The Dinner Guests

For ad free episodes, find the premium link on Scary story podcast dot com. Also, do you want to record your own true scary story with me? You can links are in the description of this episode. Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. This episode explores ghosts and the many ways we can experience their presence. My name is Edwin. Here's a scary story. It was my turn to spend the holidays with Grandma, and I kept thinking of all the things we used to do to get ready back in the day. The running around, Mom yelling at Dad for the shirt he chose to wear, and my brother simply refusing to stop fighting with each other. We would invite her over, obviously, but I remember when she stopped coming to visit us, and I remember Mom practically begging her to come spend Christmas with us over the phone, and Grandma refusing. Dad comforted Mom as she sat by the phone crying. Ever since, we all sort of knew that there was something wrong with Grandma. I stuffed the wrapped up box in my suitcase, wondering if the airport security people would force me to unwrap her gift, a three piece set of figurines frogs, her favorite animals, I knew how it would go. She would compliment the wrapping paper, suggests that I start a business doing so, and then smiled at me and say that she couldn't wait to open it. As she set the box down. I try to get her to open it on the spots, but she would always refuse, saying that she wanted to do so in front of everybody. She would cook these grand meals with turkey stuffing, macaroni salad, potato salad, all the fixings you can imagine, so that was a plus. We had just installed Wi Fi over at her house, so I would simply connect with my family back home now, usually showing off my enormous plate of food to them, the TV usually blasting at full volume in the guest room in order not to hear Grandma's conversations. That was a plus side out of all of this, flying by myself to visit Grandma because she would refuse to leave her house, and everyone understood what an enormous problem it had to come to visit her. My mouth was watering just thinking about the food that was probably already in the oven. As I sat on my airplane seat, the uber dropped me off in front of her house. As Grandma moved the curtains of the kitchen window over to the side, the front door opened almost immediately, just slightly, though, and I thought of how strange it was for her to get to it so quickly. Perhaps she had guests this time. The door stayed slightly open until I got to the front poor, when she swung it open all the way and greeted me with an enormous hug. She asked where everyone else was and when they would be arriving. I felt bad for her. Mom said to simply tell her that they would be arriving soon and that soon she would forget so I liked to her, just like I had for the past three out of six visits to her house. Everyone should be on their way soon, you know how long they take getting ready. May I come on in? She struggled to step off to the side, dragging her feet as she made way for me to step inside. She walked over to the kitchen and left her oven mites on the dinner table, apologizing for leaving them there, saying that it would only be a second. She came back to the living room, where I was taking off my coat and gloves. I bent down toward my suitcase and took out her gift. She looked at it and said, how wonderful the wrapping paper was. Then said, you know, you're very talented. Maybe this could be your next venture. Huh, as her wide smile filled her face. Say what you want about Grandma, but one thing she never forgot was to take care of her teeth. I could smell the turkey and gravy so much better from the dining room as I waited for Grandma to bring forward the plate, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes. Everything was on that huge mountain of food on the plate. Well, sorry, dear, I don't think we she started to say. No worries, Grandma, I said, looking at the rest of the plates on the dinner table, everything neatly arranged, just like a thing out of a Hallmark television show. There was no room for me at the table. Once again, I left Grandma to talk with her guests, as I had done before already, nobody minded that. I simply took my plate, a glass of apple juice, and went over to the guest bedroom to start gobbling down the plate. Right after settling into the softest bed ever, I realized I had forgotten my suitcase out there, and that's where I had my phone charger. I quietly opened the door and stepped out, and I heard Grandma talking about an old business deal she had done several years ago, many years ago, one of the highlights of her career as a saleswoman. I knew the story well, and I knew how excited she would get telling it. As I walked over to the front door where I had left my suitcase, Grandma looked over at me and then back at her table, her smile fading away. Wait did I say something wrong? She said, toward one of the plates at the dinner table, in an area that I couldn't see very well because of the divider wall in between. I heard two chairs move away from the table, and suddenly all the light went off. No, no, it isn't that. She just likes watching TV while she eats, That is all I heard her explain. I saw her shadow in the dark turned toward me. Please tell them that there's nothing wrong. She told me, Come on, honey, signaling me to come toward her. My legs were shaking as I walked toward Grandma. Standing by the end of the dinner table. The lights came back on. I walked over to her and stood by her side. I turned toward the empty dining room, the five dinner plates untouched, two chairs right next to each other, pulled slightly away from the edge of the table. It is okay, I said, not knowing