The Odd Ones in Town

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's story is a bit of a mystery. It's about a group of people who may have more in common than they know. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. I held the flyer tightly in my hand as the rest of the group sat comfortably in a circle right on those foldable chairs. I don't know how they were able to do it, especially after knowing that the announcement said that we would be there for a full ninety minutes once a week for six weeks. It was a sort of research study from Radford University, a pilot program for a study that we're going to be starting. It was not the first of its kind, not at all. Investigators, journalists, and curious people would come up with quote formal studies, and coincidentally, they all lined up a few months before Halloween, but this one was different. It was early January and freezing in that large dark room. A table had been set up with snacks and bottled juice. Free cheap notebooks and pencils with the enormous Ratford U logo were in a cardboard box next to everything. It wasn't sure how many times I had told this story but I told it whenever I could because of how vividly I could remember it up until a certain point. And I don't know why, but every time I did, I would remember a new sound or smell or shadow, something that was hiding deep in those memories for my young mind. Perhaps they would help me solve this mystery. A man with thick glasses called the five of us over to the circle. Nervously introduced himself as David Jackson, and he explained the rules. This was more formal than the other meetings, for sure. We had signed papers and everything in order to to participate. The rules here were set about what we would do if we bumped into each other out on the street, but we would say to explain how we knew each other, along with explanations of what confidentiality means. About ten minutes in the guy David pointed to a short, thin woman sitting silently on the chair that was slightly out of the rest in the circle. She uncrossed her arms and looked at her hands, placing them on her lap, looking down at the floor. She looked at all of us fairly quickly and then began talking. Her name was Anna. She had gotten in her own words tied up with the occult. When she was in high school, like with most of us, she had a phase of dressing up in all black, listening to rock music, writing poetry, or sketching things that were out of this world. Some of her friends had tried other things, reading texts about different beliefs from the odd Ones in Town. For some reason, the others in the circle all knew what she meant when she said that. They sort of nodded and gave her their full attention, leaning into what she was saying. The odd Ones in Town were a group of people that probably never talked to each other, but lived on the edges of the city, over the hills and completely on their own. Every once in a while you would see them shopping for tools at Hills Hardware or buying sand or soil for their fields. For years, rumors said that they practiced evil things and were to be avoided at all costs. I had learned of these people not long before that meeting, and it was thanks to one of those other investigators that I had met up with who mentioned them as he pushed for me to take them to the place where I had seen the church. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'll finish telling you what happened at the meeting. And it continued with her experience, telling us that she had visited one of those odd ones in town along with and other one of her friends, and that they had arrived just in time for a meal they were preparing outside they had killed some game that same day. They were all gathered around a fire outside of the barn when they all heard a guttural scream. Her friend grabbed her backpack and took off, running back to the dirt road. She was too nervous to run with all those eyes staring at her, so she stayed waiting in the silent field with only the sound of the crackling fire. As the sun was beginning to turn to golden orange. Her mind went blank, she said, and I knew exactly what she meant here, so I nodded in agreement when she mentioned it. She only remembers sitting and holding a warm vinegar drink in her hands, and was then trying to forget the image of a severed head and a bowl, an image that had arrived to her memory almost ten years after the whole ordeal. In silence, they we all ate, she told us with tears in her eyes, before the sunset chance started. What followed for her were years of confusion. Where do we go when we die? Why can't everyone see what we see? Why do we only know of the good half of the scriptures that were left for us? What about the bad half? She learned to live with it, just like we all had, going to work and coming home preparing food, keeping those stories to ourselves. When she was finished, the moderator David was visibly stunned by her story. I think it was at that moment when it actually hit him that all this was real, and that the odd ones in town were not just an urban legend meant to keep teenagers within the borders of town. It took him a bit to get his senses back and speak up, and he knew it he quick He looked down at his clipboard and then up at another man. Cole was his name, history