Hey there, it's Edwin. Scary Story Podcast will be getting to you earlier
in the week, starting next Tuesday. That'll be instead of Fridays from now
on, and that's thanks to your feedback. For now on with the story.
Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Here I'll tell you the story of a
man who spent his best years at work in some of his experiences. My
name is Edwin, and here it's a scary story. I was leaning on
my knuckles that were resting on top of the mob at the end of the
hallway. It had been a long night and it was time for me to
go. It's strange being in a place that has seen me through pretty much
everything, every phase of my life, you know, walking through the reception
desk on my way to the custodian closet and passing by the mirror they have
in the front, the one by the fake dusty flowers, I would look
at myself and see that same kid, the one who wanted a few extra
bucks to take his girlfriend out to dinner Friday nights. It was right after
my senior year. Nancy was going to be a senior now, and back
then we used to get married real young. It wasn't far off in my
mind that one day i'd want to marry her. But I wasn't great at
school, and life had not been fair with my parents either. They struggled
all of their lives, and I remember telling myself that I wouldn't end up
like them. I would be happy with just a stable job and a house
with the backyard, one with real walls, one that couldn't be towed off
the lot. One of the highways had just opened up, and the city
was hard at work with the new side streets and such. Word going around
the town at the time spoke about the new housing developments, fancy new stuff
from New York in California. But like with all small towns, everyone had
something to say. But I saw those places as my opportunity to finally get
something nice, and so on my friend Ben's old truck, he would drive
around at night and entering those large empty lots, screaming this one, this
one's mine. I miss that guy. And it was about six months later
when they started building the houses there, and along with that road came new
ones just like they said. The one you could see off the reflection of
the mirror at the front desk was Henderson Road, with new motels and fast
food restaurants came along other jobs, and suddenly this place went from dirt roads
and trailer parks to asphalts and lots of cars and less trees. I don't
know where I lost my town along the way, but it did give me
several chances to do something. I borrowed an old suit for my dad,
one that he would use for church and for flying sometimes. When I went
to interview at Sammy's motel, they were hiring for all positions, and I
remember all I wanted to be was at the front desk in a suit and
just greet people like they did in the movies. But they said that for
two dollars an hour more, I could start working in maintenance, and that
if I did good work, I would get a review at the end of
the year and then be moved to be in charge of maintenance. As a
whole, I trusted the owners. They were friends of the family, and
through all those years they always did what they promised. I really wish everything
would have stayed the same. You know, they say that teachers remember all
of their students as they go through their careers, but they never say that
about any other people. I mean, I could tell you that I remember
every single one of my guests. I mean, maybe not by name,
but all of them were friendly and kind to me, even the ones that
came only to take care of business during their lunchtime or for brief moments after
a night out. The things had been changing for a while. Mister Jones
eventually left the business to his son Robert. He got a lot of his
buddies to come and help with the business, adding new things that people do
today, like internet things, which worked for a bit, although everyone seemed
to just get more stressed out. They wanted me to use a computer.
Can you imagine that to do cleaning and maintenance work just didn't make sense.
I couldn't complain, though I didn't want to. It was their thing,
and if I've learned anything throughout the years, it's to mind your own business.
They soon started blaming me for a lot of the things they messed up
on, like, for example, they started doing a twin four hour check
in thing where people would come in by themselves, and that opened a whole
lot of trouble. Drugs and other things were around the hallway in the morning,
and I don't even want to get into what happened in those rooms.
They were terrible, even the non smoking ones. But aside from the dirty
carpets and toilets, there were other things that started happening at Sammy's Motel.
