Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A new police officer is doing her rounds late one night when she begins to reminisce some places she used to visit. My name is Edward and here it's a scary story. You nit six ' one two. Wellness check requested at five five one two Rogers Street. I know, I know, mister Cautiarez was not answering his granddaughter's phone calls. Again where the man didn't go out for his mail in two days. A call to make sure that someone's alive is a little bit strange, but it's our duty, I guess. But at three am, I know what you're thinking, and I thought about it too the first couple of times I went to check on him, but that's at the time he was up. I would drive up on those nights and check for the kitchen lights, and I would see the blinking blue lights from the television coming from the living room. As I would pull up, he would walk up to the window and then to the door. He'd come out with a smile on his face, asking if it was his granddaughter. Again, I would not and ask if he was all right. Those nights were slow, and we often chatted a bit before he went back inside, thanking me for my time. I would always tell him to call his family before heading back into the patrol car. But that was about the extent of the nights around Yadow Valley. Hardly anything to do, which is good for a town. Don't get me wrong, but it made me question myself and my choices so much. What was I doing and how was I helping? It was nice for Gabriella Guldiires, the man's granddaughter, to worry so much about her grandpa enough to call for someone to check in on him, But I also thought about the man's neighbors. Hardly anyone was left on that side of town now. Most of them had sadly passed away over the years. In the area I lost most of its residents and local businesses. When the grocery store relocated closer to downtown, I knew it was over. But it was also the area that I was assigned to patrol, along with the south part of downtown. But there were already two other officers around that area. They had been in the forest for many years. There was little a newbie like me could offer. The area was turning more industrial, large factory operations had been growing around the river. The water would serve as a way for them to cool down their machinery. Plus, the zone had a few old factories already, distribution centers for bread, canned food, and other stuff to stock the grocery stores, things that were in the surrounding cities. Some of those factories had shut down long ago. For it was good to see at least some movement around the empty lots at night now that they were being renovated. I never liked driving around there. Something was always off. Plus, and I wasn't always a believer in this one of those back rows, so it was haunted. I remember the stories from back in high school. I didn't go to the local school, but the one across the river, and those who had cars would drive out there sometimes to hang out. We just called it a haunted street. Nothing very creative, but there was proof that something was there. But those were the days you would head out there, get out of the car, walk around with flashlights, scare each other. At some point everything changed and they just used it as a place to party and drink. But anyway, I got to enjoy it up until my senior year when there was an accident out there, one of the girls in my graduating class simply vanished. Few people said to know her. I mean I probably knew of her and had crossed paths with her at some point around school. She was said to be smart, quiet and friendly. It was obvious what her name was now, Erica Jacobs. It was everywhere Erica Jacobs. Disappeared from local hangout spot, Erica Jacobs come home, Erica Jacobs gone but not forgotten. Local students, Erica Jacobs whereabouts unknown. But I was out there that night on Haunted Street, and I don't remember seeing her, and nobody I asked saw her actually, And yet the police were convinced that she had been out there on that night, the search parties, her parents, the news, everyone was out there looking for her, and they all knew through some trustworthy source, I guess that she had been on Haunted Street. And even by asking absolutely everyone I knew who had been out there for a newspaper article I wrote for our high school, one that never got published, nobody, absolutely no one remembered seeing her there. It was a tough scenario because Erica Jacobs became known after she disappeared. Before then, she just blended in with everyone. She had few friends, disappeared during lunchtime and would only be seen talking with the teachers. Today, it was likely only her family that thought of her and well me right now, just like I also had to think about mister Gutierres because of his wellness check part of my job. But still most nights I would wait for morning to pass to do my rounds by Haunted Street. It was called Timber Road by the way, but Haunted Street was the name most of the town knew it by, and Dispatch I had to hold back and call it by its real name whenever it was mentioned over the radio. But on this night, I don't know what got into me that I drove straight there while it was still dark, and I parked by the turn right next to the metal gates from one of the oldest empty factories in the town. Everything came rushing back to me the way the place was quote shut down. Nobody was to talk about it anymore, out of respect to Rika Jacobs or out of fear. You see, a couple of days after the incident, it was a Monday night, Tom and the rest of the guys from Choir were going to head out there. And had told a few of us, myself included. I didn't want to go, but my friend aded and she was into one of the guys from choir, so she decided that if I didn't go, she would go there without me. I decided to go. What we experienced that night, whether it was real or not, terrified the few who got to listen to it firsthand and visit it in the aftermath. We knew that we were going to come off as crazy if the whole school found out. Plus such a story would be disrespectful to Erica's parents, to the school, and it was too soon for anything, including theories like those, to start going around. And myself and the choir guys had gotten there in two cars. The usual spots where everyone would park were still visible in the fields right by the parking lots. Few detectives had been out there by this time. The yellow tape they had put all around the street was stretched out, ripped