Speaker 1: Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. The strange figure appears in photographs,
specifically around one place. What could it mean and why
is it there? My name is Edwin and here's a
scary story. I know this will start family drama for
a time. My mom spent two years without talking to
her own mother, something she tried doing to me as
an adult, but I didn't allow it. I kept calling
her and showing up at her doorstep until she spoke
to me. It was all over a misunderstanding at a
gathering for Christmas one year. No one spoke badly of her,
and yet I can't blame her for the way she reacted.
It's how she learned to do things to solve or
ignore her problems. From what I understand, they've both had
lots of issues. Both were single mothers trying to make
it work, one a little better than the next. I
never wanted to get in line for that. It wasn't
until a book about immature parents that I started learning
about how our parents are still solving their own problems.
As they start caring less and less about how they're
perceived by others, something that I think increases with age.
They begin to act out sometimes against their own children
and other times against the poor cashier at MacDonald's. But
it was because of this book that I started reading
up on everything that's affected by the upbringing of our parents.
Habits mainly, but sometimes there are more serious things like
diseases and traumas that we never got over. Who knows
if it's true, but I know that I've discovered several
fears I didn't know I had, and it's what got
me researching about what I will tell you about. I
went through many picture albums and questioned aunts and uncles
about my grandma. A difficult woman to deal with from
what I know, but I loved her either way. She
was a member of the church up until she turned fifty,
and right on that birthday she made the announcement that
she was quitting too much drama, she said, problems that
everyone knew she had created herself, arguments from people from there,
especially at the gatherings that they held. Sometimes people were
questioning the way she started dressing, or things that she
would talk about. It was like those people who get
lost in political issues and suddenly it's all they talk about,
except this was more about how should I say this?
The conspiracies She called my brother frantically one afternoon when
asking how possible it was that someone was hearing their
conversation at that very instant, and how she could install
an app on her phone that would keep everything private.
She had seen an ad for this on Instagram and
was crazy about getting the forty dollar app. I don't
remember what my brother told me he told her, but
she was calm enough to let it go. We taught
her about the scammer of phone calls and everything. She
was the perfect pray for it, but thankfully she never
felt for any she can. Though. Grandma had an enormous
house just outside of town, it's what made her relevant.
I know it's messed up to say like this, but
it's a truth. A barn and access to a lakeside
property that was just beyond a section of forest that
the family had for generations. Still, money was tight because
nobody wanted to sell anything, not even in lots or
to rent out or anything like that, and it proved
to be worth it. I guess if everything went down
they had a way at least to escape it and
be all right for a bit, but it never came
to that anyway. This property was large enough to host
the entire family and more for Christmas and holidays, big
celebrations and stuff like that. One of my cousins even
had her wedding there, but she regretted it almost immediately.
Everyone warned her about the thing that roamed around the property,
but her new husband convinced her that it was all
made up now that they weren't going to fall for
something like that. But the wedding photos, well, they told
the different story. They actually ended up retaking them and
it was only my grandmother and one of my aunts
who kept those pictures. The photographer had asked about it
before the final delivery. There is some one that looks
as like they don't belong there. He tried to be
polite about it. An old, dirty jacket hanging down to
the ground, rotting teeth, and dirty hair. He suggested to
my cousin to have him entered it out, but didn't
want to be rude just because of this person's appearance.
But when my cousin asked to see the pictures, story
goes that she screamed and asked to have the photos
taken in another place. Her husband joked about it for
a bit and I got to see it. Around that
time when Grandma demanded to get the photos, the original ones,
that it was her house and her rules and all that.
The thing showed up in four photos, a group, one
by the lake, one of a family having dinner, another
one of the front doorsteps of the house, and the
final that appeared to be the one wall they were
getting everything set up. And I've seen all of them,
and this person, one that nobody had seen before, shows
up clear as day. But there was one tiny detail
that the photographer left out when he brought it up,
that this thing, this person, was no taller than two feet,
barely reaching people's hips, or so it looked from the
perspective of the photographs. Ever since then, they would meet
up at one of my aunt's homes or even in
some of our family's apartments, squeezing in all of us
until they got so hot in there that people would
start filtering themselves out. But no matter how close we
got to the subject of the photos, even when I'd
try to talk to my cousin about it, it was dismissed.
