Ghostly Hitchhiker & Forgotten Dreams: Two Haunting Horror Stories

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A woman on the side of the road asking for a ride. You think you know where it goes. The car pulls over, the woman steps inside. You think you know. My name is Edwin and here's a scary story. Halloween was right around the corner, and the stories everywhere were flowing. I'm saying the book fares and new shows on TV, and I remember it clearly, my friends and I getting together to watch one of the new ghost hunting shows, stopping to talk about ghost encounters. I'd just gotten my license to drive in the state of California, but there was never anywhere cool to drive around there. The areas near the valleys over the desert were filled with the same things, long empty spaces of dry hills, and then scattered cities with the usual shops, houses thing again. For a while, my friends were just as bored as I was about the place, and our escape was the paranormal. When I think back on those times, there are several things that I remember clearly. The bonfires in the backyards and the ghost stories. They were just for fun, and I never thought that I would be ever telling anybody about my own experience, but it has been almost two decades, and while I can still remember everything as if it were yesterday. I'll tell you I was driving back from college past these roads I used to talk about with all my friends, the haunted ones, the ones that supposedly went through a cemetery, and suddenly all of those talks about skin walkers, strange creatures, and cursed streets came to life. They always did. Some of these were true, and I'm telling you from an experience, people that have cried while sharing their stories of encounters, and those that have even had close friends and family members die because of curses, and not just the kind that you're imagining, but I'm talking about real eerie stories of owls that turned into people in front of witnesses of the lurking man, and the nights that even the drunks stopped drinking forever because of being scared out of their wits while passing by the cemeteries. You can see why I would be afraid, now, don't you. But even when you're in the moment when something is about to happen, it's normal. It's only when you look back when it starts making sense and feeling a lot more eerie. Anyway, I was driving back from college right around midterms, and I had stayed out later than usual studying at my friend Mike's house. The road back then was only a two lane highway. It was a straight road and only your headlights were guiding you. At some point, about halfway between my house and the college, there was a large patch of bushes that signaled the entrance toward one of the side roads, and this is where it would lead to scattered houses before he got to the foothills. Even though it was dark, the hills were clear enough that you could see it up ahead a good distance. While driving off, my old truck was making the only noises out there, and that's when I spotted a figure up ahead. Every once in a while, an animal Coyotees mostly would roam around by the side of the road, although that was the only animal I never saw squished flat. Those guys are smart and they're never alone. As I got closer, my headlight saw the thing move, but not bobbing up and down like you would expect the coyote to look like while running away, but rather gliding like a bird over the asphalt. My heart started to take over the inside of my ears. At this point. The closer I got, the more I could see that that thing was in a bird or a wild dog from the desert, but a girl in a long white dress. I looked at her walking in the direction of the bushes, still a good distance ahead, thinking that if she was a hitchhiker walking in the dark, or packs of coyotes roam, or how the temperature drops out of nowhere, it wasn't going to turned out very well for her. To be honest, I was only nervous about having a girl in my car and trying not to come off as a creep. I never thought about it being a ghost or anything. As I was getting closer, I could see her standing still, not looking in my direction at all, and I pulled over after passing her a little bit, deciding to wait for her to walk up about ten steps toward the car and me not actually come up behind her. I could see her through the rear view mirror thanks to my red tail lights, but when she pulled up, she stopped and slowly turned her head toward me. Even through the shadows, I could tell that she was not okay. Her eyes were sunken in almost completely gone, her skin with large dark patches her arm with a huge gash on the side of it, dark dry blood visible where her sleeves ended. She needed help, so I asked if she needed a ride, and she looked ahead, pointing at the area with the road that split off by the patch of bushes up ahead, and then she turned to look at me. She struggled, but finally managed to open the door and got inside. But the smell. I remember the smell so vividly. It was terrible, and it didn't take a scientist to figure out that this woman had gone through something serious and that I needed to help her in any way that I could. I thought about driving her straight to the hospital, the only one I knew that had emergency sent her out there, but it would be past the patch of bushes, and only then would I consider myself creep. Or I could take her where she pointed, to drop her off and leave it at that. What if I asked her first? What if I dropped her off and then called for help. I was driving along, trying not to look at the gash she had in her arm when I decided to ask her if everything was all right, But she just kept looking straight ahead, her right arm extended toward the windshields, pointing at the road to the right of the patches, the bushes, the ones that my friends and everyone that came before me seemed to say avoid at all costs. Bad people live there, and they told us through ghost stories, the people that appeared on the side of the road, the traps, masked men that would surround her car and take everything in sight. I remember stories from my grandparents, with their kind hearts that would be taken to the cemetery to leave flowers for more and more friends and family as the years passed. It was only halfway up the road to the hills, but they would beg to go early enough to avoid the shadow of the mountains over the road. I looked over the woman in my passenger seat, her head loose, moving with every tiny stone on that road. I can get you some help, I said, not asking anymore. Her arm lifted half way up and then yanked back. The door opened, and before I got the chance to hit the brakes, she rolled out of the car. I halted to a stop a few yards ahead, and the door was still swinging open. I stepped out, looked just in front of the car, maybe about ten yards the patch of bushes. Was there a long winding road to the right leading straight into the hills. I looked back and all around the road, since it was mainly dirk and scattered plants from the area, surely i'd be able to spot her. The woman was nowhere to be seen. I ran around the car, shut the door she had left open, and then I strained my eyes to look in the distance and