The Woman from the Woods / The Nightmares We Have

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. In the innocence of a child's eyes, everything looks like a game, and then our second story, nightmares, seemed to come to life. Are you ready? My name is Edwin and here's a scary story. There was a time when everything was good. Looking out the glassless window to see my house, my best friend with a popsicle about to fall off the stick, knowing that even if it did, he would pick it up and eat it anyway. The latter didn't work, and despite me bothering my dad maybe once a week about it, the ladder still remained, with only loose nails and steps that would twist outward like a cruel trap waiting to kill us on our way up the treehouse. There was little that would keep us out of there. I remember seeing the tree house for the first time the same way I remember meeting Gimbo when he was just a puppy, like a cold and helpless creature that needed a friend. I looked up at it from the back seat, where the guy with the suit who was showing us the houses around the area couldn't see me. I didn't know what was happening, but the thought of being able to play outside and not have to be scolded by the landlord for bouncing a ball by the stairwell. What's the promise that Mom made me? That was cool and everything, but what really made me look forward to it was that house on the tree. I turned to look at Mom when the man with the suit told my dad that the tree house could easily be taken out to plant a new tree, and my dad agreed. Mom simply smiled at me and shook her head, letting me know that it would be okay. I don't think they ever argued about it, but Dad would mention that the tree was dead and die. Well. I didn't know that trees could die. The tree house had a view of other trees from the edge of the forest behind her house, a place that I wasn't allowed to visit. Passed the signs about fire safety put in place by the county. I knew of them, and when we first moved in, Dad and I used to explore around there searching for man made stuff. I must have been around seven or eight when Dad explained to me the difference between natural and man made things. I thought that was everything that existed, and in a way I sort of grew up, thinking that it was true, despite everything I saw in those woods growing up. It was a group of sticks lined up in the shape of a star, the one with five points, tied with some type of yarn or roots tightly around the intersections. Dad struggled with this one. Normally he would look at what I was holding, whether it be a cat from a soda bottle or a nest that had fallen from a tree, and call it out man made, natural, man made. But this time he looked at it and grabbed my wrist and shook it until the star fell off my hand, man made, he said, lost in thoughts, then he kept walking. He was distracted the whole time after that. I don't remember when we stopped walking in the woods in the mornings exactly, but I have some distant memories that remind me that things weren't normal in that place where we used to live. When I was old enough to ignore the ghosts that I had seen from the window of that tree house blaming the fog, or learning more about animals enough to discard the screams that I'd hear from those trees late at night, part of me questioned that maybe certain things aren't only made by man or made by nature. Some things are from other worlds. I strange and maybe a bit crazy, but even you can walk around hearing a voice demanding that you leave a room or have a thing try to wake you up by tugging at your blanket, and you'll just ignore it. You'll think that it was some part of a dream or your mind making things up. It doesn't take too long for us to accept some dumb explanation for something so obvious. But I think that's what happened with me. My friend, who was coincidentally named Buddy, fell off the treehouse and broke his arm one day. He laughed on his way to the hospital, even through the bombs on our way out of the property. This guy was a jokester at heart, and I think it was due to some of his joking that we were able to get through some of the creepiest moments that we had in that forest that day. Before he broke his arm, we had been walking around the woods, just on the edges of it, when we both saw a person holding a type of leash in their hand, just looking at us. It looked like a woman, expressionless, standing by one of the largest trees. We had walked along that same path forever. I mean at the time, that meant in about four years since we had met, and we had never seen anyone else there. It was sort of expected that we would be alone in those woods. I felt a chill run out of my back. But it was different for Buddy. He instead stood up tall and waved at the woman, yelling hello loud enough for her to hear us about twenty yards away, but the woman didn't move. We both turned to look at each other, and to our surprise, she was gone once we turned around. There weren't that many places to hide out there, and we had figured it out during our hide and seek games, so we kept walking toward one of the campsites where we would sit and eat our chips, talking about life at school and random things. It was then when we spotted her again, standing by the edge where the dried grass started to mix in with the sticks of the trees, just past the clearing where we'd sit whenever Buddy would come over. He didn't stand up to wave this time. Her dark dress, stained or wet, looked loose on her. She didn't let go of the leash next to her. Buddy laughed at her first, probably just being nervous or thinking that it was a type of prank, but I was frozen solid. He looked at me and acknowledged that the woman looked dead and did a teasing who at me, wiggling his fingers from both hands in front of him. I couldn't laugh. I kept imagining the look of that woman and what we would say if she approached us. We turned around again, she was gone. I had read somewhere that you shouldn't laugh at ghosts or spirits, because not all of them take it lightly. But he found out the hard way when he looked out the window of the treehouse and took a few steps back. He then missed the edge of the