Something that never happened, something that was not a big deal,
not important enough. The idea of seeing this thing, and
the photographs really bothered me. There was something about the
way it looked at the camera. When you look closer,
its eyes seemed to follow you, not human. After that wedding,
something shifted in the family, not in a dramatic, storming
out of the room kind of way, but in a slow,
quiet unraveling that none of us wanted to admit was happening.
The gatherings thinned. The warmth that used to settle over
the hows during the holidays faded, like the lights that
had been dimmed slightly without anyone touching the switch. My cousin,
the one who had gotten married out there, stopped coming
all together. She never gave a real explanation, just polite
deflections and excuses. Busy with work. We're traveling this year.
Things are just a little chaotic right now. But we
all felt it something had spooked her. Her husband showed
up alone. I found him in the kitchen during one
of the last gatherings at Grandma's, standing by the fridge,
not drinking the soda he was holding. Then I asked
him how he was doing, but he didn't meet my eyes.
She didn't look at the lake anymore. He said, like
it was the end of a conversation he'd already had
a hundred times in his head. I didn't push it.
I didn't have to. The weight of that statement stayed
with me. A few months later, early in the spring,
I decided to go back out there in the property.
I told myself that I was just going to go
take some photos, capture the place before it fell too
far into disrepair. Grandma had moved into a smaller home
in town after she slipped on the back porch the
winter before. She said the house had gotten too big
for her, too empty, too loud at night. No one
had lived there since. When I pulled up the long
gravel driveway, something about the house felt different, smaller, maybe
shrunk in on itself. But more than that, it felt
like it was dying. Inside. Everything was just as it
had been. The dusty smell of old wood and perfume
hung thick in the air, Furniture covered sheets, boxes stacked
along the walls, family photos tucked carefully into drawers instead
of left out in frames. I walked through, slowly, touching
the walls, running my fingers across the old banister that
we all used to slide down as kids. Every corner
had a memory, Every shadow held something we'd forgotten or
chose not to remember. In the back hallway, I passed
Grandma's old prayer room. She used to call it her
quiet place. Though it's over the end. She spent less
time praying and more time writing notes, lists of strange names,
hand drawn maps, snippets of what looked like overheard conversations.
It started after she quit the church. She said she
was keeping track of things now, though we never asked
what that meant. That room still had a smell. I
couldn't place something old. I didn't linger there for long.
Eventually I stepped out the back door and made my
way down toward the forest. The trail to the lake
was still there, the one we had all used for years,
though nature was starting to reclaim it. The trees had
always grown tightly around the path, but now they felt
like they had leaned in, more like they were listening.
And that's when it happened. I was about halfway down
the trail when something caught my eye at the base
of an old gnarl tree, something talking to the roots
that had been placed there. I crouched down and pulled
it loose. A piece of fabric stiff with dirt and
age a jacket sleeve, small, maybe child sized, but when
I held it in my hands, I realized it was
too small even for a child. It was no bigger
than a doll's but clearly made for a living thing.
Stitch by hand with uneven seams. The thread was black
and coarse, and there was something embedded into the cuff,
a tiny rusted button that looked like it had a
symbol carved into it, a circle and inside a rough
triangle with a slit through the center. I stuffed it
into my bag before I could think too hard about it,
but I suddenly felt exposed, like I was standing in
front of something ancient and patient. I looked around, trying
to spot anything unusual, but the forest was still, and
then I heard it, a single crack, like a branch
snapping underweight. I turned sharply, scanning the shadows between the trees.
First it was nothing, but then I saw it, a
shape low to the ground, just beyond the bend in
the trail, the place where the sun couldn't quite reach.
It wasn't moving, I was just watching. I don't remember
walking back up to the house. I just remember the
way the wind had picked up, and how the branches
above me made a sound like whispering words I couldn't
quite catch. I didn't go inside again. I left. I
drove straight into town and didn't stop until I was
parked outside my grandmother's new place. She answered the door,
wearing her robe, her hair a little wild, like she
had just woken up from a dream. She couldn't shake.
