The Songwriter

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today, we have a haunting story of people who are looking for something. Some of these things were not meant to find. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. When two of my friends said goodbye to continue with her purpose somewhere else, I felt empty inside. The new guys were much younger than I was, and I knew the good old days were ending, perhaps realizing it's a little too late to be able to take more pictures and videos of everyone who had changed my life. I was never into this sort of thing, spiritualism, if you want to call it that, seeking answers from our own bodies to tell us what to do next. But it was how this town grabbed you with the hook from tourism and parties, and before you knew it, you were talking about your third eye and choosing different protein sources, not always dead chickens or cows. But back at home, I was someone else, burghers Netflix and driving a large four by four truck all around town just to burn some gas, as my friends and I would call it. I was heavier than too, but lots of things felt like they had been left behind along with those fifty pounds things like my nikes and watches, the newest iPhones and video games. It was a small town in the outskirts of a main city that probably no one has ever heard of. Plus, it's not worth mentioning due to the attention it might receive. However small, it's just not worth it. It's not worth the risk of losing more than what people can afford. I was the last one in the little thread of friends. In that circle, every single one of us staying at the same hostel, some of the people with tents that would stay in the back yard and others in the dormitories for the equivalent of four dollars per night. Nobody did much of it anything during the day. Some went to work selling handicrafts to other tourists. The lucky ones had jobs at servers, while some other people like myself, fortunate enough to have concerned parents, would receive some money. I used to get around three hundred dollars every month, along with questions about when I would be coming back home, along with every single deposit. Had no idea. I don't think anyone had any idea of where home even was and why it was supposed to be. Where your parents were, or the same town where you were born. Many of our conversations, especially when new people would arrive to the town, would strike around that same topic. It was one time a deep one, but now it was nothing more than a topic repeated a thousand times, an idea. We were bored of being the one who had spent the longest time there. I thought, surely there was something wrong with me, something that had not been healed quite yet, like many of my friends who moved on, some to their normal lives and others to whatever place came next. Some would claim to feel a calling to head to a new place, while others had simply grown tired of all this nonsense. Perhaps tired. They're scared of this town. There was something about it that gripped you, although it for sure was not the friendliness from the locals. They looked at us as the leeches or extras in the town, the ones who took their pictures whenever they had a religious ceremony, and take pictures of their food whenever they tried something new. But it wasn't like we were taking up space. The building where our hostel was built was where no one else wanted to be, At the edge by the start of the jungle like forest and the cemetery. We would tell so many stories of the place, things that we had seen, specifically the children of the woods. Had seen a couple of them myself by the trees one night when I traded spots with another backpacker to spend the night in one of the tents because of how loud the roommates were being, and I saw them with my own two eyes as three kids chased each other, disappearing into the trees one by one. Others spoke of the humming woman, one that no one had heard until the songwriter came to stay with us. His name was Lucas from Brazil, and we got to talking about his life and mine, not too different. We were both tired of school and work and the race to retire with enough money to not starve when we got older. Except he was an artist, a songwriter. He said his idea was to travel and write songs to sell to singers, some of them he would keep for himself, and that he would make lots of money doing that, eventually royalties. He said. We're going to be his way out of his backpack. I still had no plan, although going back to school was an option and something I was becoming more motivated to do now after experiencing life surrounded by many people without the same opportunity as me. I remember thinking, even back then, now distant, the idea of a song Lucas wrote would get him out of his current life, although eventually it did happen. And although I could not understand Portuguese, the rhythm of his music and the feeling he would put into them sounded amazing. Whenever there was a chance, he would get out the old guitar from the luggage storage closet and play for us. Perhaps it was his age that made me doubt everything. He seemed much older than the rest of us, although he must have been a max of ten years different not that much as far as mentality. People begin to display their desperation when we have three quarters of our lives left. He was obsessive as far as I could tell. Some of the girls would complain of his extreme romanticism as he made songs for them, would say phrases about beauty and roses, comparing their voices to the sounds of songbirds, enough to make them uncomfortable or around the guy. To me, though, he was just another friend to talk with or split our pasta and vegetable lunches with most days. One night he came running into the dorm where it was and woke up three of the other guys that were in there when he said that there had been kids out past the yard, that maybe they needed help. He had run after them but had lost them in the dark. They would get hurt out there, so we needed to go out there and help. The three of us already knew about the children from the woods and try to explain it to him, but he could not understand it. So I put on my shoes and jacket and walked out to the yard with him and calmly explained that he had not been the only one that had seen or heard the children out there there, and he believed me. Then we were not far from the start of the trees, an area completely dark by that time, where every shadow and every sound can be the ghost of a child or a monster, whichever you choose it to be. Lucas had a tough time believing the ghost thing, and honestly and I did too, but we didn't talk about it much until the morning, when we had gathered around one of the tables by the common area of the hostel, the sound of wild chickens and dogs barking at the delivery people, the ones that were doing the rounds around town. One of the older guys that were there, Henry, an American guy who liked to wear ponchos and make his own necklaces, overheard us talking about the children of the woods. He chimed in with his own theory that ghosts don't appear to just anyone, that they have a meaning or purpose in our lives. Someone is trying to tell you something. That was his idea. That being said, some people wanted to see them. Whenever someone spotted the children, a few of them would run out to see them or record them, but only a few could actually spot them. It wasn't a common thing, but familiar enough to the travelers that even the hostel owner accepted that every once in a while the children of the Woods would show up, that they were in fact just ghosts. But the humming woman was something else. And this one that can assure you everyone heard at one point or another, Part two of the songwriter is coming upward after this stay with me. Hello Fresh brings you farm fresh pre portioned ingredients, to make cooking at home easy, fun and affordable. We all know it, but Hello Fresh just more than just that. I mean, yeah, you can choose from forty weekly recipes, but you can also choose from over one hundred items to add desserts, snacks, easy lunches, and other stuff for your pantry. And then you get it all in one box. You can get to pick the day that you want. And there's even more. 