hole, the one that we called the door, and he fell straight to the ground. She might have been scared, I don't know. It's not like he would admit it anyway. I thought it was payment for laughing, but I never told him that. It was weeks before he was able to climb back up again, but it took even longer to convince him to go back to the woods with me. So I spent a lot of time going out there, just out of habit. I guess I was searching for rabbits or cool rocks in the ground, and it was different when I was alone. The thought of the woman standing by the trees was also tough to forget. Eventually, Buddy agreed to head out there with me again, probably to prove that he wasn't scared of the woman we had seen. It was autumn now and the trees had changed colors and the leaves had fallen off earlier than expected, which made our walks just a little bit louder. Buddy was behind me something different about him, not the brave type of kid that would jump off the rocks first, but rather one that would look both ways before taking a step toward a place we had n't been to before. It would do this thing where one of us would decide on a path and the other would follow, sort of like at school with a captain leading the way, and when it was his turn, he would always lead us to the same spot. It was around the third time when I told him that we had been there before. We had already found everything there was. We had picked up coins and even an old shoe. At one point we had no matter what, We kept finding more things, a string of beads, a clump of dark hair. The trees had already turned yellow, which made the place look a little different, I guess, which would explain why we kept finding new items to bring back to the treehouse. But he couldn't wait to get away from the woods. Now something about him had changed, And though it's true that we spotted the same woman in the distance at different times, just standing there didn't seem to affect us as much. We would both look at each other and start walking back to the treehouse, perhaps only a little bit faster than before. Except this one time, we would spend our time looking for things that belonged to who knows who Way back in the day. Dad knew about it too. We would find knives and fishing hooks, even buttons from clothing. Sometimes at one point he told me that man may objects eventually became natural objects too. As a kid, I always wondered what he meant by that. Against the yellow leaves, we would see the tree branches a little bit better, and Buddy and I walked over to the large tree, the one that always had new things for us to find, and we searched for a good while until we came face to face with the woman from the woods. She was standing clear ass day by the trunk of the tree, her eyes completely sunken in, and the skin of her arms and face shriveled over and otherwise young appearance. Buddy took two steps back once again, he fell on his back and started screaming. I thought he had hurt his arm again, and the flashbacks of his fall started taking over. I screamed too, until I heard Mom or someone in the distance calling our names. But he kept looking up at me with his eyes wide open, and I could tell all that he wanted to say something couldn't get it out. Eventually, he lifted his right arm slowly and pointed up at the trees right above us. We could see her swaying like a shadow against the leaves, the remaining shoe about to fall off her shrinking potty. The next story, titled The Nightmares We Have is coming off right after this. A man sat next to a woman on the bus, and she smiled and took her earphones out. They must have known each other, but barely, since I could tell that she was a bit awkward around him. She turned away from the window she had been staring out of for the past two minutes and I felt glad I hadn't bothered her with the time, thanks to the old woman who sat next to me. Two seats behind her. The old lady took out her phone and with the thin white letters over an image with what must have been five or seven kids around her, I was barely able to decipher the time, nine forty five pm. The young woman in front of us had seemed a bit distracted. Bothered, I think would be the better word. I knew the feeling. We did the useless loop around the end of Baker Street, and I looked at the same lot with the same cars parked in the dealership. I wondered if they had sold any since yesterday. Who is buying so many cars? Anyway? The moon was on the other side of the bus now, and my views from this point on would only be the closed up shops and those who were walking around the street, walking home from work or going to it. The same thing every night. The driver had turned off the air conditioning in the car, or turned it down enough for us to hear our own thoughts, something I hated doing, especially on a quiet bus. The man who sat by the woman in front of us thankfully had something to say I was disappointed. After slightly stuttering to get it out, he asked her how her day had been, and that was it. I mean, you could have asked her what she was listening to before you got on, or told her something about your head. Heck, a joke about your giraffe neck would have gotten me to laugh, and I don't have the greatest sense of humor. Tired, she said another disappointment. Seeing Young Love being so messy and cringey was not what I liked. But unfortunately it had become a write of passage for all of us, myself included. Once you crossed it, you could end up like me, married, happy enough to look both ways when you cross the street, you know, like a normal human being. The wife would be waiting for me with the warm dish of some fantastic new steak recipes she found inside of potatoes and a glass of wine. Ha. No, I mean, I love her and everything, but the most she can cook is eggs and stuff that comes in a box, you know, the things you add water to finish off. She listened to my work stories, though she always had questions for me. Mark, what's the name of your coworker, the one with the house by the lake. If we make friends with him, then maybe we can have a barbecue over there. What do you think? His name was Ben, and he was a jerk. But every time she