Before I could say anything, she looked at the bag
slung over my shoulder. You went back, didn't you, she said,
her voice flat. I nodded. She sighed and stepped aside,
motion for me to come in. There is something you
need to know, something none of us were supposed to
say out loud. And just like that, I understood something
I hadn't before. The silence in this family was in avoidance.
It was protection. Her apartment was too quiet. My grandmother
had always filled spaces with noise, humming gospel tunes under
her breath, begging pots around the kitchen even when she
wasn't cooking, flicking through pages of her Bible with deliberate slowness.
But that afternoon she just sat in her recliner, her
eyes locked onto the TV, the volume barely above a
whisper use anchor was stroning in about something gas prices,
I think, but she wasn't listening. You're not supposed to
go back there alone, she said, finally, you know that, right.
I didn't answer. I just opened my bag and reached in.
I pulled out the sleeve. I placed it gently on
her coffee table, careful not to disturb whatever does had
collected on it. She didn't flinch, didn't even look surprised. Instead,
she nodded at once and reached behind the cushion of
her chair, pulling out a worn leather bound notebook. It
was cracked along the spine and full of dog yard pages,
some of them stuffed with clippings and handwritten scraps. This,
she said, placing it beside the sleeve, was supposed to
stay with me until I died. She opened it and
flipped to a page that had been folded over several times.
There was a sketch on it, rough on in what
looked like a pencil and coffee. A figure, small bent
a long coat or a robe hung around it like
it had grown out of the thing itself. The face
was mostly obscured by scribbles, but the eyes she had
drawn the eyes in with such force that the paper
was nearly torn through, and below it one word in large,
uneven handwriting, the Keeper. It's been part of our family
longer than the land, she said, her voice lower. Now
longer than the lake, longer than the barn, back when
you were still in the mountains, before your great grandfather
bought that stretch of property. We brought it with us.
I stared at her, What do you mean we brought it?
She pressed her fingers to her lips, like she was
trying to hold in words I had been waiting decades
to escape. It came through blood, she said, finally, through grief,
through the things we didn't bury properly. You think all
this land was just given to us. Your great grandfather
made a deal back when his second son died. I
try to remember there was no second son. She looked
at me then, for the first time, really, and I
saw a flicker of something hold in her eyes. Not madness,
not exactly, but sorrow wrapped in secret. No, she said,
because the Keeper took him, and an exchange, we got
the land. I turned my head off to the side.
I kind of wanted to laugh, to tell her that
this was just another one of her wild stories, another
weird rabbit hole she'd fallen into after quitting the church.
But then I remember the photograph, the figure, the jacket,
the way it seemed to be there and not there.
I remember the feeling I got in the forest, like
something was waiting. She turned the page. There were more sketches,
more symbols, and one of them matched the one of
the sleeves button. It watches over places where pain pools,
she said. It finds families who are good at pretending
everything's fine, who keep things in the walls and the floorboards,
who inherits silence like its money. I didn't say anything.
I didn't have to. Did you remember the arguments we
used to have, she asked, After a while, you thought
I was being dramatic, that I just wanted to control
I nodded slowly. I wasn't. I was trying to stop it.
You think it's just a story. But if it feeds
off of our forgetting, it feeds off of our refusal
to see it. That's why it shows up in photographs,
not because it wants to be known, but because it
is known deep down in the parts of us we
won't talk about. She leaned back, exhausted, her hands shook slightly.
It used to be enough just to stay off the land,
to leave it undisturbed. But the weddings, the parties, the
fighting called it back, and now it's paying attention again.
I stared at the little sleeve on the table, the
way it was slightly damp, like it had just been
pulled from the earth. I realized I hadn't really looked
at the inside yet, so I picked it up again,
turning it over gently and inside, talking to the lightning.
