Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. In these stories, I'll take you into a
family memory with a dear friend who got a strange visitor, and then we
might find out what's up at the abandoned house next door. Are you ready?
My name is Edwin and here the Scary Stuffy. When I was asked
about when I would be visiting my aunt Tanned her family in Mexico, I
went straight to my phone's calendar to see when I'd have time off work.
I almost forgot about the reasons why I hadn't visited. My family has always
been very close to each other, both physically and also always in each other's
businesses, though with sometimes a knowing, I always felt safe around there,
knowing that I could call somebody or get help whenever I needed it. That
being said, my grandparents lived one house away from my uncle's house. Between
them lived a long time neighbor, an old woman who we had gotten close
to and would drink coffee at her house a few times per week. Her
family had abandoned her, but she didn't know it. Most of her conversations
were about how she was waiting for her daughter to return, and nobody had
the heart to tell her that she was involved in bad stuff. My aunt
suspected that she was actually dead. Finding out something like that would make the
guilt stronger in not telling the old woman, a woman who we all call
Rosita. One of our last conversations with Rosita was about dogs who she claims
were coming to visit her at night. Now, her almost being ninety years
old and still managing to live by herself with the occasional visit of one of
her sons who lived in another state, we knew that the visits from the
dogs were probably a result of a degrading mental state. I know. I
mentioned she had been abandoned, but this lady was far from alone. During
the day, members of the church, kids from around the neighborhood, and
even the shopkeepers would visit her to make sure that she was okay, that
her blankets were washed, and that she was eating and getting her medicines.
In fact, word about the visits from the dogs came from around the streets,
with news spreading about beasts beginning to circle her death was coming to get
her. Now, imagine as a kid, a story like that was terrifying.
But be it simply a coincidence or not? Trosita passed away a few
days after that, and practically the whole town came to the church service to
say good bye. Her long lost family members came with their kids, some
from the US and the rest from other cities. It was a strange type
of anger, thinking that these people never truly appreciated Rosita or got to hear
the way she spoke so fondly of them until her last days, but they
could tell the coming days. They came into her house to clean and to
take some of her belongings, mainly photographs and some items that belonged to them.
A couple of weeks later, they put up the house for sale and
offered my uncle's family a steep discount for it, supposedly as a thank you
for taking care of Rosita. My uncle accepted, but they had no intention
of using the house for anything, so they signed the papers, took the
keys, and the front door was locked years. The plan was to fix
it up and remove the wall divisions between the houses to make one big lot
with the yard and a place where they could host some of the outside visitors
like me. The place looked a lot better now than how I remembered it,
but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind when I thought of
the place. You see, before we moved away, a few kids and
I were roaming around the property on the outside yard since we couldn't go inside,
or at least we weren't allowed to, when one of the kids got
the idea to jump through the window to grab a shoe box supposedly had a
hidden treasure inside, just little kid stuff, you know, But when he
stepped in, we all froze. There was a growl coming from the inside.
Hilberto, the kid who had stepped inside, had gotten a shoe stuck
on his way out and screamed for help, crying that the old man had
grabbed him. His shoe came loose and plopped right by the windowsill as he
fell on the dirt, landing on his shoulders and getting himself back up and
running towards the side of the house where the other two of us were.
The other kids told the different version of the story, something that their uncles
or their neighbors had said that Rosita had been visited by the devil before dying.
I knew the truth, but I remember thinking that it wasn't worth it,
even as a little kid, to get into an argument about what was
really in that house. We had all heard it, and despite all arguments,
there was no way that the sound had actually come from a dog.
Anyway, it was cleaned up inside. Now some ten years later, the
floor had tile on it and the walls weren't peeling like I remembered. Despite
all the changes, though, there was still something about that house. It
had several stories to back it up, too, but I tried not to
think about them, especially after agreeing to visit and stay there. The first
night was relaxing. I was too tired from the eight hour bus trip there
to think about anything. I didn't even bother to turn on the lights when
I got there. The second night, that's when things started to change.
I was by myself. My cousins all had their families and responsibilities now,
so there wasn't any sleepovers or late night conversations with anyone. My brother was
supposed to visit as well, but he would be arriving two days after me.
