A Place for Everybody

Hey there, it's Edwin and this Scary Story podcast good place for everybody. I found a collection of neatly organized sheets, things that looked like old schoolwork that a child would make and then a parent would store and forget about. When I was searching the attic for an old photograph for a school project. It was supposed to be a family tree, and part of it was supposed to include at least one photo. But inside the metal box there was everything but one of them. I have to admit it was frustrating, but it was also entertaining to go through old things like that. There were dozens of boxes up there to go through, So if it came down to it and I got bored at Grandma's house that weekend, I knew exactly what I could do. In fact, there was no water, no electricity, no Wi Fi. I held a flashlight up to the area labeled with the word name right at the top, Florence Catherine, my mom, drawings of houses and a stick figure family next to it, greeting cards and even some candy stuck to a piece of paper with wax. Everything was neatly labeled at the top, organized the way Mom always said. Grandma was. I barely remembered my grandma, and I think that most of my memories with her weren't memories at all, but rather me remembering what I had seen on home videos. We had a few, but the ones that stuck most with me were the time when we opened up the Christmas presents at her house and then when she was in the car when they went to pick me up for my first day of kindergarten. Being back at her house after it being empty for such a long time give me a strange feeling. You see, Grandma's house had been empty for what fourteen or fifteen years, and whenever either myself or one of my cousins would ask about it, they would say that it was being prepared to get it rented out, but most of my grandma's stuff was still stuck in the attic. Though it was true that the house had been cleaned out completely from the inside, from what I heard from Mom, the house had been rented out many times before that the lady that was living there had to leave, and then they had another man come in and then also had to leave. Shortly after Dad once joked that the house was haunted. My mom got very upset about it, but the story stuck with my cousins and I. We used to dare each other to try and spend the night at her house. Nobody actually did it, I mean not as part of the dare, but we all had our own strange encounters when we had to stay there for one reason or another. My cousin Jeff was the first one to tell us about it. He had gone with my uncle to take care of some of the plumbing issues that came up whenever it snowed and the pipes froze. Even though the water was shut down for the property, leaks would end up ruining several spots on the wooden floor upstairs, and again nobody questioned it. Even me, a person who knows absolutely nothing about plumbing and house paintenance, knew that leaks wouldn't just appear without running water or a leaky roof. Nobody looked around for answers. I seriously started to wonder if maybe I was a crazy one, that all of these things were normal. Jeff ended up having to spend the night there while my uncle went to his job for a graveyard shift in construction, but he told me about that night still haunts me. He was sleeping in the couch in the living room, I'm assuming from fear of going upstairs in an empty house. He described it as a normal evening, well one without electricity, but he had come prepared movies on his tablets, back up batteries, and snacks. He was set, but then in the middle of the night he started hearing strange noises coming from the upstairs area, not quite footsteps, but unlike anything he had ever heard before. Something was moving up there and trying to be silent. In a bit of a panic, he texted his dad and then waited for an answer. The sounds were now coming from the other side of the house, still upstairs, like something rolling or being dragged gently across the floor. Jeff had opened the curtains in the living room that night because it was pitch black in there that the beams from the street lights were the only things casting shadows inside. He sat up on the cow which as he heard the sounds once again, this time from the staircase, like metal objects rattling from the very top. The couch was against the wall facing the front window, and even though he had tried to look at the reflection from the glass, there was no way It was too bright outside and too dark inside for him to see, but the sounds weren't stopping, and all he was thinking about was that some one had broken in. Anything to try to convince himself that there wasn't something else in there trying to scare him away. He just sat there still, with only the sounds of his heartbeat throbbing against his ears as he tried to listen for another sound, another movement. Who was close to dashing towards the door and staying out there, but he could hear it. Something was there, like the sounds that would normally be accompanied by footsteps, except happening without them. Maybe that's what scares us about a door creak, the lack of footsteps, the missing rattle of the doorknob, something that simply couldn't be happening. His heart was beating faster as he listened, just listen. He jumped out of the couch and dropped his phone. There was a message from his dad telling him that he had left some of the tools upstairs and to go make sure that they were still there. I am on his side with this one, though. There was no way that I would go upstairs in the dark if a house had been empty for years, I could not find a tenant to stay in it. Something was there, and Jeff was about to discover it. He felt a little better after getting the message, and even though he wasn't going to go upstairs to check up on the tools that his dad had left there, at least someone else knew that something was going on. It was then when he heard the footsteps the farthest room in the hallway as he opened the door. He then walked over the staircase. He grabbed his phone and his shoes and bolted toward the door, unlocked it, and stepped out into the porch. He had then looked into the darkness inside, wondering if his ears were playing tricks on him, but his eyes caught the shadow coming down the stairs slowly at first waiting for him to react, He tried to adjust his eyes to the emptiness through the doorframe. It was clear to him someone was standing at the top of the stairs. He didn't feel welcome anymore. He took a step into the house to reach for the doorknob to pull it shut, and that's when the thing started crawling down the stairs. Even though he said he couldn't see its eyes. He knew that he was being stared down. He then pulled on the door what he said felt like rubber bands holding it open. The thing was getting