Speaker 1: In the middle of the night. They just ran out
Speaker 1: of the house. They didn't even take their stuff, they
Speaker 1: left everything. They just ran out of the house and
Speaker 1: they never came back.
Speaker 2: A mysterious figure under a street light, footsteps in an
Speaker 2: empty room, and a growl in the darkness are only
Speaker 2: the beginning of Tonight's unsettling account. My name is Edwin,
Speaker 2: and here's towards true scary story.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. From the age
Speaker 1: of five years old. I lived with my mom and
Speaker 1: my dad in this old house. I think this house
Speaker 1: was like one hundred and fifty years old. My whole
Speaker 1: life growing up, I would hear what I thought was
Speaker 1: my mom calling my I'd go down to the stairs
Speaker 1: and I'd say, Mom, what did you need? And she
Speaker 1: would tell me I didn't call for you, honey. I
Speaker 1: didn't say anything. One of my first experiences that I remember,
Speaker 1: I had just gotten a new phone and I had
Speaker 1: set up my voicemail. Now I don't know why I
Speaker 1: did this, I'm a weird kid, but in the middle
Speaker 1: of recording my voicemail, I went to the next room
Speaker 1: next to me to pretend that I was doing something
Speaker 1: I don't know, kids are weird. And when I come
Speaker 1: back out after recording my voicemail, I listened to it
Speaker 1: over and when it came to the part where I
Speaker 1: left the room, I could hear voices. It sounded really
Speaker 1: gurgly and just ron. I went and visited my friend
Speaker 1: later and I showed her like, hey, look at this voicemail.
Speaker 1: Do you hear that? And she goes, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you have demons following you. Another time, I had my
Speaker 1: one of my best friends come over and we were
Speaker 1: just hanging out, having a slumber party. We were in
Speaker 1: my room playing. All of a sudden, we both look
Speaker 1: over and see this hand pop out of my wall.
Speaker 1: I remember it distinctly because the sleeve was all ruffled,
Speaker 1: and I was like, did you see that? She's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did. We just kind of rushed it off. We
Speaker 1: went back to playing. I have windows that are right
Speaker 1: next to my bed, and we were just about to
Speaker 1: lay down for a bed I happened to look out,
Speaker 1: and I have a fenced in yard and then I
Speaker 1: have a street light right next to it. I saw
Speaker 1: somebody standing right next to that street lamp, just like
Speaker 1: looking towards my house, towards my window. I freak out.
Speaker 1: I'm like, do you see that person? Like that has
Speaker 1: to be a person, right, and she goes, yeah, I
Speaker 1: see that too. I'm thinking that this person can see me,
Speaker 1: so I lay back down. I'm laying down because I'm
Speaker 1: like trying to hide from his view. I'm like freaked out.
Speaker 1: And then I get back up, like a few minutes
Speaker 1: later to see if it's still there, and it's gone.
Speaker 1: As a kid, when I was living at this house,
Speaker 1: I had this cat. His name was little Harley. Little
Speaker 1: Harley had to be put down, and I was sad.
Speaker 1: And so the first night I slept without him, I
Speaker 1: had to have like twelve stuffed animals on my bed
Speaker 1: with me, and I just remember how sad I was.
Speaker 1: At some point in the night, I remember feeling something
Speaker 1: jumped on the bed and walked up to me. I
Speaker 1: sat up, I was like Harley. I didn't open my
Speaker 1: eyes because I was afraid of what I might see.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I was a kid, but I felt
Speaker 1: like a tail brush across my face and I felt
Speaker 1: him laying down by me. I felt good about that,
Speaker 1: and so I laid back down and I went to bed.
Speaker 1: A couple of years later, my dad ended up passing away.
Speaker 1: I was like sixteen and we had to move. But
Speaker 1: for like the first month before we moved, we had
Speaker 1: to stay in that house. I just remember how cold
Speaker 1: it got. It got really really cold. My mom would
Speaker 1: even notice. She'd be like, Tori, do you notice how
Speaker 1: cold it got in here? And I'm like, yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: We ended up moving out and moved in with my
Speaker 1: uncle and everything was fine. And then I met my
Speaker 1: ex when I was eighteen, and then I moved down
Speaker 1: to Missouri. So this is where stuff starts getting really creepy.
Speaker 1: I moved down to this house with him, and right
Speaker 1: when I pulled up to the house, I had this
Speaker 1: feeling that it was off. Like I got out of
Speaker 1: the car and I looked at it and it just
Speaker 1: looked off. A few days go by, everything was normal.
