Speaker 1: Would you raise a family in a house haunted by
your father? Since one man's legacy leave scars and shadows
beneath an ancient oak tree. My name is Edwin, and
here's a scary story. The oak tree in front of
the house had always been a witness to death. It
stood there still on most days around the property, taking
over everything inside of it, including me, especially on dark
nights like the one who were about to have. I
stood there watching it from the road during the day.
As I heard the school bus approaching, James came running
up to me from the school bus, just like he
always did, a little project or a gift in his
hands that he usually wanted to show his mom and
talk about it before getting ready to have dinner with us.
I waved to the bus driver and he sped off
into the twisting hills to leave the other two kids,
some that lived even farther out into the woods. Beatrice,
my wife, didn't like us living so far, but it
was a large plot of land, only taxes and bills
to pay on it and nothing else. It was all
my dad had left me. A successful business man who
hated well, didn't like being around other people. He would
often say to never trust anyone. James had a drawing
in his hand, something he had exchanged with another kid
from his class. Henry has a swing set in his
house now, he said, stretching out his hand and giving
me a piece of paper. He had a phone number
on it, Henry's mother, asking about James going over to
play at his house. Up until that point, I had
been very careful with James, never letting him out of
my sight, except for when he went to school and
my wife caught on right away. Nothing's going to happen
to him, she would say, it'd be fine. I walked
behind James as he ran up to the house through
the long pathway to the porch. I passed by the
oak tree while they thinking about my son and how
quickly he started going to kindergarten. So many things that
happened in that property, and how I was that oak
tree that had seen it all. Looks like James made
a friend. I said. They want him to go play
after school tomorrow, something about his swing set. That's great,
Beatrice said. She was walking up to us, wiping her
hands on her shirt as she grabbed the note from
James and read it out loud. She looked at me
right away, smiling, reassuring me that he would be fine.
So she grabbed the phone and called the number on
the piece of paper, and almost immediately. Maybe it's a
mom thing, but she got along great with the woman
on the other line. They agreed that we would go
pick him up. She wrote down the address and everything
was ready into the woods. Or is she from town?
She's from town, not far, just down the hill over
there by the Hudson Ranch, she said. Hudson Ranch was
quite a distance away. I thought to myself, looking for
excuse to change my mind about the whole thing. We
had already talked about this among ourselves, that I had
to start letting go. But I know that James had
already talked about some of the things that I used
to mention to my father when I was growing up.
The strange figures out by the yard at night, visible
from the room that James was now living in. They
would crawl from that oak tree in the front, and
sometimes they would scream, others they would cry. James had
run into her room crying, saying that he had seen
a man by his window, much older, a grandpa, he said.
He said that the old man tapped on the window
and walked out toward the tree. That night, I ran
out there like a maniac, straight to the oak tree,
the source of everything I experienced. Out there, I looked
up at the branches, the markings of ropes from many
years before, and I felt the chill of the shade
of that tree, even at night, much colder than the
other areas of that grassy field. I ran my fingers
over the three tally marks carved on the trunk of it,
the ones that haunted me almost every night when I
thought of Dad. I stood out there for a while
until Beatrice walked up and asked me to come back inside.
It was nothing, she said, Maybe James was streaming. Yeah,
I sighed as I faked the smile, and yet I
knew that they weren't dreams. When do you pick up James,
I asked Beatrice the next morning, once he had been
picked up at the school bus out by the road
at five, just in time for dinner, she said. I
looked at my watch, seven forty seven am. This is
gonna be fine, she said, and I knew that nothing
was gonna happen to him. Everything would be the same.
And I think part of Beatrice understood how the words
of my dad had gotten to me over the years,
not to trust those from town, to always lock your door,
and to keep a loaded done right by the doorframe.
The distrusting man, if that's even a word, paranoid even
And I was about to say something about the address
when Beatrice snapped and looked me right in my eyes,
asking how long I was planning on doing this, What
did I want out of my experiences around the house,
And what was I gonna do about James being afraid
to go outside at night? But he shouldn't go out
at night, I yelled, that's the whole point. No, right,
the shadows, the ghosts that roam around the house, isn't it.