closer and his head was becoming cloudy with thoughts rushing in. At the same time, the thing went faster and dashed toward him. Just as the door was being released and closed, Jeff took a few steps back and looked at the truck parked in the driveway. He prayed for it to have been left unlocked. As he tugged on the door handle, the truck opened, and that's where he spent the night. Jeff didn't tell me about this right away, though. In fact, even his dad didn't know that Jeff had slept outside in his truck. When he woke up, his dad's car was parked next to him, and his dad was fast asleep in the couch of the living room, likely assuming that Jeff had gone to sleep in one of the rooms upstairs and walked right past him when he got home from a shift. Jeff waited to tell me about this until that specific weekend when I was looking for the stuff for my project. After I told him about what happened to me. You see, Grandma had made these handwritten labels and glued them to the shelves of the cabinets, one for canned foods, one for condiments, and so on. She was like that with everything. Even the bathroom had specific spots for certain things. Though not labeled, I knew that one of the containers was for toilet paper rolls, and that each trash can that was left was for different things, just like with the labels. With the memory she kept of her children, there was never any trouble in finding any in her house. Despite it being super creepy to think about. We all sort of treated the house as a commonplace for us to go, spend the weekend or to get away from something. Nobody ever considered moving in, even though I don't think anybody would object to the idea, since it stayed like that as Grandma's house, a place for everybody. So when I got there, I put some of my snacks and random stuff I brought, like trash bags and the stuff I would need in the bathroom, aside from the bucket that we used to flush a toilet with from water from the neighbor's yard, all in one spot right above the sink where the cabinets were. I remember looking at the label under it with the misspelled word tupperware on it. I smiled thinking about it. Then I closed its door and walked back upstairs to the attic to look through a few things. That night, I was actually staying upstairs in one of the beds from the room that had become the unofficial guest room, not the one that Grandma used to sleep in, but the one that used to be one of her children's rooms and then later became storage. Our family eventually cleaned it and added a bed, and eventually it was furnished with stuff that the others were about to throw out, and it ended up looking like a regular room. It was where we used to hear noises from at all hours of the day. Some things were lighter than others, like taps, or, like one of my cousins mentioned, whispers coming from in there. The heavier stuff were grunts and objects falling. And that's when I heard it, the creak of a tiny door coming from downstairs. I yelled a loud whisper hello, but there were no other signs of life. It took me a while to fall asleep again, looking out the window, and my only source of life light. The next morning, I walked up to the kitchen to grab one of those packets of instant oatmeal that I had left in the cabinet, but it had been left wide open, yet I knew I had shut it. I'm always used to tell me that Grandma and I were alike in that manner. We never left rowers open. We always put away our forks and spoons, and even our jackets were always zipped up, just like Grandma. And it was Jeff who first brought it up that maybe the thing inside the house wasn't Grandma, but rather something pretending to be her, yet trying to scare us away, something completely opposite of what Grandma used to do when she was alive. She was always warm and welcoming. Whenever someone tried to fix up the house, or whenever we try to move things around, the activity would start. The house now sits empty once again, with only the occasional visitor attempting to spend the night. The following story is called the Ball of Fire, and it is coming up right after this. I have to really dig through the tapes of my memories for this story. It happened back when I was a young child around eight or nine years old, and it is something my siblings and even my neighborhood friends remember whenever there's a get together, be it Christmas, a birthday, or whenever we happen to be visiting back home, we talk about it. In the west central part of Mexico, there is a state called I Got Eat. It has changed over the years, obviously now it's being more modern and with better roads, But back then we used to live in a small town near the coast, where every single road was made of dirt, and the closest thing we had to entertain ourselves was a new movie theater and of course the parties and celebrations. We used to live in a small house, not a hut because it was made out of bricks, but it was very small. We had two rooms, and one of them being used as a living room, and the other was where we had multiple beds where myself and my siblings would sleep. It was simple, a simple life back then. We made it a habit of staying out late, sometimes hearing the occasional moth buzz by our ears as we watched the sunset and the warm nights begin. The town used to have a rule about turning off the lights from the streets at a certain time, and all the kids knew that being out in the dark was one of the scariest things we could experience, and it happened to us once. It was a day that my aunt got sick and we were waiting for her in the hospital to go back home, but the doctor took forever arriving and the nurse could not sign a paper that they needed to sign, so both my older brother and I stared at each other, then looked over at the clock on the wall of the clinic, wondering if we would make it home on time, but not trying to say it out loud. The doctor got there while the lights were still on, and he signed a paper, gave my uncle a small bag of medicines, and then sent us all on our way. My uncle's friend, who had given us a ride to the hospital, had gone home already, and after calling him back from the clinic's landline and getting no answer, he said that he would stay in the waiting room with my aunt and asked us to go back home and ask our neighbor Juan to come back up to pick them up. My brother agreed, and I shot him a look of fear when he said that, but I underst stood we had no choice but to go. Had I said that I didn't want to go, he would have said that it was okay and that he would go on his own. But no. I let the shiver pass from my neck to my back, and that tightened my shoelaces as I walked over to the dirt road slightly behind my brother. We were quiet at first, relieved that my aunt would be okay, though we both knew that she wasn't