Speaker 1: Spooky season is here at Scary Story Podcast, So I
have a bunch of campfire style stories for you right
now here we go. My name is Edwin, and here's
a scary story. It was Halloween two thousand and three
when this happened. I was with my sister and we
had gotten dropped off at the end of one of
the main streets of my neighborhood, one where there's a
straight shot through a bunch of residential homes. We were
supposed to meet up with some friends and make our
way back down that street, finally ending up at one
of their houses where they would have a small party.
Nothing big, just movies, pizza, scaring trigger treaters and stuff
like that. It was eight in the evening, which apparently
seemed too early because they weren't many trigger treaters out,
But then again, the end of that street had a
bunch of warehouses before you get to the dead end.
As we were making our way back, we noticed a
woman on one of the corners who was waiting at
the street light. It didn't cross when the walking signs turned.
My sister and I were still waiting at the bench
of a bus stop for my friends to get dropped
off diagonal to where this woman was so we had
a clear view. You got to see this lady stand
there for a good ten minutes. She kept looking both ways,
making it seem like she was crossing, but then waited.
My sister got closer to me on the bench and
told me how weird she looked. I normally used glasses
and wasn't wearing them right then because they would get
stained with a face paint I had on. But my
sister kept saying that she wouldn't stop smiling. I should
have believed her, for at the moment, I only thought
that she was either wearing smile makeup or a mask
of some sort. I was looking out over the street
to see if I spotted my friend's dad's car, because
the street was pretty empty and quiet. But then my
sister tugged at my sleeve and told me to run.
She stood up and pulled me until I got up.
When I looked at where she was staring at, I
saw this woman walking very quickly toward us diagonally across
the street. She was wearing a stained white and long
t shirt, like the kind old women wear to go
to sleep, or like hospital type clothing. I could tell
she had gray hair, so it surprised me just how
fast she was rushing toward us. But I was scared
at which she was holding, because I couldn't tell if
it was a pillow cover to put candy in something
much worse. We were running for like five seconds down
the block before we heard a loud honk of a semitruck.
We turned around to see it crash into the metal
fencing of the warehouse parking lot right across the street,
completely frozen in place. Just happened so quickly, and even
though it was kind of dark out, my sister and
I both got to see the red stained clothes of
that person in the middle of the street. It was
the first time I ever got to see a body
twisted in such an unnatural way that it even gave
my sister nightmares for years. Neither of us had cell
phones back then, so we ended up walking to a
frame house and calling our parents to come get us.
Much later, we found out that the person that chased
us was a guy from high school. He was dressed
up as a psych word patient. We didn't know him,
but some friends say that they knew who he was.
He was only trying to scare us. In my nightmares,
I think of how things could have been different if
we hadn't run away. Back when I was working for
a place literally called Devil's Pizzeria, fitting name. Now, I
suppose we used to get this caller that no matter
how often our boss blocked his number, he would find
a way to call from some other one. He was
a weird guy, sounded to bee like in his sixties
over the phone and would ask to speak to Sylvia.
When I first started working there, I answered the phone
and asked another coworker if there was a Sylvia that
worked there. He kind of chuckled and asked if it
was an old guy on the phone, and he just
told me to hang up. Now, I don't like being
rude to people, so instead I told him that I
thought he had the wrong number, and he was about
to explain himself pleading to talk to Sylvia when my
coworker came by and hung up the phone by pushing
the button on the phone holder. He told me that
we had a clear instructions that if he ever called,
we're supposed to hang up immediately. I had so many questions,
but this guy at work was one of those know
it all kinds of people, so I figured I would
ask someone else during a break or something. A few
days after that, I got to ask one of the
guys who worked at the back if there had ever
been a Silvia that work there, and what he told
me freaked me out because there had indeed been a
Silvia there, but she had been killed by her ex
boyfriend a long time ago. I was taking journalism classes
back then, and this was before true crime was a thing,
so I wanted to make a project about her case
turn it in at the end of the semester. But
I ended up changing my mind after learning that her
ex boyfriend had also died while in jail over medical issues,
long before I even started getting the phone calls. If
he was gone, then who was calling now? What had
weired me out the most was that I got these
calls more than once, and they continued all the way
up until I found this out that her killer had
also died. Whenever we would have someone new managing the phones,
they would claim to get those calls. I don't think
they ever stopped the business, and the phone company tried investigating.
Some of the calls were traced to come out from
out of state and others without a calor ID. They
also got trace to random places, but the instructions always
stayed the same. If someone calls for Sylvia, hang up.
I used to live in a really old house up
until I got to high school, and I'm pretty sure
it was haunted. That was nine only moved in, and
I remember wanting my parents to walk with me upstairs
when it was time to go to bed because I
refused to walk there by myself. I am an only child,
and I know this is really weird, but my parents
had a room set up at the end of the
hall that had a small bed and a few toys.