involved the game he had played when he was a kid, And suddenly even more vivid memories of how everything started with me flashed in my mind. As he continued, I'd try to hold on to my thoughts. I know how easily they tend to fade, So I rushed for the box of notebooks and pencils to write down what I was thinking. Everyone paused for me and sat in silence as I walked back to the chair. I was not minding the awkwardness at all. Cole continued with his experiences, explaining how he got to the old water tank at the top of Turnip Hill, the one that had been abandoned for as long as I could remember, and not far from where my grandpa lived. He said, he was met by an older boy, the teenager back then, who asked if he had ever played X Marks the Spot, a type of treasure hunt game where they would make lines out of objects they would see and try to get the other and the treasure. He could tell that the game needed more players in order to work, so he mentioned it to the guy, but his response and a chill down his back. Oh there's another team, all right, we just can't see them. He agreed to play, and they went around the tower, eventually stumbling upon a wrapped up cloth, its contents he refused to share, but as his voice started trembling, he sort of froze up. Next thing, he remembers, he was walking down the hill and back to his house. We all looked at each other, and then David, who was again with his mouth open and blank stare, not knowing whether to believe the stories or not, was interrupted by Cole. Sometimes. Cole managed to say, sometimes I'm not myself again. Everyone nodded, including myself. Lilted her hand upward as if raising her hand without raising her arm. Call nodded at her, and she spoke up, I'm sometimes not myself either. What does it feel like for you? Voice changes? I feel heavier, angrier, he said. Everyone again, including myself, nodded in agreement. David, still unaware of what was going on, looked at his clipboard, then his watch, and said, we have time for one more and we will continue with our introductions next week. As he looked at me in the eye and then nervously turned away. It was going to be my turn to share what had happened to me. Part two of odd Ones in Town is coming up right after a word from the sponsors for this stone, they also make the show possible. Stay with me, Ah, summer was good while it lasted, and now fall is coming and HelloFresh is here to make it easier for us to squeeze out the last of summer with tasty dishes delivered to your door. Just choose the recipes and your delivery dates and that's all. When things get busy, instead of ordering takeout, get HelloFresh. It's twenty five percent cheaper than takeout and less expensive than grocery shopping. HelloFresh takes care of everything and saves you some cash with pre portioned meals delivered right to you. The sweet chili pork and cabbage stir fries on the menu right now, and you know it's my favorite, But now it's a close call with the sweet and spicy cashew pork tacos. It was just super simple to make. Go find your favorite recipes and tell me what you get. Go to HelloFresh dot com slash fifty Scary Story and use the code fifty Scary Story to get fifty percent off plus free shipping. Again, that's HelloFresh dot com. Slash fifty the Scary Story and use a code fifty Scary Story to get fifty percent off plus free shipping. Hello Fresh, America's number one milkit. I was about seven years old when I stumbled out of my grandpa's yard chasing butterflies with a net. We had gotten at the dollar store earlier that day. A friend had come over to spend the day. It was near the end of summer break, one more weekend in school will start again. My backpack had been picked out, the black shoes from my uniform were ready, and I had gotten a brand new box of preyons. Those details came up years after the incident in a survey type session where myself, along with a group of three other people were talking about the experiences and happened to mention the start of the school year. I had enough of these sessions to put together the entire day. Now I had a visual of the field being overlooked by the abandoned water tank at the top of the hill. This was thanks to cold story. I had always wanted to go to it. Some of the kids at school talked about a troll who lived up there and he gave them some fruit. He would let you go inside. It was an odd story, I know, but as kids we believed it. My friend and I were near the fence when we heard someone calling us from the edge of the woods. Jimmy looked at me and then back at the trees, asking if I had heard the same thing. We looked around for a bit until I heard the samest coming from the trees, but I was able to see the source of the sound this time. It was a boy about our age. On that part of town, we knew almost everyone, which came with a major fault that we trusted almost everyone too. He was wearing a shirt that matched his pants in that light blue color. His hair had been poorly cut. He never reminded me of a character out of a cartoon from his large, drowned eyes and shiny black shoes. I looked around the room at this point and saw the rest of them nodding. I continued. In the last days of summer, and only being the two of us out in that field, we shouted at him to come and play, or maybe asked him what school he went to. I