Speaker 1: I was looking back toward my roommate with her hand
over her mouth as she tried to hold in her laughter.
I wanted to laugh too, but managed to hold it in.
As I stepped closer to Amanda's door. It was dark inside,
and all I could see was a blue light from
the outside seeping in through the blind Amanda had no
curtains in her room except for the blinds given to
us from the university housing department, but she kept them open.
I looked at the door handle on the inside of
her room and took a half step inside. I grabbed
onto it and was about to pull it when I
saw a tall sillow wet standing in front of the
window by her bed. Amanda was tall, but this one
had broad shoulders and what appeared to be a large coat,
and most distinctly, a hat. Had frozen plays and stared
right at it, completely ignoring the whispers from the other
roommate down the hall. She wasn't laughing anymore. My name
is Edwin, and here it's a scary story. I felt
a hand grip around my arm and pull me toward
the hallway. What happened I could hear like on delay.
My mind was racing to catch up to what I
had just seen. She was being serious now as we
both looked at the wide open door down the hall.
It was supposed to be a dare, a silly card
game when everyone else went out to parties while we
stayed in. Amanda liked to sleep with her door wide open,
and it wasn't like we cared for understanding why or anything.
We actually didn't like her very much, but her little
rules kept getting in the way of everything. Her dishes
were to be kept separately. She said something about an
allergy that nobody quite understood. The community adviser from the
university had a meeting with us and Amanda's parents to
talk about it, and all we did after that was
laugh and complained to our other friends about the whole conversation.
They had requested so many things, including removing Amanda's door,
but it was a rule from the fire marshal to
keep it on noise levels. Smells and even visits to
our unit were discussed, and we came out with a
contract type of thing. But I'll tell you neither me
or the other roommate, her name was Denise liked it
in a way. That's how we became friends. Hating on Amanda,
I felt bad for her in the beginning. Then I
understood why she was bullied. She was annoying, complained about
everything that the strangest things that annoyed the heck out
of us. That night, the night of the day, when
I tried to close the door, everything changed though, And
it was the first time I had seen the figure
by the window, the same one that Denise had been
talking about for months, almost immediately after we moved in.
You see, the unit had four rooms, but it was
divided into two, so the two of us would share
one bathroom and Amanda would have the other bathroom to herself.
One room remained completely empty, no bed, she or anything,
and it was on her side. That's the room where
Denise had claimed to see someone standing in the door
faced a living area and we could see right in.
I didn't believe Denise, and up until that night I
thought that it had been a type of a prank.
After all, Denise had a problem with keeping a straight face.
So we walked right back to the living room area
and sat down quietly as I gathered my words to
explain what I had seen. In her excitement, Denise waved
her arms and kept interrupting me to say that it
matched exactly what she had seen. What if it's her,
she asked, and I stopped talking and waited for her
to continue, like what if she's haunted or something? I
gave her a little more silence before we both let
out our laughter. The idea sounded so absurd, and we
had no better solution than to laugh. That was a mistake.
Amanda rushed out of her room silently like she used
to roam around the house without making a noise, and
stared at us. Then her mouth opened, did you know
what time it is? We both stayed quiet, and then
Denise pointed at the clock. Freaking Denise, We both started
laughing again. It was ten thirty. By the way, Amanda
tried to give us that stare that she always did,
the one that showed us how much she wanted to
punch our faces but would get in trouble if she
did so. Plus, she was so thin that she would
probably tumble over like a falling tree with a single push.
Just remember the contract, okay, she said, rushing back to
her room. This is the part where you would normally
hear a door slam, but instead nothing. The door stayed
wide open, just like it always did. Remember the contract,
Denise murmured, making the stretched out horse face that Amanda
would do when she would get mad at us. I'll
remember the contract, she said, looking at me, and then
cracking up again, covering our mouths one more time. We
continued with her card game, stopping briefly to bring up
what we had just seen. I was wondering if we
were just going to pretend that neither of us had
ever seen a strange, dark figure roaming around the unit.
