Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A new police officer is doing her rounds late
one night when she begins to reminisce some places she used to visit. My
name is Edward and here it's a scary story. You nit six' one
two. Wellness check requested at five five one two Rogers Street. I know,
I know, mister Cautiarez was not answering his granddaughter's phone calls. Again
where the man didn't go out for his mail in two days. A call
to make sure that someone's alive is a little bit strange, but it's our
duty, I guess. But at three am, I know what you're thinking,
and I thought about it too the first couple of times I went to
check on him, but that's at the time he was up. I would
drive up on those nights and check for the kitchen lights, and I would
see the blinking blue lights from the television coming from the living room. As
I would pull up, he would walk up to the window and then to
the door. He'd come out with a smile on his face, asking if
it was his granddaughter. Again, I would not and ask if he was
all right. Those nights were slow, and we often chatted a bit before
he went back inside, thanking me for my time. I would always tell
him to call his family before heading back into the patrol car. But that
was about the extent of the nights around Yadow Valley. Hardly anything to do,
which is good for a town. Don't get me wrong, but it
made me question myself and my choices so much. What was I doing and
how was I helping? It was nice for Gabriella Guldiires, the man's granddaughter,
to worry so much about her grandpa enough to call for someone to check
in on him, But I also thought about the man's neighbors. Hardly anyone
was left on that side of town now. Most of them had sadly passed
away over the years. In the area I lost most of its residents and
local businesses. When the grocery store relocated closer to downtown, I knew it
was over. But it was also the area that I was assigned to patrol,
along with the south part of downtown. But there were already two other
officers around that area. They had been in the forest for many years.
There was little a newbie like me could offer. The area was turning more
industrial, large factory operations had been growing around the river. The water would
serve as a way for them to cool down their machinery. Plus, the
zone had a few old factories already, distribution centers for bread, canned food,
and other stuff to stock the grocery stores, things that were in the
surrounding cities. Some of those factories had shut down long ago. For it
was good to see at least some movement around the empty lots at night now
that they were being renovated. I never liked driving around there. Something was
always off. Plus, and I wasn't always a believer in this one of
those back rows, so it was haunted. I remember the stories from back
in high school. I didn't go to the local school, but the one
across the river, and those who had cars would drive out there sometimes to
hang out. We just called it a haunted street. Nothing very creative,
but there was proof that something was there. But those were the days you
would head out there, get out of the car, walk around with flashlights,
scare each other. At some point everything changed and they just used it
as a place to party and drink. But anyway, I got to enjoy
it up until my senior year when there was an accident out there, one
of the girls in my graduating class simply vanished. Few people said to know
her. I mean I probably knew of her and had crossed paths with her
at some point around school. She was said to be smart, quiet and
friendly. It was obvious what her name was now, Erica Jacobs. It
was everywhere Erica Jacobs. Disappeared from local hangout spot, Erica Jacobs come home,
Erica Jacobs gone but not forgotten. Local students, Erica Jacobs whereabouts unknown.
But I was out there that night on Haunted Street, and I don't
remember seeing her, and nobody I asked saw her actually, And yet the
police were convinced that she had been out there on that night, the search
parties, her parents, the news, everyone was out there looking for her,
and they all knew through some trustworthy source, I guess that she had
been on Haunted Street. And even by asking absolutely everyone I knew who had
been out there for a newspaper article I wrote for our high school, one
that never got published, nobody, absolutely no one remembered seeing her there.
It was a tough scenario because Erica Jacobs became known after she disappeared. Before
then, she just blended in with everyone. She had few friends, disappeared
during lunchtime and would only be seen talking with the teachers. Today, it
was likely only her family that thought of her and well me right now,
just like I also had to think about mister Gutierres because of his wellness check
part of my job. But still most nights I would wait for morning to
pass to do my rounds by Haunted Street. It was called Timber Road by
the way, but Haunted Street was the name most of the town knew it
by, and Dispatch I had to hold back and call it by its real
name whenever it was mentioned over the radio. But on this night, I
don't know what got into me that I drove straight there while it was still
dark, and I parked by the turn right next to the metal gates from
one of the oldest empty factories in the town. Everything came rushing back to
me the way the place was quote shut down. Nobody was to talk about
it anymore, out of respect to Rika Jacobs or out of fear. You
see, a couple of days after the incident, it was a Monday night,
Tom and the rest of the guys from Choir were going to head out
there. And had told a few of us, myself included. I didn't
want to go, but my friend aded and she was into one of the
guys from choir, so she decided that if I didn't go, she would
go there without me. I decided to go. What we experienced that night,
whether it was real or not, terrified the few who got to listen
to it firsthand and visit it in the aftermath. We knew that we were
going to come off as crazy if the whole school found out. Plus such
a story would be disrespectful to Erica's parents, to the school, and it
was too soon for anything, including theories like those, to start going around.
