Mom's Bedtime Stories

I know you like stories of the strange and unexplained, so I need you to check out Jim Harold's Campfire. It's where real people share their true spooky stories in their own words. The concept is simple. Jim talks to everyday people about their strange encounters and publishes it as a ninety minute episode every week. There's no exaggeration or anything. The stories basically speak for themselves. I recently told a story on there, so let's see if you can spot it. And there's more stories too, like the one about a child who had vivid past life memories or the one about a woman who found a ghost in her bed. Now, not all the stories are horrifying. Some are heartwarming, like a visit from a past loved one or a peaceful near death experience. Perhaps Regardless, they are true and fascinating, as told by ordinary people who've had extraordinary experiences. Now do me a personal favor. Tune into Jim Harold's Campfire on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listened true scary stories again. You can find it by searching for Jim Harold's Campfire Welcome to Scary Story podcast. The following story is simply an experience, no answers, no conclusion, and if your mind completes the story, I would love to hear about it. It's how longtime listeners might remember how this podcast used to be. My name is Edwin and here is a scary story. You can ask my friend Sarah and she'll tell you the same thing. I will never go camping. During high school, the guys wanted to do this thing where we would go and hang out by the lake, and I was excited about it until I realized that we would have to drive into Lake Johnson, the one at the edge of the woods. It wasn't normal anymore. Had I thought about moving out to New York or Los Angeles to avoid the whole thing, if I could only save up the money. I was still a teenager and all these plans were only dreams. I needed to get away from this area. Back then, it was not that big of a deal since I could avoid it, although growing up I got made fun of a lot because of it. I missed science cap and most summer camps for middle school. No matter what my dad and mom said, I wouldn't go. I tried to one time. It turned out to be a huge problem because I refused to get on the bus. Once everything was ready, everyone was waiting for me, and I just sat there and cried, holding up the bus until the teacher called my dad at work to come pick me up. It's how I got my nicknames, scaredy Annie, Annie Boo, the one who was afraid of her own shadow, the one who needed someone to go take her to the bathroom at night. It was a big deal writing all this down. Things I couldn't remember were suddenly coming up left and right. I thought my parents understood me, although they passed it off as me just being a regular kid, one who was easily scared. But it wasn't until high school when they realized that this wasn't normal, and they forced me to go see a doctor, a therapist who could fix me. They said, was I going to be a grown up and still be afraid of doing my own laundry in the basement. All of these things I got to remember once I went through my journals, the ones I wrote back when I was a kid, I used to be afraid of the dark, and not in the sense that you were imagining it, not that I could simply hide myself under the covers and feel better. It was of what hit out there lurking. I could not explain it to anybody else until I started reading a journal by this woman who talked of something similar to me. It was because of her that I started writing my own. Her story was the scariest I've ever read in all of my research and trying to find out what these things are. I know it sounds made up, and trust me, I struggled with this too, but I've seen things in the dark. They move in the night quickly, and they have their own unique set of behaviors that you start to identify. It's as if you knew them at one point. You know, like when you walk through the same alley that you used to walk when you were a kid, and you remember the same garage doors with their different colors and shapes, hoping that the neighbor's dog doesn't scare you this time. It's like that you know, your mind remembers it, but you're not quite sure how. The journals were in regular lined notebooks, up in boxes and along the book shelves, behind the books of neatly organized school text books and work books for my classes. I didn't want just anybody to find them had always been a very private person, especially after being afraid of the world. I don't know why, but I thought about turning it into a book, but I updated it every once in a while, sometimes every day, and sometimes two or three times per year, so I figured I had already broken the rule and that it would never work. It started off with my description of my family, four of them, my mother, father, and my older brother, who eventually starts having trouble sleeping. Nothing happens, and I thought it would just be me talking about my crushes and other things from school. But eventually I found an entry when I talked about a conversation with my brother where he told me what he suspects is keeping him awake. Then he asked me, beg me to avoid the bedtime stories, say no to the bedtime stories, and just go to sleep. And then I found the entry, the one I called