Speaker 1: Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. There is a woman who
sits on her porch. Her stare can be felt several
houses down, but she doesn't speak, and all we can
do is come up with stories of what she's done
and who she might actually be. My name is Edwin,
and here's a scary story. My assistant called me this
morning asking about sending a card or flowers, and my
stomach dropped a little less this time, but I still
felt that rush of dread and the wish for time
to hurry up and get me past this feeling, wishing
for nightfall, just for everything to go by faster again.
I was the last one of the group left alive now,
and I knew it was coming. I knew it was
my fault. We were five investors, we called ourselves. We
were a group of losers to the rest of the world,
the ones who had an idea to make a movie
after hearing how Welder had gone to another group from
the film school we all dropped out of They had
no idea what they were doing, and yet they all
ended up with their own homes paid off. Two of
them got married, and the other ended up traveling around
the world from what he sold to Fillmart Inc. One
of the biggest buyers and producers. They took parts of
our ideas we presented. Some were blatantly stolen and others
were more well hidden, and yet no one was going
to go get them in trouble. I still remember Matt's call.
I can hear his voice ringing in my ear, yelling
that the group had just sold for sixteen million dollars,
yelling at the top of his lungs with curse words
left and right, calling them names, calling them lucky at times,
and criticizing the film that they had just launched at
the festival and its buyer. Isn't it our idea? Man?
Didn't we come up with the same thing? Was still
used three way calling back then, and he got another
call from Jacob at the same time. When he got
on the call, nobody understood anything. The ringing in my
ear made me turn my head away from the speaker
for a bit. Imagine setting off a firecracker and a
firework booth and then hearing everything pop. That's what this
call was like. Once they call him down, Matt got
off the call to answer another one. I'm assuming it
was Jeane. She had actually seen the premiere and texted
us to now infamous, You're not gonna like this message.
Their movie had a simple premise. A man falls in
love with a married woman. They talk about their troubles
and connect over their conversations. Nobody leaves anybody, she never cheats,
and he eventually moves on after heartbreak. But it was
the way it was framed that made it troubling. It
was in reverse that was our idea. We should have
kept our mouth shut still. We had nothing else to
do with it. The film had already sold. It was
a once in a lifetime kind of thing for our school.
It was not well known anyway, and everyone had lost
all hope there. That's kind of what we left. But
I guess their hopes ended up just becoming production assistant somewhere,
or making commercials locally, maybe for the rich nonprofits in
the area. Even though none of it mattered, we still
try to change our fate. We had nothing to lose
at this point. All we needed was a story, a
good one to make a movie about it, and we
found one. I was helping my dad out with the
lawnmower one day when he told me about the woman
who lived on the street. The one who needed help
with her lawn. She had gotten a notification from the
city about it. She was a staple in the neighborhood,
sort of. She was strapped to her porch. Nobody ever
saw her sit there, like actually moved to the chair
and sit, and nobody would see her go back into
her house. I laughed and asked how she was still alive.
It seemed like she had been old my whole life.
He tried to hold back his laughter before letting some
of it out. He told me to shut up and
help him drag the stuff over to her yard, that
it would only take about an hour. I saw her
eyes light up when she saw us come over, or
at least I thought I did. Good afternoon, ma'am, I said,
my voice shaky as I remembered being scared of her
when I was a kid. I stared at her lips.
I revealed a few yellow teeth that I tried not
to look at. We got to work. Dad left around
ten minutes later to grab a trash can, and then
came back when I was almost done. The whole time,
I kept thinking about what had just happened with the
movie idea and if we were really going to go
with the story of a virus, one that invested a
small town, turning them into aggressive cannibals. Basically a zombie
movie meets the Hills Have Eyes kind of thing. But
around the time you were planning to have something out,
it would be prime season for horror. I talked to
myself out loud. With that machine rumbling in front of me,
the old lady wouldn't be able to hear me either.