thought that I saw a shadow moving slowly across the road to the right. I got back in the car and thought about it hard for several minutes before finally deciding to get out of it there and head home. There were just too many stories out there, and searching around the newspapers in the following days, the image of this woman stuck in my mind still. I found a snippet of an article about that road. A family had filed an official complaints recently to the officials in the area. They had opened up a report for the crimes I had been committed there. Their main concern was a grave robbers who had taken everything they could find from people who had been recently buried. And even though that's terrible as it is, their concern was worse. You see the families of the deceased that had been dug up were contacted for them to arrange reburials. All except for one who were interviewed in the article were advised to simply file a report for theft. The robbers had gotten to the daughter's grave site, taken all of her belongings, and apparently her body was taken too, although that still remains under investigation. There was no reason for them to take it, and grave robbers try not to leave any trails. Ever, after all these years, I can still remember that night and the photo of the woman at her funeral. It was the same woman that went missing, the woman that was in my truck. While we're on the theme of ghost stories that you think you know, I have another one for you up next. There used to be a house at the end of the street in the neighborhood where I grew up that all the kids were afraid of, everyone except for me. I had to pass by it whenever I had to stay a little later at school and missed the bus, but I was never the only one. Sometimes I would wait until the kids got out of detention, mainly my best friend Billy, who couldn't seem to be able to stay out of it. He lived kind of by my house, and we would end up walking home together. It was him the one that told me the stories that the rest of the kids had said about the house. He had accepted a dare at one point to go inside and said that it was very clean, almost as if someone had lived there all alonge, although according to everyone, even the adults, it was abandoned. He's the one that would run in front of me to get past the house quicker. But I didn't want to do that. I couldn't explain it. I would be at the house and imagine myself going in there, parking my car, meeting my wife and kids, dinner, sleeping at the top corner room by the attic. I would get home sometimes and hide under my blanket for just a few minutes to think about that house and the life that came with it. There were so many more details that wouldn't go away, no matter how much I tried to forget about it. At that house, I fixed toilets and walls, I nailed picture frames, decorations during Christmas, an entire life, my wife Becky, two boys, Alan and Henry, their baseball games, The accident at the ice skating rink that broke Allen's arm, Becky's parents, and the issues we had over the school we put our children in. There were dreams, of course, strange at such a young age, but I always wanted to step inside that house, and if I had enough money, I would buy it, maybe just to have it fix it up from the outside, have people over all the time. Even then, I understood that having thoughts like those were strange for a boy, so I kept them to myself all through elementary and middle school. But it was in high school when I finally got to see the inside of it. We broke in a little before Halloween on a dare, and it was like a memory. I knew where everything was, how to open the windows, and where the majority of the leagues came from. I was with a group of friends, leading them around the house as if it were my own. I eventually got to college and forgot about the whole thing. The house I think, ended up being demolished after a few roads needed to be built for the growing town. Everyone I knew had moved out, everyone except for Billy, who soon became the only reason why I stepped into that town anymore. I was about to get married to a girl I met in my ceramics class, out of all places, and we had plans to move to the city after college, maybe start a bakery or something for her while I kept studying to become a lawyer. Everything was looking bright for me and I was excited. But one day everything changed. I started having these strange dreams, nothing I actually remember, but those headaches that followed made Stacy beg for me to go to the hospital and get checked out. I didn't drive that day. Stacy was behind the wheel as a road next to me turned into the ocean, an actual blue, real ocean. I could see a large wave approaching from the left side of the car. I demanded to be led into the driver's seat so that I would step on the gas and that I could get us out of there. But then the mountain of a wave cast a shadow over us. Then I started swallowing up the car. Eventually everything went dark. It was awake, I heard from above me. The shadows of strangers were blocking off the sun. If you're good, I heard a hand stretched out to help me up. We should still get you checked out. Though I was on the grass of the backyard of a house. I barely recognized. Where's Stacy? I asked, Is she all right? Stacy? Mommy dad hit his head too hard, I heard from behind me. I watched as the two boys giggled and were shoot away by another woman, the woman in my dreams, Becky, the one I had imagined as a child. She smiled, reassuring me that things were all right, that we were going to get me checked out. I looked around the places that were really familiar to me, the living room, the yard. In every single detail, I knew the boy's birthdays, my mother in law's name, and my co workers in the role of my job as a salesman at the manufacturing firm. But that wouldn't last. The confusion I felt became too much to bear. I eventually lost my job. I started spending a lot of time in the room at the top corner by the attic. I looked up as much information about this, including glitches in the matrix dimensions, timing of birth and death, and how these can blend and mix at odd times. It took me a long time to accept what the doctors had said that it was a simple explanation. I had fallen off the roof and in that time when I was unconscious, had visions, dreams that I was awake now, But who could reassure me of that? I had lived an entire life somehow connected to this one. I remembered every heartbreak, every success, the parents I would never see again, my childhood friends. It was like an entire life was wiped away, just like that. I missed it, and I missed the life I was gonna have. I found myself spending so much time by the window at the corner of the house, looking as the children and their parents walk by it, hoping in a way they see myself again, the young boy who wished it was here. Scary Story Podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kovaru. Yes. You can find out more about me and the show over on Scary Story podcast dot com, and you can get ad free episodes by joining me on scary Plus. I'll share links to everything in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening. It's scary Everyone soon