Speaker 1: Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's episode has several stories
allegedly passed down from a friend of a friend. Thinks
that could happen to you too. My name is Edwin,
and here's a scary story. It's one of those places
nobody thinks about, beat up old factory that makes rubber
parts or whatever. Way past one of those freeway exits
nobody uses. It only runs at night now, skeleton crew.
And this happened to my friend Angela. She worked there
for a few months, just trying to save up some money.
It wasn't a great job, but it was steady and
it paid anyway. Every night she would clock out around
two fifteen in the morning. Her car was parked a
couple of blocks down past this chain link gate, just
dark streets and that hum from the factories that never
totally shuts off. One night, she tells her roommate that
she's hurt something weird while walking to her car. It
was like crying a little kid, maybe really faint, almost
like it was being carried on the wind. She looked
around and nothing again. The place is empty at night,
just warehouses and broken street lights. Second night, same thing,
same spot, right by the gate, crying again, still soft,
still no one there. She starts thinking that maybe it's
a cat or something, you know, high pitched and sad sounding.
But on the third night things got messed up. She
finds his little shoe sitting right by the gate. It
was dirty and old, like it had been there for
a while, one of those tiny veul girl sneakers. You
know what I'm talking about, Toddler sighed. She picks it up,
looks around and nobody and then the crying starts again,
but this time it's not behind her, it's right in
front of her. She looks up and there's this little
girl's stand just outside the gate, barefoot, soaked from head
to toe, wearing this white dress that's all torn up
at the bottom, her hair stuck to her face like
she just climbed out of her river or something like that,
and her eyes gone just black holes, like someone punched
them out of her skull and never filled them in.
Angela says. She couldn't move, couldn't even breathe, and the
girl just stood there staring at her or whatever it
was doing without eyes. She blinked and the girl was
now on the other side of the gate, on the inside,
right there with her, and that's when it started. The screaming.
The girl never made a sound. It was coming from
everywhere else, all around her, dozens of voices like whispering, crying,
and shouting, all at once, like they were inside her head,
but outside too. She panicked, dropped her keys, and ran
back inside the factory. She locked herself in the break room,
and her coworker found her twenty minutes leigh shaking and
pale and crying. She never went back. She quit that night,
wouldn't even go to pick up her last check until
somebody went with her. She told her roommate everything, even
tried to show her a video that she'd taken. She
started recording on her phone the night before, just to
prove that she wasn't going crazy, But the video was useless.
It was too dark until the very end, with one
frame only of her walking toward the gate behind her,
clear as day, a hand reaching through the fence. Angela
moved to Bakersfield with the rest of her family not
long after. She said that she still sees a girl,
sometimes imagines her, not like Fullan, but in reflections, car windills, puddles,
turned off TVs just for a second, but she's always
looking at her, and the gates still there. If you're
wondering same spot, some folks who work around there say
that if you walk by it after two in the
mon and still hear her crying, and if you stop,
if you look through the gate long enough, sometimes something
looks back. My brother's friend Marcus, used to do food
delivery in La work the graveyard shift, mostly downtown in
west Lake. He wasn't really a people person, didn't mind
being alone. Driving at night calmed him down, especially when
he wasn't dealing with traffic or customers breathing down his neck. Anyway,
this all started with what seemed like a glitch. One night.
He gets in order at one twelve am. Weirdly specific time,
he remembered that to this apartment building on Commonwealth, kind
of tucked between two old laundromats and a run down
liquor store, the orders for unit three B. He drives over,
no problem, quiet street, drops the food at the door, knocks,
No one answers, and the app says leave at the door,
so he does. He takes a photo, walks away, and
ten minutes later, boom, fifteen dollars tip. Not bad. Next
night same address, same time, new order, though different name,
and still three B. He delivers again, and no one's home,
No one ever is. Food's still there from the night before,
though untouched, but the app clears it, tip goes through,
no complaints, and it keeps happening. Third night, fourth and
by the end of the week, Marcus has delivered to
three B six times, all different names, different food, but
the same unit, no lights on, no sign of life inside,
and by now there's a pile of delivery bags outside
the door, still untouched. So he tells my brother, it's
like I'm delivering to a ghost. But here's a thing.
The app never flags it, no errors, no refunds, nothing.
It's like someone keeps placing orders and forgetting about them,
but also tipping big, like two big, twenty dollars, forty dollars,
one's even sixty dollars. And I thought there was a
limit to those things, and you would think that's a win, right,
But it started to bother him. He tried looking into
the names on the orders, and they weren't repeats. Each
one was different, but not a normal thing either, Like
half of these names sounded fake. One was just a
first name, and no last initial one had a random
string of letters, like someone was testing the system. He
talked to the maintenance guy one night, older guy, barely
paying attention, and Marcus asks, hey, does anyone actually live
there in three B and the guy shrugs, he says
been empty for a while, maybe a couple of years.