And myself and the choir guys had gotten there in two cars. The
usual spots where everyone would park were still visible in the fields right by the
parking lots. Few detectives had been out there by this time. The yellow
tape they had put all around the street was stretched out, ripped and dangling
from every post and tree that was around there. This was a scene that
all the kids wanted. That's the haunted street everyone talked about, and not
the place with underage drinking and loud music coming from the terrible speakers. That
cars used to have. The area was dark with no headlights around, kind
of like that night. I was there on the patrol car by the metal
gates. We were there with the car doors open, just talking, and
everything was fine for about an hour, when suddenly the place got darker,
like physically darker, as if the moon had gotten covered up, or if
a big blanket had suddenly flown over the entire area. It was then when
one of the guys yelled out a sharp look and pointed out toward one of
the dirt roads that led to the factories. Nobody saw anything, but when
the high beams went on, they all, all six of them in total,
saw a white figure out in the distance walking up to them, and
was immediately scared. But being surrounded by a bunch of teenage boys, we
all knew very well what we were about to put up with. They stayed
outside while we both got into the passenger seats of one of the cars and
looked out toward the shadowy rode. It was clear the person was walking and
crawling in a strange mix, alternating between the two. Toward us. It
was getting real close to the ground and then standing upright and then repeating and
started screaming when she noticed how fast it was running toward us, but I
couldn't make a sound. They took the rest of the guys a while to
notice it too, but when they did they rushed inside, all of them
squeezing into one car and attempting to start it. I could see tom shaky
hand as he tried to put the key in the ignition while looking straight ahead
through the windshield. It was a woman in a darkened large white shirt or
dress, long dark hair, sprinting and bending unnaturally like an animal, very
close to the ground. The car had finally started, and the light beams
were aiming straight towards that thing or rushing at us from the empty road.
When Anne shouted at us to be quiet, and she asked if it could
be Erica Jacobs. This made us all freak out even more, and Tom
turned the car around just with enough of an angle to give me a direct
view of this thing running up to us. It was a girl, but
not Erica Jacobs. That had seen many of her photographs, and I was
writing my article for the school newspaper. She was not even close. The
guys dropped us off before they went back out there for the car they left
behind, and that's about as far as we got. I didn't know it
back then, but my investigation of what happened to Erica Jacobs was just beginning.
The rest of Haunted Street is coming up right after this stay with me.
The other guys chose to not talk about the incident again, while most
of the conversation about that night stayed between Tom Anne and myself. Back then,
we thought that the other guys were scared of what we had seen,
and although that may have been true, now I know that they probably didn't
want their parents to find out they were out there so late at night.
I see it all the time now, young people telling their parents that they
are somewhere else and then having freaked out parents calling us to find out that
they were out playing cards or drinking at a public park. It took me
a while to figure out what I wanted to do with my life after high
school a journalist, doctor detective. I bounced back and forth between schools in
private education programs to try and sort everything out. And it was long after
spending many years of doing the wrong things that I met up with a friend
who eventually got me thinking about becoming a police officer. The pay seemed okay,
and the danger everyone talked about was not as severe as it made it
seem. It sounded like it would help me to get to other places faster
if I chose to change careers. So there I was, once again in
my hometown, riding around in a patrol car at night, at the same
places that I used to go to as a teenager. Two completely different people,
now into completely different worlds. The street that was once packed every Thursday
and Friday night was now empty. The factories that would make so much noise
and add strange smells to the air, We're gone. For the most part,
the decades's old mystery was still there. Verica Jacobs never salved. The
barons had left the town, the city cleaned up, the posters and the
candles dried up. Her name became just another one of many in the list
of missing people in the state. I tried to find out who had been
in charge of it back then when I was in school, A so called
Burner. I'm sure if that was his actual name, but he was a
detective who had retired way before I joined. But there's something about being alone
with a purpose that makes you question it, and that was the case with
me. I was the only one who wanted to show somebody, anyone who
would be willing to listen, that Erika Jacobs was not at Haunted Street the
night she went missing. But they looked in the wrong places the whole time,
that maybe she had run away or was out there somewhere living in another
city, living and other life. But Haunted Street had shown up in several
other cases. I came to find out cases of missing teenagers. In the
nineteen fifties and sixties, when the city was as developed as it was ever
going to get. That part of town around Haunted Street had factories, storage
facilities, and even an adult school mainly teaching trades and other things essential for
working in those specific fields. But like with the rest of the town,
people started leaving. Nearby cities like Palover and Togolia were booming, and most
of the residents moved there. The city did what it could, and it's
started several programs, and that's how Yahoo Valley went from steelmaking to bakeries and
canned food processing, leaving the vast majority of factories completely empty and run down.
