Mr. Tran

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. The stories in this episode bring along the unexpected. I hope you're ready. My name is Edwin. Here's a scary story. There was another fight in the bus that night, and oh god, how I wanted to quit. Sometimes it was always the same thing and in the exact same area. Driving down the long stretches of dark road right outside Los Angeles was exciting at first. I used to see them in the movies. The movie Speed was one of my favorites, and I always remembered that scene of the bus jumping over a freeway. I think it took place around here too. It was exciting at first. The training I did to get my license was with a group of truck drivers, all excited and scared when they had to dock a trailer or go in reverse to learn how to do that too. You know, I met a lot of friends and we kept in touch for a while, but just like with everything, we just sort of lost contact. I would spend long hours sitting there, always assigned to do the same route, seeing the same people, and yet nobody talked to each other. As drivers, we greet everybody, and maybe that's why I've made so many friends during my training. The bus was moving over one of the bridges where I had nowhere to pull over when the fight started. It was a kid, a high school kid most likely, picking a fight with this large man who had asked him to turn down his music. I felt kind of guilty. I never enforced those rules about people turning on their bluetooth speakers in there. I just assume that people will know to use earphones instead. I told him to settle down and had to get up in their faces. The kid went to the back of the bus and the other man stepped outside, saying he would walk the rest of the way. Was unfortunate. I liked working during the day a lot more. Nighttime was always full of this sort of stuff, tired people getting off of work, students coming home from school, and everyone mixing into this box with wheels with only one thing in mind, getting home. And that was on my mind too, To be honest, there was nothing else I hated more than to drive past the street that would take me straight to the parking lot where I would clock out. Just four more trips, I would tell myself. But I try and not to think about it too much. You know. It's kind of like when you have to go to the bathroom, the closer you get to it, the more you have to go. It was just me and the old lady with the McDonald's hat. She was either super happy or just tired and angry when she got on the bus. She worked late, and so far I had learned a few things about her, like how she lived by herself and how she brought a cheeseburger for her Chihuahua dog every single night. She told me that one time she forgot it and her dog. I got angry about it and almost bit her. Those little dogs are fears, so I believed it. She got off the door in the back. She waved at me, and I waved through the rear view mirrors, making sure that she stepped off properly. Before I pulled out of the bus stop. It was just another night. I turned the corner and then turned right again, watching the yellow reflective things that were right on the lane against the black asphalt. Then up ahead, I saw someone standing by the bench of the bus stop. I looked in their direction. It was a tall man nearly hitting the roof over the bench. He reminded me a lot of mister Tran, the man who came from his shop in downtown every single night except for Sundays. Watch your head, I know, he would say to me. Then I would just laugh with him about her inside joke. He loved talking about his kids and how they were going to be studying at USC doctor. Yes, doctors in the family, he would say. I felt proud of him, and then I thought back on my own kids. They had just gotten caught with vapes and getting in fights at school. Still, I kept my smile all the way up to my eyes as I watched him step off every single night. I pulled over, hit the brakes, and opened the door, and I waited. Some people carry things and bend down to pick them up before climbing onto the bus, but this was a little longer than normal. Do you need help, I spoke out into the flickering lights of the bus stop. There was no response. I looked out the windows and dimmed the lights inside. The exterior became clear blueish street lamps lighting up part of the road up ahead. I unbuggled my seatbelts and went for the door, grabbing the edge of the exit and peeking outside. There was nobody there. I stepped back into the bus, looking at the monitor. Dang it, minus five minutes. Again I was a little behind schedule. I put on my seatbelt as I was pulling away from the stop, hearing the wind and creeping in through the cracks of it. The thing didn't see it well. Even though it had been quote unquote fixed several times, it always came back. Fortunately it wasn't too cold that night. I thought of mister Tran, and then my kids, and then how little we all know each other right there in my own little piece of the world. The role I was given, everyone working towards something better or to hang on to what they have. There were always people around that were out of it, especially late at night, so I thought little of the strange person who ran away at the bus stop. My mind races when I'm by myself and the bus. It was something about being alone. The next night, on a saturdy mister Trann and the McDonald's lady, the kids with their hot cheetos, the young lady with the book, and two new people climbed on at different stops along my route. They never spoke to each other, and yet knew each