The Visitor

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. If you have ever gotten a strange visit while you're sleeping, please listen at your own risk. Some things may resurface. My name is Edwin and here is a scary story. I was going to be late for the meeting for the third week in a row. I don't know why. After the many retellings of this story. That's the one insignificant detail I cannot forget. But it felt like, finally I didn't have to apologize for anything. People believed me or simply accepted things as they were without questioning me. Nobody there had told me to stop being late or to get my act together. They would simply welcome me as they always did. My chair already pulled out in a little circle in the middle of that enormous room, our voices being the only one zechoing before we started with the session. Doctor Martinez was his name, a short, balding man in his fifties who had gotten us all together through a simple flyer in the laundromat. The other three people that used to attend you used to live in the same neighborhood. I might have bumped into them on Saturdays at the coin op Fizzles, fluff and fold. I think that place is still open, likely with the same old machines he had to hit on the side for them to take your quarters. Have you seen this woman? That was a headline on the flier a thing that most people thought was simply a joke by one of those weirdos. Those that would go hang out at the vending machines of Fizzles late at night had to go there late a few times, and I had seen a few of them, but the four of us had been the only weirdos that called that number and actually got called in by mister Martinez, who answered the phone with a series of questions, where do you live, how much do you sleep? How often do you wake up? I noticed that after the third question he started noticing that I was not joking around or playing a prank, and his tone changed. He asked for my name and then explained his program. He also gave me a little information on his background, and then he took my information to call me back once it was up and running. Honestly, I didn't think he would call, but eventually he got a small group of us, myself and another man a little older than me, and also a college student and a woman who seemed to be about the same age as doctor Martinez. It was easy to get us to talk. In fact, I think that Doc had a tougher time getting us to be quiet and keeping the meetings only to an hour and a half. That first meeting was doctor Martinez explaining everything to us. He would not charge a dime and what he was conducting was only for his research, funded by his own time and hours. He reminded us that one of his students from a class that he taught at a university would be coming by to help him with note taking every once in a while, but that he was also pursuing his license in a branch of psychological services and was under the doctor's supervision. The whole thing seemed so official, and yet we all knew that this could not possibly be anything scientific or even anything a professional should be going after. We all had something in common, and it was unusual enough to pursue and dark enough to only have the most tormented together in one room. I think that's what doctor Martinez wanted. When the Doc asked us which one of us had to visit her episode in the previous week, Rachel was the first one to share her story. She had raised her hand as she looked over to me, as if asking for permission, if she could go first. She lived with her husband and her two sons. Her husband worked as a bank teller, and she was a cook at the hot meal area at Brown's, the grocery store about four blocks away from my apartment. Rachel liked a garden and would spend her time reading books on taking care of house plants, and was also thinking of writing a book about the topic herself. It started several years ago after a visit with a couple of her friends at a restaurant on the night set of Town. She had gotten home, taken off her shoes, and settled down on the couch next to her husband, was already dozing off in front of the television with the news on her She flicked the channel to a movie. It was one of those Friday Network specials where they would air a romantic comedy movie followed by an action one. I remember those. I used to start watching halfway through the rom com and would fall asleep as soon as the action movie was over. Promptly at midnight anyway, she too, eventually started falling asleep on the couch and her half awake state. She started slowly opening her eyes only to see a strange black mass on the side of the television stand. It was growing, with dark strands coming from the top of it and onto the floor. She tried to shake herself awake, but all she could do was blink. No sound was coming out of her mouth, and she was surprised that she was still able to breathe. The figure started stretching up and against the wall. It wasn't a dark mass or a jacket left on the floor, but rather someone curled up against the wall, wedged there between the stand and the carpet. It started standing up, at least that's what Rachel was expecting as she desperately tried to move and shake her husband to wake through the sounds of the commercials on the TV in the background, but the thing never fully stood up. Instead, it hunched over and started stepping tiny, short, quick steps toward her. Rachel was frozen. Her hands and legs would not move, and she could sense a discomfort in the way that she had been sleeping, with her neck poorly positioned against a cushion behind her. When there was more light coming from the screen, that's when she was able to see it, the old, sagging face and large nose from an old woman approaching her with a determined patience, given that she would step and step closer to Rachel's face as if she were exploring some strange item at a thrift store, and then retreating, hesitating take steps closer to her. She was dressed in a dirty white type of clothing, like the kind you see on a patient in a hospital, one that had just vomited all over herself. Her shirt or what remained of it, was falling off her shoulder. This whole time, Rachel was trying to wake herself up with all her might. The commercials were over and she could see and hear the movie starting up again, but she couldn't get herself to wake up till finally her husband