Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. For some, the holidays bring along memories of
those that are gone, a time when tragedies seemed to hurt us just a
little bit more than usual. My name is Edwin. Then he's a Scary
Story Robert's song. I had just started my shift at my dad's shop and
it was already going badly. An angry man had just left after coming to
me for an issue with his phone line, when all we did at the
time was selled and repair cell phones. He had paid his bill and was
getting charged again, and even though I try to help him figure it out
for free, by the way, he was frustrated the whole time, until
he turned to cussing me out for asking him to call his service provider.
The job didn't pay anything. I was just doing my dad a favor while
he was out of town for his tree about four hours away, and I
was staying at his house. He offered to close a shop for those two
days if I couldn't help out, but I couldn't say no. Plus it
was my girlfriend's birthday that weekend, and even though she was upset, there
was only so much she could say to me about it. I would make
it up to her. The rest of the day went okay. I sold
a cell phone and a warranty for it, a couple of phone cases and
replacement chargers. A few people stopped by the shop to ask how my dad
was doing, and nothing more, which was nice of them. But I
really wanted it to be closing time in order for me to go upstairs.
I wanted to order takeout and fall asleep in front of the television. But
around six point forty I started wondering just how bad it would be if I'd
closed down the shop just twenty minutes early. What could happen between then and
when the actual time to close rolled by. But with every thought came opposite
one, snapping me back into reality like a river band, thoughts that told
me to just be patient, that I had gotten through the hardest part already,
and that my dad needed the help. I sat back down behind the
counter as I watched the crouching silhouette of a woman coming up to the front
door. I was hoping she would just keep walking, but unfortunately, she
reached for the door handle and rattled it open. It was an older woman,
but her hair dyed red that was closer to purple, a long black
skirt, and glasses hanging from the front of her yellow blouse. She looked
at me and smiled before focusing on her steps, once again, making sure
not the trip over her own feet. Hello, she greeted me while trying
to reach for her purse to take out her cellphone. After a few seconds,
she gave up and focused once again on her steps until she got to
the counter, where I was pretending to be busy with something else. While
she got there, she told me she had a few problems with her cell
phone. One of them was that her battery wouldn't last very long, and
when she told me that it only lasted a day, I explained that cell
phones nowadays had more features and used to have more battery power than before.
After some back and forth on her thoughts on how long a battery should last,
she accepted that it was fine and came to terms with the fact that
she'd have to charge her cell phone every night. The other issue, though,
that one was a strange one. I keep getting a phone call,
young man. It rings at around two in the morning, and it wakes
me up. I can't go to sleep easily, you see, she explained,
later, telling me about some of her ailments and her sleeping problems.
I asked if she had tried to put the phone on silent, but she
said that she needed it on in case of an emergency. This that sounded
a lot like the problem I had with another customer at the start of the
day. It was an issue with the phone service provider, not with the
phone itself. But I took a deep breath and decided to give this old
woman a hand with the phone by offering some ideas. I could block the
number for her, and that's what I offered, so we tried that.
As I was running through the incoming phone logs, I saw a few phone
calls during the day, none with names attached to them, But she was
right about the middle of the night ones. They'd show up at one fifty
nine am consistently every single night. The thing was, they would all be
coming from different numbers. I scrolled down as far as I could for the
entire sixty days that the phone kept records for. It was there, night
after night at one am the phone call. Sometimes it would go unanswered and
display as a missed call, and other times it would show up as an
eight or so second phone call. Do you know who's calling your phone that
late? Have you talked to them? She explained that nobody would ever answer,
that her hearing was also bad and so she couldn't be sure. I
thought it was odd, but I was convinced that it was a scammer or
prank caller. But every night for at least the past two months, they
must have been determined. While we do certain types of repairs, we also
provide loner phones, which my dad started offering to certain customers, and this
woman had known about it because after noticing that I was looking at my watch,
she fearfully suggested to leave her phone there overnight and then just give her
a loner phone. She would come back tomorrow once the phone was fixed,
and that she would let me close up. I didn't know how the phone
was going to get fixed, but honestly I was tired and I accepted without
making her fill out all of the paperwork required. I simply gave her a
flip phone and told her that the phone number was labeled on the back of
the phone, and then to come back for her cell phone in the morning.
She smiled and watched her every step as she worked her way back to
the front door. I sighed in relief, accepting that if this woman would
just never come back with our phone, I would just pay my dad for
it. I was tired, and so I went upstairs to the living room
above the shop and couldn't wait to sit down with a hot pocket and a
Diet coke right in front of the television. Dad didn't have cable, but
there was something comforting about being in that house, sitting on Dad's chair after
all those years. Again. I flicked on the TV. The evening news
were on, and the microwave beaped just then. I groaned as I got
up to grab the hot plate from out of there, and then sat down
once more. I closed my eyes for just a minute when I heard it
my phone and I had forgotten to text my girlfriend that evening, and despite
her being chill for just about everything, not saying good night to her was
a sure fire away to get her angry. I never understood that, but
in my head I planned out the speech, saying that I was in a
sleep, that I had been watching something on TV, or maybe that I
was just about the texture. I'd come up with something on the spot.
But then I looked at the cell phone screen, and it was dark,
dead, and yet I could still hear the beeps. The ringing of the
phone was faint but clear. I stopped breathing just so that I could listen
better. That's when I noticed it was coming from the shop downstairs. I
was hoping it would stop on its own, but it kept going ringing and
ringing until I made up my mind to go check it out for myself.
The cell phone was on the counter, just where I had left it,
vibrating near the edge of it and about to fall, still ringing. I
could barely see it in the dark mini showroom of the shop, but if
I flicked on the light switch, it would turn everything on, and I
feared that it would let people know that the shop was open, even though
in my drowsy state, and had to become clear just how late it was.