other very well. Everyone knows quiet, and most nights everyone had a nice time on my bus. But just like every night, they started leaving through the back door, waving goodbye, one of them asking how to transfer to the other Lions that would take them to Long Beach. And soon it was just mister Tran and the second to last seat from the back, silently looking out the window. The poor man was overworked, and we both knew it. His eyes would close on their own, and it seemed like he would wake up mid conversation. At times he leaned his head against the window. I tried the corner and then turned right again, the same yellow reflective paint guiding my poor tired bus back to the station. Up ahead the bench from the bus stop, and there the tall man hunched over, turning his face toward the bus, his black shoes on the red paint of the edge of the curb. The white socks could be seen. And I'm telling you, just like mister Trann, I opened the door and again I waited. The bus hissed. As I used the neely mechanism to get closer to the curb. I could see his silhouette walking slowly toward the door, his head down, half of his face covered by the collar of his raincoat. I could see the thinning top of his head as he came from the right side of the door. He looked up. It was mister Trann. I couldn't help but let out a gasp, and then glanced over to mister Tran in the second to last seat on the back of the bus. He hadn't woken up, and I looked back at the door once again. The strange man was gone. I took a few seconds to think about what I had just seen, and took several deep breaths before I started the bus back up and shut the doors. I scanned those mirrors like a hawk. Had he crossed the street? Had he hidden behind one of the signs or behind the bench. I tried not to think about it anymore, so I looked back down at the bright yellow lines the whole way until I got to mister Trant's corner. Mister Tran, your stop, I said, mister Tran, I said a little louder before taking off my seatbelt to walk over to him. The smile got wiped off my face when I turned around. I walked slowly toward the back, afraid. I had run this scenario in my head so many times, but never thought it would happen, not with mister Tran. His head was hunched over and it wobbled loosely. When I tried to shake him awake, mister Tran, I yelled and then took steps back. I turned around and tiled for help. There was nothing they could do. He was gone. I sometimes picked up their children right by usc doctors. They're doctors now. The whistler Dad used to scare us when we misbehaved back when we were kids, telling us about the strange creature that lurked in the dark, waiting right outside our windows. It would arrive for several reasons, from things like not brushing our teeth, to talking back or messing up with our chores. There were several things that made us really believe it, and the entire place where we used to live did not help one bit improving us otherwise. The house was a renovated farm on a few acres of land, and we had room for horses and other animals, but we were still adding them. At the time, we only had one horse and about a dozen chickens that kept dying. We kept buying more for some reason, even though Mom argued that we should focus on fixing up the roof to the place where they lived. One time, we overheard Dad talking on the phone about the whistler, and it creeped us out to know that he would talk to his friends about it over the phone. I think that's what made it real for us. The whistler would come by and kill the chickens, and instead of fixing a roof or whatever, Dad wanted to install a security fence and cameras. Now so back then, cameras were expensive, and that's what Mom and Dad disagree with. Why I spend so much on a dumb theory about this so called the whistler, Mom argued. But still they only seemed to talk about it between themselves, and whenever either I or my sister would hear something about it, we would call a meeting and run up to the attic to talk about it. We pretended to take notes and records of the sightings and reasons why the whistler was real. We had read a few books about detectives and mysteries, and that's about as exciting as life in an old house with the field was going to get. We told our friends at school about it, and one of them, Kara, would come over sometimes to do our investigations into the whistler, and on some weekends we were allowed to camp out in the yard and start a fire. My sister was the first one to fall asleep. Always, Kara would fall asleep shortly after, so I was the only one that would stay up later than usual until the battery from my rechargeable flat light would die and I would lay there listening to the stomach's growl as they thrashed around like wild animals while they slept. It was a Friday and Kara's dad was unloading her sleeping bag and the cool tent, which had room for six people, when I saw my dad bring along the medal cages with another set of chickens. I remember thinking to myself that I shouldn't even look at them. They had no idea what would be waiting for them. I was also slightly angry at my dad for buying more. My dad and hers talked for a little while, mentioning the chickens and about purchasing other animals. While they talked, they asked us to grab the cages and take them to the chicken coop. The poor things looked up at us, twitching their necks from side to side as they tried to figure out what we were about to do with them. We opened up the cage and they climbed up the little ladder and into their new home. Neither