Nancy

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. A worker had forgotten what it was like to take the night shift, but he's about to discover why everyone hates it so much. It's not for the reasons that you're thinking. My name is Edwin, and here it's a Scary Story. It was eleven at night, two more hours until my shifts started, and it didn't feel that way. I had been texting with one of my co workers, Amanda, half the night, complaining about Markman's Warehouse, the despised clothing store. We both hated and work that. It's always kind of like that, isn't it With our co workers. I've become friends. We always talk about work, even when we don't want to. It's like a way for us to connect and bond complaining about work. But we all had the reasons to do so. You see, the place was owned by this man, Robert Markman, that had recently passed away, and just our luck, he happened to die during a visit to our store. I mean, he was pretty old, and it felt like he was really pushing it by staying at work visiting his other businesses in the area. At that age, the raisin some of us would call him, and it probably felt bad for a little while for saying that. Pablo, the security guard waited for us in the car when we came in the week that the owner died. He's the one that told us, but he also took out his phone and showed us how it happened. He was fixated on an idea that it wasn't just a heart attack, at least not one caused by only his age, but that he had seen something that quite literally scared him to death, and he had the reasons to believe something like that. Pablo was a big believer in ghosts and always had some type of video or tweet to show us ghost caught on tape or whatever. I think that's why he was so into his job. He got to look at the cameras all day, but this time he was onto something. In the video, you could clearly see the owner walking with one of his directors and the store manager toward the warehouse. Mister Markmans points at something seeming kind of upset, and the two women that were with him rush over and leave him standing there for a little bit. He looks around and then looks briefly at the camera and then stares directly toward the center of the store. He could tell that he saw something that terrified him because he tried to run, but instead his knees gave in and he dropped to the floor. The video has no audio, but you could see him screaming, his face stretched in an unusual manner, and then he tilts to the side and ends up sitting like that, his hands curled up by his chest under his neck. He freezes up and he just stays like that until the store manager comes back running. He just finds him there completely still. She screams, and the director comes in, and then two other people follow. From that day on, things started changing around there. They started getting some new hires to work the night shift, but no one would stick around long enough to be switched the daytime shift. Of course, it was incredibly boring, but it was easy, and as more and more people would come and go, Pablo started to notice a few things. You see, he would get along with everyone, especially with him being the only other person on site at night. They started talking with them about previous co workers, leaving that he was trying to get to the bottom of it. Not even the managers tried so hard, but Pablo was so into mysteries and detectives and stuff like that that had fit them. He wanted to figure it out, and I have to give him credit for that, although some of the answers were hard to believe even for him. The person before me on the night shift was this girl named Deborah, who had told pretty much everyone that she wanted to get into sales, but was all right with taking the night shift for now. Nobody liked it. I had enough seniority that I could say no to taking it, but I really didn't mind it. I probably should have kept my mouth shut about it, though, because I was the one that took her spot. When she left, her reasons were bizarre, and even though she seemed a little out there, I don't know, maybe something about the way she'd look at you, everyone believed her. Pablo once again showed us some footage on his cellphone of her running out of the back storage area, right around where Robert Markman, the owner, had died. You could see it. She looks off camera towards one of the windows and towards the center of the store, and then in shock, she tries to run away. She hits her knee on one of the work tables. And keeps rushing towards the front of the store. The front doors were locked by that time, but she used the emergency exit to get out and set off the alarm. Deborah I had told Pablo that she didn't quit, she was just suddenly off the schedule, so she stopped coming in. She also told them that she regretted telling the management what she had seen that night. Things had gotten tens around Markmans. Although it wasn't formally announced, rumors had it that we couldn't talk about ghosts or anything of that paranormal stuff around there. It's messing with employee morale. They said that after going through a hard time keeping employees around, it was affecting everyone. If we didn't stay quiet about it, we would all lose our jobs if it shuts down. Pablo had several theories, and that's what we talked about that night before work. When I showed up, I just started on the