going to die or anything. And yeah, we both knew that it wasn't that serious, but we were still relieved. It would be about a fifteen minute walk back to the house, and once we got a rhythm walking in the dark, my brother turned to me and asked if I wanted to pass by the Witch's house. Yes. Was her name, a woman who used to live by herself in one of the bigger lots of the town. We all knew her as the Brucha, the witch, so much that some people didn't even know her real name. Shook my head. I think he thought that I would like the idea. After waiting over an hour for the doctor, hoping for something fun, to do that night, but the moon was gone and the night was pitch black. Once the lights went out, the only lights we could see were the ones from the windows of those who were still awake inside their houses, dim orange lights barely casting a stream of light against the dark dirt roads. As we made our way toward the house, but suddenly we heard the sound of a roaring fire, followed by a bright orange light that went along the road right in front of us and turned the corner. It raced up toward one of the hills, and we watched it hit a tree and fall to the ground. My brother was already running ahead of me, trying to understand what we had seen, and I was trying to keep up with him. As I watched some of the people on that street open their doors and start rubbing their eyes as they adjusted to the darkness of the outside. Small crowds were gathering along the street. Now, my brother and I raced towards the tree where the thing had stopped. A little bit of smoke was coming out from the leaves, and the smell of burning shrubs surrounded the night air. He saw one of our friends there, a kid named Oscar, who came out wearing no shoes and asked us what we had seen. When we started telling the story, another kid came by, and soon we were being questioned by one of the adults and curious neighbors. We just explained what we saw, and everyone seemed surprised but concerned about the whole situation. My brother was able to get us out of there pretty quickly with the excuse that we needed to get a ride for my aunt, but one of the neighbors offered to take us in his taxi and we accepted. He questioned us even more on the way there. I remember thinking that it wasn't that big of a deal, at least at the time. I mean, we had all heard about the rumors, but nobody took it very seriously, and even as children, we knew that some of the legends about the witch of our town couldn't possibly be true. We picked my aunt up and went back home, trying to stay up as late as possible outside in the port until mom came out and she scolded us to go to sleep. We were supposed to be up early for church the next day, but we couldn't help it. We went inside but kept talking, whispering to each other more about what we had seen. You see, Yez, the woman who everyone called the witch, lived next to an empty lot. She was rumored to perform Satanic rituals, or at least some that would do things such as make people fall in love with you so more sinister ones like luring death towards your enemies, and people would travel to see her, even from the capital of the state, just to come and talk to her. She would make soaps and candles to help attract or scarcertain energies. But what we knew more about at the time was about the burnings in the empty lot next to her house. The lot was all walled up, and at night, very late I got two or three in the morning, the neighbors would see her walk with baskets of items towards the center of it. She would start a fire and begin burning the items. They were things like clothes and shoes, sometimes human hair, her personal objects like combs and photographs. We all suspected that she was doing some type of witchcraft. A few people ever confronted her in fear of being cursed themselves. Again, there were different times back then, and risking being hated by the local wits, which was a very serious issue. In fact, my mom used to work at a store on the next block from her house, and Oldienz used to buy things from her. Whenever we would go to my mom's work, we would hide behind her apron. Whenever Oldynez would come by. She smiled at us once with her missing teeth, telling us with her eyes that she wasn't going to deal with any funny business from us. But one of the most well known rumors, and some that our neighbors used to swear by, was that Henz would sometimes chant in that empty lot, sometimes so loudly that she would begin to levitate and turn into a ball of fire. Saying it out loud, it sounds a bit out there, but realized that people would swear on this, claiming to have seen her just as clearly as you could see them in front of you. We used to think that it was just a cautionary tale to get us to come back home after a party or something, or one of those stories to get us to come back before dark. But boy were we mistaken. The word eventually spread that we had seen a ball of fire fly along the road and crash into a tree, and I think that word got to oldy Ness too, because we stopped seeing her around town. People would whisper about her, cursing her, but also saying a small prayer whenever her name would come up to protect themselves. But it was on a Monday when I went to my mom's work to help her out, since we had been out of school for break and sometimes Mom would bring home groceries that she needed help with. That's when we saw a crouched woman wobbling up to the counter of the store. Her face was covered up well. She smiled and we knew that it was old he Ness. Mom greeted her and reached for the usual tuna cans, rice, tomatoes, and onions. I was hiding behind Mom's apron when I saw her smile. Her face was completely different now, with large, purple, almost black bruises on her face. Mom was a bit nervous, I could tell, but she still managed to ask what had happened to her, and then she offered her one of those healing creams that people used to buy to help with bruises and muscle pain. Ah my dear, she said in Spanish, I fell down the other day. She just don't go around telling everybody you know how they are around here. She then shot me a look that I will never forget. She grabbed her bag and walked away down the long dirt road back to her house. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Komaruas. For a new project, we will be collecting your story, so if you're a writer or know of someone who has horror stories to share, please get in touch. I'll leave my email in the description of this episode of next. Be sure to check out our other show called True Scary Story, where people tell their own paranormal stories Directly listen alone at your own risk. Don't forget a tap follow to stay up to date with the stories. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon, Assas