I thought that maybe it was the reason why the
room was empty, that maybe something had happened there, and
that no student ever wanted to stay there because of
a ghost that would haunt it. And yet I knew
that the money hungry institution would find a way to
rent it out either way. It was almost midnight and
we were both on our phones when the topic of
Amanda's door came back up. Denise wasn't having it. I
knew she hated being told what to do and always
held something against Amanda even more than I did. But then,
without saying a word, she got up, rushed toward Amanda's room,
grabbed the door handle, and closed it shut. I stared
from the living area, not believing what I had just seen.
There's your contract, Denise said, laughing again. But almost immediately
we heard a loud scream coming from Amanda's bedroom. It
was shrill and terrifying, loud, like from an animal, things
that neither of us had ever heard before. We stared
at each other with white eyes, not knowing what to do.
As the screams intensified, we could hear Amanda banging on
her door, crying and yelling. I didn't know what to do,
so I ran tow her door to open it. When
there was another knock on her front door, I asked
the niece to open it while I continued to Amanda's
and grabbed onto the doorknob. It swung inside without even trying,
and suddenly Amanda went quiet. She went toward the window
and crouched under it. Next to her was that same
tall figure. But I wasn't going to wonder anymore. I
reached for the switch and flicked it on. There was
no one next to her. Out in the living room,
I could hear two other voices, God one of the
community advisers and one of the other residents of the building.
Who we knew. They went to speak with Amanda while
Denise and I sat in the living room for a
couple of hours. Eventually, Amanda's parents arrived and then the
resident director. They moved Amanda's things out without saying a
word to us. We didn't get to see Amanda leave.
Within two weeks, we had two new roommates and our
unit seemed somewhat normal. But during one of the meetings,
I asked the community adviser about Amanda and what had happened,
and obviously he couldn't say much to Denise and I
about what it was, but did tell us that Amanda's
housing contract had included two rooms, one to be kept
empty as part of her co signers agreement, which I'm
assuming were her parents a room for that thing. Denise
asked as if the CA would know what she was
talking about. He stayed quiet for a bit and then
asked us about it. We told him about the dark
figure that we had seen in the unit. He took
a note of it, saying that the housing director had
asked him to let him know of Amanda's roommates, which
were us ever mentioned something strange in the unit, that
it was all he knew and all he could tell us.
We never found out what was up with Amanda, And
every time we tell the story, someone has a new
theory or a new idea to share with us about it.
I don't know what to believe anymore. When someone tells
me a story of a dark figure standing by the bed,
I believe them. I don't know who or what they are,
but I've seen them. Denise has seen them, and I'm
sure Amanda, wherever she may be, I had seen them too.
I spent a lot of time writing for editors who
genuinely care about my work. They have lately taken the
role of keeping tabs on how I'm doing. Let's just
say I had some problems at home, things that everyone
else found out before I did. My wife left me
with the guy from work. My adult children don't even
know or care that I got a number. But even
though I had a small bar made in the basement
of the house for friends that I no longer had,
all the bottles and glasses were intact, gathering some dust, sure,
but I hadn't touched any of it. That was part
of that. It seemed like I had to convince everyone
of that, though, But I'm being straight with you when
I tell you that I was fairly all right, just
things that happened. I guess there was one thing that
was bothering me, and it made convincing my editors a
little bit tougher. You see, some of the writing gigs
I get are fourteen fiction, sometimes horror books and magazines.
