Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's story will bring you back to a place
of loss, memories, and discovery when a man revisits an old place in
his father's stories. My name is Edwin and here's a Scary story. Hotel
California was playing at the airport when I arrived in Bogotak, Columbia that night.
For several days, I had been seeing or hearing all of these signs,
strange coincidences that led me back to my father and his memory. It
had not been that long since he passed, and although all of my friends
told me the same thing, to take time to myself, to take care
of my mother, to not forget about me, all I could do was
revisit those places my father had told me about. I knew I would find
nothing when I set out, And despite the many things I bumped into,
which were these signs, if you want to call them, that left me
with nothing but a set of story or that nobody would believe. Just like
the stories of my father. My dad had traveled a lot in his lifetime,
long before he met my mother. He had many pictures of himself with
travelers he met along the road all over the place, from Brazil to Nicaragua,
Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I got to see him with the
beard and ponchos of dark colors, his face covered in mud. I saw
him sitting on curbs with plates of strange dishes and young women with braided and
tangled hair. My old man always wanted me to travel. He said it
would bring out more of me, be I a fearful kid. It would
bring out fear, but then it would keep it out. That it would
challenge my bravery and wit and humble me down to the ground if I needed
it. But on the other side, he would say, would be the
real world, a thing you cannot unsea. It was a unique time his
death, you know. It was like owing that a person died with an
empty tank, who gave it everything he had before blissfully and peacefully embarking on
his next journey, the one we are all on. My mother was like
that, too, adventurous. She understood that there was little for him to
do in the world. I mean, what can you do once you've seen
it all, from places on a map to your own children grow up and
become parents, When you've read enough books to turn us study into a library
and have spices and jars to fill three cabinets labeled in languages only he was
able to identify. When we all said goodbye to him, he said he
would see us around. He had learned over his travels that goodbyes are not
good byes when we're only a boat, a plane, or a bus ride
away plane. We were not going to argue with him then in that case,
I mean he was actually leaving the planet. No mode of transportation would
be able to get us to him anymore. But that meant always knew something
that we didn't, and I wanted to figure that out. He had mentioned
lots of places and as many stories that went over the head of my cousins
and friends, but I was always amazed by one. The hotel in the
middle of the road. He called it a hostel, a peculiar place that
symbolized the middle of your life, along with its peculiar location in the middle
of a dirt road on the side of a hill. Most he would say,
don't even know it's there, Just another annoying obstacle in the road,
like a pothole or a dog deciding to make the warm road his bed for
a nap in the middle of the day. Only those who are looking for
it are the ones that can find it. Despite its obvious placement, everything
had two or three meanings with my old man, and it felt like having
to solve a riddle. I think Mom was the only other person who appreciated
and believed what he would say. I may have picked up the same habit
from her. Whatever tell California would play, he would say that it reminded
him of that hotel one in the middle of the road and the many people
he met to while he was there, bizarre experiences that I had at one
point thought had been induced by natural and quite intentional means. I had looked
for the place myself, only finding surrounding osperachis, which are places to stay,
and calling around. Ah, yes, the house on the street.
Some would call it with the stone walls. Others said that it was not
a place to stay and that it didn't have a phone number, then excitedly
telling me of the things and the prices of what their place had to offer.
But by acknowledging it, they told me that the place existed and that's
where I would be going for that night. It was a mystery unworthy of
solving. For just about anyone except for me. The drive there was uneventful,
with a taxi driver trying to charge me more than we had agreed to,
but that was about it. I could see the place, a large
house where the dirt road split by lanes to go around it, over grown
plants from the windows on the second floor reaching the top of the door frame
on the bottom a lush green and stuck along the stone wall. I grabbed
my backpack from the seat next to me and stepped out, crossing the street
to reach the large metal door knocker on the heavy wooden door. As I
stood on the street, no room for a sidewalk, a woman answered after
the second knock. With the hinge of the doors struggling to hold everything together,
the woman nearly pulled me in, and before I knew it, the
door had closed completely behind me. Shadows filled the entrance to that house,
uncovered like a courtyard with a garden made up of many pots of plants and
vines along the wall. The smell of stony musk would come in waves,
along with soft, cold breezes that would last a few second at a time.