The first one of many was with this woman named Teresa from the state of
Arizona. From what I heard, she didn't drive herself to Sammy's Motel,
and I don't even think she stepped into the place over at Room one,
P fourteen on her own. It was about two years after mister Jones had
left Robert in charge, and the place, who was more or less still
all right. The manager, a woman hired from out of town, was
on the verge of quitting after all the demands Robert would put on everybody,
And that night, when she was instructed once again to leave the place up
to the cameras and the security buttons to do their thing, she got in
her car and went home after that long twelve hour shift. I mean I
would have done the same, That's what was supposed to happen. But that
next morning, Robert and some of his friends who didn't actually work there,
had been coming in and out of the building telling me and the cleaning staff
about an incident that required us to be extra careful with everything. They shut
the place down, with the exception of seven or so guests that had not
checked out that day. When they called that ambulance, that's what I call
it, even though those who were in charge of it were definitely not there
to keep someone alive. The police arrived, a couple of men in suits
and cameras, and they asked each of us a few questions, and that
was that. Margaret, one of the cleaning ladies, had the toughest time
getting all of the information out. She had been the one who made the
discovery that morning when she stabbed into Room one fourteen. She found the woman's
lifeless body in the bathtub. No note, no weapons, just a cold
person and a dry tub. I don't think I was able to process that
back then. I was still very young and had my mind in other places.
I had just gotten married and usually couldn't wait to get out of there
to go back home to see Nancy after those long shifts. But I think
it did hit the other employees pretty hard. All we knew of this woman
was based on the check in information. We all started calling her Teresa from
Arizona. The police did their own investigation, but for all of our town's
talk, Teresa from Arizona was enough. I remember going into Room one fourteen
to paint the walls. They looked perfectly fine to me, but Robert wanted
them painted over to cover up the layers of bad stuff, as he put
it, So that night I went over and painted it. I wiped down
the tub and changed the light bulbs. I thought he would change things up
and stop leaving that door open to let people check themselves in with whatever computer
thing they were doing, but that didn't happen. It didn't take long for
us to have a second incident, a bloodied room, this time number one
thirty one. By that time, Margaret had quit and we had new people
in who were even more traumatized by the scene, and with good reason.
They had never been through that before. I didn't get to see it right
away, but I was the one in charge of painting those walls after the
poor job the cleanup crew would do. I remember going home and telling Nancy
that everything wouldn't find at work except for one thing. She would normally find
out what it was when it popped up on the news by the time she
found out about that one, I had already painted all the walls in that
room. It was always the same thing, same patterns, discovery, police
questioning, then the newspaper and radio, and finally we would all forget about
it. I'm happy for them for being able to do that, because I
never could. Those walls had streaks of brown liquid that had once been dark
red. They'd stand out from the rest of the walls, and if they
wiped them for too long or were too rough with the paint, it would
begin to peel, showing the layer underneath. I offered a help. I
told him that I knew a guy who could stand the paint off for us,
or use paint remover to start over. The owners had given up.
First there was the walls, and then the ice machine. The carpets,
then the beds. Curtains would get tiny holes that would cast little dots of
lights in the rooms at night. This somehow attracted a certain type of person
to the Sammy's Motel. Remember this was just a start. All of the
employees were eventually replaced after the countless events at the motel, not just deaths,
but other strange things. I remember every single one of those co workers,
just like I remembered all of those who fell victim to the evil of
the night. I would get asked often about the strange sounds and whispers that
they'd hear at all hours of the day, and I would tell them,
if you really want to know, I'll tell you think about it first,
and every single one of them eventually decided to find out Part two of Layers
is coming up right after this stay with me. A common complaint from the
employees, not the guests, was that the doors would get stuck. I
mean, the guests knew what they were getting into after stepping into the reception
desk area, but the employees, God bless them, still expected something better
out of management. I would normally go in and sand off part of the
door, the painted surface on the frame. It had been painted over so
many times that it had grown thick enough to make the door barely fit on
the frame itself and get stuck. I would tell them about it, and
they'd asked me why it had been painted over so many times. I would
just say that the owner wanted it that way, so I would do it.
I would tell them that eventually they would find out for themselves, but
the workers, especially the young ones, would be so interested in the dark
part of all of this, you know, about the ghosts and all that
stuff. I would tell them leave them alone, they're not bothering anybody.