Marcus double checks. He goes back through his order history,
six nights of deliveries to a unit nobody lives in.
So now he's wondering who's ordering the food and why
hasn't the app flagged the account? Why keep sending food
to a place where nobody ever opens the door. He
figures maybe it's some scam, maybe someone's laundering stolen cards
through food apps, maybe it's a bot testing addresses. But
every time he thinks that, he asks himself, why only him?
Why does he keep getting these orders? That's when it
gets worse. He starts noticing the orders show up on
his cube before he logs onto the app, like he'll
be opening his phone just to check messages, and there
it is order request already ringing, and it's always the
same one twelve am and always three B. So he
tries rejecting one. The next night, he gets two, one
at one twelve and one at one seventeen. Then his
other deliver start rerouting a pizza run in Echo Park,
randomly ridirects mid route to a new drop off three
B on Commonwealth, and it's not just the app. One night,
he swears he sees someone waiting in the hallway as
he's leaving the food, not outside the unit, but far
down the corridor, just standing near the stairs, shadowed facing him,
and when he blinks, the person's gone. He says, nothing
ever happened, no threats, no messages, but he started to
feel like he was being watched, like someone was studying
what he would do and how long he would keep
playing along. A couple times he tried sending messages, but
nobody responded. He stopped sleeping well. He also started dreaming
about endless apartment halls, rows of identical doors, and food,
just food. Eventually he assigns to stop delivering to that address.
He uninstalls the app app and delete his account. The
next day, he gets a text, no name, no number,
just one of those bracket names. I'm not sure if
you've seen one, but he said, drop off missed one
twelve a m He shrugs it off, thinks maybe he
imagined it. And then the money starts showing up. His
bank account starts getting deposits, no explanation, no sender, A
couple of hundred dollars at first, and then more. He
calls his bank and they say the payments are legit,
coming from a verified vendor, same one that runs the app.
He never reinstalled it, never took another order, but the
money kept coming. He said, he felt like a lab
rat that wandered off course, but they still wanted to
reward him, keep him comfortable, maybe keep him quiet. He
moved about six months later, no explanation, couldn't say where.
He told my brother he needed to reset, said that
lay had gotten weird. Here's the part that sticks with me.
A guy I met recently who also does late night deliveries.
He tells me about this address that keeps showing up
in his app. So, of course I started asking him questions,
and eventually he kind of remembered. It was in Westlake,
near Commonwealth. Always comes through around one twelve am or so,
he said, and always asks for drop off at Unit
three B. That's I remember. I asked him if he
ever took the order, and he said once. But when
I got to the door there were already three other
bags sitting there, like someone had beat me to it.
He said he didn't remember seeing another driver on the
way up, no one leaving, just silence. He left the food,
took the photo, and walked away fast. Now he skips
the order when it pops up, says he doesn't know
what it is, but it feels off, like it's not
really a person on the other end. I don't know
what to tell you. Maybe it's just a sis them glitch,
a weird string of coincidences. Maybe someone's gaming the apps
and the way that no one's figured out yet. But
if you're ever out there delivering and three B comes up,
just skip it. Whatever's behind that door, if anything, it
doesn't eat, it just waits. I don't usually tell people
this story. Most wouldn't believe it anyway. I used to
dispatch for a small plumbing company in San Bernardino. Nothing fancy,
four trucks, one office, and a staff of guys who
had been fixing busted toilets and water heaters for longer
than I'd been alive. My job was mostly in the office, phones, scheduling,
handling late night calls when the emergency line rang after hours. Sometimes, though,
I would go out myself, like if a tech called
off or we were backed up, or if a customer
was just really angry and we didn't want to lose
the job. I wasn't licensed to do repairs, though, but
I knew enough to walk aside, check out an issue,
and make a call about how urgent it really was.
And that's how I ended up at the house on
Euclid Avenue late March. Cold night was quiet. Around ten
forty five pm. The woman had called three times said
something was wrong with her pipes, not inside, but in
the backyard near the shed. She says she could hear scraping,
and the water in the guest bathroom was running brown
and then stopping entirely. She also said something about the
smell like meat. She said. I wasn't planning to go,
but we were booked solid the next day, and I
figured if I checked it out myself, maybe we could
reshuffle the morning crew and get ahead of it. So
I drove out. It was a single story place and
of a cul de sac chain link fence, out front
porch light flickering. One of those houses that looks like
time forgot it. Faded paint, concrete lawn. The woman who
answered was older, maybe mid sixties, short, heavy set, hair tight,
back tight. She looked tired. I introduced myself and she
said her name was Helen. I don't need anyone to
fix it tonight, she said, I just want someone else
to hear it, to see that I'm not crazy. She
led me around the side of the house. The backyard
was unlit, just a plastic motion sensor over the back door.