I didn't want to start a fight that early in
the morning. But she was wrong. She thought they were
bears or some other animals around the yard, because even
she had seen them too, silhouettes of humans floating across
our fields. It bothered me so much that I set
out trail cameras out there with clear views of the
dark fields the trees on the outside of the property,
but I could not get myself to put one near
the oak tree in the front. If there was one
thing I could prove to Beatrice that there were no
bears out there and no creatures large enough to match
what we had seen. I think she was mostly worried
about how all of these would affect James with his
experience of seeing quote a grandpa. Beatrice was getting worried
that maybe all of my fear was somehow being passed down,
even though I never even came close to talking about
these experiences in front of him. I walked out toward
the porch and stood there, procrastinating about taking out the
scrap metal I was clearing out from the shed from
where the truck was. It was four point thirty when
I pulled up to the house. Beatrice was still in
the garage when I honked for her to come out.
I know she always took forever to come outside, but
every minute had the wait of an hour that evening.
James was going to be ready very soon, and we
had to be there to get him. The drive was
as you could imagine it, Beatrice trying to lecture me
on things while being careful enough to not let me
shut down completely. Although it could have gone much worse,
we got there in one piece. James was excited when
he got back in the car and told us all
about what they did and played at the house. We
got burgers, he said, you got bert, I started, James,
your mom made dinner for us. Beatrice shot me a
stare that I could feel as I looked at James
in the rear mirror. He stated quiet. Beatrice asked him
some more about the games that he played, and he
came around again. When we got back, James jumped out
of the car, singing something he had learned at a
stranger's house. He walked inside and put his backpack down
by the hallway. I stood by the doorway as Beatrice
walked over to James. So many thoughts thrilling like smoke
around me, stinking my eyes and making it hard to breathe.
I walked back outside. The sun had started its golden routine.
As I leaned against the truck, the light beginning to
dip between the branches of the oak tree. He ate
dinner at a stranger's house with people from town. I
thought of Dad's warnings. Why you always ate the same
things at home. Why the only person to ever come
over was his business partner Lewis. Why their meetings were
always out in the yard or in the car, and
why Mom always stayed out of everything. So many memories
turning into life lessons that I couldn't get rid of.
As I looked out at the darkness of that oak tree,
I made up my mind that I would slow down
and let those memories catch up with me. Finally, Beatrice
was right. I didn't want this for James. I looked
at the dark silhouette of the oak tree as I
leaned on my truck, the wind picking up just a
little bit, bringing alive part of the thing that terrified
my father. You see that thing out there, my dad
asked early one evening, just like this one. I nodded.
That tree has a few things, and one day that
thing will end up taking me too. The thing the tree,
when it was getting dark out, looked menacing from my room,
like a monster that would release one of its own.
Every night, I could swear that I saw those strange
silhouettes crawling out of it, things floating underneath its branches.
But Dad was the only other member of the household
that would talk about them with me. Had I sat
with him during the heated meetings with others. The way
he spoke of the people from town with such hate
in his voice. One morning, the sound of Dad's truck
approached my side of the house and he rushed inside.
He grabbed something from the safe and got to the
room we were not allowed in, and he dialed the number.
I remember only part of his words, but exactly his
tone during the call. Thieves, don't change, he yelled in anger,
Bring her here. All I remember from that night were
the crowds of people that surrounded our fields, the way
Dad told all of us in the house to stay inside,
as we grabbed onto Mom's skirt and tried to distract ourselves.
In the kitchen, she was going to bake a cake.
Nobody got to eat it. Mom had forgotten an ingredient
in all the commotion, but refused to step closer to
the refrigerator by the window. She just continued with the recipe.
There was a moment when everyone got louder outside, a
group of well over thirty people. Mom looked over the
field for just an instant and brought us closer to her,
and after only a few minutes it was completely quiet outside.
Mom ran to the window and I watched as the
group left and Dad was left standing there by the tree,
carving something into it with a knife, writing something on
the trunk. Mom started waking up its screams in the
middle of the night for some time, and my dreams
turned into nightmares. Whenever the curtains in my room were open,
I could see figures swinging on the branches like upside
down ears of corn from the ropes. I could hear
the creaks crying, as if at any moment there were
thud against the ground and begin to crawl. But I
used to tell Dad all about this, and he would
smile as he listened to me, asking me details about
what they looked like, asking if it was a man
or a woman out there, how many and what they
were wearing. A man showed up to the house once
with a box truck and parked it by the porch.
He stepped out, and Dad ran out there. I watched
him drag the man all the way to the tree,
and they yelled at each other. I couldn't do anything
else but stare in disbelief. Thinking back on it, I
should have gotten Mom or one of my brothers to help,
but I just stared at a distance from the window
of my bedroom as a rope went up on one
of the branches. I shut my eyes and heard the
squeak the same cries from the rope as it stretched
and then swinged from side to side until it came
to a near complete stock, woken up only by the
soft wind that came through the property in the early evenings.
