A Haunted Car

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. The stories in this episode I'll deal with strange occurrences. My name is Edwin and here's a scary story. I was trying to sell my car once again. Despite all the jokes and fun my dad would poke at me for my reasons to sell it, I was going to do it this time. There were lots of things that I needed to figure out, things about transferring stuff with the Department of Motor Vehicles in my state and even canceling my insurance. Who knew that it would be this much trouble. This was my third attempt at trying to sell it. The first couple of times I changed my mind because it felt like too much trouble to do so. Literally, at the last second, I asked the guy who was trying to buy it if you could give me some time to think about it, but he didn't like that and instead it started cursing me out, telling me that some people genuinely need a car and I'm over here playing around. The second time I tried selling it, it was a strange broker guy basically a person who searches for a car for someone else and they get a cut of the sale or they'd charge a fee for it. But if they were charging a fee for it, then did that mean that I could have gotten more money out of it. The car was marked as salvaged, which supposedly means that it was involved in a car accident or something, and that is what would bring the price down. It was almost sundown and my friends wouldn't stop talking with some guys that they had met at a football game. We had agreed that I would drive them home, but that I needed to be home early. I looked over to the old clock at the coffee shop, right over the barista who had been looking at me the whole afternoon. It had been the reason for them teasing me. I had forgotten that the clock up there wouldn't move, and I needed to keep pulling up my phone, no matter how rude it was, just to check the time my friends were thinking. I kept looking at the guide behind the counter. I guess it was okay this time. I mean, my friends were there with me. Nothing strange would happen while driving down that road at night. Nothing ever, happened when I wanted proof. There was no use in looking at the time anymore. I was going to finish my frat before the water that was dripping from the sides of it would grow the puddle that I had going on the tiny wooden table even more. The shop was about to close and my friends were about ready to leave. One of them had gotten upset over something and declined an invitation to a diner. Honestly, I wasn't paying attention, but I was happy to finally be able to leave. It was almost ten at night and the conversation had died down. I was driving with a friend on the passenger side and the other on the seat behind her. Those long stretches of were easier with someone else around. Normally it would be my dad who would be in the car with me, since he would tag along when I absolutely needed something from the store on this side of the city. Long stretches of highway are common here in Colorado, and I used to really like them until I got this car. The hum of the engine surrounded us as we crossed over some of the dark grassy hills to our right, when suddenly Katie, on the passenger seat next to me, asked if we could lower down the window. I was able to smell that same old musky scent, but I tried to shake off the fear, telling myself that I was with people now, there was no way it could happen again. I told her to simply roll it down, literally because the windows were not electric and you had to crank the handle. Thing. I gull uped at the thought of seeing her again, that same woman that I saw the last time I drove down these roads by myself. I blamed the road, and I looked up ghost stories of the highway, things about entities appearing in the back seats of cars, and other stories like that. Even though I found many, I couldn't seem to find one about this particular road. It was a thread on an Internet forum that mentioned the experience of someone else with a haunted car, a ghost that kept appearing in front of it, making her nearly swerve off the road. Several times. It happened in front of her house and on her way to school early in the morning. It even happened once she had gotten into her garage already and the door had shut behind her. In the headlights, the faint image of a woman appeared right in front of her car. She turned toward her in the driver's seat and opened her mouth as if to scream, but sound never came out. Then she simply disappeared. It was a bizarre story, but not far from what may have been happening to me. I was with my friends now. There is no way I would see the ghost in the car again. Right the time I saw her, I had a fast food paper bag in the seat next to me and the medium drink balancing between the ashtray and the small compartment between the seats of this car. I felt the musky smell crawl up my nose and down my throat, like sweat and algae from the sea combined into one. I lowered my window a little bit before, making the mistake of looking in my rear view mirror, and there in the back was a woman with a face hidden by the shadows of the headlights behind us. She sat with a crooked back twisted to the bright, her unblinking eye staring right at mine across the mirror. She started inching closer and closer to my seat, close enough that I could feel her body right next to mine. It was like reaching for something in an open freezer. I hadn't realized that my foot was now off the gas pedal, and I had slowed down enough to make the car behind me honk at me and then passed me on my left side. I then snapped back into it and pulled over to the side of the road, afraid to look at my rear room mirror once again, without any cars around me and in complete darkness, I somehow muster the courage