked
out, the black shoes from my uniform were ready, and I had gotten
a brand new box of preyons. Those details came up years after the incident
in a survey type session where myself, along with a group of three other
people were talking about the experiences and happened to mention the start of the school
year. I had enough of these sessions to put together the entire day.
Now I had a visual of the field being overlooked by the abandoned water tank
at the top of the hill. This was thanks to cold story. I
had always wanted to go to it. Some of the kids at school talked
about a troll who lived up there and he gave them some fruit. He
would let you go inside. It was an odd story, I know,
but as kids we believed it. My friend and I were near the fence
when we heard someone calling us from the edge of the woods. Jimmy looked
at me and then back at the trees, asking if I had heard the
same thing. We looked around for a bit until I heard the samest coming
from the trees, but I was able to see the source of the sound
this time. It was a boy about our age. On that part of
town, we knew almost everyone, which came with a major fault that we
trusted almost everyone too. He was wearing a shirt that matched his pants in
that light blue color. His hair had been poorly cut. He never reminded
me of a character out of a cartoon from his large, drowned eyes and
shiny black shoes. I looked around the room at this point and saw the
rest of them nodding. I continued. In the last days of summer,
and only being the two of us out in that field, we shouted at
him to come and play, or maybe asked him what school he went to.
I don't remember, but he simply stood there, waving at us,
making emotion with his hands. To follow him as he turned into the woods
and stopped a little farther inside. Jimmy ran after him first, and I
followed. I knew in the back of my mind that my grandpa would come
out looking for me, and that I was always supposed to tell him where
I was going. When I was at his house, but I also remember
thinking that it was so close, just right there, and that everything would
be all right. The boy stood still and looked at us, before making
the hand motion to follow him even deeper into the woods and running far enough
away to almost lose sight of him. It was dark in the woods.
The trees were dark green now that the flowers were gone, and soon the
leaves would die and the whole area would turn into a different color. We
walked far enough away for the entrance where we had come in to hide among
the trees, and all we could see was a little boy standing still,
waiting for us. He pointed to an area that looked like a pit,
although not deep, like a valley, in the shadows of the trees,
where nothing else had grown for quite a while. Somewhere among the trees,
a little farther down was a building, something we had never seen before.
It was old and had a pointy structure on the corner. Even at that
age, I knew that it was a church. I hated churches, and
after that I hated them even more. My parents were never strict about the
church, even in that small town where everyone went, so that helped the
little boy was walking toward the church, not turning around to look at us
anymore. Then among its abandoned walls, he disappeared. It looked around the
room at that moment. Everyone was looking at me, afraid to move.
We had all had encounters with the odd Ones in town, but no one
had heard of a child being one. We knew what we were all talking
about. The odd Ones were not like regular people. They had been known
to keep to themselves, discreetly looking for recruits. Every once in a while
you would hear of someone who joined them and still lived among us. But
sometimes you would hear of disappearances, rumors of people being killed for the rich
they had held. I was around ten or eleven when a large group of
men from around town got together with their shotguns to bring them to justice.
The police interfered and forced them to stop. Everyone, and I mean everyone
in that group except for David, understood what it was like to be tormented
by these events, not feeling like ourselves. One said, well, I
don't think I had ever been myself. My only memories ended with that visit
to the church. Jimmy walked up to the walls of the abandoned church in
the woods, and I followed close behind. We searched for the boy all
around the place, and we would have kept looking had it not been for
the voice that shouted at us from the inside of the broken windows. It
was not a child but a grown man wearing the same colored clothes we had
seen on the boy. Jimmy took off, running back to where we had
entered the woods, and I, well, I don't remember. Everyone in
that room nodded at me at that point. They were waiting for me to
cry, or perhaps they were expecting me to explain more of my story,
but I simply sat there in silence. That was the end of it,
the end of me. Eventually, David got it. He closed his notebook
and looked at the rest of us. He was still nervous. We could
all tell these types of things were not something you would hear every day,
and at least I suspected that he knew exactly what was happening. Anna looked
around and smiled at the rest of us. We had been subjected to this
type of thing before, and yet we had never met. The surveys they
made us take were probably for that purpose. Would be harder to lie if
we all knew each other, or maybe they need we did something else and
decided to match us by the similarity of our stories. Experiences that were difficult
to explain to those who had never been in our positions should have been easier
now, but they weren't. And yet we all knew the pain of knowing
the truth beside we hide away from and completely unintentionally too. Oh what we
would give to go back to how things used to be, money, give
time, maybe give up our lives. If one of us could remember what
the ritual was when our memories faded and we turned into this, If just
one remembered, we might have had a chance. We all knew it and
looked around again, and after a brief pause, she asked, we're hopeless,
aren't we. David looked at us in shock as we all turned to
each other and started to smile and then laugh. It was time to go
share your thoughts with me. I'll leave my contact information in the description of
this episode. If you're looking for something else to listen to, check out
the other stories on this podcast. You can also find other stories really creepy
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and true horror. The latest episode is about the horrific experiments on humans that
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See you soon.