of us said anything, simply staring into the opening of the chicken coop, somehow knowing what would happen. My sister scared us when she showed up from around the corner a jar of peanut butter in her hand. She asked what we were doing and if we could camp out by the chickens instead of under the old maple tree. We told her that if we got that close, we were not going to be allowed to start a fire, but she insisted, and we finally settled on having the tent face the chickens, but farther away into the field. Smiling, she turned around and started walking away before turning back to us to ask me to open the jar for her. That night, we started the fire, ate our usual fish sticks and spaghettios and started talking about random things. For us at the time, deep talks were about what the stars were and stuff about our parents also boys. Soon my sister fell asleep with her dirty socks facing the entrance to the tent, but Carrie and I opened up the window of it and covered up her feet with the jacket and shined our flashlights over to the chicken coop. The chickens made noise whenever we did that. Insects were buzzing around, and the wind was starting to rattle the trees in the distance. Then the frog started doing their thing. Kara put her head down for an instant and ended up falling asleep on her own arms. Again, it was just me. I remember thinking that I needed to zip the window thing back up, but I put my head down too, and soon I was asleep. Then, in the middle of the night, the faint sound of a song like the wind started surrounding the tent. I opened my eyes and looked out the opening, but the song it wouldn't stop. I tapped on Kara's arm, but my words wouldn't come out. She shook it away and rolled over. Suddenly, the horror started nighing and the chicken started to rucous inside the chicken coop. I could hear their wings flapping and making their chicken noises wildly across the inside of it. But then everything went quiet. I shined the light over to the entrance of the chicken coop, toward the tiny little window in the middle of the wall. Inside, I saw the silhouette of a head, too small to be human, but the exact same shape. Its eyes reflected back at me like a cat. Is that what it was? I shook Kara awake, telling her that there was something with the chickens, and asked her to stay awake that I was going to run to the house to get my dad. Kara didn't get the chance to disagree. I unzipped a tent and took off, running toward the house. I opened the door and then called out for my dad. While I was in there, you heard a scream coming from the outside. Dad jumped out of the bed and ran downstairscribing a shotgun on the way out. Kara and my sister were running toward us a thing in the chicken coop. They said it was a pale, skinny man with a wide smile. As he slowly walked away. Dad put his shotgun down. I told you girls the whistler. This next story is called Learning to Crawl, and it is coming up right after this. Mom was right. As much as I hated admitting it that those books had spent upwards of two hundred dollars on CALLI was better off with the food that she suggested. At only four months old, she was sleeping almost at my same patterns, And yet it was because of Mom. I try to argue about the authors and mom clubs and all that, but hey, mom knows best. At least this time, we had moved into her house after Mike struggled with keeping his new job and I was fired from mine for reasons that I suspect had nothing to do with my performance, but for having a baby and requesting additional time off. Who cares. I was glad to have my family at that point. We accepted the help my parents were offering. We would stay at their place for a time until we got back on our feet, and then we could thank them with more frequent visits to see their granddaughter. Sounded like the perfect deal to me. Mike appreciated the help, and we accepted. My childhood bedroom was the same as I remembered it, nothing strange, if anything, just dustier than I remembered it and a lot smaller. I went through the old boxes in the closets and found the many notes and drawings I had made when I was little, and I went back in time briefly. When Mom announced that dinner was ready downstairs, the place seemed quiet. Many of the neighbors had moved to better areas, and I didn't know that my parents had been surrounded by mostly empty houses in the lots around theirs. After dinner, Mom went straight to bed, and I gathered a few blankets from the closet downstairs and went back up to check on Cally. She opened her eyes wide and laughed. I would get her out of this, We would get her back into a house of hours. I promised her. Her sleeping schedule was spot on. Mom was right. Kelly went to sleep, and I knew that she was deep inside her dreams. At that moment, I got ready for bed while asking Mike why he had been so quiet this whole time, But he ignored the question in the best way he knew, how, by trying to make me laugh. I knew it would be hard on Mike too. This thing, after all, would only be for a little while. We turned off the lamps and I stared up at the ceiling briefly before I too, drifted off the sleeve to the sounds of that old house and its many cracks and pops. It was almost two in the morning when Mike shook me awake. I grabbed onto his arm, trying to catch my breath and fill up my chest with air, even through the heavy shirt, wet with sweat, feeling like it was freezing. When he got the blanket off of me, he told me that I had been screaming. He was sitting next to the bed, holding Calli