It wasn't allowed in most of the time, except for
when my mom was cleaning it and asked me to
go in there with her because she was afraid of
it too. One time, when we were both in there,
something weird happened. That room had a really cool train
set on top of one of the desks, and I
remember trying to reach for it. Before I did, it
turned on and I stood there watching it loop around
twice and then stop. My mom freaked out and got
us both out of the room, but didn't tell me why.
I heard her explain it to my dad when he
got home later that day and he got up from
the dinner table, He went upstairs and came back confirming
that the train had no batteries. I watched them both
look at each other for a while and then look
at me for my reaction, But honestly, all I could
feel at the moment was relief and knowing that now
they knew that I wasn't making anything up and that
there was something weird in that house. A couple of
months after that, my mom and I were home alone
on a Saturday afternoon when he heard movement coming from
that room. Clearly. She turned off the TV and we
both heard footsteps. They were running from where that room
was and down the hallway upstairs. She grabbed my hand
and pulled me toward the front door, and that's where
we sat on an old couch we had on the
porch until my dad came home. This time it was scarier,
I think, just seeing how frightened my mom was really
freaked me out. I asked her about the room and
what she thought it was, and I didn't understand her
completely at the time, just the part she said about
how the owner of the house wanted us to take
care of that room while we lived there. When my
dad got home and we all went inside again, he
went up to check it out and said at the
closet door inside that room was open and that some
of the boxes that had been in there were now
on the floor. Those boxes were some of my old toys.
Looking back at it now, everything makes sense. Well, everything
had an explanation, except for the haunted part, Like it
would make sense that whatever was in that room didn't
want any of my stuff in there, or that it
didn't want me touching the toys or whatever, so we
just sort of followed those rules. We didn't have much
trouble after that, although Mom still asked me to go
with her whenever she cleaned it. It was like that
until our lease ended. The owner of the house, who
was pretty old already had died and had left the house,
who has grown children who were now planning on selling it.
My dad told me much later now that we retell
this story, that he didn't want to buy the house
because even though it wasn't a condition for purchase, we
all knew they would have to keep that room for
whatever was living in there. Ever, that he would rather
have someone else deal with it. While I was in college,
I had a job working for a company that fixed
monitors and other computer hardware. The only thing I was
allowed to work on there were the power units and
replacing the speakers or other minor things on the monitors.
Anything more than that I was supposed to call the
team leader, who was this super nerdy guy who had
started his own business when he was even younger. Well,
one time, we got this girl who came in super
nervous about her broken computer monitor. When someone like this
comes in all nervous and stuff, we usually know what
it is, and they're usually worried about their search history
or some virus that they got after downloading certain content online.
But this girl had only brought in her monitor. Our
story was pretty wild, and to this day it's still
the creepiest thing I have ever witnessed. Aim was that
there was a shape that kept appearing on her screen,
and no matter what she did, she couldn't get rid
of it. She showed me a picture of it, and
I saw it clear as day, the face of an
old woman, wide mouthed and a wrinkled face. Literally looked
like she was screaming at you. When I'm saying this
was clear. I mean you could literally see the reflection
of someone in the darkness of her eyes, like they
already looked watery and really shiny as is, but in
front of me at just an old monitor, a common
brand that's still in business today. I didn't know what
to do with the information, so I called up the
team leader and asked him what he thought of it.
It burned impression on the monitor. He said something that
meant that there had been an image, either a background
image or something that was left on the same spot
for too long, giving it enough time for the tiny
little lights or pixels on the screen to burn and
keep the same image there even when it was no
longer there. The girl had been sitting on the waiting
area by the desk of the shop while I took
the call, so I asked her if it looked like
something she had seen on her screen before, or if
it was her screensaver or something. By her reaction, I
knew that it wasn't something she wanted to look at,
so I decided to test it. We plugged in another CPU,
turned it on, and everything seemed to be working as normal.
They opened up a notes program, a game and even
the web browser, and nothing seemed to be triggering it.
But I asked her to click around and open what
she would normally open. Neither of us could see this
impression of the woman. Honestly, at this point that was
kind of skeptical, but I knew she was feeling bad
about it, so instead I suggested that she bring along
her CPU so we could really test it out. She
brought it back later that same day with another one
of her friends who carried it in for her. He
also supported her claims of this impression of a woman's
face on the monitor, explaining even more of the other
things that they had tried so that they had tested
before it in, including trying out other monitors that their
friends had let them borrow. The woman still showed up,
so we turned it on, even dimmed the lights at
the shop to see if I could see this impression
of the woman on the screen. Nothing. I kind of
thought it was a joke, and I had a bunch
of other things to work on, so I tried to
convince them that maybe it was the angle of the
light in the room, where maybe you a poster reflecting
off of it, something that they both denied. I was
really curious about this too, so when they asked me
to go check it out, that they had the computer
set up in the corner of their shriff apartment, I
said yes that I would go that same night, not
even sure of what to expect or if I was
walking into the prank of the year. I was around
ten at night when I finally showed up. The same
monitor in CPU had been set up where it would
normally be, and it was already turned on when I
walked in. The guy from earlier rushed me in and
told me to sit at the desk chair, and there
it was. The thing was much creepier than they had mentioned.