the origin story. I used to title my entries, and that first one from nineteen ninety seven started off with I couldn't sleep last night, just like my brother. In it, I mentioned thinking that he's staying up at night or sneaking into the living room to watch TV, and that maybe that's where he's getting the bedtime stories, perhaps some creepy show like the ones he used to like. I then go on and on about things that I did that day, including how we named my friend's new dog, and I kept updating that journal. About a week later, I said the same thing, that I couldn't sleep, and then I began to explain my day, mentioning how I got locked in the basement by accident and I had to wait for my dad to come home from work to let me out. You could imagine the sense of relief knowing that I had found a possible explanation for my fear of the dark. Then I mentioned mom and her bedtime stories. How I heard noises outside my bedroom and watched the door creak open as my mom peeked inside the room and asked if everything was okay. When I told her that I couldn't fall asleep, she offered to tell me a bedtime story. In that specific entry, I mentioned the warning from my brother to say no to the bed time time stories, but it was mom and mother's rules are stronger than brother's rules, or so I said in the journal entry, and so my mom stepped into the room and sat at the edge of my bed, looking right at me without turning on the lights because they would wake me up even more. In a faint whisper, she began, And then I wrote what I remembered of Mom's bedtime story. Surprised that I was even able to do that. Although I'm not sure how accurate it is, given that I was young and might have made a few things up to make the story make sense, still, it was not something I could have come up with on my own. No way. Anyway, here's what the story was about. There was once a girl who lived in a house with her mother, only her mother, who loved her very much. The girl wanted to go outside to beat with her friends, but her friends were bad kids and wanted her to steal candy and toys and bread from the corner store. Please mother, let me go out and play, and I I won't misbehave, she begged her mother. Her mother. Her loving mother agreed and let her go outside, But the girl came back after a very very long time, long after the lights on the street had turned on. The mother waited outside for hours past midnight now, and she would not come home. So she gathered her neighbors and asked them to go look in the woods behind her house, quiet woods that silence all voices and screams, and they called the police and people from the neighboring towns to look for the girl. She never came home. The mother, in the same clothes she had been wearing that night, wandered the streets looking for her daughter for weeks. Since she wouldn't eat, she grew thin and weak, and one day collapsed in the middle of the street and died. A year later, when the house was going up for sale and needed to be cleaned up, they got rid of the rotten food and spiderwebs and finally opened the basement door, only to find the dried up corpse of a young girl leaning on the other side. Afraid of her mother's wrath, she had tried to sneak back into the house without her mother finding out. The basement window had been opened, easy for her to climb into, too tall for her to climb out. It was a pretty bizarre story in that journal, But I continued in the journal by saying, how I, now, with my eyes wide open, was able to see the shadow of my mother walking out the door and closing it. Good night. She whispered as I turned my head over and heard the ticking of the clock until the cold blue color from the window started lighting up my room. I could remember it clearly, as though I had gone back in time. The following entries, I would mention more and more bedtime stories. Some I could remember, and others I simply mentioned, saying that I had made myself forget that stories of a mother and a daughter who disappeared one day. Why my mom would scare her child like that in the middle of the night was beyond me. But I was obsessed with my journal, and although I didn't know if it would help me figure this out, I knew it couldn't hurt. I was tired of being afraid all the time, so I kept journaling. But I was glad I did, because it was an eye opening experience reading something like that, And I think that's why I started liking autobiographies and memoirs instead of the typical novels my friends were reading in high school. There was more to that. Whenever I would mention the creatures that lurked in the night, I began to remember them again. It was although I was reading someone else's journal at first, long lost memories coming right back to me. When I was rereading everything, it felt like a secret, like this investigative reporting project I was doing for myself to get to the bottom of it, a thing that I could tell no one about, but needed to discover for my own sanity. I started getting images flashbacks of these creatures very vaguely. I remembered the way they would come through the doors, the cabinets and drawers that lined the walls of it, crawling like groups of snakes toward my bed. Some would stand and others would remain on the floor, and I could swear that they talked to