night shift myself, and yeah, it was super easy. Had so many movies, music, and podcasts loaded on my phone. It seemed like I was about to take three twenty hour flights back to back. My job was to organize a storage area and count items to receive the delivery from the trucks that would start coming in between three and four in the morning, and also to work on printing out price tags, labels, things like that. It was a bunch of things that no one wanted to do, but they were super simple. The only bad thing was a lack of sleep, obviously, but other than that it was fine. Well except for the thing about the ghost, or at least I thought it was a ghost. Being in a place where someone had died so mysteriously was definitely going to be creepy. But I remember hearing somewhere that people have probably died everywhere. Ever, thought about the streets to drive, in the sidewalks you take to work. At one point a car might have gone off the road, or someone might have taken out a weapon, drive by, trees falling, I don't know lightning strikes. But Pablo knew something that I didn't. You see, he had worked at Markman's for a while, and he had met the owner several times. He knew of some of his strange requests around the stores. He was very into keeping a hierarchy going, for example, made everything slower, but he liked to feel at the very top in charge. He didn't like being questioned even for his odd orders. Pablo showed me the video again of the footage of Robert's death. It was hard to see, both emotionally and quite literally, because he recorded the security footage on his phone from the TV monitor. But again we watched as Robert pointed to something, scolded the director and store manager, and them rushing over to fix it. That's when he stands around for a bit and again sees something by the center of the store, and then screams. People aren't quitting because of the ghost of Robert, Pablo said quietly. We were sitting in his old truck parked by the entrance of the delivery area of the store. The rest of the shopping center was empty by now, except for the security patrol car that did their rounds every half an hour or so. Even before you came in, Man, people have been complaining about something else. I waited for him to finish, and I didn't point this out to him, but I noticed the hand holding his phone was beginning to shake nervously. No one would be bringing this stuff up to anyone, you know, Gil and Debbie. He was referring to the director and general manager. No one could tell them anything either. They even went against me. At one point, Pablo continued, I almost got fired because of it. My alarm went off at that point I had two minutes to clock in. I'll tell you about it. Man. You're gonna be at the back storage area, right, Pablo asked, I'm still on the clock. I'll leave at four, but i'll stop buy a little later after I do my other rounds. I don't know why this guy had to ask. I mean, he could see literally everything inside the store and warehouse to do the security cameras well. I later found out that it wasn't exactly every corner of the place. Some of these areas were off limits, and I think on that night we found out why I didn't turn on any of my podcasts that night. Usually there might go to when I'm by myself, but since I listened to a lot of scary stories, I decided to hold off for a bit. I had actually started working the night shift a few years before this. Right there at Markman's. There was another coworker with me at the time, and lots more to do since it closed a little later and open earlier than it did now. But with theft and everything, they changed their hours. We rarely had to step onto the sales floor during our night shifts. There was almost nothing for us to do out there. Plus you were just setting off the secondary alarms, the beeping alarms. Who would call them. They were basically a soft beeping noise that sounded when a detected movement, I guess had some slack between something small like headlights casting shadows in the store, or the AC knocking something over and a window breaking or someone running across the floor, which would set off the real alarm. Either way, that alarm had been set that way for the longest time. When I first started, I didn't want to risk it because it's what security would see, and then they would report that to the owner, and he always had something to say, although he wouldn't tell us directly. Debbie would normally do that. I remember one time the AC wasn't working and I went in with basketball shorts and had to explain myself, even though we had no uniform, and it was well within store policy for us to do that. It's respect for the workplace, Debbie said, I don't know how I stayed there for so long, And so I got to work, getting used to the new roles by myself, everything written down in this makeshift manual that other coworkers started years ago. They even added their own notes to a book on things that we needed to do, what was important, what to ignore, and how long things would normally take to finish. There were several boxes to put the price tags on, so I got started with that, slowly getting into the groove of things, and suddenly I heard the beeping sounds from the secondary alarm. After a few seconds it stopped. The phone started ringing from the desk behind me. It was probably PABO. I walked over to it