The Watchman

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's story is about a cemetery caretaker, a watchman, who has, along with his wife, collected many stories throughout the years, eventually becoming part of one. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. There was one word that my grandpa would say with so much pride, veladore, meaning watchman. Whenever someone would ask what he did for a living, he would smile, puff up his chest and say it loud and clear, velador. He was a humble man who knew how to sharpen knives just as quickly as he could do math in his head. Mom told me much later, long after he had passed, that he never learned how to read. As a kid. I thought everyone knew how, and I found it strange how he knew so many stories. It was only later in life that I realized he was retelling stories he had heard or lived through. It would tell me my favorite ones, and when I was about eight years old, he told me in front of my dad that once I got old enough that he would take me to his job, that it was only for the brave, and for me, that's where most of the stories had come from. Mom wanted my grandpa to stop working already, he didn't need the money. Both him and Grandma had their house paid off, a consistent pension coming every month. But something always told Mom that the day he would stop working would be the day that he died. He was always active, always doing something. I was about twelve years old when I finally got to go with him, and even at that age, I was terrified. You see, my grandpa worked at a cemetery at night. His job was to lock the cemetery gates to head inside to the small house on the corner of the property by the old part of the cemetery, and he would wait until dawn to hand over the keys and go home. Summers spent with my grandparents were something that I would never get close to living again in my life. Grandma would come with us on those nights, sometimes bringing along her basket of bread, ham, coffee, candles, a kind of tuna that she would use to make sandwiches for us. She would bring along an extra blanket for me. He would stay up late into the night with candles, as there was no electricity or running water behind those cemetery gates. They would share stories about the place the lock would bang against the metal with the peeling green paint. At the front of the cemetery, by the dirt road, I would wait for Grandpa by one of the tombstones, the one with the statue of the little boy pointing up at the sky. He would look over at me and nod to follow him back to the guardhouse in the direction he was pointing. I knew that he would want to take the long way back around the old place, the area where the graves were only mounds on the ground, nameless, forgotten. Did I ever tell you the story of the ghosts of the little girl I saw the other day? I walked a little closer to him, looking up at his face past the green jacket that he always wore. I'm trying to find her name around here, he said. I think her name was Marie Belle. I pretended to help him look in silence, until I realized that he wasn't looking at the gravestones, but rather at the trees in the distance. Something had cut his eye. And in a place like that, empty with only stones scattered throughout the dirt and grass, one was bound to imagine those lives with only dried up bodies stones as reminders that they ever existed, and if you look close enough, you could almost see them walking among the trees. Grandpa used to explain that those gravestones with no visitors those of the forgotten dead. Some were also forgotten near the end of their lives. They were either those with no friends because there were bad people, or those that outlived everyone, something tragic either way. But there were some that were not cared for, or worse, hated the dead. That made some people glad. Whence they were stuck under a pile of dirt, with no mourners, no candles, no flowers. One could tell the cemetery was cold as it was already, but something around their gravestones made the air even colder, and Grandpa could tell. And even though we know their names, he would warn, a ghost can never know yours. If they call you by your name, if they know who you are, they are trying to welcome you, and not in a nice way. They're trying to welcome you to the realm of the dead. My Grandpa looked out towards the trees again and then to the sky. I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to hurry up so we could get back to Grandma at the guard house to hide under a blanket and wait for a sandwich. But then he looked to the sky and suddenly he grabbed my hand. He pulled me as he walked quickly through the dirt paths between the dry trees, with only the sounds of our shoes against the gravel. And if you listen close enough, you could hear the whispers we would walk through, of the ghosts that talk to each other, fading behind us. When we got back to the guard house, Grandma had already lit two candles by the window. We got inside and Grandpa shut the door and told Grandma about the trees smoke out in the distance. He said ash had probably made the sky change colors that evening, and we needed to keep an eye out for the fire from the hill. It was known to be a common thing around the time of the year, and Mom was the only one that used it as a reason for me not to go on those cemetery nights with my grandpa, always reminding him of the fire that burned down one of the nearby towns when she was younger, And it was true the place never recovered and those who survived resettled in the town, where my grandpa lived at the time. A few chose to stay up there, surrounded by the charred brick and stone buildings, Although most got turned into fields. It was their choice to live among the reminders of the tragedy that struck those three days. Once the sun had set, Grandpa