moved his arm and she was somehow able to use his touch to shake herself awake. And that's when she said that she screamed louder than she had ever screamed before. Her husband jumped out of the couch and asked what was wrong, Quickly going for the light switch to flick it on. Rachel looked around the room to that corner between the television stand, the wall, and the floor. There was nothing there. She was so nervous she couldn't explain what she had seen to her husband. But after a few minutes, when she was able to get the words out and still not able to finish any story, her husband simply interrupted to suggest that she was probably just imagining things and it may have been a nightmare or some type of hallucination. Part of her thought that she was just asleep and had seen something that wasn't there, so she accepted that and forgot about the whole thing for a few days. She had no idea that it was only beginning. This visitor would take one hundred tiny steps to approach her by the side of her bed, and every single time the same thing would happen, she would be unable to move. The woman would get closer, getting inches away from her face. So close, Rachel said that she could feel the woman's cold breath and see her dark eyes more visible than normal because of the drooping bottom parts of her eyelids. They were exposing the dark pits between the woman's eyeball and the rest of her face. She explained in detail for a little over an hour, uninterrupted about her experiences and the things that she had looked up, the people she had talked to, the ties according to her priest to the devil. I had never heard anyone talking about this so openly and be taken so seriously by others. The younger woman Lilian, who was sitting next to me in that circle of five people, stood up a couple of times to grab napkins from the snack table, the one that Doc had sept for us, just a couple of steps away behind her. I could feel my hands shaking, like they do when I get cold, though I knew it was nervousness or anxiety or something else. I'm sure the Doc could explain to me at some other time. Once she finished talking, we all sort of sat there, processing our own tales encounters with this thing that would come at night. I remember getting chills thinking of just how eerily similar both of our stories were. But that was before I heard the rest of the accounts. Now I know for a fact that this was far from a coincidence, because Rachel looked at me once more and said, I don't think I got to tell you the full story right, to tell you the full story? And then it clicked I had seen Rachel before at that same laundromat where we found the flyer, and it took me several days to fully remember the time. We were both waiting for the woman, the one with a bunch of kids who would take up all of the dryers at once. She sat next to me on the bench facing the washing machines. She told me then about her horrible night. She released that stream of complaints on me that Saturday morning. I didn't think much of it. Back then. Lots of people would come up to me and either ask me for money or for the time. Ever since I moved into the city, I just thought Rachel was one of those people who needed someone to talk to. I vaguely remember her mentioning the figure that wouldn't let her go to sleep. It just wasn't important to me back then. I swear before that night at the group session, Rachel had only been just another phase at the laundromat. Part two of the visitor is coming up right after this stay with me. Oh you too know each other, doctor Martinez asked, with a serious expression on his face. I didn't know how to answer that. I mean, we didn't know each other yet, but we had talked before, Thank god. Rachel answered it first with a yeah, I've seen him at the laundromat where I washed my clothes and we talked a bit. Even back then, I could tell Doctor Martinez was pretending to sound concerned about this, and after a brief pause, he looked around and asked who else knew each other, and Lilian pointed to Richard, Rachel pointed to Richard and me. Our first meeting went from a quiet one with what seemed like nervous confessions, to us talking over each other as we talked of our own experiences with the visitor. Doctor Martinez would listen to them at different times, while I, for the most part, stayed quiet, trying to piece things together. I was never much of a talker, and I think that's why people like Rachel find it easy to talk to me. Our first response was just to listen to them and answering shortened almost scripted sentences. Eventually, doctor Martinez looked up at the wall clock and stood up, saying that we would continue with the sessions the following week, not before asking us if we had already signed and turned in our recording release. Our talks had been recorded through a little recorder on the chair by the snack table. We all nodded and stood up. The three of them talked amongst themselves as they walked out the door. Richard had already grabbed a few cookies with a napkin before crossing the doorframe. I picked up my backpack and looked over to the doctor, starting to explain that I thought I knew what was going on, but he nodded in a quiet agreement, and then he got lost and thought again. I felt like we had all somehow ruined the experiment or research or whatever else he was doing. But we kept meeting the next few sessions. I learned about Richard and his experience about how he met Rachel while he was waiting for his daughter at school. Rachel had apparently parked too close to Richard's truck and he had to get out to ask her to move, and that's how they found out that they both had children that went to the same classroom, and started talking about issues that they were having with their kids. Rachel's son was obsessed with a television and was falling behind on his math homework, but apparently he had already finished in class. That's when Richard mentioned his daughter's drawings and how she was having difficulty sleeping all this time. Rachel nodded in agreement and interrupted Richard a few times to say things like yep, that's what he said to me, yep, or uh huh. The imaginary friend, the doctor and I would exchange glances whenever this happened. Richard's experiences had been the same. It was an older woman that would come from side of his night stand, as if she was waiting for him