He visited more often, though, so he was more aware of everything
and knew of the businesses that had closed down or opened up. Believe me
when I say that I was this close to asking to stay at my uncle's
house instead of that where it was around one am. Though I can't be
sure exactly, but I know that it was after midnight. I had seen
that clock strike twelve, and I knew that the new day had started.
It started off as a light knocking on the window with a tiny horse walking
on rocks, if that makes any sense. I looked out the window to
see the faint blue light from across the street. That's how the lights were
back then, blue or purple, with mosquitoes flying all around it, buzzing
and bumping and dying every minute or so. The tapping wasn't coming from there,
It was from down the hall. I forgot to mention. This house
was small, but had an abnormally long and dark hallway that would lead you
straight to the backyard with the area to wash and hang your clothes rap beside
the tiny fences with the chickens and rabbits wood roam. During the day.
I could see some lights shining from there, though not a lot. I
imagine someone knocking at the door, or a branch hitting against the metal roof
of the house. I swear I imagined everything except for what it actually was.
Tiny boots walking toward my bed, stepping against the cold tiles and echoing
through the hallways as they came closer. I thought it was my mind.
There was no one else in that house, and all of the windows and
doors had a type of iron protection, fencing bolts into the frames. Nobody
could get in, perhaps even worse, no one could get out. Suddenly
I was a kid again, shutting my eyes eyes tightly against the rest of
my face. Whenever a tiny ray of light would shine through, I would
press my face even harder against the pillow try and block it out. I
tried humming at myself to block the sound of the steps coming closer to me.
Then they stopped. I opened my eyes, and there it was,
an old man, hunched over, so low that all I could see was
a dark mound of old clothing floating by my bed. My eyes opened wide,
and I tried to scream, but nothing came out. All I could
do was stare as he walked by the window, turned around and walked straight
down the hallway out to the yard. I curled up against the headdress of
the bed, the blanket over for my body, and worried that the thing
would once again be standing right in front of me. It was around four
thirty in the morning when I heard the first rooster, and before I knew
it and for being lost in thoughts, it turned into six in the morning
when I finally felt confident enough to check the door of my uncle's house next
door, just to see if it was open. I rolled out of the
bed and rushed past the hallway to get to the front door, which was
bolted shut, just how I had left it. I smelled the coffee in
the air before looking at my uncle's house. It was always an early riser,
and was standing by the door, looking out of the street and greeting
those who passed by with their work and school uniforms, getting ready for just
another day. You didn't seem surprised to see me awake so early, but
then again, we had seen each other in years, so how would he
know that my regular wake up time was around nine. He asked if I
wanted some coffee, and then my aunt stepped toward the door to invite me
in. It was a matter of hours before everyone knew my story of the
hunched old man. I spent another night in that house, this time with
a borrowed television from my aunt who said that keeping it on would help me
sleep better, and I took the offer. I flicked on the news channel,
and even if the thing was stepping around that house at night, I
didn't hear it. Not around seven in the morning, my brother showed up
while I was already awake. He had already heard the story and chuckled when
he saw me. The others knew of his stories too, which is why
he always stayed at my grandparents' house instead. But still, he said that
he would hear steps inside the empty house at night, even from next door.
But then he told me something worse. He said that my uncle had
tried to rent out the house before that they wouldn't stay there any longer than
a week, and visitors wouldn't be able to stay there for more than a
few days, saying that they too could hear the footsteps in the middle of
the night, even stranger cases of a hunched over creature that would bark at
them. You know, he said to me, I'm pretty sure I've heard
that thing barking before, and sometimes I wonder if that's a creature that Rosita
saw and talked about. The next story, something in the ground was coming
up right After this, the person who owns the house where I'm renting sent
a notice a few months ago that he would be installing security cameras on the
exterior areas of the house. I'd been living there for about four years already,
and I remember just how calm the streets used to be. But then
things started changing around the neighborhood. The neighbors that I knew and had become
friends with slowly started leaving, some for Texas and others for New Mexico,
and they tried to convince me to go too. One of them had worked
in the same place where I worked for over a year, and he offered
to get me an interview so that I would have a job before moving.