Everything from vampires to witches and goblins, to post apocalyptic
religious movies. Bakaa, another Dracula, another Blair Witch, another book
of Eli. Come on, now, why can't we come up
with something new around here? Go with the typical haunted
house story? Is that really the limit of our minds?
At that very moment, I looked up at Missus beneath
this on the porch that was her name. I could
swear I saw her eyes turn completely black for an instant,
though maybe it was just my imagination and coming to life.
Right then, I had just asked for an idea, and
I heard distant yelling among all the noise, and then
a cloud of dirt blew up in front of me.
I had hit a small heap of dirt and my
dad was out there yelling for me to watch out
for it. The lawnmower turned off as my dad walked
up to me. She'll be fine, he said. I looked
up at missus beneath this, smiling through the cloud of
dirt I had just made in her front yard, completely unbothered.
She looked at me as my dad and I both
coughed with the necks of our shirts over our noses.
He didn't seem to notice her anymore. I started up
the lawnmower and finished up the front yard. Dad took
the back part of the house while I picked everything
up and trimmed the edges of the yellowed grass against
the concrete. I could feel the old Lady's eyes on
my neck the whole time, and I remembered why I
had been afraid of her for so long. I started
as a joke rumors around school that talked about the
old Lady. We used to sing it in a chant
to scare the girls in our class, sometimes humming it
to the bathrooms or in the quiet hallways. Some kids
would actually cry, the old lady who sits on the porch,
always alone, always alone. We thought it rhymed, but it
didn't she ate her son, She ate her daughter, and
now is alone, Now is alone. She looks at you,
she curses you. Now you're alone. Now you're alone. And
I had it the idea for a movie. April loved it.
Her cousins had been staying with her, coming all the
way from Los Angeles. She said, as if that automatically
made them great actors. You could at least participate. We
had or could borrow equipment that could get us by
some like Matt going into debt with some of the
gear he got at a discount when Jimmy's Camera was
going out of business, a poor guy with an eight
thousand dollars camera that he was afraid to use. But
everyone was in. Our script actually started to come together
that same night over the phone before we met up
at Becky's, a signer that always had the same customers.
All we had to do was put it together. It
was going to be about a woman who watches a town,
knowing that every secret and movements of people. She knows
that the married couples who cheat, and the teens that
knocked over the mailboxes. She's quiet, always still, and always watching.
She holds a secret. Let's make her live at the
end of a cul de sac for better views. We
had to give her a name, of course, but we
decided to keep it between us. Women on the porch.
No missus Beckert, just the made up name. No the
lady on the porch. That might work if you change
just here and there. And we had it. The woman
who cursed an entire town. Lady on the porch. Now
I should have known. I really should have known we
were getting into When all of it came together, I
knew everything seemed way too easy. Even the filming. We
had four main actors in the whole movie that took
us two months to finish a record. They asked for
very little money, perfect stuff that we all put together
with some loan sharks a credit cards quite easily. It
was gonna work. But once a post production started and
we were gonna edit, we had already sunk about forty
thousand dollars into the whole thing, almost completely. Even among
the five of us. It didn't even notice how we
were spending it. It was quick and like I said, easy,
it was until we were finished and doing the final
Edits the point when you know the whole story and
then you know what's going to happen enough to regret
even starting it, because now it makes no sense, and
you think others are going to notice that you don't
know what you're doing, but it was too late by then.
It always is. All you have to do is get
everything together at just the color, the sound, to a
couple more revisions with whoever did the last edit, and
keep it going. We ignore the details at some point,
hoping that the story by itself is able to carry
the entire movie for you. We submitted it to festivals,
to screenings. We signed up at the local colleges for
a premier display of an indie movie that they had.
It was great, People loved it. The movie started with
a woman frail and about to topple over as she
got up from the bed. She was reaching for a
comb and boiling water to put over a coffee stained cup.