Speaker 1: It was right outside middle of the day. I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there and I think I was one of the only
Speaker 1: people in the house. I don't know if my stepdaughter
Speaker 1: was there or my ex, but I just remember I
Speaker 1: was in the living room by myself and I'm watching TV.
Speaker 1: There were two doors in the living room that led
Speaker 1: to the outside, and one of the doors I saw
Speaker 1: it on my proofree vision. I saw this man in
Speaker 1: a dressed in a blue shirt walk by, and I
Speaker 1: was like, what is somebody here? I get up and
Speaker 1: I go look, but there's nobody there. So that kind
Speaker 1: of freaked me out, but I tried to brush it off.
Speaker 1: This one night in particular, everybody is asleep. It's in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night. I wake up for some
Speaker 1: reason and I start hearing what sounds like people yelling
Speaker 1: outside my window. So I'm thinking the neighbors are fighting.
Speaker 1: So I get up and I move the curtain and
Speaker 1: I'm like, what is that like when people are trying
Speaker 1: to sleep. I don't see anybody. I just brush it off,
Speaker 1: you know. I go and I lay back down, and
Speaker 1: then I hear it again. I move the curtain more
Speaker 1: and I really try to get a good look because
Speaker 1: maybe I just didn't see them at first. I still
Speaker 1: don't see anybody, so I just figured I'm just going
Speaker 1: to ignore this and go back to sleep. A few
Speaker 1: minutes past and I start hearing what sounds like footsteps
Speaker 1: coming across the carpet. Now I have carpet, so I
Speaker 1: don't know how I heard this, but I heard footsteps
Speaker 1: coming from the living room into our room and then
Speaker 1: I start hearing growling. My heart starts racing. I'm like,
Speaker 1: what is going on. I'm a big believer that if
Speaker 1: you experience anything with a paranormal you just ignore it,
Speaker 1: don't even acknowledge it, because that feeds into it and
Speaker 1: that gives it power. So I didn't do anything. I'm
Speaker 1: still turned over, my eyes are still closed, and then
Speaker 1: I feel a hand touched my shoulder. Again, I just
Speaker 1: ignore it. I start praying. I'm like, please watch over me,
Speaker 1: please protect me, Please, whatever is in this house, get
Speaker 1: it out. I don't want this around me. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to sleep. It eventually goes away and I'm fine.
Speaker 1: Another night, it's in the middle of the night again,
Speaker 1: I turn over to like readjust how I'm sleeping, and
Speaker 1: I turn over and I look. I see this person
Speaker 1: standing in front of my ex This hair is all scraggling.
Speaker 1: It's pitch black. Now, this room is already dark, but
Speaker 1: this figure was pitch black and it had scraggly, curly
Speaker 1: hair all around its head, and it just was like
Speaker 1: staring at him. I tried to open my eyes further
Speaker 1: to see what is this, and it just disappears. My
Speaker 1: stepdaughter would be playing in her room with her friend.
Speaker 1: Her and her friend for some reason, was playing in
Speaker 1: her closet, but her closet it locked on her and
Speaker 1: it kept her inside. I'm in the living room and
Speaker 1: I'm watching TV and I start hearing the kids screaming.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking they're just playing, but it just keeps getting
Speaker 1: louder and I go and I open the door and
Speaker 1: they're like, we were locked inside. I'm like, what, you
Speaker 1: couldn't get out? And they were explaining to me how
Speaker 1: they were playing in the closet and the door slams
Speaker 1: on them and they couldn't open the door. I was
Speaker 1: really freaked out. She was really freaked out about that.
Speaker 1: I would go into the kitchen sometimes and there would
Speaker 1: be orbs. I would see orbs flying around. There was
Speaker 1: this one time in the middle of that night, I
Speaker 1: had to go to the kitchen for something I can't remember.
Speaker 1: I go into the kitchen and I see this orb
Speaker 1: flying around the ceiling light. It was white. It was
Speaker 1: like a small, white, little circle orb. It was weird
Speaker 1: because like, I've never seen anything like that before. And
Speaker 1: I go in there and it's just flying around and
Speaker 1: it disappears once it notices that I'm looking, but I
Speaker 1: just thought that was really weird because I've never seen
Speaker 1: anything like that. I would experience these dreams. I would
Speaker 1: be laying there still, and all of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: would feel these hands go around my neck and start
Speaker 1: choking me. I would feel myself thrashing, like trying to
Speaker 1: claw and punch at anything, at what whatever it was
Speaker 1: that was holding me holding my neck because I was
Speaker 1: like freaking out. But at the same time, I was
Speaker 1: still laying there still. And I have never met anybody
Speaker 1: or heard anybody have that same kind of dream. And
Speaker 1: it's like I'm fighting back. I can feel my body
Speaker 1: like fighting back, trying to get these hands away from me,
Speaker 1: but yet my body is still laying still. One time,
Speaker 1: I'm taking a shower. It's in the middle of the day.