before he fell asleep, because he would start seeing her out of the corner of his eye just before darkness. Then he would wake up while frozen completely still. The woman would stretch toward his bed, barely taking any steps before looking straight into his eyes, and then took a lot of steps back, as if preparing to lunch forward. He couldn't see what she was wearing, but he could remember that lingering smell, the sour stench of old chicken. Lillian once again had gotten more napkins to blow her nose as her red eyes swelled up with tears. She had actually started her story before we had to close down for the night once again, and agreed to continue the following week. When we met up again, Lilian started over, reminding us that she had gotten up late to go to her volunteering gig a few times because of how tired she would wake up feeling. For several nights in a row, she would see that same woman, which by this time we all knew was the same one, mind you, same appearance, a visitor coming to us in our dreams, and doctor Martinez was eagerly taking notes on it and treating it with the highest level of respect. It was just a bizarre experience. She explained that she knew that Richard was a father of one of the little girls, some that she would tutor at the elementary school where she volunteered, and apologized over and over again for telling his daughter about the woman from the closet, but it was only supposed to be a scary story to help her with her writing prompt that day. The doctor had us take a short break at one point because of how Lillian was reacting as she relived her experiences. Lillian used to share a room during her first year in college and had the most terrifying experience out of everybody. She was sleeping, she heard a soft tapping coming from the opposite side of the room, assuming it was her roommate, She didn't pay attention to it and instead tried to go back to sleep when she suddenly heard a deep room. When she tried to check what it was, she couldn't move everything, even her eyes locked shut in the position she had kept them. She explained that she had a habit of sleeping with her eyelids half open, apparently something she had been doing since she was a child. All she could see were shadows as a thing approached her, and she incloser and closer. As the sound of breathing grew louder. She squirmed and desperately tried to shake herself awake, but said that she was only able to get her eyes to open only to see this woman staring right at her. But she wasn't next to the bed like in the other accounts. This thing was crouched down at the end of it, right by her feet. Lilian struggled to move as a weight of this thing pressed down on her knees and crawled up to her stomach. The visitor reached up into the torn up clothing it was wearing and took out a small wooden stick. It was about the length of a pencil, and it moved it around Lilian's chest until it found her heart. Lilian was able to wake up right then. Unsure of what she had just seen, she woke up her roommate to ask if she had seen anything, but fearing that she would come off as crazy, she decided instead to keep the story to herself. And it was during Halloween of that year when the class where Lilian's tutoring took place. The teacher assigned the children to come up with the scary story, but Lilian didn't know. She said through tears that things were going to happen that way. I think that's where Richard and Rachel caught on that Lilian had shared the story with Richard's daughter, and his daughter had told him, who told Rachel, who, on that Saturday morning at the laundromat, had told me about the visitor. We talked about it until the end of the session, and we learned that doctor Martinez was well aware of this phenomenon, and it made sense now when he asked me when the incident had started and where I had seen the flyer. He was trying to find a solid link between those who had seen the visitor, and now he had found it. And that last session, they asked me to please share my story, and I did. I had just gotten home from work. My boss had asked me to work overtime again while another coworker got to take Friday off for the third week in a row because of a family emergency. See again, I'm not much of a complainer, so I just accepted it and got off work at two in the morning. I turned on the TV of my room before collapsing onto the bed and falling asleep. Almost immediately, I could hear a hospital show on TV in the background before it changed into complete static, and then from behind the TV, I saw her, the visitor, as we had all come to call it. She seemed to stretch out of a curled up ball from the floor, not very tall in stature, but stepped little steps toward my bed. My body was completely still as she got up close to me and climbed onto it, pressing on my chest with her heavy body. I felt like I could not breathe. That she got heavier and heavier by the second. My eyes were tearing up. I could feel I'm rolling down the side of my face and into my ears as this thing's cold breath lingered right there in the air in front of me, and I got to see her smile. She was missing teeth. The ones that remained were long and yellow. I could tell even through the light reflecting off the TV static bouncing against the wall. She got up close past the left side of my face and whispered, well, I probably shouldn't tell you. We all know how she arrives. And just like doctor Martinez's conclusion after six sessions, two more than we had planned for, it was the same as mine. We experience what we listened to this episode of Scary Story podcast. It's part of the collection of shows by Scary FM. I know I say this a lot on here, but seriously, thank you so much for your messages through Instagram and email. You already know that I love what I do, but your reviews and encouragement really help push everything to another level. If you look up the reviews on Apple podcasts. By the way, I guess story requests are becoming a thing, so I say we just go for it. I can only reply to reviews and shout outs on Instagram, though I don't get a reply button on podcast apps. By the way, you can support this show by leaving your own rating, or by trying out scary plus. I'll leave links in the description of this episode to absolutely everything anyway, Thank you so much for listening to my story. See you soon, yeah,