answered the call by pushing the blinking button. That thing had been upgraded in over a decade. Hey man, you were on the sales floor, no, I answered, I'm the only one here, right, I asked him. Yeah, Okay, no worries, you're good man. Don't worry. I'll tell you about it later. Don't worry about it. He hung up abruptly. But that was one don't worry too many. I think it was the way he said it. It was disturbed, and so I kept labeling away for a couple of hours and I finally got into it. So I started listening to my music, making time pass a little bit faster. I took off my earphones to go back to read the manual. I remembered that thing that made some notes on it too at one point, and forgotten all about it. Working in the front was a whole other world compared to this one. Part two of Nancy is coming upward after this, stay with me. Every once in a while, one of the shift leaders would leave a set, which was a few clothes, all in the smallest sizes available, to be brought up near the door and put on hangers so they would get unwrinkled overnight. I don't know if it worked, but hey, that's what the note said. The clothes would then get put up on the mannequins in the morning, and there was another set, an individual one that would be in a different size. It was very specific size fourteen pants, medium top, and usually had to search several boxes to find the perfect unseam length of it. I knew exactly of the mannequin they wanted it for, and everyone had at least two jokes about it. Although we were all pretty much creeped out, nobody really found out why, but for a while we had stopped getting the sets for some of the mannequins only kept the larger one. I never questioned anything. It just felt like there was no point to it. Plus, all the mannequins were creepy. They weren't the usual ones you see nowadays. I feel like they've gotten more stylish and even headless, handless and featless. But the owner was an old school kind of guy, and his obsession were these ultra realistic things that would scare even some of the customers. But there was one that even Pablo remembers from back when he started that everyone called Nancy's, the one with the specializing. The owner always wanted it front and center with the most recent arrivals, and no one knows for sure, but the workers used to say that the owner lost his wife or something and they felt bad for him overlooking his creepy obsession with it. One of my co workers joked that they looked like they would have made a good couple if he took off, like fifty years from him. I wouldn't hear a lot of those things too, but I never put much attention to them. I looked at the list and found the set request, but it didn't have a date on it. One of them was requesting a red top and the other a yellow one, so I had to open the door carefully in order to not set off the beeping alarm to glance at the mannequin, and I was able to see its dark hair tied up in a ponytail, the head looking straight ahead and away from me. For some reason, I felt a little bit better seeing that. But okay, so she wants the yellow set to myself, taking a note of it on the notebook they would leave for me. I finally found the set that the shift leader wanted for the morning and set it aside. I was about to continue with everything when my alarm went off again, scaring the heck out of me. It was break time already. I went out toward the back gate and found Pablo sitting in his truck looking at his phone. You ready, he said, as I got in the passenger seat. Yeah, so what happened? I asked, as he prefaced the story by saying he would have to go back to when he started. He didn't waste any time. Robert Markman was set in his own ways, but he didn't want security cameras at first because he thought that it would make people rely on them and therefore make them less vigilant. But soon the store started experiencing people stealing things. They would always blame the shoppers, but employees can be guilty of that too. There anyway, the point was that in order for the insurance to cover things like that, they needed alarms and security cameras. A guard would be a good thing too, and that's where Pablo came in. There were two security guards, one more on the floor while the other was overlooking the cameras and equipment. But this is where things started to get a little bit strange because Pablo, no matter how much he loves the ideas of the paranormal, he doesn't believe that it's a ghost creeping everybody out. You see, for a time, employees that would stay laid pass their shifts or by themselves near the sales floor would complain of hearing noises. At first, they blamed the rats, but since there was never any food there and the past control people were pretty good with their jobs, they dismissed it to just saying that it was the store settling. Things get moved around a lot during the day, they explained, so it made sense that maybe something wasn't placed properly on the shelves and they would shift. But it took one person, a young man that had been hired recently, to say that he saw Nancy the Mannikin move an arm, that it was clear as day, and that his reasoning sounded crazy. He admitted it, but the arm moved up and not down, which could be easily explained by gravity or a loose joint or something. It just wouldn't move in that direction. And we talk about it as normal now. But