Little Stranger in the House

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. It's funny how having a baby can change you so much. I mean, aside from how the same clothes don't seem to fit you as well as it used to, or the way that you begin to squeeze in naps at random times, I think it also does something to your mind. My son was not even a year old when we moved into a new apartment. The place was old, I'll give you that, and it was technically the first floor in regular house. I had the staircase blocked off by a door that the upstairs neighbor had access to. The neighbor would walk in through the front door and see the staircase, while we had to use what used to be the case door that faced the backyard and parking spot. The floors were made up of thin wooden panels, so you could hear the guy upstairs wake up, go to the bathroom, and then walk back to his room. I kind of knew his whole schedule. At around eleven in the morning, he would get up again, go to the kitchen, and turn on the television. This happened every single day. I think he went to work around noon because that's when the loud stomps would work their way down the stairs, slam the door, and head out. Even though he was loud, there was something about knowing that there was someone upstairs that made me feel a little more relaxed. In fact, I had not felt at ease ever since we moved in, and it was tough to pinpoint it because I had my kid, and instead of going back to my parents' house where I lived with my husband, it went straight to this old place, a place where could call or own. Finally, they are just creeks from an old house. Jim would say, it's nothing to worry about. But there was something to worry about. When I'd hear a creek around the kitchen area, I would roll off the couch and sit up straight to see if I could hear it again. I thought of every option out there, like rats or a cat outside, maybe the old pipes of the house were acting up, or something even worse that the house falling. But no, those sounds were not those sounds made by an object. The thing was made by something moving around the house. I eventually figured it out. Our floor was noisy too. On some areas. Not all of the floorboards creaked, but the ones that did were loud enough to wake up even the guy who lived upstairs, high pitched and slow, depending on how long it took you to step away from it. Jim suggested that we label it with chalk, and we did for a few days, but the circle kept getting smudged away until it was nothing but a blurry patch of dust on the floor by the entrance to the kitchen area. Jim was probably not paying attention and would step on it anyway, and if he could not follow simple chalk markings, he would definitely not follow it if we labeled it with a sharpie, which he was quick to suggest. I didn't even bother complaining about it, but hopefully that gives you an idea of just how annoying the squeaking floorboard was to both of us. I honestly did not know why I didn't simply put a house plant over it, or was some type of furniture something that was in the way that would not let me step over it. There was something about it. I would walk over to the kitchen and squeak, I would come back to the living room and squeak again. But it was when I was by myself that I hated it most At first I thought it was my imagination, or that maybe it was coming from upstairs. But in the middle of the day, when I was alone with my son and I could hear it possible, but it was clear as day coming from the entrance to the kitchen. One day, just before Jim got home from work, I was watching the television in my living room, my head on the armrests closest to the kitchen, when I heard a half squeak, the way that it sounded when we stepped on it by accident. I sat up immediately and looked over to the kitchen when I heard the rest of the sound, and I saw a small silouette walking down the hallway and into my son's room. I stood up right away and ran over to his room, looking behind the door, behind his crib, under the furniture, and even in the closet door. The window was just how I had left it. The sigh of relief, I looked down at the baby, looking straight up at the ceiling, his little eyes following something more moving around the room from corner to corner. I looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there. I heard another sound again the front door. I grabbed my baby and walked over to it. It was Jim. He asked me what was wrong, but I could not even begin to explain what had happened. He grabbed the baby and I went to the living room, trying to process what it could have been, the sounds of the TV sort of fading in the background. I was in bed when I told Jim about it, about the strange thing that I had seen. I think you phrased it as something like, if I tell you what I have seen, do you promise not to get scared. My heart stopped for a second, but I had to know, so I agreed. And then he told me that he had seen two little girls playing in the yard a couple of times. He hadn't thought anything of them. Maybe they were to the neighbor's children. I was a bit relieved, honestly, thinking that maybe one of them had snuck in because they happened to know the people who lived there before us, you know, the way neighbors didcome close to each other like that. But Clara, he said, sometimes I see them playing in the middle of the night. Jim used to get up in the middle of the night to use a bathroom, and every single time he did, he would wake me up. Sometimes I would watch him next to me when