to get back into the road. I did my best to avoid that rear room mirror since then. I saw her one more time, this time when I was about to get into the car to go to work one evening. I screamed and ran back into the house, trying to explain to my dad that this wasn't the first time I had seen her, and that I thought the car was haunted. And that's when the teasing started. There I was, again driving in the dark. Katie looked over at me, looking uncomfortable about the smell, while my friend in the back was simply looking out at nothing through the window with her earphones on. The window creaked as a two inch gap opened up at the top, followed by cool air from the outside. Katie looked over at me and then looked back at the empty seat behind me. She let out a scream. My friend in the back seat pulled off her earphones as Katie screamed even louder, pointing at the seat behind me, and I tilted the rear mirror to the side. There she was a woman in dirty gray clothing, wet hair, and large eyes, smiling right at us with a grin that spread nearly to where her ears were supposed to be. My steering wheel twist it to its side, followed by a loud pot from the right side. A tire had pot and was thumping against the metal of the car. We tried explaining to Mel what we had seen, but all she claims is true is that the back seat suddenly got very cold, but she blames that on the open window. Four seventeen am. It was late again. I used to have trouble sleeping back when I was younger, but this time, every single little thing like too much hair falling out or an odd sensation in my knee were enough to send me into a long Google search in order to find out the reason. So it made sense for me to go a little bit crazy with this lack of sleep thing. I did everything that was recommended, setting my alarm clock away from me waking up at the same time avoiding caffeine, but still nothing seemed to work, and like clockwork, I would wake up at four seventeen in the morning and just lay there with my eyes wide open, without understanding why in the world that was waking up so early for no reason at all. Eventually I started taking advantage of it. I picked up a new workout video program, and I decided to get into journaling, even though that lasted about a month. Then I decided to start cleaning the house that early. It was so weird the piece that it brought to me. I lived by myself and the apartment that I had was quiet even during the day, so there was no reason for me to be waking up so early in the morning. Though. Soon I started noticing that a few things were off about this place. One strange thing that I kept noticing where the kitchen utensils and other things from the tiny kitchen table that would go missing and then later reappear in strange places. Why would I put forks above the fridge and it must have been extra board. One day, in order to do a kind of experiment around the house, I grabbed a fork and I placed it on the kitchen counter, then made a note of it on my phone by taking the picture. I went to work and came back and the fork was still there. I was tired that night, so I decided to head to bed early and promptly fell asleep. This time. I wasn't surprised that I had woken up so early, since it must have been before ten at night when I had gone to sleep. It was a little before three point thirty in the morning when my eyes opened wide to look up at the purple light coming through the window and bouncing off the ceiling fan right above my bed. The fan in the ceiling was spinning slowly like it always did, as I felt like it gave me something to look at while I try to fall asleep at night, and it worked most of the time. I reached over to my phone and the nights stand next to me, and then turn on the lamp resting right next to it. It's warm, yellow een lights reassured me that I was not going to go back to sleep. That morning, I opened up the news app on my phone to read for a little bit before getting up. When I heard something moving in the kitchen. It was light like a tapping against the floor like footsteps. My heart started racing a little. I'm not gonna lie as my eyes scanned the rest of the room, mainly the door. I was afraid to look away from the tiny gap between the floor and the door, the one that would tell me if there was somebody on the other side of it. It was then where my last memory of that early morning stayed, with nothing more to tell about it until I woke up again at four seventeen. My eyes opened wide, and my lamp was still on. I rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom, just like a regular morning. I stepped out the door and walked over to the kitchen, ready to make my coffee, when I noticed that the fork I had taken a picture of was still there. I know so because it looked so out of place where I had left it. I felt a little silly at the thought of that, but just as a way to reassure myself that maybe my lack of sleep had been messing with me, so I took out my phone and took another picture. I then did some cleaning, and I actually sat down to read a book and flicked on the television to catch up with some of the news again, and then I went off to work as usual. That night, I came back feeling even more tired than the night before. I even skipped dinner. We went to bed. Some of my coworkers had told me that I looked more tired than usual, and when I told him about being unable to sleep until seven like a normal person, they suggested that I go speak to a doctor. I made a note of that, thinking that it sounded like a good idea, but just the thought of going to a doctor was a waste of time. I don't know what I was thinking. It wasn't like I was spending my time in more productive things, but whatever. I went straight to brush my teeth and then changed into my sleep