Speaker 1: I think I'm washing my hair, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I look over and I see a little kid hand
Speaker 1: brush across like the shadow of a hand brush across
Speaker 1: the shower curtain. So I moved the shower curtain, thinking
Speaker 1: that somebody was there, but nobody was there. I would
Speaker 1: come home from work a lot of the times and
Speaker 1: I would smell sulfur or an old, old woman's perfume.
Speaker 1: I wasn't wearing perfume back then, so it was really
Speaker 1: odd to us all that it smelled like that old perfume.
Speaker 1: One night, I send my stepdaughter to bed and ad
Speaker 1: This is after we got into an argument. But I
Speaker 1: send her to bed, and I'm in the kitchen. I'm
Speaker 1: still cleaning up or doing whatnot, and out of the
Speaker 1: corner of my eye, I see what looks to be
Speaker 1: her standing in the doorway, in the same pajamas, same hair,
Speaker 1: same everything. It looked like her, but her hair was
Speaker 1: like half in her face, and it looks like she's
Speaker 1: looking down at me, like her face was like half
Speaker 1: tilted down, and she had like this angry look about her.
Speaker 1: And I look like directly at where she was, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't there. It was gone. Fast forward a couple
Speaker 1: of years, it's twenty fifteen. We move it to this
Speaker 1: house ten miles into the country. My sister comes down
Speaker 1: from Tennessee to come help, because at this time I
Speaker 1: had just had my daughter. So she comes and you know,
Speaker 1: she tries to help. So we're all staying in this house. Now.
Speaker 1: This house, it was a double wine mobile home. It
Speaker 1: was really nice. My sister had gotten me these new slippers,
Speaker 1: and I really liked them, you know, I wore them
Speaker 1: the whole night because I love them so much. And
Speaker 1: then it comes to bedtime. Everybody's in bed. It's in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night. All of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: hear this huge, like a gunshot in the next room,
Speaker 1: the living room. I shoot up out of my spot
Speaker 1: because I'm like, what the heck was that. I look around.
Speaker 1: My ex is still fast asleep, and nobody else is awake,
Speaker 1: so I'm the only one who woke up and heard it.
Speaker 1: And then a few minutes go by and I start
Speaker 1: hearing what sounds like my slippers shuffling across the floor
Speaker 1: from the kitchen all the way through the living room
Speaker 1: into the doorway. It stopped at my doorway to my bedroom.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, it makes this really high pitched
Speaker 1: screeching sound. And I'm telling you, I have never heard
Speaker 1: any sound like this before, but it sounded all high
Speaker 1: p screeching. I don't know why I did this, but
Speaker 1: in my head, I start praying again and I start
Speaker 1: saying to the entity, to whoever is there, I said,
Speaker 1: in my head instead of out loud, you need to
Speaker 1: get out of this house. If you do not leave
Speaker 1: this house, I am going to grab my Bible and
Speaker 1: I'll make you leave. Luckily, thank the Lord, it did
Speaker 1: end up leaving and I never experienced anything else at
Speaker 1: that house. Fast forward again a couple of years, we
Speaker 1: had to move up to Iowa. In Burlington, there was
Speaker 1: this three story brick house on twelfth Street. When we
Speaker 1: first arrived here, it was supposed to be my ex,
Speaker 1: my other sister Brittany, and then my stepdaughter and my daughter, Lucybeth.
Speaker 1: The landlord shows us around this house because he just
Speaker 1: wanted us to get a feel of the place before
Speaker 1: these other tenants move out and we take the house. Now,
Speaker 1: the other tenant was still there, but it was only
Speaker 1: that one person. Apparently there was a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: other people staying there with him. So the first thing
Speaker 1: that struck me as odd. If you walk into the
Speaker 1: living room, you have the living room on the left,
Speaker 1: and then you have this big staircase that goes upstairs
Speaker 1: to like right in front of you, and then a
Speaker 1: hallway that goes all the way to the kitchen. I
Speaker 1: had the staircase that leads upstairs, but I noticed to
Speaker 1: the left where the living room is. What I thought
Speaker 1: was odd was there was like three or four couches,
Speaker 1: like that's where they all slept on. We go upstairs,
Speaker 1: we're looking in all the bedrooms. He's showing us around.