That didn't work, so I used my flashlight. The shed
sat maybe twenty feet from the house. Talked into a
corner where the fence met the trees, metal rusted and
about to fall over. As we got closer, the smell
hit me. She hadn't been exaggerating. It wasn't sewage, though
it was sweeter, wet, rotting, like a full trash bin
left out in the sun for too long. I asked
her where the plumbing lines ran, and she pointed a
shadow trench just behind the shed, barely visible in the grass.
I told her I would take a quick look, and
she didn't follow. The shed had a small gap between
its back wall and the chain link fence, maybe three
feet wide, and that's where the trench ended, or it
maybe started, depending on how you looked at it. That's
also where I heard it, a kind of shuffling low
to the ground. It was soft but steady, like something
dragging its limbs through wet leaves. I crouched down a
little hesitant now, but I angled my flashlight toward the gap,
and that's when I saw it, only for a second.
Pale skin, long, thin arms, elbows bent the wrong way,
knees tucked into its chest like had folded itself in half.
It was hunched completely still, its head low, and I
could see its face, only that its skin didn't reflect light,
like it absorbed it, or something like it didn't want
to be seen. And then it moved, quick and fluid,
and it backed up into the darkness behind the shed
without a sound, not even a rustle. This time I
stood there frozen, not scared exactly, not yet, but uncomfortable
in a way that I had never felt before. Something
about it didn't make any sense. It wasn't the shape
or the way it moved, but how it felt like
it had been watching me. First, I walked back to
the house. I told Helen the smell might be a
dead animal near the piping, and we would send some
one out first thing in the morning. She nodded and
didn't look surprised. I drove home with the windows down.
That smell clung to me the whole right back. Next morning,
I checked our system. There was no job listed for
that address, no record of a helen, no invoice, no
call history. Even the emergency call log, which is automatic,
by the way, was blank, just three skipped time stamps
around ten thirty, like the phone had rung, but nobody
picked up. I didn't say anything to the team. I
figured maybe I had logged it wrong. We were slammed
that week, and I had been working twelve hours and
wasn't sleeping much. Still, it bugged me enough that the
following weekend, I drove back out to the house, same street,
same number, only the house looked different. The windows were boarded,
the grass was dead. Mail was piled in the box
like no one had touched it in months. The porch
light was broken, the gate was padlocked shut. I checked
the county records online. The property had been vacant for
over a year. I kept it to myself. What was
I gonna say, Hey, I saw a pale thing behind
a shed at a house that doesn't exist anymore. Augh Anyway,
a few weeks passed, I started sleeping better, convinced myself
I had gone to the wrong house, wrong street. He's
a mistake when you're tired and in the dark. And
then the smell came back, faint at certain job sites.
In the van, the office bathroom once that same sick,
sweet rot drifting in and out like it followed me.
And then about two months later, I was covering the
light shift. Phones were dead and I was sorting paperwork.
Just after midnight, the emergency line rang. The caller ID
was blocked, and I answered silence for a long time,
and then the faintest whisper, not a voice exactly, more
like breathing, and I hung up and checked this out.
The call logged as coming from another phone from our
system in the same building. A few nights after that,
I had a dream. I was back in the yard,
standing by the shed, and only this time the thing
was facing me. I couldn't see its face, but I
knew it could see mine. I ended up quitting two
months later. I moved north new job, new town, smaller company.
There was too much trouble down there. Anyway, I haven't
smelled that rot since I haven't taken another emergency call either.
But sometimes when I'm walking your a fence line, or
when the grass dies in a narrow path leading up
to the trees, I think about that space behind the shed,
and I wonder if it's still out there, crouched and waiting,
or if it came with me. I don't really believe
in fate or guardian angels or whatever, never have, but
I do believe in coincidence, and sometimes, if I'm being
honest with myself, I wonder if coincidence is the only
reason I'm here. This happened about two years ago. I
just moved into a cheap apartment and a rougher part
of San Bernardino. It was all like a ford at
the time. Building was old, smelled like old carpet and bleach,
no elevator, just four floors, chipped tile, and tenants who
mostly kept their heads down, the kind of place where
no one makes eye contact unless they absolutely have to.
That was in Unit six D, the top floor, last
one at the end of the hallway. He had one
of those really bad wooden front doors that never sits
just right on the frame. He had to give it
a shoulder shove to get it open. Sometimes same when
you closed it, it just stuck a little, like the
wood had swelled years ago, and nobody ever bothered to
fix it. It was annoying, but I got used to it.