After this experience, I'm strongly considering giving him a call now. When I
say that the area started changing, I don't mean that it had started becoming
dirty or dangerous, but rather it had started becoming a place I didn't feel
comfortable walking in for other reasons. There was a vacant house next to mine,
and it had been like that for the better part of three years or
so. People would come in and out, and the neighbor on the other
side of it started saying that he had a strong suspicion the house was haunted.
And let me tell you, this guy was a super geeky type of
guy, the most logical person you can imagine. He could explain an issue
of water pressure or land contaminants for his lawn like a manual. He had
done some research about the area, and he had filed several complaints with the
city. His theory was a little out there. I couldn't help thinking that
it might have been true. He had gotten some dirt tested for composition and
found, though a bit exaggerated in my mind, a high concentration of metals
and toxins that were likely affecting the groundwater. When you explained this to me,
I was obviously confused. I had just gotten over to his garage to
ask for a tool to change the brakes on my car. The guy had
clearly done his research and needed someone to tell about it. When he noticed
that I wasn't getting it, he took off his glasses and looked me right
in the eye. Saria was a cemetery dude. I thought he was joking
or simply trying to scare me about the house that was right next door.
It wasn't falling apart, and it didn't look old, but the owners refused
to fix one of the broken windows on the side that faced me, and
looking at it from my own living room really gave me the creep. Sometimes
we used to talk so much about the house, the strange noises that would
come from it at night and very early in the morning, things that simply
couldn't be For example, an alarm would begin beeping early in the morning and
shut off almost immediately, pretty standard in the neighborhood with houses so close to
each other, but this one I was certain was coming from the empty house
that, along with the radio with the sound it makes when it's searching for
a station, scared me more often than uncomfortable sharing. It wasn't loud,
and to the normal person it wasn't anything scary. With the hissing sound of
the music and advertising switching so quickly, with the words jumbled up like that,
it was another story for me. I thought that's what Greg was going
to talk about, but instead he just switched up the conversation to another topic
I had forgotten about, the ding Dong ditchers, kids from the neighborhood who
would come around and knock on the door or ring the doorbell and then run
away. Greg and I would laugh about it, telling our stories because I
found it's just so strange how slowly they knocked. The other neighbors said that
we were the only ones that would get them coming around because neither of us
had fencing around our houses, But we would soon find out that everyone else
was wrong. The cameras were installed and I was shown how to use them
and get access to the recordings. It was more complicated than the normal ring
doorbells that you have nowadays, because everything would be recorded to a single computer
thing, and I had a monitor where you could turn it on and see
cameras live as well as recordings. The first few days it was fun sitting
there and watching at what times a mailman came, and when I discovered who
the dog that kept pooping in my yard was. But one night, well
I was sleeping, I heard it the radio. One of the cameras that
was on the side of the house actually caught movement and I started recording on
its own. It was then when I saw them for the first time,
the mists. It would come from around the house and to the front,
same way that a person who parked their car on the driveway would go when
they got home. There were mists in the empty house's backyard, circling around
for a few seconds before disappearing. When I showed Greg the next afternoon,
he couldn't believe it. He had been logging similar things, but had thought
it had been a type of temperature difference. And I don't know what other
type of scientific explanations they seemed to make sense. Eventually, the complaints were
filed with the town and Greg and some of the neighbors, and I went
to the hearing. That's where it became clear the developers of the area had
known about the grounds before the houses were built, that it had indeed been
a cemetery. I mean that it had been already relocated. All they had
done was to put all the remains in broken coffins, all in one deep
hull in the ground. All they did was cover it up, And now
we have a strong suspicion as to where that place is today. The stories
in this episode were written and produced by me Edwin Kobapovness. If you have
ideas for a story, send me an email or find me on Instagram,
and if you want to hear true stories directly from the people who live them.
Use us search bar to find true scary story. It's another podcast that
I made, but it is scary to listen to it by yourself. Just
a heads up, thanks for listening, See you soon.