each other whole night, whispering and pacing around the room in their own ways. Everything I found through books and websites at the library would eventually lead to other worldly creatures, in depth studies of elementals and demons, beings that did not belong to this realm. None of these theories pointed to them being anything good. A lot of the words that used describe them I needed to look up myself. They were all terrifying, but I felt like I was saving the answer for later. As I finished and reread those old journal entries, one question kept popping up in my mind. My brother had warned me he wanted me to say no to the bedtime stories. Why And even though I knew he would make fun of me for asking, I called him anyway. It took a bit for him to realize that this was a serious issue for me, and then he asked that I really want to know, and then he told me the rest of mom and her Bedtime Stories is coming up right after this. Stay with me. This episode is brought to you by Betterhelp. Listening to and sharing your stories is great. Setting up calls, emails, release forms, and the tech stuff that gets messed up sometimes is less fun. Finding that balance between what people expect from you and taking care of yourself is one of the biggest lessons for me so far this year, and therapy helps with that. Setting boundaries and learning how to cope with stressful situations in a positive way empowers you to bring out your best. It isn't only for those who've experienced major trauma. It's for everyone. If you're thinking of starting therapy, try Better Help. It's flexible and convenient because it's entirely online, and you can get started by filling out a brief questionnaire. You'll then get matched with the licensed therapist. You can switch at any time without any additional charges. Find more balance with better Help. Visit betterhelp dot com slash true Scary today to get tempercent off your first month. That's better Help. H e lp dot com slash true scary with Hello Fresh, get pre portioned fresh ingredients right to your doorstep, saving you money and trip to the grocery store along the way. 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Go to HelloFresh dot com slash scary story sixteen and use a code scary story sixteen for sixteen free meals plus free shipping. Again, that's HelloFresh dot com slash scary story sixteen and use a code scary Story sixteen for sixteen free meals plus free shipping. Cooking at home with HelloFresh is easy, fun and affordable. That's why it's America's number one milk it. My brother was a logical person. Anything having to do with science, math, or computer games. He was into. It showed in his personality too, how he would brush off anything that didn't make logical sense to him, like how colors match with one another when you're picking your clothes, or why people cry so much over dumb things. Knowing that about him made hearing his experience all the more bizarre. You see, he had asked my parents to stay for twenty minutes more after school because he needed to talk to his teacher about something. This was back in middle school and I remember because it was when I first got to see the school that I would be going to after leaving fifth grade. Dad and I walked to the classroom after parking the car, and the teacher talked to us about the importance of getting enough rest and if my brother played too many games at night because he seemed tired during the day. He said it was because of his games and the books he was reading, but I knew it wasn't true. He had been more quiet than usual around the house too. This was when I had made that entry about my brother having trouble sleeping, although I didn't know why, and I turned into a whole family thing with all of us making rules about when we could use the TV, peopul, turn off the lights at a certain hour, and even changed our dinner time to earlier in an attempt to help him. As my brother was explaining this to me over the phone, he asked if I remembered him asking me to say no to the bedtime stories. I said, yeah, I remembered what I told him that one time. Mom came in to tell me one My brother grew quiet over the phone and started asking me questions about it. What had Mom told me? And when had it happened. I tried to explain everything to him, but he seemed to grow even more impatient with what I was telling him. What had she told me, and what had Mom been wearing that night, how she had come into the room, and what her voice sounded like. He stayed quiet for a moment, until finally he started telling me about his experiences. He had been laying in his bed one night, again having trouble sleeping. Suddenly he started feeling very tired out of nowhere, and so he turned around to finally try to get some rest. And after a few minutes, he heard a tapping at the door, and then it cracked open slowly. He saw Mom at the door and watched her come in and sit at the foot of his bed, saying that a bedtime story would help him if he couldn't fall asleep. Even I was getting too old for bedtime stories at that age, and he was older than me, so I understood when he said that it was strange for her to do that. Not knowing what to say to her question, he stayed quiet as he started telling him the same story that she would eventually tell