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I had been talking with a couple of girls traveling from France, and they had just gone to sleep while I stayed out finishing my drink, staring out into the yard when I heard it, a soft, sad melody coming from deep in the woods. It was so clear that I was sure someone from the hostel had gone out there to sing, perhaps away from us in order to not wake anyone up. But quickly I remembered one of the early conversations with the people that had met when I arrived at the hostel, the sounds out there by the woods, by the cemetery. The sounds were the ones of a woman that they would hear at night enough to become worried of what they were hearing. To the owner of the hostel, there was a normal thing. The guy used to live in a bungalow type thing on the same property, and he said he had known what he was getting into buying something so close to the cemetery, but he had tried to buy a property far enough away as to not upset the locals. They've had enough of foreigners here, he would say, whenever there was a problem with anything like the electric or water. Bill Lucas, the songwriter, used to spend a lot of time outside, almost as much as I did late at night, and it was only a matter of time before we heard the humming woman, the sounds that were coming from the woods by the dying campfire, one that two backpackers had left before going into their tent. I remember Lucas leaped out of his chair and leaned against the wall when he heard it, a reaction I was not expecting from him for some reason, although it wasn't hard to imagine when you experienced something like that startled. He looked at me and asked if I could hear that. I won't lie and tell you that I wasn't a little freaked out by the whole thing. My heart was thumping at my neck so much that I could barely hear the crickets we had gotten used to hearing every night. We could follow the melody with her eyes, that's how clear it was, starting from the left side of the trees and zig zagging through the woods until they reached the right far end of the property, where the cemetery was, and then it would fade out. I turned to look at Lucas, who was listening so intently that he forgot I was there. It took a few tries for him to hear me as I told them that the humming woman was another thing that travelers talked about. When I Fani heard me, he ignored me as he reached for his notebook and pencil. We kind of lost Lucas after that, first as just a figure of speech, but then quite literally. He would sing to himself a tune in the humming we had heard that night, and he would stay up waiting to hear her. Something said he wanted to experience again, and that he did. Sometimes it would happen, and around one or two in the morning, and especially on Friday nights, when everyone was up a little later than usual, he would hear it. He would turn down the music as someone would eventually whisper, can you hear that? Lucas was already on it by that point. He'd been running after the melody one night and then eventually stepping out of the woods smiling, saying that he had heard the melody a little bit closer. I still remember that huge smile on his face. He was one of those people who was either all lay on something or completely out of it, an artist. The owner of the hostel set at one point, some people have that gift of being so passionate about something that they would be willing to give everything up for it. Addictive personalities were a common thing with them, he would say, and I believed them. The guy had met many people in his life. He had been married three times and had several businesses before he escaped to live out there with us and get his own hostel. The night Lucas disappeared, the owner was the first to notice. It was early in the morning, and Lucas hadn't come back. He hadn't knocked at the door to be let in at night, and when the owner noticed that his bags and notebook were still where he had left them that night in the common area, he became worried. Every once in a while, travelers find another place to stay, but they returned for their things. But there was something different about this particular situation. A few of us got involved in searching for him, with no luck. Those of us who spoke Spanish wandered about the streets asking if they had seen him, with no one except for one guy who said he had seen him over by the cemetery, calling him a loco or a crazy one for being out there at such hour, mentioning that Lucas had been acting as if he was speaking with someone by one of the benches in the cemetery. That's about as close as we got to finding him. We got a little group together and walked through the cemetery gates as the sun was setting, the first time we had been in there, and more worried than terrified about what we might find. But he wasn't there. The following days we spent looking for him around town, and eventually the police from the nearby city came by to collect his things and search for contact information. They eventually let his relatives know of his disappearance. A phone number was found. It was a sister back in Brazil, who made arrangements to come as soon as you could. Lucas was never found. About a week later, his sister took his things with her, thanking us through tears in her eyes for taking care of her older brother. The whole thing was a blur, and one of the reasons why many people I had met decided to leave. Some blamed the townspeople who had grown tired of us. Others found living in a place where a person can simply vanish too much to deal with. It was a reason why I was the only one left, a person with nowhere to go, and that's when others started to come and stay at the hostel. It had been several weeks since the incident when one of the new guys walked into the dorm room, whispering my name to see if I was awake. I took the covers away from my face, asking if everything was all right. I figured it would be another sighting of the children of the woods, but instead it was of the humming. My shoes on and walked over to the back porch of the building, the lights completely off by that time. I whispered to the other guy who had been waiting there if he had heard the humming too, and with white eyes, he nodded. I felt bad for them, although for me this was such a common thing that I started to ignore the sights and sounds. We've all heard of the humming woman. Welcome to the club, I said jokingly, as I started heading toward the door and back to my dorm. When one of them stopped me, the humming woman, he said, I think this is something else. I looked at him directly in the eyes as I heard the sounds in the rhythm of Lucas's song he would play every night, accompanying the melody and harmony. The stories in this podcast are written by me, and if you have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to email me over at Edwin at scarypod dot com or find me on Instagram. I'll leave the info into the description of this episode. AD free content is available on Scary Plus over at scaryplus dot com, which helps with the production of these shows including Scary Mystery, Surprise, True Scary Story, and Dark Memory which we'll be getting a new name pretty soon, as well as the show is in Spanish from Scary FM. Thank you very much for listening to my stories. See you soon.