Rooms lined the first and second floors with faded blue doors, a scene
I had only seen in movies and my father's black and white photographs. I
had been so amazed by the place that I had not noticed the woman looking
at me with that smile that had given her the deep memories and reminders on
the side of her face. When I looked at her, she spoke up
her hands gently reaching for my chin as she said that I reminded her of
some one that she used to know. I knew at that moment that it
could have been my father, but after seeing so many travelers come and go,
I let go of the idea and waited for her to continue what she
was saying. She smiled at me for a little bit longer before making her
way to the small reception desk on the corner of the courtyard with a large
notebook. As I followed behind her, I saw a young man walk out
of one of the rooms above and across from where the counter was. He
was shirtless and with a bowl of soup or cereal in his hand as he
waved at me, and then he made his way down the stairs. I
had a photograph of my father with a spoon in his mouth in that place,
and although the stories of my father served as a way to remind me
of him and everything he did for our family. The stories themselves, as
I said, were not easy to believe. If I was going to be
able to discover how much truth was contained in them, I had to be
ready to shatter and reglue the pieces of his stories, to live the rest
of my life truly knowing who he was. Complex life full of lessons and
curiosity. That same curiosity he passed on to us. It was the same
sense of curiosity that had driven me there, wondering how such a fearless man
who hopped on boats and planes and buses to get where he wanted, sometimes
without a map, The same person who would eat foods from questionable places and
dodged one too many accidents throughout his life. He's so afraid of one thing,
of the nothingness when the light goes out, and not a normal fear
of darkness, mind you, one that would trouble him for days. Mom
would say that he would sometimes scream, more so when they were younger,
and that he would hide by the light of the television, which he would
turn it on in the middle of the night. He had installed emergency floodlights
that must have turned on less than five times in his lifetime for blackouts in
the house. At least, that's what he would say, And it's interesting
to think how little us humans are in complete and total darkness. He can
probably count those times in one hand, and for Dad that would be more
than enough. Where are you from, my friend, the guy with the
bull asked, noodles, By the way, is what had been in there
had finally made it downstairs, flip flopping all the way to us. His
accent was from somewhere in Europe the United States, I said, as he
smiled and started telling me about his life. But as he spoke, all
I heard was my father and his stories, the places he had visited,
the people he had met, and the nightmares. I would be the only
one who would listen, like actually listen to his stories. He would tell
me how the world has a good part, but is also full of things
not many of us are aware of, much less have experienced them. Things
that lurk around corners, things that wait for your permission to join you,
and not once they do, they don't leave easily. The guy and I
spoke for a bit as the old woman, just like my own mind wandered
away the woman to the kitchen area of the place, and my mind to
the photographs with the questions I came looking to answer. Part two of of
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milk it. My father used to speak of a friend woman he met at
that place, who told him that, unaware of what she was getting into
and being betrayed through a young drama thing, as he called it, she
went to seek help or she was not supposed to. She used to stay
there, although not as a traveler but as a helper. She would wash
the towels and the floors. She would do the shopping and run general errands
around the hostel. One night, as he was trying to go to sleep,
he heard people running along the corridors outside of his room with shouting.
The most terrified deep its darkest screen he had ever heard. Travelers yelled and
ran to the first floor. The door to the outside was locked for the
night, and the owner of the house had only turned on the light to
his room, but had not goten out just yet. When another scream a
growl rumbled throughout the entire building, the owner finally came out and ran toward
the kitchen area that led into a small hallway into another set of rooms.
Worried that a thief had somehow climbed inside, he ran around, looking up
toward the walls and windows, calling out for Elena, the young girl,
to come out. My father ran toward her room and knocked on the door
before the owner. Her father took out the set of keys and opened her
room, and that's when he saw her body flat against the ceiling above her
bed. Some of the travelers, backpackers, people who roamed with guidebooks that
had not prepared them for anything like this, panicked. Some my father told
me had passed out and others had vomited. Fear. He used to say,
real fear has a power over your body. Our mind is the one
that makes the stories, and only those we can deal with. Stories were
the ones that came once the rumors started spreading of the girl who became Zest.
About half of the people in the hostel left that morning, and the
next few days there were only four of them left. Once the events started,
growls like from an animal could be heard from the corners, the sounds
of objects breaking in the kitchen during the day, and the sudden freezing gusts
of wind that would fill the rooms unexpectedly were just some of the minor things.
The remaining people there, a young woman from Brazil and two other young
men, one from Germany and the other from Sweden, along with my father,
had all spoken of the dark shadow that would come into the rooms at
night. It had turned into somewhat of a habit that they would stay up
laid into the night on the couch in the middle of the courtyard, all
of them with no plan to go anywhere just yet. For young people who
had escaped to work right after college or college altogether, this was one of
those experiences that, although it was terrifying, would bring them to life.
Life. My father explained it calmly and with facts to me, along with
the photograph he took one night. In it, you could see the outline
of a window frame with what I imagined had at one point been a bluish
light from the outside, and a dark black patch in the figure of a
tall man on the right side of it, so dark you would think it
was simply a missing part of the picture, like a spot of black ink
completely standing out from the wall next to the window, which was already dark.