and dangling from every post and tree that was around there. This was a scene that all the kids wanted. That's the haunted street everyone talked about, and not the place with underage drinking and loud music coming from the terrible speakers. That cars used to have. The area was dark with no headlights around, kind of like that night. I was there on the patrol car by the metal gates. We were there with the car doors open, just talking, and everything was fine for about an hour, when suddenly the place got darker, like physically darker, as if the moon had gotten covered up, or if a big blanket had suddenly flown over the entire area. It was then when one of the guys yelled out a sharp look and pointed out toward one of the dirt roads that led to the factories. Nobody saw anything, but when the high beams went on, they all, all six of them in total, saw a white figure out in the distance walking up to them, and was immediately scared. But being surrounded by a bunch of teenage boys, we all knew very well what we were about to put up with. They stayed outside while we both got into the passenger seats of one of the cars and looked out toward the shadowy rode. It was clear the person was walking and crawling in a strange mix, alternating between the two. Toward us. It was getting real close to the ground and then standing upright and then repeating and started screaming when she noticed how fast it was running toward us, but I couldn't make a sound. They took the rest of the guys a while to notice it too, but when they did they rushed inside, all of them squeezing into one car and attempting to start it. I could see tom shaky hand as he tried to put the key in the ignition while looking straight ahead through the windshield. It was a woman in a darkened large white shirt or dress, long dark hair, sprinting and bending unnaturally like an animal, very close to the ground. The car had finally started, and the light beams were aiming straight towards that thing or rushing at us from the empty road. When Anne shouted at us to be quiet, and she asked if it could be Erica Jacobs. This made us all freak out even more, and Tom turned the car around just with enough of an angle to give me a direct view of this thing running up to us. It was a girl, but not Erica Jacobs. That had seen many of her photographs, and I was writing my article for the school newspaper. She was not even close. The guys dropped us off before they went back out there for the car they left behind, and that's about as far as we got. I didn't know it back then, but my investigation of what happened to Erica Jacobs was just beginning. The rest of Haunted Street is coming up right after this stay with me. The other guys chose to not talk about the incident again, while most of the conversation about that night stayed between Tom Anne and myself. Back then, we thought that the other guys were scared of what we had seen, and although that may have been true, now I know that they probably didn't want their parents to find out they were out there so late at night. I see it all the time now, young people telling their parents that they are somewhere else and then having freaked out parents calling us to find out that they were out playing cards or drinking at a public park. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with my life after high school a journalist, doctor detective. I bounced back and forth between schools in private education programs to try and sort everything out. And it was long after spending many years of doing the wrong things that I met up with a friend who eventually got me thinking about becoming a police officer. The pay seemed okay, and the danger everyone talked about was not as severe as it made it seem. It sounded like it would help me to get to other places faster if I chose to change careers. So there I was, once again in my hometown, riding around in a patrol car at night, at the same places that I used to go to as a teenager. Two completely different people, now into completely different worlds. The street that was once packed every Thursday and Friday night was now empty. The factories that would make so much noise and add strange smells to the air, We're gone. For the most part, the decades's old mystery was still there. Verica Jacobs never salved. The barons had left the town, the city cleaned up, the posters and the candles dried up. Her name became just another one of many in the list of missing people in the state. I tried to find out who had been in charge of it back then when I was in school, A so called Burner. I'm sure if that was his actual name, but he was a detective who had retired way before I joined. But there's something about being alone with a purpose that makes you question it, and that was the case with me. I was the only one who wanted to show somebody, anyone who would be willing to listen, that Erika Jacobs was not at Haunted Street the night she went missing. But they looked in the wrong places the whole time, that maybe she had run away or was out there somewhere living in another city, living and other life. But Haunted Street had shown up in several other cases. I came to find out cases of missing teenagers. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, when the city was as developed as it was ever going to get. That part of town around Haunted Street had factories, storage facilities, and even an adult school mainly teaching trades and other things essential for working in those specific fields. But like with the rest of the town, people started leaving. Nearby cities like Palover and Togolia were booming, and most of the residents moved there. The city did what it could, and it's started several programs, and that's how Yahoo Valley went from steelmaking to bakeries and canned food processing, leaving the vast majority of factories completely empty and run down. And although I wanted to think that the rumors about Haunted Street were just that made up stories teens would tell each other. The truth once you get a glimpse of actual records of cases is a terrible one. Bodies found reports of missing boys and girls and crimes around the general area surrounding Haunted Street, and that was only the beginning. When the new factory started operating in the area, the police dispatch started getting calls about a different type of disturbance, strange sightings in and around Timber Road, the place we all knew as Haunted Street. At least one call per week would claim to see with the reports going from vague statements like strange woman walking around the dark roads looks to be in distress to reports that were much more detailed Caucasian woman in a white dress looks injured, spotted twenty yards from Timber Road and the entrance of Albert's Company distribution center. Every single call was followed up on based on our protocol, but eventually the call started being acknowledged, recorded and left as part of the police records without a patrol car being sent out. For years, scattered reports of police officers being sent out to investigate Timber Road and report seeing no one out there became common. They had gone as far as to bringing the callers into the station for more details. Everyone seemed completely coherent, logical, and some were well respected members of the community. One of the callers happened to be mister Gutierres from the Wellness check calls. His record it was from nineteen eighty seven, calling about a woman spotted crawling around the field when he was driving home late one night. The record was taken by Berner, the same officer that would later oversee the Erica Jacob's case the Girl from school. Thinking about everything again and seeing Haunted Street at night after many years reminded me of the drive I used to feel to crack the case of Erica Jacob's the Missing Girl of Yahoo Valley. Today, the nightly routines of driving along the dying streets and residential areas felt pointless. The sun started picking out behind one of the factory lots. I had spent too much time out there. I set the patrol car on drive and pulled away, wondering for how much longer I would be able to do this. About two weeks after that, received another call to head out to mister Gutatras's home. Another wellness check. It was a complete routine. Now I pulled up, saw the kitchen light on his silhouette against the window, and the door opening. I walked up to the front door and asked if he was all right. We did our usual exchange asking how everything was going. Went out of the blue. I'm sure if it was just frustration or something else, but I asked him about Haunted Street. His eyes opened wide as he started sharing one of his encounters out there. Back in the eighties, he had gotten off of work. He was an attendant at one of the plans and in charge of shipping and receiving. It was finally driving home after one of the shipments arrived late. The drive to his house and the factories might be what ten minutes max, But those ten minutes changed his whole perspective on reality. He saw crawling along the empty lots and heading straight for his car. While he was out there, he freaked out so much that he stepped on the gas and nearly drove off the road in his attempt to get back home. The first thing he did was called the police, who, in his own words, didn't care much back then. But soon after he told me about what he thought it had been a ghost, and that not only he had seen, but multiple workers had already witnessed. This phase got even more serious as he started talking about Timber Road. The city was dying, and it was dying quickly, he said. They wanted to fix it, and a ghost story wasn't helping. The townsfolk and the mayor. Everyone was in on this, But that remote area of the factories was the perfect spot for disposing of bodies. Missing kids would be found there, you know. It would bring them from the nearby counties. Sometimes it'd be hidden deep in the disposal channels, mixed with the waste, and sometimes even thrown accidentally. He said that in air quotes into the rivers. Awful, awful stories I've heard, he continued. Nobody wanted to work there. You could tell that mystery with theaters had never been given the chance to talk about this. He told me about his theories, the things he had heard, the ghosts he had seen, and then mentioned how scared he was when he found out through his granddaughter that teens were heading out there late at night to hang out. Glad it all stopped with the missing girls story, he said. Erica jacobs I interrupted yeah, yeah, that one. She wasn't real, but it worked. All them photos you've seen, they're from someone else on the other side of the country or I don't know where they got them from. Her parents or so called parents were said to have left town almost immediately. None of it was real. I think it was a rumor that got out of hand. He told me so many stories, following thread after thread, and I was there for about an hour. I knew even then that his side of the story was only a part of the truth, if there was one, and I knew that he had no motive to make anything up. You see, once you hit a certain age, you have fewer reasons to lie. I must admit that I didn't feel any sort of relief in accepting his version of it, but it made sense. Something about Erica Jacob's story never added up. I started walking back to my car, turning my head slightly toward mister Guthires to tell him, as always, to call his family. He smiled and wished me a good night, and so I drove down the dark streets and nearly empty areas of town right before sunrise. I had two hours left on my shift. Driving past the shut down grocery stores, the old diner, and then going straight down Main Street, past the city center and onto Haunted Street, the plays looking over grown as always, but still the same. As it drove straight down that same place, I remembered I could see the city lights from the nearby cities, some of the houses on the nearby hills, and I was lost thinking about how fragile our stories are, sometimes only one person keeping them alive, and others like this one, the story of what we saw that night, the one story I thought was dead, brought back to life through a late night conversation. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Karoubiez. If you need more tales but true ones, check out horror Story, my podcasts about creepy events, places and legends. And if you search for a horror story right now on your app, it will be the one that pops up with horror Story and yellow letters. If you see the tiny scary FM logo on it, that's the one. Anyway. If you want to support the shows and get ad free stories at the same time, go to scaryplus dot com. You might also see a button for it on your app you're listening on right now. It's pretty simple. You can try it out free for fourteen days, and if you don't like it, you can cancel whenever, no questions asked anyway, Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone so soon