I walked up to it and grabbed it just before it went off the
edge. The number on the screen seemed familiar, but it was it registered.
It vibrated in my hand, heating up as the numbers themselves seemed to
blur on the super bright screen. I pressed a green button to answer and
held it up to my ear. Hello, I answered, that's when I
heard a song. Clearly it was a piano, soft and hauntingly familiar.
I closed my eyes and let the music flood over my head, with every
note taking me to the next, until all I could hear was a melody
that followed every stroke of the hammers all the way to the end. I
stood there in silence as I heard the tone that tells you goodbye. I
must have stood there for another ten minutes before I took the phone with me
and walked upstairs again. I sat on the couch and texted my girlfriend good
night, and relaxed in front of the television until I fell asleep. In
the morning. Dad called promptly at nine, asking how everything was going,
and that everything went well for him the previous night, thanking me for taking
care of his store. It must have been the first time I heard him
say such a sincere thank you to me. It was the first time I
told him that he was welcome the way that I did. We just weren't
the touch of feely type of people in my family. I was glad that
he was okay, and I wanted him to come back. At ten,
I walked downstairs and opened up the shop, and I hadn't even managed to
sit back down. When I saw the old woman walking up to the front
door, I smiled at her and met her at the entrance. She shook
the phone I had loaned her as I asked how she was doing well.
This phone didn't ring last night, she said, smiling. I shared her
same smile when I said that I was glad to hear that. I then
explained that I had also heard the phone ring at two in the morning,
and that a way to fix that would be to change her phone number.
Her eyes lit up, but then said that her friends would not know that
new phone number. She then stopped suddenly and asked who the caller had been.
It was likely a machine, I explained, it played a piano song
and then hung up. Did they say anything? What song was it?
She was surprised at my lack of knowledge about classical music, and despite the
song being familiar to me, I tried humming it before she started humming it
along with me. Her voice was cracking, which she said knocked her and
e flat. That's Robert's song, and then a wide smile spread along her
face. Do I owe you anything, she asked, I said no.
After a few seconds but then I try to find out if she wanted me
to change her phone number where if she wanted to trade it for another loner
phone. She smiled and said that she was okay with it now. She
then said thank you and then walked out the door. The next story is
called five Steps Away, and it's coming out right after this, a car
passed at just the wrong time. Desperately hoping that the audio would have at
least caught the moment that the little girl dropped her ice cream cone and screened
in sadness, made my fingers tremble against the recorder, almost missing the stop
button. It pushed on the track back one and then pressed the tiny speaker
against my ear. I should have brought my headphones, but even through the
loud noises on the street, I knew that luck was not on my side
that day. I had missed it. And here's the thing. I doubt
anyone else has ever bumped into one of us people out there recording everyday objects
walking around the streets with microphones. But trust me, it's a job.
Sure. Walking through airport or security will always flag me with some questions about
why I'm carrying so many microphones, so many interfaces with me then asking if
I'm a producer or a musician, But really I just catch sounds and add
them to my own collections or sell them in my libraries. When I was
first starting out, I would go around editing sounds and uploading them for one
dollar and seventy nine cents on some of the forums, mostly for low budget
films or universities that would buy them. They would be sounds of footsteps through
metal stairs or sounds of airplanes passing by. I used to live by Lax,
which was both a blessing and a curse for all of the airplane sounds,
which was good then it was bad for all the sounds I would get
in the way of other sound recordings. But things were changing. With every
season. Things started becoming a little more extreme. Sounds of homeless people fighting
in the streets, or the sounds of a leg breaking. Sure, you
could make these with celery and smashing fruits in order to get the perfect sounds
out. There was also another level of production, getting the real thing.
Realistic sounds paid the most money, and even though hardly any field recordist out
there would ever admit to this, some of us were guilty of trading evil
things for money. Among the groups and conferences, there would be a few
that talked about it being our right of passage, the things that we would
do for sound, just like photographers do for the perfect photograph. But then
we would reach a tipping point that would turn us back into the friendly men
and women walking around with huge headphones and microphones in their hands. For me,
it happened last year around Christmas. Requests for sounds and the horror topics
are big around the start of the year. Are you surprised to hear about
that. I was two before I got into this. Anyway, there was
a specific director that I legally can't name, who would reach out for a
few of us here in the Los Angeles area about getting some sound made.
Sometimes it would be about on location recordings, and other times it would be
requests for sounds human sounds, laughter, cries, grunts, and screams.
But this recording will never leave me. It was almost five in the morning
and the metro station had just opened. There were a few people on the
train platform, and I was adjusting the cables of one of my microphones when
I heard it. People gasped. At the same time, there was a
woman at the end of the platform that was screaming hysterically, unable to make
any other sounds. I was standing five steps away from the edge of the
platform, staring at the woman and pointing my microphone at her echoing screams.
I had press record by now and was staring at the monitoring graph on my
device. Sound was perfect. Two guys rushed up toward the platform from behind
me as I watched a hand trying to reach over the yellow border on the
edge just before the rails. One of the guys reached for his left hand,
the other grabbed him from his right elbow. The train was now approaching.
It was coming fast, with a loud screech of the brake system as
it tried to stop before striking the man. I could see the top of
his head immediately before I saw both of his eyes the plea for me to
help. I was only five steps away from grabbing on his sh and yanking
him out onto the safe concrete platform, But it was then when the screeching
takes over the recording. Two guys trying to pull him up lost grip against
the heavy train as the body crunched away from them from under the train.
Tracks. The screams didn't last for very long. The woman at the end
of the platform sounded like a blurred echo. The sounds of the breaks and
the wheels against the metal tracks covered up most of what I needed after the
disappointment left me. It got covered up by what I had just done,
a consequence of those who lose themselves in sound. You can join me on
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