me, the one about the woman who lost her daughter, who was later found dead in the basement, and just like that, the way she had done with me, Mom simply walked to the door and shut it, leaving him creeped out that night, if anything, making it more difficult for him to fall asleep. Several nights after that, Mom came into his room again, offering another bedtime story. My brother, not knowing what to say, did not answer, and Mom started telling him another one, this one even more bizarre. From the foot of his bed, he explained, Mom started telling him the story of a woman who was a rope maker. She would spend her time on the machines in the back of the house, twisting and collecting material to make ropes that would get sent throughout the state, and had made a big business out of it until she learned that a man from one of the prominent families one in the area had hanged himself using her rope. The mention of the newspaper made the rope sell even more, and soon she went from two employees to twenty, until one day she saw the ghost of mister Gilbert sitting in the living room by the fire, deep bruises in a ring around his neck. Frightened by the whole thing. She rushed to the bedroom and waited awake until morning. She went straight into town and got hold of one of the offices of the business people Associations. She then put the business up for sale, and then sold it a week later, but it was too late for her. Thoughts of mister Gilbert, and suddenly other people with bruises on their necks kept visiting her at night, so she couldn't take it anymore and ended her life with the last of her remaining inventory. The whole time I was listening to my brother speak, I could tell that he had been affected by this as much, if not worse than I had. Perhaps I had been the only one to manage to forget the whole thing, and needed my old journals to remember everything. My brother had lived with the memories this whole time, but the stories kept coming, he said. There were many more terrifying bedtime stories. I would keep them awake for hours that would eventually start affecting his grades at school. Eventually all of us, aside from the daughter in the basement the ropemaker, there was also one about the cook in the kitchen, the mouse traps, and the one about the tall creature from the yard until he was finally able to say no to the bedtime stories. It was at that point when Mom stopped coming of his room. That's when she went into mind. All of those stories had long been forgotten. I mean, having to go through my journal to remember them was one thing, but it felt terrible knowing that Mom had been responsible for my fear of the dark all this time, and for my brother's trouble sleeping. Knowing what had happened the cause of all of this seemed to help, even though I didn't understand what her reasoning could have been, And even after changing up our entire lives to help us sleep at her and Mom, the same mom that would make us change the channel whenever a scary movie would come on, also told the scary stories at night. Just didn't make sense. Still, I noticed I was less afraid in general, and soon things started improving overall. By the time I had gotten to college, I had forgotten about the whole thing, and just like with my brother, it didn't seem to affect me at all. Time passed, and eventually I graduated, got married, and moved to a city nearby. But it wasn't until I went to visit my parents' house with my own family. Years later, when everything came back to the surface, it was like I was a child all over again when I heard the tapping on the door and then the creek. Mommy, mommy, I heard, in a faint whisper. I'm scared, I'm scared. My daughter had come into the room. She crawled into bed, explaining that a woman had come into her room to tell her a bedtime story. Was it, Grandma, I asked her as she shook her head. My daughter had a night light in that guest room, the one that had been my brother's old room, and it was thanks to that light that she was able to see what she looked like, short and dark hair, long arms, and a smile. But what really scared her or what should call the woman's friends? Small creatures, she said, that crawled out of the closet door and out of the drawers and the cabinets. Some crawled under her bed, others simply seemed to be talking to each other. And then she told the story of the mother and her daughter. Do me a favor and follow this podcast to get next week's story. You can get a hold of me by email if you have any questions, and you can also reach out via social media. I'll leave my contact info in the description of this episode. Story ideas and suggestions are welcome. Thank you very much for listening. Let's see you soon. Here are some scary news. We're throwing away an estimated five billion plastic hand soap and cleaning bottles every year. Five billion with a B. And even getting these to the stores is costly and wasteful because they're ninety percent water already, so it just costs a lot to ship it. That means even more carbon emissions. And that's where Blue Land enters a picture. Their mission is to eliminate single use plastic by reinventing cleaning products to be better for you and the planet. Here's what they do. 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