Priests, he said, would visit the hostel looking for the owner and
his daughter, Helena, who had become sick by that time. Unable to
stand up, Clara, one of the travelers, would be the one to
help out with her meals. She confided in my father many years later that
she would dread going into her room because of the smell and the way her
eyes looked at her. Every one spoke of her eyes. When my father
first told me this story, I asked what the eyes looked like. The
best he was able to describe them as he asked if I had ever seen
an eyeball a real human eyeball unattached. Even though I hadn't, that image
in my mind never left me. My father had collected photograph after a photograph
of almost every corner of that enormous house in the middle of the road.
I knew because of those photographs where the common areas in the garden were,
and where they used to be, where the old television had been at one
point, and some of those photographs, with the handwritten caption on the back,
would invite you to look at certain corners of it to spot the dark
phenomenon he had captured. Elena got worse before she got better, with strange
voices that would follow her. As soon as she was able to stand up
doors, heavy wooden doors would slam shut right in front of her. She
would scream, men cry when this happened, and her story got the attention
of other people in town. New backpackers would arrive at the place unaware of
the stories within those walls, and soon my father was the only one left
who had been there from the start of everything, and he would have to
decide whether to explain or keep it to himself. Whenever someone would bring up
something unusual that happened to them in that place to those that he suspected could
handle it. He would tell in a way that made me feel proud of
knowing his stories. Elena was eventually cured thanks to a woman who came from
the mountains along with the priest from her town. The story was rarely spoken
about again, and just like with other tales that survive on word of mouth,
it was eventually forgotten. But whatever darkness had arrived had stayed in the
place, at least for a while, and it took my father years of
nightmares to finally realize how much it had affected him and the owner of the
place. Not five years after my father had left to continue his travels,
he found out andres the owner had passed away in his sleep with no explanation.
The mea though they would say, how to fear, and that's when
his fear of the dark started. I think my father claimed he would get
visits. When he would tell my brothers and I about it. He would
say that he was going to be okay, that it was only the events
that haunted him and nothing more stories. And just like that, I had
many other of his stories and other places haunting tales of how he went to
seek protection afterward from that same woman and the priest who came from the mountains
his search for the dark entity in the photographs. A short biography on Helena,
depicting her account, all hand written by my father and tucked away in
a drawer, the story of a young woman and her problems that I knew
far too well from the many times he had told and retold me the same
things. When he asked the guy with the bull of soup about the owners,
he pointed me to a portrait on the wall, on the part where
the garden was in. It was a man with his wife and young daughter,
andres Anna and their daughter Elena, taken in front of the large house
and had gone out early the next morning to walk around town. And when
I got back, breakfast was served in the small table by the kitchen,
with the old woman smiling at me. I could speak no Spanish, but
I understood kafe Kumpan said in the same way my father would call coffee with
bread, and it was like I knew her. When she introduced herself finally,
Elena, my eyes lit up. This had been the young woman from
the stories, and just like that I knew that at least part of it
had been true. Part of me wanted to show her the photographs I had
brought with me, but all I could tell her that morning was my father's
name. As I put my hand over my chest and then above my head
as a way to try to tell her who I was, she smiled in
the same way my dad's friend smiled. I remember even at his funeral,
they looked at me with a smile, knowing that I had gotten great lessons.
And then dozens and dozens of his friends arrived, all of them knowing
he had used up his life in the way every person should. She told
me to wait as she walked into the hallway, past the kitchen and came
back with a dark green book, the photo album full of pictures of travelers
with their long hair, clothes and bags of chips that took you back to
simpler times, unattached from phones and the internet, just friends and phone calls.
And she stopped flipping through the pages as I saw the young man with
a poncho and beard, my father. She showed me a photograph of him
with a light bulb over his head, laughing hysterically. The one of the
chicken bones sticking out by this out of his mouth like a cigarette. My
father with friends he had made along the road with paper hats and a birthday
cake in the middle. I smiled as I flipped through those pages, looking
for more photographs of him, The stories he had captured versus the ones he
had left behind so different. I thought of all the stories he had collected.
As I flipped through those collected of him. Elena walked over to the
counter as a guy with the bull from the day before came over and just
one day we had talked of our lives and walked around town to the cheap
restaurant at the end of the street. Friends already. I laughed at the
bowl he was carrying once again, so I grabbed the fruit bowl from the
table and held it the same way he did. We had a good laugh,
Elena. I came back with the camera just at that moment, as
I heard the click and shudder. My father was right. Things that survive
our stories that everyone, even my father, would be just a boat,
a plane, or a bus ride away. According to your comments over on
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