asked me, I would say that it was a great idea, and that his name was Matt. I mean, he looked like a Matt anyway. She would smile and want to know all of the details of work and how I liked it, what I was thinking, and what I dreamt about, and I would lie about that too. I looked away from the window for a bit to see how a young couple, or the soon to be couple would unfold when I found him looking at the top of her head, not intentionally. The man's neck simply would not allow it otherwise. He opened his mouth as if to speak. Then she interrupted him. I can't seem to get good sleep lately, she said, faking a yawn. What's keeping you up? He asked, find something good here, let's get it nightmares, she said. The man stayed silent. Four or five other people were in the bus with us, and I'm sure that at least one other person on the bus wanted to hear about this. I could tell because this other guy on the seat across the aisle from me, took off one of his earphones without moving another muscle of his body. Now it's been a while since this happened, so bear with me. The story she told still lingers in my mind or my nightmares, and sends shivers down my back. Most nights. She has a glass of water, and she started avoiding the cereal that she used to eat before bed, thinking that it was a cause of these dark dreams. She would bathe, get into bed and open a new chapter of her book, The Alchemist Nothing Scary. Before that she had read a Tale of Two Cities, and before that some mother aknow book about the tone that the earth hums in, which is be flat. I think no matter what she read before bed, she would have the same nightmares. She crossed the street, a crowded one like the kind you see in New York City in the movies, with noise and places where you can see everyone but not a specific person. She walks past a food cart hot dogs or something, and keeps walking past the street until suddenly most people are gone. She looks behind her and the street is empty except for the man from the cart, who is gleefully still serving invisible customers. Now, without the sounds of the cars and people, all you can hear is his voice asking for one dollar and seventy five cents. He drops a hot dog on the sidewalk in front of him, then begins to serve the next invisible customer. She keeps walking because, in her own words in the dream, she knew where she was going. She goes past another corner to see a man dancing on the street, stopping every few seconds to pull out a coin from his pocket and place it carefully on his own tip bucket. He dances, jumping and spinning, then pauses, takes out a coin and places it in the bucket once again. And she keeps walking, seeing all of these bizarre scenes of people behaving strangely, and suddenly she bumps into a man who claims he's there to pick her up. He opens the door of a red car and signals to welcome her inside. That's when she feels it, the fear, as the man begins to chase after her. The deep wrinkles on his forehead is what she's able to remember. She runs past the characters in her dream, every single one of them being the same person with the wrinkles on his forehead. The dancer stops and looks at her, only to be the same man in disguise. She runs past a delivery driver, a person sitting on the street, again all being the same man. Then she gets to the man from the hot dog cart, a pile of them now by the side of his cart. As he keeps preparing them and tossing them out into the sidewalk, she catches a glimpse of the deep wrinkles on his forehead. Now I know that I shouldn't have been listening to this woman talk about her dream. It wasn't meant for me, obviously. I'm known to blurt out comments, so I surprise myself for being able to stay quiet on this one. I must have made a face, because the old lady next to me locked eyes with me for half a second, enough to make me gnawd awkwardly at her. He turned away just as she was about to tell me something, and she didn't carry on with it. Well, what makes it scary? I heard the man next to the girl ask her, trying to seem more interested than he actually was. I don't know, too familiar, I guess, she said, turning toward the window again. I knew what made it scary. I've seen that same guy, the deep wrinkles, sunken eyes. It wasn't so much the way he looked, but the ways he showed up for me. He would come up in reflections and ask for change, and then I would run to catch a train down at the station, and he would be the first person I would see against the glass as I stepped into the empty cart. He was the man I would see everywhere, and the only one that paid attention when everyone else would ignore me. That's why it was scary. And no, I wasn't making this up. It had bothered me for years before I forgot all about him. I once made the mistake of telling my wife about the dream, and sure enough she started seeing him too. The curse, we joked. We used to call him the follower. We hear about him, and suddenly we begin to notice him. The couple stayed silent this time. The old woman next to me was trying to stand up, so I moved over to the side. She took a couple of steps over to the seat in front of us and sat behind the quiet girl with the nightmare. Honey, she said as she tapped her on the shoulder. I've seen that same man in my dreams too. The girl turned around, stunned. She took another look at her and then looked at me, and this time I couldn't keep quiet. I've seen him too, I said, and surprised myself once again for not saying anything more. Wasn't anything else to say, I guess. I could feel the eyes of the guy across the aisle from me and caught him mouthing the words me too, leaving his jaw slightly open in disbelief. I grabbed my bag and broke the silence as a door of the bus opened for me. The sound of the bus faded as I walked down the empty streets for a couple of blocks. It was just me, no one else. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kobar Rubez. You have an idea for a story, reach out to me via email or through the link in the description of this seve To listen to other creepy stories, use a search bar to find True Scary Story or our other show, a Dark Memory. Thanks for listening, see us soon.