shorts, and then I flicked off the light, plopping down on the bed and falling asleep almost immediately. But again, the consequence of going to sleep at that time was that I would wake up too early, and that I did. It was a little over three in the morning when my eyes opened wide, and I had no choice but to find something to do again in the exact same order. I reached for my phone and I turned on the lap. Sure enough, the same sound was coming from the kitchen, little taps like footsteps going back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. I shut off the screen to my phone and waited for the next sounds coming from outside my door. But I couldn't resist the urge to put on my earphones and crank the music on my phone, just to not freak out over anything. Well. Debating whether to do that or not, I started to feel that same wave of tiredness come over me. But I decided on plugging in my earphones and started listening to some upbeat electronica. When it was about four in the morning, I turned off the music, and all this time I had been reading pointless news articles on my phone. It was surprisingly quiet in my apartment until four fifteen in the morning, and I looked at my phone, proud of myself, not sure why normally I would be waking up at four seventeen like clockwork, like something coming over me, like when some but he wakes you up. I looked at my pictures on the phone. That dumb fork experiment made me almost laugh at myself. What was I expecting to see this time around? There was the fork right on the kitchen counter where I had left it. But then I looked at the previous picture. The fork. The fork on the picture before it had been turned around. It was four sixteen. Now someone had turned that fork around. I knew it wasn't sleepwalking early in the morning. The tabs in the kitchen were not imagined. Someone had been messing with me. A million thoughts raced through my mind as I thought of who would have an extra key to my apartment. Maybe I had been sleepwalking, If maybe all those strange things that had been happening around the apartment had anything to do with why the landlord offered it at such a low price. I looked back at the image just as the little clock at the top of my phone changed to four seventeen. The door to my room creaked slightly open. I put my phone down and stared at the door in disbelief. The door shut with a loud thought, even though I was awake. Now my eyes opened wide. Trail children. There was a long way home from school, and I remember most twists and turns of that trail clearly. I mean, it was the one that I walked every day from the bus stop off Dane Road. Mom always asked me to be careful getting there because I was supposed to cross the street by myself. This was before drivers would get off and actually made sure that you crossed it. It would simply drop you off and leave you. So I was happy when Hannah's family bought a property next two hours because she went to my school and we were automatically walking buddies. Her dad asked me to show her the way home, and I agreed, but I don't know how we ended up planning a sort of practice walk for Hannah to walk back home through that trail. Her mom drove us to the bus stop and dropped us off, leaving only Hannah, her dad, and myself to walk down the trail. I thought that it was a bit of a chore having to walk down the path on a Saturday, but there was something cool about going with my friend. It almost felt like a little adventure where I would be the leader, like Indiana Jones or something. We crossed the street and I showed them the trailhead while Hannah's dad spoke out the actual instructions as if making mental notes like Okay, the trailhead is right by the large oak tree to the right and across the bus stop and stuff like that. Hannah knew where the trail was right off the bat It was clearly marked by a broken down fence, so we walked on the path between the trees and turned around the dried up creek before taking the path to the right. What's on the left, Hannah's dad asked, I didn't know. I had never gone that way, and it was obvious to me that it was the wrong way because it led us away from our houses. I don't know if he knew that. Hannah and I were a few steps ahead, and we both looked back at her dad as he was standing at the fork of the trail, as if making another one of his mental notes about where to go. Hannah looked back and tried to nudge her dad to come toward us. When we all went quiet off to the left side, we could hear the faint voices of children, a chant like a song. Hannah's dad scanned the area with his eyes, slowly adjusting his glasses that had slipped lower on his nose, slightly fogged up from the sweat of his face. The echoes grew a bit louder, with laughter coming from all around us. But that's when we spotted them, two kids, one boy and one girl, standing on the edge of the dryed up creek. Standing still looking directly at us. Hannah's dad spoke up, asking if they were all right. They wouldn't answer, then it took off, running down the trail. What I remember after that is Hannah and her dad talking about going to see maybe they needed help. Hannah almost cried, saying that she wanted to leave, while her dad insisted that they needed to stay together and that maybe the kids needed help. So we went. Not even twenty steps closer to that side of the trail, we spotted something through the trees, an old, burned down cabin or what remained of it, walls without a roof. It was the reason why the trail was there in the first place. We walked around it for a bit and Hannah's dad was more curious than we were, But eventually we walked back and took the proper trail home. And about the children, well, we never saw them again. Sometimes we can kind of hear them in the distance. I think old