They sure would push it. One time they showed up at night asking me
to let them in to record ghosts or whatever. I've been working at night
doing some of the plumbing repairs covering for someone else. When they did that,
they came to me all freaked out, saying that they had heard a
woman whispering in one of their ears. That would happen to me as well,
but it wasn't scary anymore. I knew about the calls to the front
desk from Room one fourteen, even though it was empty. That wasn't the
only one. It would ring in the middle of the night, sometimes when
there was no attendant there, and I would have to walk all the way
there only to see the room marked as available on the phone thing. I
answered a couple of times and just heard the sound of air. Obviously those
rooms were empty. I think you can be afraid of things when you don't
know what they are. And I know about the rooms, I know who's
in there, and I was there when they found Elizabeth, her body stuffed
in the wooden box under the mattress. It was a complaint from a traveler
going across the United States who checked out, saying that the smell of the
room was terrible, even though he was very nice about it. When one
of the maids moved the bed to clean underneath it, liquid was oozing onto
the carpet and spreading a terrible smell all around the room in the hallway.
When she knelt down to check it out, she got to see a greenish
purple arm about to fall to the floor right through the wood boards from under
the box spring. It used to be so easy back in the day.
You see, even with the technology that they had back then in the nineties,
people wouldn't be so quick to pay with a credit card like they do
now. I hear that they can trace your money down to the scent and
figure out exactly where you had been, but not back then, the attendant
would be happy to take your cash and your excuse for not having your ID
card with you. It was better than having to get your card information and
process everything by that evening hoping that it would go through. Then checks,
well, those were equally as bad to accept. I was glad to have
taken a job in maintenance instead of the front desk. I don't know how
I would have dealt with stuff like that, But in the end, it
was the Biltinton family the one that caused the owners to finally give up on
the place for good. I got to meet them when I replaced their key
after the father had lost it. Without going into the details of the incident,
they were all found dead on a Saturday morning. They were forced to
replace the carpet and furniture, and again I was there to repaint the walls.
It didn't happen all at once. I had been there for over forty
years already when they finally decided to sell it, and even though I don't
know about other roadside motels, eight deaths over the span of forty years doesn't
seem as excessive as I make it sound. In the end, I was
the only one left, quite literally, in the entire building. The new
owners had removed the Sammy's Motel sign from up front, one that hadn't been
changed for as long as I had been there, and along with that they
had the carpets torn off. All of the furniture thrown out of the back
lot with the lamps and everything. They were going to do a complete overhaul
with the sinks, showers, and windows. I knew about every single nook
and cranny of that place, so they asked me to stay with them while
they sorted everything out. The tasks were only about replacing the parts of the
pipes and wiring and move them over to the place where they would reach their
new installations. It was pretty easy near the end, although a little lonely.
Some of my last days there were spent only with the light of my
lamp as I got rid of popcorn ceilings and scrape the paint off those doors.
I would walk up and down those halls, pass room one fourteen and
one thirty one, sometimes into one twenty eight and the saddest one, and
I would think so much about those people who came and went over the years,
how they, I guess, in part, helped me pay for that
spot where I live, for that paycheck that would be vanishing, but had
left me with savings for myself and my family for the next stage of my
life. And it would be those whispers at night while I would be in
the rooms that reminded me of those who stayed and probably didn't know it,
the ones that would gently remind me of where we're going. I spent a
little over a week scraping at those walls. I saved the sad rooms for
last, revealing the lives once lived, be it through their blood or hair
trapped there, or even just their breaths. And I thought that perhaps even
parts of me were between those layers of paint. I was the one who
had painted every single inch of those walls. What had been grown over the
span of forty years was now being scraped away by its painter. I left
the keys for the new owners in the lock box outside, and I then
stood by the entrance door for a moment, looking at the dark, empty
front desk area. My eyes tried to make out the shapes I would see
in the dark hallways for a bit. It was before I turned away and
started heading toward my car. The fading sounds of the telephone was how it
said goodbye to me. Do you want to know what I'm working on?
You can follow me on on social media. I'll leave links to everything and
the description of this episode up next, check out Dark Memory, where I
talk about real haunted places and mysteries. You can search for it by typing
Dark Memory on your podcast app. Don't forget a tap follow so you get
the next episode. Thank you very much for listening to my story. See
you soon.