Brandon, the guy that saw it, wasn't shocked when it happened. People didn't call ambulances as easily as they do now, but the paramedics arrived in everything. He was dismissed or quit. No one really knows what happened. The story faded as it got passed down from co worker to co worker, and only Pablo claimed to know the truth. I mean he was there. Of course, back then, cameras weren't always in our pockets, and tape would be recorded over frequently, especially with security footage, so there's no record of it. Although Pablo saw it with his own two eyes. It was subtle if he admitted to that, but clear the thing had moved I smiled as he told me that, wondering if he would just admit to lying about his story, but he looked at me, reding the eye, his lips trembling as he continued in order to not hear more about it. Mister Markman had the cameras angled away from the center display where Nancy was, and when Pablo brought it up that the insurance needed a camera covering a certain percentage of the floor, they had several meetings with him about what he had seen and who he had told about it. Paulo had just had a baby back then and needed his job, so he kept quiet about it. But that beeping alarm had a different meaning to him now. It detected subtle movements. It would label them on a map on the floor. They always came from the center display, which was an area where the mannequin was along with some other clothes lying on special shelves for viewing. Does it still happen, I asked him, kind of believing him by now, Well, that's the thing, he continued. It's been picking up. One of the theories many of the coworkers had, and had them for the longest time. Was that ever since a new set of Mannicheans was brought in. The motion detector kept going off at night from the center display. Nancy, by the way, had been kept all this time in the same spot. Became so obvious that it only happened after the new ones were installed around the store that mister Markman demanded that they be removed immediately, which they were, and suddenly everything was fine. For years, no one complained about it, and the story sort of became a rumor, a tall tail around the store. But you know what Pablo said quietly, the day the owner died, some of the new anakins had been set up around the store. That's what he was angry about. The direction where he turns his head. Look, it took out his phone. The position of the video was right before mister Markman screamed. Look, Pablo whispered, he's looking right towards the center display. I think it's Nancy Man, I'm telling you, he said. Whenever there are other Mannekins around the floor, even just one, this thing acts up. I can't find any other explanation for it. We talked about how bizarre it sounded, and now with this whole theory being thrown out the window considering the Mannikins were in storage and not on display. My alarm rang, My brake was over, and I had two minutes to head back inside. I'll go with you, man, to show you, Pubblo said, as we shut the doors to the truck and walked up the side entrance to the back. We stepped inside, and he casually pointed at the storage closet for the mannequins were I wanted to see them, so I opened it up and saw them, realistic in the style that mister Markman liked them, five of them leaning on the wall. Pablo went inside and turned on the light, looking behind the door on the high shelves. He stepped outside and into the other storage closet, turning on that light and then looking around the warehouse. It was freaking out. He walked up toward the door that led to the sales floor. He opened it up slowly to not set off the beeping alarm, and then he turned around and back toward the exit. There are supposed to be six Mannikins stored in here. There's one on the floor aside from Nancy. He looked at me and then turned around to head to his booth. He was out for about two minutes before rushing back, saying that he had checked the footage, that he noticed that there was one mannequin off camera by one of the corners, that maybe the changes in staff caused some confusion, that they put one out there after years. I'm not doing so I stayed quiet the whole time he spoke. I didn't want to scare him anymore. It was time for him to do his rounds on the outside of the building, and the delivery truck was about to arrive, so I told him we would talk about it later. I didn't want to tell him. When we looked out towards the cells floor, Nancy her profile, her stiff collar bone showing as she no longer looked directly away from me now her head was turned to the right. I didn't know what to think of it. It was a complete sense of loss of reality. It's going to be happening, and so I sat there about myself. Once Pablo left, with the new boxes opening, sorting, stacking all in that silent storage area, I had two more hours to go. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kobarugaz. To stay in touch with what we're doing, follow our account at scary dot Fm, on TikTok and Instagram. Can also find me over there on at edwin Cove that's E d W I N c o V. And if you want to help out the show, I have episodes available without the ads over on scary Plus. You can try it out for free. Scaryplus dot com links to everything or the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening, Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.