Just an Old Friend

Hi friend, Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. The first story in this episode begins with a strange visit to an old friend's house, followed by the story of a babysitter. The last story, though, comes from a much requested idea creepy dolls. Are you ready? My name is Edwin and here is a scary story. Are you sure this is it? I asked my mama. She had convinced me like she always did, and this time it was that we should pay the poor man a visit. We had been going to his shop ever since we were little, my sister and I and I remember even helping him dig stuff at his backyard over the summer. Mister Bundraft would pay me five dollars per hole I done up, saying it was some sort of gardening thing. Then I'd go straight to the burger joint. I felt so grown up. But now as the years went by, mister Bondraft had gotten weaker and less consistent with his shot. Meatball soup and burgers were his thing. I never really understood them because I would always go for the fried chicken, no matter how much he tried to convince me. He could be a pushy salesman, that's for sure. But now I think I would have accepted one of those burghers. I mean, the guy could barely walk anymore, and some people around town used to say that the cashier was stealing some of the money. Nobody knew, and nobody would tell the old man would likely die of a heart attack. With such news, and without us knowing for sure, we didn't want to risk it. I walked up to the porch with the memories of being greeted by him and his wife vividly in my mind. Come are on the back, you would say, Oh, he handed me a shovel. Mom was always afraid of letting me go there on my own, you know, walking across town. So the fact that she drove me to his house this time, almost ten years later, it was bizarre. Be careful, she would say, be back before dark. But I'm happy to say that I wasn't the only person whose mother would treat them that way. My friends from school were the same way, and they had a good reason to. Some of my friends were not allowed to go out at all. The murderers had been in the next town over. News of a serial killer were going around, and concerned citizens would make meetings to talk about how to act and of different ways to protect ourselves. Eventually, though the murders became less frequent, they never quite went away. Well until now, you hadn't heard of a missing person in a few months, which was something strange to say out loud, but true. Nonetheless, I saw the curtain of the living room window move to the side, and then the front door opened. An older woman, Missus Bunraft, was at the door. She looked much different now, but still had that nervous smile that I remembered her by, I remember you. She said, you're the kid. How are you? I told her that my mom had driven me to the house to ask how mister Bundraft had been doing. The expression of her face was immediately wiped away. She looked back at the house and said that she had a few things to tend to. With that, she waved at my mom and completely ignored me. As she walked back into the house, she waved and smiled nervously, ending it with the great face while I was still looking, and then shut the door. Well, that was weird. I told my mom want to close the door to the car. He had been wondering if he was alive since his shop was closed, and he had somewhat become a friend of the family, serving us all those ground meat dishes that the town had gotten used to. A few weeks later, we found out on the news that he was alive all right, unlike his victims. Back when I was in high school, my mom told me that a person from her job needed someone to take care of her kid while she went out to a doctor's appointment with her husband. I jumped out of my chair, excited over the opportunity. One of my friends from school had already gotten jobs like this and that's how she was able to do so many things after school. My mom reminded me that I didn't have to take it, that it was a big responsibility, but then said that it would be for about four hours in total, and that I would get fifty dollars, which was beyond what I was expecting. My heart was beating super fast when she called her friend, and then she told her that she would bring over the four year old girl along with the bag of some of her snacks and toys in about an hour. Mom was getting ready for work and Dad wouldn't be home until later that night, so I did my best to not act so nervous, and eventually found myself waiting in the living room by the chair that would let me see out the window. Sun was setting. I started to feel those butterflies in my stomach when I saw the shape of a little girl coming toward the porch from the side of the house. I stepped away from the window and give her a few seconds for her to knock on the door, but when nothing was happening, I decided to open it and let her in. It was windy outside, but even through the sound of the leaves, I couldn't hear a car nearby. Had she simply been dropped off. I looked to the side of the porch, and sure enough, there was a little girl facing away from me, her arms on her side, looking to the side of the house, toward the neighbors. She must have been feeling scared, so I did my best to try to talk to her, telling her my name and what my favorite color was, and I asked for hers. Her dark hair was shiny, dirty shiny, dropping straight behind her on her left side and over her shoulder on the other one. She wouldn't budge. I took one step closer to her. She turned away a tantrum. I remembered those. I figured that at one point she would change her mind and before to talk to me. The kid normally can't stand still, and impossible for her to do that. For four hours, I sat on the chair outside and kept trying to talk to her, asking her for her name and telling her that things would be okay. It was strange that I didn't know what she looked like, and yet I felt something completely off about her. Her parents dressed her in strange blue dress, something completely out of fashion even for today's standards. I wouldn't forgive my mother if she took a picture of me wearing that. It hung way too low on her, oversized. The whole thing, including the sleeves, were far too large for her. Only the pole left over from the sun that was now gone remained in the sky. I was starting to get cold. She really didn't want to go inside the house. She refused to move. She was playing with her own fingers in front of her, nervous of everything. At one point I thought of just walking up to her and dragging her inside. I quickly changed my mind. I don't know how people did it. There's no way I could babysit if the child was going to act like this and then tell her parents that I treated her horribly. I looked out into the street, begging for time to fly by, worried that if I stepped inside, the girl would run away or something. She really didn't want to be there. The phone rang inside the house, trying to watch for any reaction from the girl. I kept my eyes on her until I went inside and picked it up. Claire, Hey, sorry, I forgot to tell you earlier. Meg couldn't bring her daughter along today, but she asked me to thank you, and that next time she'll bring her along. Do you think dogs can see or know things