The only person I really ever talked to was Doug,
the property manager. The guy was probably in his fifties,
thinning hair, always in a polo shirt with the building's
logo embroidered on the chest. He was decent, polite, didn't
act like he was doing you a favor by fixing stuff.
He saw him around a lot with a clipboard or
a plunger. We weren't friends, but we said hey when
we passed in the hall. Around the second month I
was living there, things started feeling a little strange. It
started with little things, notices pinned to the lobby corkboard,
Remember to lock your doors, report just bitious activity, that
kind of stuff. Doug told me someone had been breaking
into the buildings in the neighborhood, messing with locks, looking
for easy targets. He said the break ins weren't violent,
at least not yet. There was no forced entry, no
one hurt, but people would wake up and realize things
were moved. The fridge would be open, the closet door cracked.
Sometimes nothing was even stolen, just shifted, like whoever was
there didn't want stuff, they just wanted to be inside.
Doug was taking it seriously. I caught him walking in
the hallways at like six in the morning one day,
checking each door, writing stuff down on his clipboard. He
looked tired, meg he hadn't slept, and he said, just
making sure everyone secure. I still remember that voice. The
building was quiet for a few weeks, and then one night,
around one point thirty am, I was half asleep on
my couch watching dumb videos with headphones in. I lived alone,
didn't have a pet, and the only noise came from
the occasional plumbing groan or the neighbor coughing through the wall.
But that's when I heard the knock. It was soft,
three quick taps, almost polite, just tap tap tap. I
paused a video and sat up, headphones still around my neck.
I wasn't expecting anyone, definitely not at that hour. I waited,
thinking maybe I imagined it. Then they came again, slightly
louder this time, tap tap, tap. I got up and
walked to the door. I remember reaching for the handle,
ready to open it, because why wouldn't I I was
half asleep again, not thinking, but the door stuck like always.
I pulled harder, gave it a little yank, and still
it didn't bunge. Now I don't know why I stopped.
Normally I would have given it a full body pull
and popped it right open. Something about the way the
knob turned without catching Something about that knock, I don't know.
I just stood there. The knock came again, this time slower,
then nothing. I backed away. I didn't say anything, didn't
look through the people. I always forgot it was there. Eventually,
I just went back to the couch and sat there,
still half awake, waiting to hear footsteps. But I didn't.
I must have fallen asleep eventually, because the next morning
there were cop cars out in the front, yellow tape
around the back. Doug had been found dead around two
in the morning, blunt four or trauma. No witnesses. They
found his clipboard and his phone was missing. The police
said it looked like a robbery, maybe a breakin gone wrong.
Rumors spread fast. One neighbor said that she had seen
someone in a hoodie walking the halls around one forty five.
Said that they were tall, said they moved in a
weird way, fast, but kind of punched, like they were
trying not to be seen. Another tenant said that the
door had fresh scratches near the lock, nothing big, just
little marks, like someone had tried a key that didn't
quite fit. I didn't say anything at first. What was
I supposed to say, Hey, someone knocked on my door
and it didn't open it. But a couple of days
later I noticed something. The people the one I never used,
had been covered over from the outside with the piece
of scotch tape perfectly centered. I peeled it off and
stared through. I could see nothing but the hallway and
the name's door across her mine. I started thinking about
how close I had come to opening that door. I
hadn't stuck, if I hadn't hesitated, if I'd just been
a little more awake, maybe a little more polite, would
I have opened it? What I have been next? The
worst part. I wasn't cautious, I wasn't smart. I was
just lucky. That thought stuck with me more than anything else.
And about a week after that, I was sweeping by
the door. I don't know why, I just couldn't sit still.
I noticed something on the frame, just near the latch.
It was a scratch. It was thin, shallow but long,
like someone dragged something sharp against it. A screwdriver maybe,
or a knife. I moved out a few months later,
when my lease was up. I told myself it was
just time for a change. I found a cheaper spot
across town, better lighting, closer to work. But the truth
is I didn't like sleeping the other that door anymore.
I still think about Doug. He was a decent guy,
probably saw something that night he shouldn't have. Maybe he'd
tried to stop it. Maybe he was just in the
wrong place at the wrong time. And I think about
how random it was, how nothing saved me, not instincts,
not awareness, just the sticky old door and my own laziness.
The new place I live now, the door opened smoothly,
doesn't even creak. Sometimes when I'm turning the handle late
at night, I almost wish it didn't. Scary Story podcast
has written and produced by me Edwin Colarus. I've gotten
a few stories from you for my show Paranormal Club.
We might need a couple more to get the full episode,
but thank you to those who have emailed me with
their true encounters. It's going to make a really good
episode anyway. As always, if you're following the show, I
will tell you more stories next week. Thank you very
much for listening, Keep it scary. Every one's yea soon.