in his arms, the lamp on behind him. My apology faded in volume as I reflected on what my nightmare had been about. I could see the lady by the foot of the staircase, her legs twisted and blood dripping away from her foot. She used to make me afraid of going to bed when I was little and I had forgotten all about her. My sister and I both would talk about the woman at the foot of the stairs. It would make stories about her and draw her in our notebooks, probably some of them still in some box in the closet. At that very moment. He would scream and run from the hall sometimes at night, claiming to have seen her. Dad was more open to these types of stories, so when we finally annoyed him, he took us to the library to work on a project. He said it would be like a school project, except just for fun. Our job was to research the house to finally stop believing this nonsense. But what we found even surprised him. A woman had indeed died in that house after falling from the top of the staircase, and the story has it that she lived alone by choice. The choice was that she had chosen to get rid of her children, and it had a whole story behind her. And Dad got really into it, but called off the whole research thing because we weren't old enough. That's all I remember about Teresa Maybury, the woman who died. We kept seeing her for a while, though you would hear her cries in the middle of the night. I always try to keep our screams to ourselves by covering our own mouths, but the floorboards and the house made it impossible to even go to the bathroom at night without waking anyone else up, especially Mom. I had never told Mike about it. Actually, it wasn't about to. It was late and we were both exhausted from the move. I said sorry once again and fell asleep. Mom had gone grocery shopping that morning, and the sun was seeping into my dusty room through the window, just like I remembered it. If I closed my eyes once again, I could imagine the morning craziness to get ready for school. Poor mom. I went out to two job interviews that day, and Mike had good news about one of his a restaurant looking for a cook. We settled in for the night. After a generally positive day. Things were looking up. I flicked off the lamp and went to sleep. I was peeking out the railings of the second floor, a few feet away from the staircase. The flowery dress of the woman at the base of the stairs was torn from one side, and her twisted knees shook up and down as she took her last breaths. In real life, I knew that she was not a good woman, but in my dreams it went up another level. I was afraid of her getting up and coming after me, something I thought she had done already multiple times. I looked down at my own legs short I was six years old again. I was running back to my room as Mom opened her door, yelling at me to go to sleep. I closed the door to my bedroom and the cries of the woman at the base of the stairs. I sat up on my bed, awake. Now Mike was turning around on his side. The baby was fast asleep on the crib next to us, and my shirt was damp with sweat. Once again, I stepped out into the hallway and to the bathroom, the floorboards creaking underneath me as I made my way there, when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I looked down to the base of the stairs, the moon shining through the curtainless window of our living room, the cries along with the twisted legs of the woman. A puddle of blood ran next to her feet, a red shoe by her tangled up dark hair. She twisted, grunting and crying like thunder and wind on the wooden floor downstairs. All those times I had seen her when I I was only a kid, and I had never seen her move like that. Then her arm twisted the other way, her palm landing by her neck as she pushed herself up. Suddenly I was a kid again, hiding behind that railing of that worn down staircase. My legs gave out and I dropped the ground, my mouth unable to let in even a breath of air. She dragged her body to that first step. I thought of my older sister and I standing safely on the second floor, looking down at her. Her arm twisted onto the second step. I thought of all the nightmares and the time I teach her found my drawings of the woman at the base of the stairs threatening our parents with social services. Her legs jerked right by her head on the third step. I remembered the screams for my sister that would wake me up as we turned on the lights to talk more about it. Her head turned up to look at me as she threw her dead leg forward, a slab of her face dangling right off her right cheek, her eyes completely gone. Terresa Mayberry, the way she ended up alone in that house. My arms were shaking. I could hear my elbows rattling as they tapped against the wooden railings. She opened her mouth, the jaw now dangling in front of her neck. I try to get up, but I was only able to throw myself back, my legs now pointing right at her. I try to scoop myself toward the wall, but nothing worked. My voice, my legs, my arms, they wouldn't respond, I couldn't see her in that staircase. I knew she was there. I heard the taps as she crawled up another step, and then again, then again, Tap tap Tap. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwinkom. For more creepy story, search for True Scary Story on your podcast player. I also make a podcast called a Dark Memory. Tap follow to stay updated with the show, and as always so you can find me on Instagram and Twitter with my username Edwin Cove. That's E d w I n coo V. Until next time, Thank you very much for listening.