The floor creaks under her as she makes her way
to the kitchen table, then to the living room. She
finally opens the front door, and it's dark outside, and
she takes four more steps. She sits down on the
porch facing an empty street. The sun rises and the
street comes to live, and though we don't see her
eyes just yet. The entire movie moves along as it
explores her past and flashbacks, explaining why she ended up alone,
combining what she's seeing across the street with the neighbors
to her own experiences. But you know, the whole time
that we're telling the stories, I couldn't help I remember
how easy everything came together. We all knew the story
of our town and the things we told each other
as children, about the woman from the porch, how her
husband left her, how her children disappeared, how it was
set around the neighborhood, that she practiced your could through rituals,
and that she was doomed to remain awake at all times.
A couple of us got to see her during the
filming of the movie, and we felt such guilt. When
we were recording in an area nearby, she looked at
us as if we were doing her a disservice, like
her story wasn't accurate enough. I almost felt sorry for
her instead of afraid. Eventually, her stairs down the street
became angrier. She knew what we were doing, walking in
and out of the houses with gear, the ones we
stored at my parents place. She wanted to tell us something.
The movie was done, and many found the story of
the old lady from the porch. They connected it to
Missus beneath this from the block right away, the woman
who was always there looking at the street. They started
taking pictures of her, not many at first, but then
a few kids from the crowd from the Platter Indie
Movie Festival try to get an interview with her. They
freaked out halfway through when they noticed that she didn't speak.
She just smiled with those few yellow teeth and empty expression.
They managed to publish these pictures on Facebook, where the
post was picked up by a local newspaper and then
a national one. Our movie started becoming famous for that
reason alone. They got optioned by a large production company
for a remaster, and a deal for a second part
came through. It got placed in theaters, and we went
to signings. A book was going to come out of everything,
and before we knew it, we're making real money. Thousands
and then tens of thousands and more, sometimes in a
single day of sales. Everything came to us very fast,
merchandising agents, appearances and TV shows and interviews with newspapers,
and all this time people were gathering and looking at
Missus beneath this from the front of her yard. They
were waving at her the same way that kids look
at a tiger at a zoo admiration, with a mix
of fear, while all she did was smile and looked
their way with her empty eyes. The old lady who
sits on the porch, always alone, always alone. She ate
her son and daughter, and now he's alone, Now he's alone.
She looks at you, she curses you, and now you're alone,
Now you're alone. The story of the disappearances of her
children and husband also became well known, and not for
investigators to pick it back up. The police showed up
at her house a couple of times, and all the
neighbors came out, thinking that she had died, but no,
they were simply walking past her and into the place.
They must surely know how she manages to take care
of herself, although from what I found, she did have
a caretaker that would come once a day to check
up on her. Some say that she was a distant
family member, while others said that it was a nerse
hired by her because she had a lot of money
stored in a bank account. They did find a couple
of things on the story of her children, and yes
it was deemed suspicious, but not enough to charge her.
The rooms had remained intact for years, even with hair
on her daughter's comb somewhat fifty years later or more,
no records of her disappearance, and no way to get
it out of her from someone who wouldn't speak on
the whereabouts. I thought about her a lot, and even
though I brought it up to April and Jean a
couple of times that I felt uneasy, like we had
taken advantage of Missus beneath This to make a movie
out of her and the rumors we used to hear
as kids. We're all feeling the same level of discomfort
with the whole thing, considering how badly we made her look.
But it turned out to be kind of justified. There
was a woman we meant while we were poking around
to get some information on Missus beneath This. Her name
was ce Celia. The woman who gave us more information,
and of course it made us even more excited about
the whole story when she told us that Missus Beneatha's
had been known to perform rituals in her home, that
she had been cursed by one of them. She said
that she had heard the rumors too, but that she
had noticed other things about Missus Beneatha's something that made
her seriously think that maybe she wasn't even alive anymore,
that all we were saying was what remained of her.
Her hairstyle is always the same. Don't you notice that
she stood up to look at herself in the mirror.