where to look. I prefer eating in the room. It is no problem at all. Please go back to enjoying your meal. I looked over to Grandma as she put her hand on my back, a smile growing on her face. See, she said, looking over at the empty table. Once again, no worries at all. She sat back down. I could still feel my weak knees about to give out as I made my way down the hallway and turned one more time to look at Grandma. I heard the two wooden chairs scoop back in. She then smiled at her invisible guests at the dinner table once again. We stapped into the house carrying a few boxes. Well, I was carrying a few boxes. Stella was just carrying her purse when she said into the house and then went straight into the kitchen. It was hard to impress her, and even when you were dating, she would always take a moment to think about something I don't know what right before smiling. One time I got her to finally tell me why she did that, but she blamed her makeup, and until this day, I don't know if that's true. She looked up at the high ceilings and said something I couldn't quite understand. It was likely about how difficult the windows would be to clean, or how cold the place would get. I don't know something to complain about. The entire place was equipped with brand new appliances in furniture, a little too much for me. Honestly, I had grown up in a small apartment and was not used to that. So I too started wondering how we would manage to take care of a house with three bedrooms when we only needed one. Our friend had set this up for us. He said it was a once in a life, lifetime deal, and I believed it. The place was enormous and had a very good price. We had the inspections made and had everything filed before we hired movers and flew over here. Based on Sella's request. I wanted to drive her own stuff over, one to save money, and two I don't trust movers. I don't buy houses often, obviously, But how often do they come completely furnished. Our friend told us to not ask too many questions because someone was going to pick this house up in no time. It was true. Even while we were settling in, we got calls from our friend telling us that he had been getting calls asking if he would be willing to sell the place for a profit, literally within the first month. It made me feel a little better knowing that this was actually a good deal. Stella didn't care about any of that, though. She instead started picking up decoration magazines and going on Pinterest every day looking for ideas. It took about two weeks before she would change her mind. We had gotten in an argument and I was downstairs sleeping on the couch, and I swear this thing was not a regular couch. It was like a bed. In my head, I remember joking that I might actually get some proper sleep. Finally, Stella hated sleeping alone, but she also liked to kick and move her arms like a starfish while she slept. I swear I was fully and completely waiting for her to come downstairs to ask me to apologize and go back upstairs with her. And that's what I thought she had done. In the middle of the night, I felt the sensation of someone standing over me, strong enough to get me to wake up. I opened my eyes and saw a figure walking away from me and float up the staircase. I followed it with my eyes until it reached the top, and then I watched it reappear again in the landing of the second floor, right by the handrails. Standing still looking down to me, I called out Stella's name in case she was sleepwalking. The shadow would it move? I sat up on the couch, trying to get my eyes to adjust and make sure that Stella was there or if I was dreaming. But suddenly the shadow sped toward the railings and its head flipped upside down as it hopped over it. I screamed Stella's name as I watched the shadow fall down to the hardwood floor and then vanish. I watched the light flick on from the bedroom and Sella open the door. She walked up to the railing and then looked down to me. She told me to turn off the chimney, and then angrily walk back to the room and shut the door. I stepped up toward the middle of the living room to look to where the thing had landed, but it must have been dreaming the whole thing. I looked up at the handrails and then to the windows. They had fogged up. Stella and I talked things through the next day, and things were generally good for the first month we were there. On occasion, Stella would get angry about me turning on the chimney, but without it the place would get very cold, so she would complain about that. I never saw the same shadow figure again, and I never told Stella about it. I did start noticing Stella acting weird around the house. She would clean the windows every day, always looking up and asking if I could also see the spots on the glass. When I would say no, she would tell me to open my eyes and then to tell her the truth. Just really odd stuff like that. Everything fell through One night, though, when I turned the chimney on as Stella was about to go upstairs. She then stood over the railing looking down at me and started crying her eyes out. She told me to turn it off and then became hysterical about it. She yelled and stormed off into the bedroom and slammed the door. I went upstairs as I always did, and stood over the railings looking right at the fog up windows. Stella was right. There were spots on the windows. They were in the shape of handprints. Stella eventually told me about how she had seen them multiple times already, along with the shadows standing over the frame of our bedroom door, but refused to tell anyone about it. We eventually sold the house for a prophet and moved into a smaller place. It has given us no problems. The following story is about another experience at a new place, something