stepped out of the guard house and went out to a nearby mount of rocks to get a closer look at the sky. It was smoke, he confirmed, and it looked like it was getting closer. That he would check back in an hour, and that if it was indeed coming up to us, he would have to run. Being a watchman after all, involved this sort of thing, he was supposed to take care of the cemetery and the areas around it. The shotgun by the doorframe was a stern reminder of just that. Grandma put the blanket over me as I sat in that huge couch in the front room with the guardhouse a cup of hot milk with chocolate powder by the tiny table in front of me. Grandpa looked over at Grandma and said that he needed to get a closer look by the Red Hill, which was a hill off the west side of the cemetery wall. He wanted to get a closer look at the fire that was approaching with all the dry brush and trees. He was worried that he might need to call the fire department, which in that small town was it was only a group of three men volunteers, including himself, people that would use their training to dig ditches to find water and climb trees and roofs to help people out. It made sense why he was concerned about the fire. He knew what it was capable of doing, and he knew what to watch out for. I heard Grandma tell him to hurry back, and it was then when I pulled the blankets off from my face and looked at him. He seemed concerned, saying that if he didn't come back in twenty minutes, to grab our things and run out over the south exit and ask for help at the first house, the residence of missus Linda, who had a phone, and to call for help from town. He would catch up with us later. My grandma was worried, I could tell, but all we could do was to lock the doors and wait for him to come back. And so he zipped up his jacket and stepped outside. My Grandma locked the door immediately, and then walked to the other windows. The place was small, but with all the latches the windows had, it felt like we were in a fortress of some kind. Grandma closed all of them and we waited. Your milk is gonna get cold, she said, and she picked it up and handed it to me. I moved my hands from out of the blanket and held on to the cup with both hands. Grandma walked over to the kitchen and cut into a piece of bread, about to make that sandwich. She wrapped it in paper and was coming back toward me when the wind started howling outside. Grandpa would often mention that it's hard to start and stop a fire when it's windy. It was a phrase Grandma would often hear, so she knew what it meant. I looked over at the clock, thinking about how if we stuck to the times that Grandpa said, we would be leaving in about two minutes. Grandma's the wrapped sandwich down, walked over to the table where her things were. She put everything in a bag and then grabbed my shoes, bringing them over to me to put them on. And as we were there listening to the whispering of the wind, on that couch, watching the clock as it ticked and talked. We suddenly heard a tapping on the door. Neither of us moved. Brampa never knocked. Part two of the Watchman continues right after this stay with me. We were both frozen the moment we heard the tapping at the door that turned into knocking and then stopped. And Grandma signaled me to be quiet and forced a smile upon and seeing how scared I was, he waited for several minutes, all the while only the wind howled outside. You see, my grandma used to have stories too, I think, even more than Grandpa did. From the small town where she was from. She spoke of the farmer had heard strange noises around where he kept his chickens, but when he got near, he saw a large creature crawling on all four legs and long hair, coming closer and closer to the door. He fired a warning shot, but instead of scaring it off, the thing turned to him, locking its eyes on his and lunged toward him. That's when he fired at it, missing the first shot by just a few centimeters. The second shot got it in the chest and it fell to the ground before crawling away. Toward the woods. It wasn't until the following morning when some of the workers reported the body of a woman with a bullet through her chest, a trail of blood falls following her from the farmer's property. The judge believed his account, and the residents of the town were no longer terrorized by the creature. They had all been affected by. But I never brought up to anybody else in fear of being laughed at a town there would have been just another urban legend. But Grandma was very much into sketching, paint and art in general. She had been hired many times by government officials back in the day who went to visit university. Researchers would photograph her work and put it on display due to the lack of images that existed of that tiny town, which of course meant that she had realistic drawings of the creature she had seen with her own two eyes. It was against Pomp's wishes that Grandma showed me her drawings. I was too young, that I would get scared. She would say that maybe once I got older, I could look at them. And indeed, those things have been burned in my mind ever since she shared them with me. A woman with long hair that covered her entire body, her face scrunched up in scaly skin, her mouth pointy, and you see, everyone knew who she was. Olga was her name, that she lived up on the hills Ahinta, they said, a person who did their own hunting and loved being on their own. Whenever she would come into town, people would run inside their homes, watching her from their windows. As she walked over to the shop on the corner, she would place several coins on the counter and then grab her candied apple, the thing she would do every now and then. Someone knocked at the front door again, Soila, I heard from the outside. It was loud and coming from a voice I could only describe