that we cannot understand? This next story is called Elizabeth's Doll, and it's coming up after this. It was getting darker earlier than ever, not even six in the evening, and the light sensors outside flicked on almost automatically whenever the moths started coming along with their muffled buzzing tapping on the windows. Every night around this time. It was then when my dog, a large German shepherd, would begin barking at the door, reaching for his leash hanging on the key hooks by the frame. It was like this almost every night during the winter, and even though it didn't snow here, the nights were still cold. At first, I would grunt and complain about it. My dog was urging me to go outside and walk. Once we would get a few houses away down the street, he would calm down and stop tugging on the leash. And that was until we got to Peach Lane, the street behind my house. I remember going there to visit one of my friends to play Pokemon cards then, since he was the only kid with the Nintendo sixty four at the time, I'd sometimes grab my bike and head straight there. And even back then, the kids at school would talk about the corner house, the one diagonally behind mine, when that was too large for the lot it sat on, and maybe that's why they abandoned it. Nobody wanted to pay for it to be torn down and the owners didn't want to pay the fine. Well, that's a story Dad told us. Obviously I didn't understand it back then, but eventually it started making sense. But the kids would say at school was much worse than that. It was a story of a girl who went to our school and who one day stopped showing up. Everyone seemed to have an older cousin or a sibling that knew the true story of the girl. We often wondered if the girl in the photo by the principal's office was the same one. A seven year old girl standing by a bearded man and a police officer on the other side. They both smiled while the girl simply stared at the camera, ragged doll in her hand. Through all the stories I had been told, a substitute teacher once confirmed that the girl we were talking about was named Elizabeth, and that the picture on the wall in the administration office was from a time that the police came to the school. I talk about bullying. The girl had been teased for carrying her doll everywhere. I don't know. That's a story that we were told, and even though I barely remember it, I think she used to live in that house on the corner of Peach Lane. Thinking about it when I passed by always gave me the creeps, and I think my dog knew it. He would tug at the leash toward the house when we turned the corner, and he'd begin growling. The fence or what remained of it, was leaning into the property, and some neighbors had put an old couch on the porch to hang out in during the day. Nobody would say anything, and no one from the city seemed to care it was still there When we were passing by. My friend, the one that lived on that street, sent me a message on Instagram for my birthday, and he said that his mom had seen me walking around the block with my dog and that we should hang out sometime soon. The topic of the house came up and we talked about the time that we snuck in to look for the box with a thousand dollars. Hear me out, This makes no sense even for me, but as kids, things like these felt real. One of the older kids said that he saw a man drop off a box at the house and that inside of it was a thousand dollars. He went in grabbed it and that's how he was able to buy a game Boy. For those of us old enough to know, this was like the precursor to today's Nintendo Switch. Of course, a bunch of us in third grade would be excited about that, so we made a plan to go look for the box with a thousand dollars. We didn't know what it would look like, and nobody knew if the story was even true. It sounded like a cool adventure, and so my friend and I, along with another kid from our class, waited for each other to walk there by ourselves. I was laughing at the dms with this guy. I miss being a kid so much. Obviously, we didn't find anything except for a few old toys like a hot wheels car, a stuffed animal, and some doll clothes. I think it was then when things started to click in my head. I could feel my dog growling through the leash and onto my wrists as we walked past the house. I didn't like him barking so loudly like he always did, would trigger other dogs to bark, and soon the neighbors would start peeking out their windows. So this time, as I was passing by the house on Peach Lane, I tried to keep my head down. Suddenly, the cat peeking out of the corner of the back of the house didn't seem like a cat anymore, and my dog didn't seem to be wanting to go out for walks, rather to hunt something down. The house was right ahead on my right side. The tall windows above the door in dirty exterior walls made the place look like a castle when that was right against the front broken fencing. Indeed, the house was oversized. The old wooden doors right on the porch, with a chain across a doorknob and a bolt onto the frame, looked to serve a double purpose. In the backyard, I could see those tiny little eyes. I remember that I should have been keeping my head down. I tugged at my dog's collar as he stood on his hind legs, wrinkling his mouth and showing his teeth. Deep rumbled through his body, still running up the leash and through my arm. Headlights turned into the street, dropping the shadows away from the house. My head turned toward the house, once again, shatching the tiny silhouette to moving back behind the house. My heart was beating the rest of the walk home. Might ha taken years for me to connect things that had been so obvious. My dog whimpered as I opened the front gate to my house and removed his leash. He ran to the back yard and ran to a spot by the corner of the property, the one that was shadowed by the large house on Peach Lane. He ran back to the front door and stepped inside when I was sitting on the couch, I stared at the open door thinking. Thoughts raced through my mind about the tiny figure that roamed in its back yard, thoughts of Elizabeth at one points running around there too with her doll. It was strange to sit in the living room without the tee, beyond thinking about the past like this. The light censored to the porch came on once again. The moths started tapping on the windows. My dog ran from his water bowl and bolted through the gap in the front door. He growled and nod. I stood up and ran toward the side of the house and looked into the backyard to follow the deep growls like animals fighting. The neighbor's lights started turning on. Everything stopped. It had been years. There's no way that I can remember it correctly. Part of me thinks that the little red shoes he came back with we're on that photograph hanging off the legs of Elizabeth's doll. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kovarubias. You can find me on Instagram at Edwin Cove. That's e d w I n c o V. For more creepy content, be sure to check out my other shows, A Dark Memory, and if you're up for a real scare, listen to people share their scariest tales over on True Scary Story, available right here. We are listening until next time. Thank you very much for listening.