It was almost dark out when he came back to
the house. He went straight into this room with the telephone,
and within five minutes two cars had arrived and taken
the ropes off the tree and drove away. Back then,
I had no idea what was happening, But as I
grew older and things became more apparent, I learned of
things hidden deep in my memories that showed that Dad
was not a good person. The night Mom was found
was the beginning of the end. The police was unwilling
to help us at first, and we were invisible to
those town for weeks. We would go out at night
as I sat in the car, riding by dried up
rivers and dirt roads with flashlights with my aunts and uncles,
people I would only see on my mom's birthday for Dad.
It ended with my dad calling over his friend and
business partner, Lewis, to the house, only to carry him
by himself away from the tree sometime in the middle
of the night. For me, it hasn't ended yet. Dad
would speak of the shapes at night, the ones that
would whisper his name through the darkness of the fields.
He would look tover the tree and let a manic
laughter out, suddenly stopping what he was doing and sitting
on the ground to look toward it. He would tell
my brothers and I the stories of that tree. The
woman who stole, the man who lied, and the one
who killed. Everyone must pay was his lesson. But Dad
was too far gone by this point. His sentences stopped
making sense. Sometime around when my brothers went off to
college and I was just getting into high school. I
had learned to take care of myself by that point,
and I didn't need him anymore. And he knew that
the things that would come from the trees would remain
outside most days and wouldn't bother me, though I wish
I could have said the same for Dad. I heard
the door open one night, and I walked over to it,
only to see Dad walking out to the tree. It
didn't surprise me anymore. He would often talk about wanting
to confront everything himself and rush out there, sometimes spending
hours under the branches of the oak tree. He was
a haunted one. His conscience, as I now understand, was
too much to bear. That night was his last. I
walked out there before the sun came out to see
the familiar shape of a large ear of corn like
a sack, hanging from the tree. The police actually showed
up that time and took care of the rest. From
that point forward, things were silent for a while. I
would be on my own from that point forward. All
of this I remembered as I stood there, leaning on
the truck in front of the dark oak tree, as
the sun faded into the horizon behind the house, the
darkness that was that tree now swallowing up the property.
I thought of James and the real fear that I
felt about losing him for one of my choices, or
losing him to one of the many things he said
he would see roaming around that house. And end to
all of this was what we needed. Beatrice was right.
She always mentioned how our lives would be better outside
of that property, that memories become real far too often,
that I was beginning to turn into someone else, and
so I brushed toward the tree that night, now in
complete darkness, as I felt the shape swoshed by my sides,
the cries and the wailing of the ropes as they
feared getting snapped into the deep growl, slowly turning into
the final gasps of air the lives he had taken them.
I felt the roots of that monster in front of
me when I got close, nearly tumbling to the ground
before I felt the rough side of the trunk against
my hand. It twisted and turned hungry for what it
thought I was about to offer. I searched with the
tips of my fingers for the markings on that tree,
high up there where Dadd used to carve them. One, two,
three tally marks on the tree. I took the knife
out of my pocket, unfolded it, and right next to
the fingers of my left hand, I started carving the
last of them. I could feel the wind against the
oak tree and circling every part of my being as
it prepared for my climb. But it was not for me.
The fourth mark, long forgotten and missing, was for my father.
Four tally marks, four lives the tree would ever feel
against its surface. It was as though every scratch of
that knife against the wood meant so much more than
his very name on his headstone, A proper goodbye. I
finally pulled away from the oak tree and ran back
to the house. I stood still on that porch, the
light buzzing with mosquitoes by the doorframe, when I heard
it squeak open, Dad, Can we get a swing set,
James asked, startling me. Thought of someone swinging from a
set of ropes, and it chilled on my spine for
the last time. We'll get one for the new house,
I said, just as Beatrice stepped out toward the doorway.
We stood there for a bit and I looked at
her in the eyes before her smile faded. The wind
picked up and we all heard a deep hum coming
from the direction of the oak tree. We ran inside
as quickly as we could shut the door behind us.
Scary Story Podcast is written and produced by me Edwin
Kowar Robes. You can find me on social media and
on my website Scary Story podcast dot com. Links to everything,
including how to join Scary Plus, are in the description
of this episode. Thank you very much for listening. Keep
it scary everyone, See you soon.