No matter how hard I try, I always have to
take care of this mop, she joked as she grabbed
her hair and patted it twice on the signs and
one time on top. April and I looked at each other,
didn't say anything. Missus Beneatha's was a she wasn't there
at night, was she? No, she wasn't at night, I mean,
and she was alive. You would see her turned her
head every once in a while, and the caretaker would
clean her up from time to time. There was something
off about her. I don't know how bad I would
get until the first one of us died. It was Jeanne.
She was found in her car and some of her
last calls had been to Jacob. All this time we
had been talking about how uneasy we felt the nightmares
of this woman at first, we thought it was all
because of what we were filming. Some of those scenes
were pretty dark, especially the rituals done with historical accuracy
and everything. Jean's friend, who played the role of Missus
beneath this, looked exactly like her. We had a scene
where she buries one of her children, done in the
rain that really stuck with me for days after filming,
and every single one of us, Matt, Jacob, Jean and
April we knew exactly what we wanted and corrected the
camera guy, the actors, the lighting right there on the spot,
as if we were just retelling something from memory. She
picks up the body in silence, slowed down as we're walking,
All these little details, And how did we know? We
thought it was just because we knew the story. We
kept telling ourselves that we understood it deeply because of
what we learned growing up. But did we really that
chance was all we had? The rumors we heard in
the hallways twenty years prior, I should have known. Did
she want us to tell her story and found my
vulnerability through anger? Did she get her story told through us?
It was a theory that Jean had. She dreamt of
her and saw her in odd places. During one of
our signings, she had to walk away because of an anxiety,
claiming to have seen her staring at her right in
front of her holding a book. When she shut her eyes,
Missus Beneathas was gone. She started hearing sounds moaning of
pain and solitude, especially at night. We told her to
keep it together, but we all knew by that point
that this was no coincidence. Jacob admitted it first. He
had seen her at night peeking through his window. This
old lady, imagine that, and thinking that he was just
tired from the whole movie or deal, he didn't look
into it. But then the nightmare started. Missus beneathe Is
rocking in a chair right by his bed. Over the
course of a week, we started getting his phone calls
in the middle of the night with theory after theory
about Missus Beneathas and how to get her to talk.
By this point, she was gone. After Jeane was found
dead in her car, Missus Beneatha's was sent away to
a nursing home, where so everyone claimed, she was being
bothered by curious people trying to see the main subject
of a very famous movie we had made. And then
Jacob's calls stopped coming. One night, he called his brother
to check up on him. My nightmare came to life.
He was found dead by his own doing. It was
the same cause of death as Jeanne, April and Matt
were freaking out, talking about how far we had taken
the whole thing, that none of it mattered, not the money,
not the fame. What had we done? We did our
best to forget about it. A couple of years later,
April passed away tragically in a car accident, and then
a year after that is when I got the news
that Matt had passed away while on a business trip.
Found in a hotel room. I was the last one now,
and every time I got a call for an interview,
I would yell at the agent no more of this.
I could hear steps in the middle of the night,
dragging along the floor. Missus Beneatha's eyes stared at me
from the ceiling. When I woke up. She followed me
in my dreams, and every scene of that movie made
me wonder how we were capable of making such a
thing a truly original film, or what I thought it
had been might have not been entirely hours to begin
with some one had seen a group of desperate fools
and used us to tell her story. And now, when
I sit in the dark, I think I see her
sitting at the edge of my bed. I smell her
rotting breath, I see her yellow teeth glowing in the night,
that empty stare, And I know it's my turn, and
I don't know when I'll go, but I want it
desperately to be my choice. This time. Scary Story podcast
is written and produced by me Edwin Kobar Rujaz the
special thanks to everyone who dropped comments with ideas for stories.
If you want to hear more, we have a new
show called Paranormal Club available on this app as well.
We read listeners submissions talk about paranormal events and some
pretty dark history too. Just search for Paranormal Club and
you'll find me. Also a huge shout out to our
Scary Plus members who get to listen ad free. Thank
you so much for your support. You're following the show.
I will bring another story next week. Thank you very
much for listening, But Scary everyone, see you soon.