Speaker 1: The first thing I noticed is there are symbols scratched
Speaker 1: into the doorframe of these doors, Like the door to
Speaker 1: the bedroom, there's symbols etched on the doorframe. And I
Speaker 1: thought that was odd because I have never ever seen
Speaker 1: anything like that. It reminded me of something that would
Speaker 1: ward off these different spirits. I'm not sure I've never
Speaker 1: seen anything like it, but for some reason, we never
Speaker 1: did ask anybody. I don't know why I didn't. But
Speaker 1: then we get to the bedroom that was going to
Speaker 1: be ours. There was this burned spot in the middle
Speaker 1: of the floor where my bed was going to be. Eventually,
Speaker 1: I noticed that the closet, this was the only closet
Speaker 1: in the whole house that was painted like a blood
Speaker 1: red and the whole closet was painted like that. I
Speaker 1: thought that was a little weird because you got the
Speaker 1: burned spot on the floor and then the closet is
Speaker 1: painted this color. After he shows us around the house,
Speaker 1: we're sitting outside, and I happened to look back and
Speaker 1: the tenant who currently was staying there, he was staring
Speaker 1: out the door at us in this like deadpan, blank face.
Speaker 1: It just gave me this off feeling. We ended up
Speaker 1: moving in. Everything was okay for the first night or two.
Speaker 1: There's this little area in the hallway to the right
Speaker 1: where our toolbox is and where you could put like
Speaker 1: maybe a desk or whatever there. It's just like this
Speaker 1: little cut out area from the hallway. And then my
Speaker 1: ex tells me that he was standing there one night
Speaker 1: and doing whatever he was doing, and he saw like
Speaker 1: the shadow walk past him. Obviously there's nobody there. I
Speaker 1: would see faces whenever I would walk throughout the house.
Speaker 1: One time, I'm coming upstairs and I see this face
Speaker 1: pop around from the corner, and I'll never forget this face.
Speaker 1: It looked all like he was baring his teeth. It
Speaker 1: was like this distorted face with weird eyes and scrunched
Speaker 1: up like he was like sneering at me. One day,
Speaker 1: I'm downstairs in the living room with my stepdaughter. My
Speaker 1: ex leaves to go do something and it's just her
Speaker 1: and I in the house. As soon as he walks
Speaker 1: out the door. We hear a woman screaming from upstairs.
Speaker 1: We both stop what we're doing and we're both looking
Speaker 1: at each other like, uh my stepdaughter, She goes, did
Speaker 1: you hear that? And I'm like, I did, but we're
Speaker 1: just gonna ignore it. And that's literally what I did.
Speaker 1: I just went back to what I was doing, and
Speaker 1: that was that. Another night, I was coming home from
Speaker 1: the store from down the street, I could see this
Speaker 1: big wood fence that surrounds our house. I saw what
Speaker 1: looked like a huge black figure that was like peeking
Speaker 1: its head above the fence. It was just standing towards
Speaker 1: the road like where I was. As soon as I
Speaker 1: saw it, it ducked under the wood. So I go
Speaker 1: and I get home, and I opened the gate to
Speaker 1: the house and I don't see anybody behind the fence.
Speaker 1: There's nobody. My stepdaughter would always tell me how she
Speaker 1: felt sleep paralysis whenever she was in that house. And
Speaker 1: I still have dreams about that house. I have dreams
Speaker 1: where I'm living in this house again, but it's bigger almost,
Speaker 1: and it has more rooms. The one thing that always
Speaker 1: freaks me out is it has that same negative energy
Speaker 1: and I feel like there's always something watching me. When
Speaker 1: I'm in that house. In my dream at the same place,
Speaker 1: my stepdaughter had found bones outside on the ground. She
Speaker 1: was digging doing something I don't know, being a little
Speaker 1: but she come in and she goes, Daddy, I found bones.
Speaker 1: He was like, no, no, this isn't good. You found bones.
Speaker 1: You need to go take that outside. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't know if anything can attach itself to you or
Speaker 1: follow you in here. You need to take it outside.
Speaker 1: You can't keep that. In the middle of him talking
Speaker 1: to her, I think they leave the room, but I'm
Speaker 1: in the kitchen. I'm standing there and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I hear some deep voice behind me laughing, and so
Speaker 1: I turn around and there's nothing. I almost felt like
Speaker 1: it was laughing at the situation. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: thought that was really strange. One day, we're talking to
Speaker 1: the name and the neighbor tells us a little bit
Speaker 1: of information. He goes, you know, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of people that used to live in this house. A
Speaker 1: lot of people have come and gone. And we're like, oh, really,
Speaker 1: and he goes, there are a couple of girls that
Speaker 1: just happened to move in and they weren't here very long,
Speaker 1: maybe a couple days later after moving in, in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, they just ran out of the house.