he thought I was asleep. I'd see the way he would look at the ceiling, lost in thoughts. It sort of made sense now. It was again the middle of the day and my son was on the rug between the television and the couch. I was dozing off. I don't know something like that. He had already learned to crawl by that time, and I wanted to stay awake in order to keep an eye on him, just to make sure he wouldn't go into the bathroom or the kitchen by himself. But he was okay. I could feel him holding onto my arm as it dangled off the side of the couch. Occasionally he would sit up and lean his head against my hand, pressing it lightly against the couch. I was half awake when I felt his hand grab my arm once more, but his hand was ice cold. I reached instinctively to grab it to feel if he was okay, and I felt a cold arm before I opened my eyes, and I stared directly at the dark eyes of a little girl standing right in front of me. Her mouth was wide open and her dark hair was tangled behind her. I looked around the room, letting go of this thing that had been standing right in front of me, and I got up to see my son leaning on the other side of the couch by my feet, playing with one of the toys I had laid out for him. I rolled out of the couch, away from the girl who had not moved. I grabbed my baby and ran tover the kitchen door, and I waited out there for as long as I could before I had to go back in to feed my son. When I think back on that old house, it's tough not to believe that something else is out there. I don't know who that little girl was, what she wanted, but I'm glad we moved back into my parents' house at the end of that month. The following story is called Cemetery Knights, and it is coming up right after this. Perhaps the strangest thing that happened to me took place back in two thousand and five, when I was barely starting to get used to the Internet on my phone. I was already an adult, early twenties, and had landed a job at a local cemetery. I was not burying bodies or anything, but rather I was trying to keep them from getting out. No, not zombie style, just like you hear about it in the movies. Groups of people from the Dallas area were coming down to dig up some of the grave sites, mainly to steal jewelry and other nick knacks that were probably worth thousands of dollars. I wasn't around when they had been buried, With most of the gravestones being labeled from before the nineteen hundreds. Based on some of the photographs around the older part of the cemetery, we could all tell that these people had money, and understandably, the cemetery at the time looked amazing. It had views of the hills in the distance with protected areas along with trees that would grow these beautiful pink flowers in the summer, lots and lots of shade, and lots of space. And if things looked a a lot more busted up at that time generally than back then, this place must have been paradise. Places that the normal person would dream of being able to rest in for the rest of eternity. But along with wealth comes the fear of losing it, and the dead were no exception. I joined in after the fourth break in. A man had come down from the city and hired two local weirdos to help him with the hall. We all knew of them, Kenny, the man from the popcorn Barrel restaurant, and the son of one of the farmers named Bill. They were always up to no good. We all knew that they had landed in jail a few times for starting fights outside of a couple of stores. Back then, just like with other cities in the county, money was tight. The main distillery and the two factories that processed caned food were relocated to one of the bigger cities, and many people lost their jobs. Some of them were smart and left, and I was dumb and moved into the town, lured by the cheap house I found. I lived by myself, and I don't mind taking a risk every once in a while, so I made a huge payment and agreed to come in the following week to begin fixing it up. Two months later, I was moved in and searching for work. I got to know Kenny and Bill when I bumped into them separately at the gas station, but both of them in the same manner, standing outside by the pro paintings, drinking out of a can. Kenny complimented my truck when he first met me, but Bill was more confrontational with questions about where I was from and what I was doing there. Both conversations ended with standard SiO rounds. I could tell just by looking at them that they were up to no good. The cameras had caught them both lurking around the cemetery during the day and then come back at night. They were reversing into one of the few parking spots that were in front, and then they walked the rest of the way to the grave sites, bee lining to the older part of the cemetery. Since nobody visited the areas, the cameras usually would catch nothing, well not nothing. It caught a few things, but the manager would normally brush them off as regular cemetery mystery stuff. It felt like he was hiding something from me too. But the time Kenny and Bill showed up, along with the third guy that waited in the car, we saw them struggle with a machine that they brought. It drilled into the ground and loosened up the rocks and dirt. Then they brought shovels and got to work. It was disgusting the way that they did it, The machine wouldn't reach the casket at the bottom, and they instead started breaking the lid with shovels. It didn't take much for it to collapse, since it was probably over one hundred years old, and I was able to see them laugh. They would grab the