It was clear as day, like a mirror reflection of
a woman completely frozen. She was pale and had dark eyes,
with the very clear reflection in her eyes. It wasn't
faded out or anything, but extremely clear when the screen
turned dark, like when a video was loading. I moved
the monitor around from left to right and actually got
to see the whole image shift for just an instant
before I went back to the same woman. The girl
who had brought in the monitor kept her eyes on
me as I reacted to this thing, trying my best
to debunk or figure it out right there in front
of both of them, but I had no answers. All
I could think of was to get up close to
the image and see the reflection of her eyes. I
got it close to the screen very slowly and asked
both of them to turn off the lights in the
living room. We all huddled together as I got close
to it, my face now directly in front of the
screen with a dark screensaver to make the reflection easier
to see. But as I did, my heart started beating
faster and louder, and those eyes I could see three faces.
I gasped and threw myself back in the chair, freaking
both of them out. I don't know if what I
saw in those eyes was a normal reflection of ourselves
in that monitor, or literally of just her eyes. I
tried to take a screenshot of the screen, but there
was nothing that showed up there either. We had no explanation,
and even when I brought it up to the team
leader to see what we could do, he said to
just get it replaced with one of the newer flat
monitors with less reflection. We had a couple that we
had fixed, but were no longer needed by the original owner,
so we sold it to them for twenty bucks and
called it a day. They said it worked. Now this
is going to sound crazy, but the only thing that
changed between those monitors is that the ones that they
had tried all had the glossy reflective screens, while the
ones that we sold them did not. It made me
think that there was something in their living room all along,
and not the monitor itself, something that's still there. We
still use that monitor around the office where the invoice
computer is. It's the one we print from. No one
had any trouble with it. In the shop. There was
an old tree in the middle of the apartments where
we used to live that all the kids were afraid of.
There had been a kid who had seen a pair
of legs dangling from the branches one night when he
was out there playing by himself. He was bouncing around
to basketball, and he had gotten so scared that he
couldn't talk for several days. The family moved doubt in
the first month we had been there, so I only
got to see him around a few times, but he
always refused to go outside and play, so we never
really became friends. His mom was a real talker though,
and had told my mom and some of the other
people from the other units all about the incident. She
actually had the police investigate in everything, but nothing came
of it. Ever since then, the rest of us kids
would scare ourselves talking about it when we would stay
out after it got late. It all changed one night, though,
but the three of us all saw something we couldn't explain.
I had two friends, Edgar, who was eight my age,
and Anthony, who was a fifth grader, so of around ten,
we knew each other from school, and thanks to a
couple of other friends who also lived in the same complex.
For a while we got into glowing the dark stuff
like stars and rubber balls and all this other stuff
that we would hold up to a flashlight then later
throw around in the courtyard for a type of I
don't know, treasure hunt. It had gotten dark out, and
even though we normally stayed away from that tree, I
knew that no one would try to look there for
the treasure, so the timer would run out and I
would win. Honestly, I can't remember the rules of our game,
but that was the gist of it. I walked up
toward the tree practically through a little alien head that
glowed in the dark near the roots, and ran away,
getting to my other two friends before the time ran out.
Now they were supposed to look for it. Yeah, I
think that's how the game went. So I got back
to base and they started searching, and I was sitting
there against the wall by the millboxes, staring at the
timer when I heard both of them shriek loudly. Two
of the neighbors got out and yelled, asking them to
rush inside, and I ran out toward the courtyard as
the doors were shutting. I looked around me and watched
all of these window curtains move almost at the same time,
looking toward me. I looked back toward my door, but
in order to get to it, I was supposed to
run right by that tree or either around it toward
the dark parking lot. I panicked and couldn't get my
legs to move, so I stared ahead and watched as
this figure climbed down from the tree, gripping to the
sides of the truck slowly. It was too dark for
me to see what it was, but I watched as
a glow in the dark toy floated back up toward
the tree. In the darkness, and it disappeared in the branches.
It was then when I felt someone pull me from
my arms and shoulders and carried me toward my other
two friends. Edgar was trying to laugh over his tears,
while Anthony looked just as in shock as I did.
The neighbors went to get our parents, and they walked
over to get us one by one. The police showed
up about an hour after that, and they searched the
area along with us friends and our parents, where we
explained what we had seen. It turns out that for
Edgar and Anthony it had been much worse. They say
that they heard a man whistling from the tree and
they got to see his face, a bearded, bald man
with large red eyes. The police never found anything and
said that it was most likely someone who had sneaked
in and tried to scare us. The rest of the
kids in the neighborhood found out about the story too,
and we had something cool to talk about for the
rest of that year. But no matter how much I
try to figure it out even now, I still have
no idea how a person would be able to crawl
down a tree trunk like that and then go back
up last I checked that tree is still there and
the stories still circulate with some details added. I hope
children still avoid that area at night. You're following the show,
I'll be back next week with more stories. In the meantime,
find our other creepy shows from Scary FM right here
on the same app. Thank you very much for listening.
Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.