There was something hard. I pushed at it with my
thumb until it slid into my palm. The tooth, small
gray human, no bigger than a child's. And suddenly I
was cold, not from the room, but from some memory
that had not happened yet, the future nightmare curling at
the edge of my mind like smoke, And I think
my grandmother whispered, her voice thin, that it's looking for
someone new. I didn't go home. After I left my grandmother's.
I drove back to the house. It didn't feel like
a choice. I was just behind the wheel, my hands steady,
but my heart folding in on itself. The sleeve, the notebook,
the tooth. They were in my bag on the passenger seat,
almost humming like static before a storm. Dusk was swallowing
the trees. By the time I pulled up into the
driveway again, the windows of the house looked empty, like
hollowed out eyes. And still I got out of the car,
and still I opened the door. It was like stepping
into a memory that had rotted at the edges. The
air was warmer than it should have been, the way
closet smell when you left the light on for too long.
I walked room to room with a kind of sloane
as you use in a dream, not fully sure you
want to know what's waiting around the next corner. Everything
was just as I had left it until I got
to the prayer room. The door was opened now I
hadn't opened it before. It creaked. As I stepped in,
it looked different. The rug was pulled up at one corner.
The wood underneath was discolored. The floorboards looked newer than
the rest of the room, cut cleaner and slightly raised.
I knelt down and touched them. The edge shifted under
my fingers loose. There was something under the floor. It
took everything I had not to run right then, but
I pried it open, and beneath the boards it was
a shallow compartment, maybe two feet deep. Dirt and stone
lined the bottom, and resting there, carefully arranged, were small items,
dozens of them, buttons, teeth, bits of cloth, bone, things
that looked like they belonged to animals, and things that didn't.
At the very center was a photograph, faded and warped
from moisture. I reached for it, holding it up to
the light. It was a picture of my mother, maybe
ten years old, standing by the edge of the lake,
smiling alone. Except she wasn't. The figure was there, standing
just behind her, partially hidden in the reeds, same coat,
same height, same unnatural stillness. And in that moment something
in me cracked. Not fear, not yet, but a terrible
kind of understanding. This thing hadn't just returned, it had
never left. I stumbled back, my heart punching through my ribs,
and knocked over a box in the corner of the room.
Papers scattered, and something clattered to the floor, a tape recorder, old,
dusty and heavy. Automatically, I pressed play ecstatic, and then,
if you're listening to this, I didn't tell you soon enough,
I thought, I could protect you by keeping you away,
but that's not how it works. It watches the ones
who pretend, who hold it all in, who try to
fix what they didn't break. It doesn't want blood, not really.
It wants your secrets, your shame, the things you inherit
and carry anyway. The only thing that keeps it sleeping
is truth. But we don't do truth in this family.
We do silence. The tape clicked off, and then I
heard footsteps, not upstairs, not outside below, a slow shuffle,
skin against dirts, like something waking up, something stretching. I
dropped the tape recorder. My hands were shaking now, but
I forced the floorboard shut and backed out of the room.
I slammed the door and didn't look behind me. I
got into the car and drove until the sky turned black.
And the house it's nothing but a thought I didn't
want to have. My grandmother died two weeks later, no warning,
just gone peaceful. They said she left me the house.
No one said anything about it at the funeral, not
the land, not the history, not the thing and the pictures.
We gathered in the church hall like we always did,
and talked about how stubborn she was how loud, how complicated.
Nobody asked me why I kept glancing at the corners
of the room. I having gone back to the house.
But sometimes when I close my eyes, I see it,
that thing watching from the tree line, waiting at the lake,
standing behind people who think they're alone. And I think
about how the silence in my family isn't just the habit,
it's tradition, it's survival. But I wonder if I say
something now, write it down, share it, yes, does that
keep it asleep? What's going to happen to me? Now
that I've told you about it? Scary Story podcast has
written and produced by me Edwin Karu Yes. Thank you
all for your ideas. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram,
and TikTok as Edwin Cove. That's e d w I
n coo V. Links to join our growing community for
Scary Story podcasts are also in the link in the
description of this episode. You subscribed, I will tell you
another story next week. Thank you very much for listening.
Keep it scary everyone, See you sooner.