What Rosita Saw

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. In these stories, I'll take you into a family memory with a dear friend who got a strange visitor, and then we might find out what's up at the abandoned house next door. Are you ready? My name is Edwin and here the Scary Stuffy. When I was asked about when I would be visiting my aunt Tanned her family in Mexico, I went straight to my phone's calendar to see when I'd have time off work. I almost forgot about the reasons why I hadn't visited. My family has always been very close to each other, both physically and also always in each other's businesses, though with sometimes a knowing, I always felt safe around there, knowing that I could call somebody or get help whenever I needed it. That being said, my grandparents lived one house away from my uncle's house. Between them lived a long time neighbor, an old woman who we had gotten close to and would drink coffee at her house a few times per week. Her family had abandoned her, but she didn't know it. Most of her conversations were about how she was waiting for her daughter to return, and nobody had the heart to tell her that she was involved in bad stuff. My aunt suspected that she was actually dead. Finding out something like that would make the guilt stronger in not telling the old woman, a woman who we all call Rosita. One of our last conversations with Rosita was about dogs who she claims were coming to visit her at night. Now, her almost being ninety years old and still managing to live by herself with the occasional visit of one of her sons who lived in another state, we knew that the visits from the dogs were probably a result of a degrading mental state. I know. I mentioned she had been abandoned, but this lady was far from alone. During the day, members of the church, kids from around the neighborhood, and even the shopkeepers would visit her to make sure that she was okay, that her blankets were washed, and that she was eating and getting her medicines. In fact, word about the visits from the dogs came from around the streets, with news spreading about beasts beginning to circle her death was coming to get her. Now, imagine as a kid, a story like that was terrifying. But be it simply a coincidence or not? Trosita passed away a few days after that, and practically the whole town came to the church service to say good bye. Her long lost family members came with their kids, some from the US and the rest from other cities. It was a strange type of anger, thinking that these people never truly appreciated Rosita or got to hear the way she spoke so fondly of them until her last days, but they could tell the coming days. They came into her house to clean and to take some of her belongings, mainly photographs and some items that belonged to them. A couple of weeks later, they put up the house for sale and offered my uncle's family a steep discount for it, supposedly as a thank you for taking care of Rosita. My uncle accepted, but they had no intention of using the house for anything, so they signed the papers, took the keys, and the front door was locked years. The plan was to fix it up and remove the wall divisions between the houses to make one big lot with the yard and a place where they could host some of the outside visitors like me. The place looked a lot better now than how I remembered it, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind when I thought of the place. You see, before we moved away, a few kids and I were roaming around the property on the outside yard since we couldn't go inside, or at least we weren't allowed to, when one of the kids got the idea to jump through the window to grab a shoe box supposedly had a hidden treasure inside, just little kid stuff, you know, But when he stepped in, we all froze. There was a growl coming from the inside. Hilberto, the kid who had stepped inside, had gotten a shoe stuck on his way out and screamed for help, crying that the old man had grabbed him. His shoe came loose and plopped right by the windowsill as he fell on the dirt, landing on his shoulders and getting himself back up and running towards the side of the house where the other two of us were. The other kids told the different version of the story, something that their uncles or their neighbors had said that Rosita had been visited by the devil before dying. I knew the truth, but I remember thinking that it wasn't worth it, even as a little kid, to get into an argument about what was really in that house. We had all heard it, and despite all arguments, there was no way that the sound had actually come from a dog. Anyway, it was cleaned up inside. Now some ten years later, the floor had tile on it and the walls weren't peeling like I remembered. Despite all the changes, though, there was still something about that house. It had several stories to back it up, too, but I tried not to think about them, especially after agreeing to visit and stay there. The first night was relaxing. I was too tired from the eight hour bus trip there to think about anything. I didn't even bother to turn on the lights when I got there. The second night, that's when things started to change. I was by myself. My cousins all had their families and responsibilities now, so there wasn't any sleepovers or late night conversations with anyone. My brother was supposed to visit as well, but he would be arriving two days after me. He