we might have encountered. The situation, though, is really something else. Pictures is coming up right after this. A couple of my friends had rented out the house of one of their aunts, a nice vacation home in Baja California in Mexico, right on the beach one summer, and they would not stop talking about it. They knew that I was into haunted houses and scary stories and such, so they try to convince me to go based on one thing they experienced while they were staying there. I can't say that it changed my mind. I mean, yeah, I like that sort of stuff, but also going to the beach getting all sandy and not being able to sleep in a new place really got in the way, but in the end I agreed. Before the summer was over, they told me that we would leave on a Friday and come back Sunday evening, just a short weekend trip. The place was really nice, and during the drive they told me about what one of their friends, a girl named Barbara, had experienced. She saw a woman roaming around the front porch one night when she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she got out, she saw her standing inside the kitchen, simply staring at her. She had a white, flowy skirt and a faded pink shirt and looked fairly young. She had long black hair. Barbara freaked out and ran to the room, waking everyone up. Since then, they said they would hear noises coming from the living room and chance coming from outside every night until they left. Now, the story was creepy, but I was intrigued by the whole thing. Obviously, nobody wants to sleep in a haunted house, but I had brought along my recorder and night vision camera just in case this thing was real. I'll just spoil the story right here and tell you that I did not catch any strange sounds or anything on my camera. Even though one night did manage to hear something coming from the outside, but it was not caught in my recording. I asked her around in case someone had died in the house or if it had some strange history, but the nephew of the woman who owned it said that no one had stayed in the house before her grandma, since her and her husband had built it from the ground up. He walked over to one of the shelves and picked up a box, brought it over to the couch and opened it. Inside there was a small stack of photos. He took one out and said, look, these are my grandparents, a young couple and a little girl standing on the beach, a small lighthouse into the distance. It was a cloudy day, and that lighthouse was still just a short distance from where we were and could be seen right outside. Everyone was leaving and I told them that I would hang out by myself that day, so they all grabbed their towels and went outside to the beach. I started thinking about everything that surrounds the place and how we are only here for a little while. There was something about being there that made me want to sit by myself and think about what I was doing. I was struggling with lots of things, and this social anxiety thing had gotten the best of me several times. I didn't know what to do with my life or how to figure it out. Lost. Some would say, I kept thinking that my friends invited me with them just to help me out. I add nothing to my name, nothing going for myself, and I was scraping by with odd jobs here and there. I was looking at YouTube videos for inspiration every morning, but nothing I seemed to work. Fred had told me about his grandma, a talented writer. It was probably how they were able to afford the vacation house in the first place. I still had the box of photos in my lap, and instinctively I grabbed another one. It was the same couple, maybe a couple of years older, standing in the same place, and I got excited about it. It was one of those series of photos, real paper photos of people in the same play spread out throughout the years, the little girl became a young woman in front of my eyes as I flipped with different pictures, slowly overtaking both of her parents in height, her parents getting older, their styles remaining more or less. It's the same as the photos changed from faded colors to more bright ones as film cameras became better. Most likely I kept going through them. The lighthouse still in the background were painted in one of the photos, but still the same one. It was when the stack was getting smaller when I noticed that the older woman was wearing something familiar, a white, flowy skirt and a faded pink shirt. When something clicked in my mind, what if this was the ghost of the woman that Barbara had seen in the house. I stared at it for several minutes, letting my mind wander once again, ideas floating about photography, colors and freezing time on a piece of paper. I wondered if my friend's grandma imagined her writing pieces in the same way. The sun was setting already and the place was becoming dark, so I grabbed the box to put the photos back when I noticed something else the next photo. It was the young woman and her father, their expressions lacking the joy that the other photos had. The woman's mother was missing. That was the last picture in the box. I will always remember that day as a moment when I started to turn my life around. When I got back, I dug around my room for my digital camera, and started a new side gig for myself. Eventually it became a business and now I work on creative projects like what my friend's grandma had done. We can always reread our story, and I think his grandmother knew a lot about that. These stories were written and produced by me Edwin Kovares. Find me on Instagram at Edwin Cove. That's E d w I n c O V and don't forget to tag me when you share this episode. Record your own story with me by visiting truescarystory dot com. Until next time, Thank you very much for listening.