don't remember, but he simply stood there, waving at us, making emotion with his hands. To follow him as he turned into the woods and stopped a little farther inside. Jimmy ran after him first, and I followed. I knew in the back of my mind that my grandpa would come out looking for me, and that I was always supposed to tell him where I was going. When I was at his house, but I also remember thinking that it was so close, just right there, and that everything would be all right. The boy stood still and looked at us, before making the hand motion to follow him even deeper into the woods and running far enough away to almost lose sight of him. It was dark in the woods. The trees were dark green now that the flowers were gone, and soon the leaves would die and the whole area would turn into a different color. We walked far enough away for the entrance where we had come in to hide among the trees, and all we could see was a little boy standing still, waiting for us. He pointed to an area that looked like a pit, although not deep, like a valley, in the shadows of the trees, where nothing else had grown for quite a while. Somewhere among the trees, a little farther down was a building, something we had never seen before. It was old and had a pointy structure on the corner. Even at that age, I knew that it was a church. I hated churches, and after that I hated them even more. My parents were never strict about the church, even in that small town where everyone went, so that helped the little boy was walking toward the church, not turning around to look at us anymore. Then among its abandoned walls, he disappeared. It looked around the room at that moment. Everyone was looking at me, afraid to move. We had all had encounters with the odd Ones in town, but no one had heard of a child being one. We knew what we were all talking about. The odd Ones were not like regular people. They had been known to keep to themselves, discreetly looking for recruits. Every once in a while you would hear of someone who joined them and still lived among us. But sometimes you would hear of disappearances, rumors of people being killed for the rich they had held. I was around ten or eleven when a large group of men from around town got together with their shotguns to bring them to justice. The police interfered and forced them to stop. Everyone, and I mean everyone in that group except for David, understood what it was like to be tormented by these events, not feeling like ourselves. One said, well, I don't think I had ever been myself. My only memories ended with that visit to the church. Jimmy walked up to the walls of the abandoned church in the woods, and I followed close behind. We searched for the boy all around the place, and we would have kept looking had it not been for the voice that shouted at us from the inside of the broken windows. It was not a child but a grown man wearing the same colored clothes we had seen on the boy. Jimmy took off, running back to where we had entered the woods, and I, well, I don't remember. Everyone in that room nodded at me at that point. They were waiting for me to cry, or perhaps they were expecting me to explain more of my story, but I simply sat there in silence. That was the end of it, the end of me. Eventually, David got it. He closed his notebook and looked at the rest of us. He was still nervous. We could all tell these types of things were not something you would hear every day, and at least I suspected that he knew exactly what was happening. Anna looked around and smiled at the rest of us. We had been subjected to this type of thing before, and yet we had never met. The surveys they made us take were probably for that purpose. Would be harder to lie if we all knew each other, or maybe they need we did something else and decided to match us by the similarity of our stories. Experiences that were difficult to explain to those who had never been in our positions should have been easier now, but they weren't. And yet we all knew the pain of knowing the truth beside we hide away from and completely unintentionally too. Oh what we would give to go back to how things used to be, money, give time, maybe give up our lives. If one of us could remember what the ritual was when our memories faded and we turned into this, If just one remembered, we might have had a chance. We all knew it and looked around again, and after a brief pause, she asked, we're hopeless, aren't we. David looked at us in shock as we all turned to each other and started to smile and then laugh. It was time to go share your thoughts with me. I'll leave my contact information in the description of this episode. If you're looking for something else to listen to, check out the other stories on this podcast. You can also find other stories really creepy ones on horror Story, which is a show where I talk about real Mysteries and true horror. The latest episode is about the horrific experiments on humans that the CIA made and this was all real, by the way, not some conspiracy theory. You can find the podcast by searching for Horror Story on your podcast app. If you want to listen to the whole collect of SCARYFM podcasts without ads, check out Scary Plus. You can find it out scaryplus dot com or on your Apple podcasts app. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon.