Speaker 1: Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A woman on the side
of the road asking for a ride. You think you
know where it goes. The car pulls over, the woman
steps inside. You think you know. My name is Edwin
and here's a scary story. Halloween was right around the corner,
and the stories everywhere were flowing. I'm saying the book
fares and new shows on TV, and I remember it clearly,
my friends and I getting together to watch one of
the new ghost hunting shows, stopping to talk about ghost encounters.
I'd just gotten my license to drive in the state
of California, but there was never anywhere cool to drive
around there. The areas near the valleys over the desert
were filled with the same things, long empty spaces of
dry hills, and then scattered cities with the usual shops,
houses thing again. For a while, my friends were just
as bored as I was about the place, and our
escape was the paranormal. When I think back on those times,
there are several things that I remember clearly. The bonfires
in the backyards and the ghost stories. They were just
for fun, and I never thought that I would be
ever telling anybody about my own experience, but it has
been almost two decades, and while I can still remember
everything as if it were yesterday. I'll tell you I
was driving back from college past these roads I used
to talk about with all my friends, the haunted ones,
the ones that supposedly went through a cemetery, and suddenly
all of those talks about skin walkers, strange creatures, and
cursed streets came to life. They always did. Some of
these were true, and I'm telling you from an experience,
people that have cried while sharing their stories of encounters,
and those that have even had close friends and family
members die because of curses, and not just the kind
that you're imagining, but I'm talking about real eerie stories
of owls that turned into people in front of witnesses
of the lurking man, and the nights that even the
drunks stopped drinking forever because of being scared out of
their wits while passing by the cemeteries. You can see
why I would be afraid, now, don't you. But even
when you're in the moment when something is about to happen,
it's normal. It's only when you look back when it
starts making sense and feeling a lot more eerie. Anyway,
I was driving back from college right around midterms, and
I had stayed out later than usual studying at my
friend Mike's house. The road back then was only a
two lane highway. It was a straight road and only
your headlights were guiding you. At some point, about halfway
between my house and the college, there was a large
patch of bushes that signaled the entrance toward one of
the side roads, and this is where it would lead
to scattered houses before he got to the foothills. Even
though it was dark, the hills were clear enough that
you could see it up ahead a good distance. While
driving off, my old truck was making the only noises
out there, and that's when I spotted a figure up ahead.
Every once in a while, an animal Coyotees mostly would
roam around by the side of the road, although that
was the only animal I never saw squished flat. Those
guys are smart and they're never alone. As I got closer,
my headlight saw the thing move, but not bobbing up
and down like you would expect the coyote to look
like while running away, but rather gliding like a bird
over the asphalt. My heart started to take over the
inside of my ears. At this point. The closer I got,
the more I could see that that thing was in
a bird or a wild dog from the desert, but
a girl in a long white dress. I looked at
her walking in the direction of the bushes, still a
good distance ahead, thinking that if she was a hitchhiker
walking in the dark, or packs of coyotes roam, or
how the temperature drops out of nowhere, it wasn't going
to turned out very well for her. To be honest,
I was only nervous about having a girl in my
car and trying not to come off as a creep.
I never thought about it being a ghost or anything.
As I was getting closer, I could see her standing still,
not looking in my direction at all, and I pulled
over after passing her a little bit, deciding to wait
for her to walk up about ten steps toward the
car and me not actually come up behind her. I
could see her through the rear view mirror thanks to
my red tail lights, but when she pulled up, she
stopped and slowly turned her head toward me. Even through
the shadows, I could tell that she was not okay.
Her eyes were sunken in almost completely gone, her skin
with large dark patches her arm with a huge gash
on the side of it, dark dry blood visible where
her sleeves ended. She needed help, so I asked if
she needed a ride, and she looked ahead, pointing at
the area with the road that split off by the
patch of bushes up ahead, and then she turned to
look at me. She struggled, but finally managed to open
the door and got inside. But the smell. I remember
the smell so vividly. It was terrible, and it didn't
take a scientist to figure out that this woman had
gone through something serious and that I needed to help
her in any way that I could. I thought about
driving her straight to the hospital, the only one I
knew that had emergency sent her out there, but it
would be past the patch of bushes, and only then
would I consider myself creep. Or I could take her
where she pointed, to drop her off and leave it
at that. What if I asked her first? What if
I dropped her off and then called for help. I
was driving along, trying not to look at the gash
she had in her arm when I decided to ask
her if everything was all right, But she just kept
looking straight ahead, her right arm extended toward the windshields,
pointing at the road to the right of the patches,
the bushes, the ones that my friends and everyone that
came before me seemed to say avoid at all costs.
Bad people live there, and they told us through ghost stories,
the people that appeared on the side of the road,
the traps, masked men that would surround her car and
take everything in sight. I remember stories from my grandparents,
with their kind hearts that would be taken to the
cemetery to leave flowers for more and more friends and
family as the years passed. It was only halfway up
the road to the hills, but they would beg to
go early enough to avoid the shadow of the mountains
over the road. I looked over the woman in my
passenger seat, her head loose, moving with every tiny stone
on that road. I can get you some help, I said,
not asking anymore. Her arm lifted half way up and
then yanked back. The door opened, and before I got
the chance to hit the brakes, she rolled out of
the car. I halted to a stop a few yards ahead,
and the door was still swinging open. I stepped out,
looked just in front of the car, maybe about ten
yards the patch of bushes. Was there a long winding
road to the right leading straight into the hills. I
looked back and all around the road, since it was
mainly dirk and scattered plants from the area, surely i'd
be able to spot her. The woman was nowhere to
be seen. I ran around the car, shut the door
she had left open, and then I strained my eyes
to look in the distance and thought that I saw
a shadow moving slowly across the road to the right.
I got back in the car and thought about it
hard for several minutes before finally deciding to get out
of it there and head home. There were just too
many stories out there, and searching around the newspapers in
the following days, the image of this woman stuck in
my mind still. I found a snippet of an article
about that road. A family had filed an official complaints
recently to the officials in the area. They had opened
up a report for the crimes I had been committed there.
Their main concern was a grave robbers who had taken
everything they could find from people who had been recently buried.
And even though that's terrible as it is, their concern
was worse. You see the families of the deceased that
had been dug up were contacted for them to arrange reburials.
All except for one who were interviewed in the article
were advised to simply file a report for theft. The
robbers had gotten to the daughter's grave site, taken all
of her belongings, and apparently her body was taken too,
although that still remains under investigation. There was no reason
for them to take it, and grave robbers try not
to leave any trails. Ever, after all these years, I
can still remember that night and the photo of the
woman at her funeral. It was the same woman that
went missing, the woman that was in my truck. While
we're on the theme of ghost stories that you think
you know, I have another one for you up next.
There used to be a house at the end of
the street in the neighborhood where I grew up that
all the kids were afraid of, everyone except for me.
I had to pass by it whenever I had to
stay a little later at school and missed the bus,
but I was never the only one. Sometimes I would
wait until the kids got out of detention, mainly my
best friend Billy, who couldn't seem to be able to
stay out of it. He lived kind of by my house,
and we would end up walking home together. It was
him the one that told me the stories that the
rest of the kids had said about the house. He
had accepted a dare at one point to go inside
and said that it was very clean, almost as if
someone had lived there all alonge, although according to everyone,
even the adults, it was abandoned. He's the one that
would run in front of me to get past the
house quicker. But I didn't want to do that. I
couldn't explain it. I would be at the house and
imagine myself going in there, parking my car, meeting my
wife and kids, dinner, sleeping at the top corner room
by the attic. I would get home sometimes and hide
under my blanket for just a few minutes to think
about that house and the life that came with it.
There were so many more details that wouldn't go away,
no matter how much I tried to forget about it.
At that house, I fixed toilets and walls, I nailed
picture frames, decorations during Christmas, an entire life, my wife Becky,
two boys, Alan and Henry, their baseball games, The accident
at the ice skating rink that broke Allen's arm, Becky's parents,
and the issues we had over the school we put
our children in. There were dreams, of course, strange at
such a young age, but I always wanted to step
inside that house, and if I had enough money, I
would buy it, maybe just to have it fix it
up from the outside, have people over all the time.
Even then, I understood that having thoughts like those were
strange for a boy, so I kept them to myself
all through elementary and middle school. But it was in
high school when I finally got to see the inside
of it. We broke in a little before Halloween on
a dare, and it was like a memory. I knew
where everything was, how to open the windows, and where
the majority of the leagues came from. I was with
a group of friends, leading them around the house as
if it were my own. I eventually got to college
and forgot about the whole thing. The house I think,
ended up being demolished after a few roads needed to
be built for the growing town. Everyone I knew had
moved out, everyone except for Billy, who soon became the
only reason why I stepped into that town anymore. I
was about to get married to a girl I met
in my ceramics class, out of all places, and we
had plans to move to the city after college, maybe
start a bakery or something for her while I kept
studying to become a lawyer. Everything was looking bright for
me and I was excited. But one day everything changed.
I started having these strange dreams, nothing I actually remember,
but those headaches that followed made Stacy beg for me
to go to the hospital and get checked out. I
didn't drive that day. Stacy was behind the wheel as
a road next to me turned into the ocean, an
actual blue, real ocean. I could see a large wave
approaching from the left side of the car. I demanded
to be led into the driver's seat so that I
would step on the gas and that I could get
us out of there. But then the mountain of a
wave cast a shadow over us. Then I started swallowing
up the car. Eventually everything went dark. It was awake,
I heard from above me. The shadows of strangers were
blocking off the sun. If you're good, I heard a
hand stretched out to help me up. We should still
get you checked out. Though I was on the grass
of the backyard of a house. I barely recognized. Where's Stacy?
I asked, Is she all right? Stacy? Mommy dad hit
his head too hard, I heard from behind me. I
watched as the two boys giggled and were shoot away
by another woman, the woman in my dreams, Becky, the
one I had imagined as a child. She smiled, reassuring
me that things were all right, that we were going
to get me checked out. I looked around the places
that were really familiar to me, the living room, the yard.
In every single detail, I knew the boy's birthdays, my
mother in law's name, and my co workers in the
role of my job as a salesman at the manufacturing firm.
But that wouldn't last. The confusion I felt became too
much to bear. I eventually lost my job. I started
spending a lot of time in the room at the
top corner by the attic. I looked up as much
information about this, including glitches in the matrix dimensions, timing
of birth and death, and how these can blend and
mix at odd times. It took me a long time
to accept what the doctors had said that it was
a simple explanation. I had fallen off the roof and
in that time when I was unconscious, had visions, dreams
that I was awake now, But who could reassure me
of that? I had lived an entire life somehow connected
to this one. I remembered every heartbreak, every success, the
parents I would never see again, my childhood friends. It
was like an entire life was wiped away, just like that.
I missed it, and I missed the life I was
gonna have. I found myself spending so much time by
the window at the corner of the house, looking as
the children and their parents walk by it, hoping in
a way they see myself again, the young boy who
wished it was here. Scary Story Podcast is written and
produced by me Edwin Kovaru. Yes. You can find out
more about me and the show over on Scary Story
podcast dot com, and you can get ad free episodes
by joining me on scary Plus. I'll share links to
everything in the description of this episode. Thank you very
much for listening. It's scary Everyone soon