Speaker 1: They didn't even take their stuff, they left everything. They
Speaker 1: just ran out of the house and they never came back. Apparently,
Speaker 1: any other family that has lived there, they have never
Speaker 1: stayed that long. They just they kept moving too, and
Speaker 1: we still stayed there. We stayed there for about seven
Speaker 1: eight months, and it got to the point that before
Speaker 1: we went to bed, we would have to say the
Speaker 1: prayer Psalms ninety one out of the Bible, the whole
Speaker 1: verse Psalms ninety one. After saying that prayer, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: experience anything. One night, however, after saying that prayer, my
Speaker 1: ex told me that in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: he heard footsteps coming towards the door of our bedroom,
Speaker 1: but it stopped right at the door, like it couldn't
Speaker 1: go any pass like anymore, like it couldn't go past
Speaker 1: the door. It realized this and it started growling. It
Speaker 1: would more happen to him. He would see stuff, or
Speaker 1: my stepdaughter would feel stuff. I would see stuff or
Speaker 1: hear stuff, but I always ignored it, so I didn't
Speaker 1: experience it as much. But my ex come to me
Speaker 1: one day and he was like, listen, we got a
Speaker 1: move because this is just getting too much. I think
Speaker 1: it just got too much for him to handle all
Speaker 1: the stuff that was going on because it was every
Speaker 1: single day. We just felt like we couldn't get a
Speaker 1: peaceful night's sleep without saying the prayer or anything. So
Speaker 1: seven eight months later we ended up leaving. As we're
Speaker 1: packing and we're getting our stuff and we're leaving, I
Speaker 1: was one of the last people to go in. I
Speaker 1: don't know if this really means anything, but we had
Speaker 1: there were mice in the middle of the floor and
Speaker 1: they were just like keeled over dead. They were just
Speaker 1: laying there dead. That's weird because mice don't really do that.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's so oh. My ex and I
Speaker 1: both thought, you know, maybe these entities here were just
Speaker 1: so bored that they had to mess with these mice
Speaker 1: because these mice were just in the middle of the
Speaker 1: floor dead and I have never seen anything like that
Speaker 1: in my life. I ended up leaving my ex and
Speaker 1: then I met my now fiance. We ended up getting
Speaker 1: our own place where we are living now, and it's
Speaker 1: a little apartment. I haven't really experienced anything. Except one
Speaker 1: day I'm in the shower and my fiances in there
Speaker 1: doing something at the sink and I see this shadow
Speaker 1: go from the sink over to the door. I look
Speaker 1: out and I'm like, Chris, was that you? And he goes, no,
Speaker 1: I haven't moved from this spot. I'm like, you literally
Speaker 1: didn't just go towards the door. You didn't move it all.
Speaker 1: You didn't just walk away from the sink and move
Speaker 1: and he goes, no, I didn't do that at all.
Speaker 1: And I literally that that kind of freaked me out
Speaker 1: because I was like, am I really seeing stuff? I
Speaker 1: literally thought I saw a shadow move and no, it
Speaker 1: wasn't anything. So I'll be completely honest. My ex wasn't
Speaker 1: really a good person. So part of me wonders if
Speaker 1: all the stuff that was going on when I was
Speaker 1: with him, if it wasn't like attached to him because
Speaker 1: he held his own negative energy around him. The fact
Speaker 1: that these things were happening wherever I was with him,
Speaker 1: I almost wonder if like they were feeding off of
Speaker 1: his energy and like showing themselves. I've never really looked
Speaker 1: into why I'm so aware of these things, but I
Speaker 1: kind of almost wonder if I'm sensitive to this stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm also very thankful that you know, none of that
Speaker 1: has ever followed me. And maybe it's because I haven't
Speaker 1: reacted to them, is why they don't really follow me.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but I think it has helped that
Speaker 1: every experience that I've had, it hasn't gotten any worse
Speaker 1: with me because all I've ever done is ignore it.
Speaker 2: A huge thank you to Tory for sharing her experiences
Speaker 2: with the rest of us here at the True Scary
Speaker 2: Story community and for everyone else. If you have a
Speaker 2: scary story that you want to share something that happened
Speaker 2: to you, head on over to true scarystory dot com
Speaker 2: because I want to hear about it. This episode was
Speaker 2: edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Window of VW Sound,
Speaker 2: with additional production by me Edwin go Arubjaz and The
Speaker 2: Scary FMTAM. If you're following the show, you'll get more
Speaker 2: stories next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep
Speaker 2: it scary everyone, See you soon.