So I get sent to a lot of gifts, creepy
posters and independent movies on DBD, candles and books, the
whole thing. But there was one thing that never quite
felt right. Small doll made of composite material that came
with a note in this note. This letter said that
her name was Veronica, and according to the letter, she
had been involved in the success of several poets and
songwriters over the years. Her name Veronica Porto, was how
she was credited in some works and had even listened
to them back in the day. Famous stuff things that
you have probably heard about. The thought of crediting an
object for a creation of something, some material like that
that became so famous seemed absurd, and I thought it
was an interesting joke when I read it, and I
guess that's what writers are supposed to love, you know,
that kind of stuff, and I did so I kept
it and I set Veronica high up on a shelf
with some of the many books that had been sent
to me from where I worked. I would get to
see her by turning my neck a little bit to
the left. She had dark green eyes, rare in a
doll like that. Normally they would pick blue and make
the eyes extra shiny, but these were deep and dark.
It would be green only around five or six in
the afternoon when the light hit the shelf. The doll
had been giving to me Right around the same time
when I was awarded the John L. Marx Award for
writing at the University. Many contracts came from that, and
one of them had been for a new piece for
a major motion picture company. Thinking that they needed to
convince me, they sent it along with a box, and
in that box it was Veronica. The contract eventually fell apart,
not on my end but on the companies restructuring or whatever,
and I wasn't a buying to turn over the words.
I had already started with them because I wanted to
keep them for myself. They were good, some of the
best writing I had ever made. But after a firm
letter from a lawyer I turned everything in. It's a
strange feeling when you make something that you genuinely like.
It's like a sense of pride, mostly followed by the
fear of never being able to make something like it,
a feeling that makes you selfish and wanting to keep
everything to yourself, never accepting another contract again, and working
on your own. But they get the buyers. They know
how to distribute what you make, and it's a necessary evil,
if you will. But back to my problem, that one
I was telling you about in the beginning, This doll
Veronica didn't belong with me. There had been a short
request through the text messages made by one of the
many numbers that reached out to me during the times
of those contracts. One of them said, return Veronica, and
that was that. Now I didn't know to whom or
how to do so, and I for sure didn't want
to reach out to the company again, bitter from what
they had done. But days went by and it was forgotten,
lost among the rest of the messages filling up my phone.
Story circled in my head, stories that told me that
Veronica was unhappy on that shelf as she wanted to
go back. That would turn my head to the left
every once in a while during my writing sessions, and
I would see her an uncomfortable, vengeful face for making
her sit there. I thought it would end there, But
as time passed, I kept noticing small changes, little things
like the position of her arm or the strands of
her hair. Could the wind be so strong to move
it away from her eyes and then back again? I
thought I was losing it. And yeah, the contracts kept coming,
and the book sales increased. Editors kept pushing for more.
Their publishing companies were raking it in big time, and
I was out there struggling to understand where all of
these tales were coming from. And then one day I
felt compelled to write, and right at the end of
a poetry piece for Homeword Magazine, a special thank you
I wrote to Veronica Porto. Immediately, I had my editor
call me and tell me that he had reached out
to the magazine to have that last line removed from
the online and the print editions, warning me to never
put such a thing in the credit, that the works
are mine and mine only. But I disagreed. The stories
I was able to write were nothing even close to
my own experiences. There were trails of sentences that I
would watch after my fingers typed them, and in astonishment,
I kept reading as these beautiful, dark works of art
kept appearing on my word document stories of love and loss,
strong descriptions of people I've never met, and clothing I
had never seen before being described perfectly in words right
in front of me. Of course, I don't want you
to think that I've lost it too, just like my editors.
Do you believe me? Right? I'm all right? Trust me?
What's that? All right? Okay, all right, hold on, I
gotta go back to writing. Scary Story podcast is written
and produced by me Edwin Kovarubiez. Thank you for your
recent messages and dms. I was out due to the
passing of my best friend. It was a time for
stories that turned to memories and some I hadn't heard
for the first time. We're also remembering other stories and
memories that we had made together. It was a rough time,
and I mentioned this on my channel on Instagram that
friends or family that we get to choose, So I
just want to remind you call them up every once
in a while. Life cannot get in the way when
they're a part of it already. Thank you for showing
up once again. I appreciate you so much, and I'll
be back with more stories. Thank you very much for listening.
Keep it scary everyone, Seya soon