And although I wanted to think that the rumors about Haunted Street were just
that made up stories teens would tell each other. The truth once you get
a glimpse of actual records of cases is a terrible one. Bodies found reports
of missing boys and girls and crimes around the general area surrounding Haunted Street,
and that was only the beginning. When the new factory started operating in the
area, the police dispatch started getting calls about a different type of disturbance,
strange sightings in and around Timber Road, the place we all knew as Haunted
Street. At least one call per week would claim to see with the reports
going from vague statements like strange woman walking around the dark roads looks to be
in distress to reports that were much more detailed Caucasian woman in a white dress
looks injured, spotted twenty yards from Timber Road and the entrance of Albert's Company
distribution center. Every single call was followed up on based on our protocol,
but eventually the call started being acknowledged, recorded and left as part of the
police records without a patrol car being sent out. For years, scattered reports
of police officers being sent out to investigate Timber Road and report seeing no one
out there became common. They had gone as far as to bringing the callers
into the station for more details. Everyone seemed completely coherent, logical, and
some were well respected members of the community. One of the callers happened to
be mister Gutierres from the Wellness check calls. His record it was from nineteen
eighty seven, calling about a woman spotted crawling around the field when he was
driving home late one night. The record was taken by Berner, the same
officer that would later oversee the Erica Jacob's case the Girl from school. Thinking
about everything again and seeing Haunted Street at night after many years reminded me of
the drive I used to feel to crack the case of Erica Jacob's the Missing
Girl of Yahoo Valley. Today, the nightly routines of driving along the dying
streets and residential areas felt pointless. The sun started picking out behind one of
the factory lots. I had spent too much time out there. I set
the patrol car on drive and pulled away, wondering for how much longer I
would be able to do this. About two weeks after that, received another
call to head out to mister Gutatras's home. Another wellness check. It was
a complete routine. Now I pulled up, saw the kitchen light on his
silhouette against the window, and the door opening. I walked up to the
front door and asked if he was all right. We did our usual exchange
asking how everything was going. Went out of the blue. I'm sure if
it was just frustration or something else, but I asked him about Haunted Street.
His eyes opened wide as he started sharing one of his encounters out there.
Back in the eighties, he had gotten off of work. He was
an attendant at one of the plans and in charge of shipping and receiving.
It was finally driving home after one of the shipments arrived late. The drive
to his house and the factories might be what ten minutes max, But those
ten minutes changed his whole perspective on reality. He saw crawling along the empty
lots and heading straight for his car. While he was out there, he
freaked out so much that he stepped on the gas and nearly drove off the
road in his attempt to get back home. The first thing he did was
called the police, who, in his own words, didn't care much back
then. But soon after he told me about what he thought it had been
a ghost, and that not only he had seen, but multiple workers had
already witnessed. This phase got even more serious as he started talking about Timber
Road. The city was dying, and it was dying quickly, he said.
They wanted to fix it, and a ghost story wasn't helping. The
townsfolk and the mayor. Everyone was in on this, But that remote area
of the factories was the perfect spot for disposing of bodies. Missing kids would
be found there, you know. It would bring them from the nearby counties.
Sometimes it'd be hidden deep in the disposal channels, mixed with the waste,
and sometimes even thrown accidentally. He said that in air quotes into the
rivers. Awful, awful stories I've heard, he continued. Nobody wanted to
work there. You could tell that mystery with theaters had never been given the
chance to talk about this. He told me about his theories, the things
he had heard, the ghosts he had seen, and then mentioned how scared
he was when he found out through his granddaughter that teens were heading out there
late at night to hang out. Glad it all stopped with the missing girls
story, he said. Erica jacobs I interrupted yeah, yeah, that one.
She wasn't real, but it worked. All them photos you've seen,
they're from someone else on the other side of the country or I don't know
where they got them from. Her parents or so called parents were said to
have left town almost immediately. None of it was real. I think it
was a rumor that got out of hand. He told me so many stories,
following thread after thread, and I was there for about an hour.
I knew even then that his side of the story was only a part of
the truth, if there was one, and I knew that he had no
motive to make anything up. You see, once you hit a certain age,
you have fewer reasons to lie. I must admit that I didn't feel
any sort of relief in accepting his version of it, but it made sense.
Something about Erica Jacob's story never added up. I started walking back to
my car, turning my head slightly toward mister Guthires to tell him, as
always, to call his family. He smiled and wished me a good night,
and so I drove down the dark streets and nearly empty areas of town
right before sunrise. I had two hours left on my shift. Driving past
the shut down grocery stores, the old diner, and then going straight down
Main Street, past the city center and onto Haunted Street, the plays looking
over grown as always, but still the same. As it drove straight down
that same place, I remembered I could see the city lights from the nearby
cities, some of the houses on the nearby hills, and I was lost
thinking about how fragile our stories are, sometimes only one person keeping them alive,
and others like this one, the story of what we saw that night,
the one story I thought was dead, brought back to life through a
late night conversation. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Karoubiez.
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