rings, necklaces, and boxes of what I assumed was money or gifts by the dried up corpses. The skull rolled right off, and the suits of the dead man was falling apart without moving. When they lifted the cuffs of his jacket and pulled out the fingers, the hands cracked and fell off when they took a watch, and who knows what else. They dragged the machine with a drill back to the truck, showed the driver the bag of things, and the truck rolled the way into the dark street with its headlights off. I'm telling you these guys were not the smartest out of the bunch. They chose a grave sight right by the night vision cameras, and they were the only two in the entire cemetery that would record without turning on the spotlight nearby. The second recording that the manager had was of Bill by himself walking over to one of the grave sites by the wall that faced the steeper hill. He came along with a shovel and started digging for a couple of hours. The man struggled. He took several breaks until you could see into the distance. As he set the shovel down, ran directly across the hole he was digging, nearly falling in, then stopping to look behind him. He circled around the area carefully this time, as he watched over to where the shovel was left. He picked it back up, but it didn't take long for him to jump once more, dropping the shovel and trying desperately to shake something off his back. He hopped around for a few seconds, took a look behind him once more, then grabbed a shovel and walked back into his car. I fast forwarded the tape to catch him arrive once again. Another man behind him. I could tell it was Kenny, the scrawny looking guy in the beer gave it away pretty quickly. He walked over, carefully, inspecting the sight by the heap of dirt and rocks that Bill had left behind. They talked about it for a bit, and Kenny took the shovel to start digging. Once again, both were being very careful and keeping a lookout behind them went out of nowhere. They both jumped forward and turned around at the same time. They both froze in place for a good while until Bill snapped out of it and grabbed the shovel once again. They started digging quicker this time, and once again he broke through the top of the box, grabbed whatever he could find and showed a few things to Kenny, and then they threw the dirt back and they walked away into the streets in the middle of the night by themselves, leaving the car behind. The manager of the cemetery said that he had captured footage of both of them another time after that in a similar style, and that once he confronted them, even with the police, the report couldn't even be filed against them because the footage was questionable. There could have been anybody, they said, corrupted system, but the fourth time they couldn't deny it. They were digging in one of the better grave sites, this time one of the few spots in the old part of the cemetery that looked much nicer than the rest. When Kenny turned around, the camera glitched at that instant, and kept going back and forth between a blank screen and footage of him running up to Bill. They both looked over to the edge of the cemetery, seeing some invisible entity apparently walking over to them. The screen kept flickering until both the men disappeared death by fear. The town said. Both their faces were stretched out, their jaws nearly reaching their chest, and their eyes duck wide open. He had gotten what they deserved. I knew they had died for doing something dumb, but had no idea I had been there. So what was I there to do? I asked the manager of the cemetery. The problem was gone, right. He took out another tape from the drawers under the computer desk at the office. We need to take care of something else, he said as he pressed play. It was nighttime and the time around the screen read zero two nineteen am. A man in a suit walked from the edge of the cemetery on the right, by the first grave that Bill and Kenny had destroyed, and toward the center of one of the yards. He reached the front of one of the headstones and just stood there, no movement, no swaying, perfectly still. The manager fast forward through the footage about two more hours until the man twitched his way back to where he started. I asked him who he was, and he said that nobody knew. He had shown the footage to the police and the other cemetery maintenance staff, and nobody knew who he was. I watched the video over and over again, and after the second night, by the end of my shift, the tape was still looping on the screen. When I looked up, That's when I noticed something on the screen. I paused it and rewinded. Yes, right before dawn, a truck drives away from the cemetery. What it meant, I had no idea, and that's all I had. I worked for a couple of years there, the man with the suits appearing every once in a while on the cameras, and with the rumors that kept spreading about Old Kenny and Bill the way they had left the earth made me feel uneasy. Nobody really knew what had happened with both of them and why they had left the earth the way that they did. But one theory I believed. They say that they had made a deal with the devil, while others say that the dead came back for Revenge. I'm happy to hear your comments and messages on the story, so thank you for that. And if you want to reach me, you can find me via the description of this episode or on Instagram at edwin Cove. That's eed wncov For even creepier story, search for true scary story right now on your podcast player. Thank you for listening. Let's see as soon