as tired. Sola was my grandma's name. Her eyes looked up toward the window, was blocked by the wooden doors and the strongest hinges I had ever seen. Grandma stood still. So Ela, it's about Thomas. My grandma looked over at the clock, something I had been staring at the whole time. We should have been out to the guard house four minutes ago. Grandpa had been very serious about that. Grandma and I had our things ready, my shoes were tight, my jacket was on, and we would have been out by then had it not been for that person standing at the door, the person Grandma was trying to ignore. And even though everything happened so quickly, I still remember everything in vivid detail, just like Grandma's drawings. The smell of the walls and the floor, the sound that the candles made when an insect flew into the flame, the sound of the person calling at the door. Many of what was happening. Grandma had told me about this long before Grandpa confirmed it. In fact, those were her own words. If they call you by your name, if they know who you are, they're trying to welcome you, and not in the nice way. They're trying to welcome you to the realm of the dead. Grandma was a strong believer in all of this, and not in some strange way with rituals or anything, but rather very careful about the things she would say or do around the house. Strange noises to me were not strange to her. She would know exactly what they were. When she told you to come inside at night, or to stay indoors, to lock your doors, you would listen. That look in her eyes was not that of fear, but of caution when she heard her name from the outside. But when she heard that they had something to say about Grandpa, doubt took over her expression. Tricksters, She whispered loud enough for me to hear, in hopes that it would calm me down. Thomas, the voice whispered, Thomas is dead. Soula opened the door. She looked down at her own hands gripping each other, before she looked up at the small wooden door covering up the window glass. I couldn't help myself. I grabbed out to Grandma's arm and tugged at it, my eyes swelling. Thomas, my grandpa? Was he dead? I looked at the clock and begged my grandma for us to go. We should have been at missus Linda's house getting help right now. What if it's Linda, What if it's Linda, Come to help us, I asked. My grandma signaled for me to be quiet as a voice whispered, Soila, Thomas is dead. That's not Linda, Grandma said in a stern tone. It's Rosa. The voice yelled, frustrated. Now come with me. Thomas is dead, Rosa, my grandma questioned her shoulders were now dropping and her eyes were losing focus as she stared into nothing. My grandparents used to talk about her Rosa. She was one of the women who had been around the fire of the town on the Hill many years ago. Her, several of her family members, and some other people had resettled part of the town among the burnt down fields and homes. They hardly got along with anyone in town, but like with any of the townsfold back then, they were kind of forced to be polite to each other. My grandma walked over to the door and I watched as a glowing beam of orange light entered the room. A woman silhouette stood there, walking up and through the door frame. Even through the candle light inside, we could see how part of her face was burnt. Her clothes were black and with a hole on the left leg, a patch of ashy, wet flesh shining against the candlelight. Drossac Drosa. What happened? Grandma asked, so Ela, let's go, She yelled back. That woman grabbed onto my arm with that cold grip. As she dragged us outside. We could hear the roaring fire from behind the house, and that's where she was taking us. I wanted to go see my grandpa, of course I did, but he set ahead to missus Linda's house and the other direction. Grandma was pulling back and away from Drosa, now asking where they were going. We rushed between the tombstones and trees up and almost through the cemetery gates, the ones that were leading to the glowing town at the top of the hill. It's hard to describe how the heat felt against my face that night, arriving in waves against the cold air. Just before getting to the gates, my Grandma yelled at Rossa, saying that we were not going to get any closer. The smoke was too much and we were heading in the wrong direction. The fire would be coming toward us fast and we needed to get away. PetroSA kept insisting. She gripped my arm tighter as she pulled me toward the dirt road. Just before the dry trees in front of us, there was a large glowing cloud of red and orange smoke ash flying everywhere. It was then when we saw a shadow coming through the trees. It was growing bigger as it was coming closer. I grabbed onto my Grandma as she turned around to head back through the set cemetary, releasing her grip from Rosa, and suddenly he heard another voice, Sola Soila. I turned around. It was Grandpa. He had taken off his green jacket and was now running toward us at full speed. What are you doing here? I told you to run to get help, but there was no time to explain, no time to say anything. He grabbed my hand as we ran through the cemetery. Grandma was stopping to look back and eventually stopped us to ask about Rosa that she had been with us, telling us that we couldn't just leave her behind. Grandpa slowed down to look at us. Rosa didn't make it out of her house up on the hill. Grandpa said it was the first house to go. Scary Story podcast has written and produced by me Edwin Komarogas ad Free and early stories are available on scary plus dot com or just look for the button to try it out for free. Stay in touch through our TikTok and Instagram at scary dot fm, and if you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at edwin Cove. That's e d W I n c O V. Links to everything are in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.