visited more often, though, so he was more aware of everything and knew of the businesses that had closed down or opened up. Believe me when I say that I was this close to asking to stay at my uncle's house instead of that where it was around one am. Though I can't be sure exactly, but I know that it was after midnight. I had seen that clock strike twelve, and I knew that the new day had started. It started off as a light knocking on the window with a tiny horse walking on rocks, if that makes any sense. I looked out the window to see the faint blue light from across the street. That's how the lights were back then, blue or purple, with mosquitoes flying all around it, buzzing and bumping and dying every minute or so. The tapping wasn't coming from there, It was from down the hall. I forgot to mention. This house was small, but had an abnormally long and dark hallway that would lead you straight to the backyard with the area to wash and hang your clothes rap beside the tiny fences with the chickens and rabbits wood roam. During the day. I could see some lights shining from there, though not a lot. I imagine someone knocking at the door, or a branch hitting against the metal roof of the house. I swear I imagined everything except for what it actually was. Tiny boots walking toward my bed, stepping against the cold tiles and echoing through the hallways as they came closer. I thought it was my mind. There was no one else in that house, and all of the windows and doors had a type of iron protection, fencing bolts into the frames. Nobody could get in, perhaps even worse, no one could get out. Suddenly I was a kid again, shutting my eyes eyes tightly against the rest of my face. Whenever a tiny ray of light would shine through, I would press my face even harder against the pillow try and block it out. I tried humming at myself to block the sound of the steps coming closer to me. Then they stopped. I opened my eyes, and there it was, an old man, hunched over, so low that all I could see was a dark mound of old clothing floating by my bed. My eyes opened wide, and I tried to scream, but nothing came out. All I could do was stare as he walked by the window, turned around and walked straight down the hallway out to the yard. I curled up against the headdress of the bed, the blanket over for my body, and worried that the thing would once again be standing right in front of me. It was around four thirty in the morning when I heard the first rooster, and before I knew it and for being lost in thoughts, it turned into six in the morning when I finally felt confident enough to check the door of my uncle's house next door, just to see if it was open. I rolled out of the bed and rushed past the hallway to get to the front door, which was bolted shut, just how I had left it. I smelled the coffee in the air before looking at my uncle's house. It was always an early riser, and was standing by the door, looking out of the street and greeting those who passed by with their work and school uniforms, getting ready for just another day. You didn't seem surprised to see me awake so early, but then again, we had seen each other in years, so how would he know that my regular wake up time was around nine. He asked if I wanted some coffee, and then my aunt stepped toward the door to invite me in. It was a matter of hours before everyone knew my story of the hunched old man. I spent another night in that house, this time with a borrowed television from my aunt who said that keeping it on would help me sleep better, and I took the offer. I flicked on the news channel, and even if the thing was stepping around that house at night, I didn't hear it. Not around seven in the morning, my brother showed up while I was already awake. He had already heard the story and chuckled when he saw me. The others knew of his stories too, which is why he always stayed at my grandparents' house instead. But still, he said that he would hear steps inside the empty house at night, even from next door. But then he told me something worse. He said that my uncle had tried to rent out the house before that they wouldn't stay there any longer than a week, and visitors wouldn't be able to stay there for more than a few days, saying that they too could hear the footsteps in the middle of the night, even stranger cases of a hunched over creature that would bark at them. You know, he said to me, I'm pretty sure I've heard that thing barking before, and sometimes I wonder if that's a creature that Rosita saw and talked about. The next story, something in the ground was coming up right After this, the person who owns the house where I'm renting sent a notice a few months ago that he would be installing security cameras on the exterior areas of the house. I'd been living there for about four years already, and I remember just how calm the streets used to be. But then things started changing around the neighborhood. The neighbors that I knew and had become friends with slowly started leaving, some for Texas and others for New Mexico, and they tried to convince me to go too. One of them had worked in the same place where I worked for over a year, and he offered to get me an interview so that I would have a job before moving. After this experience, I'm strongly considering giving him a call now. When I say that the area started changing, I don't mean that it had started becoming dirty or dangerous, but rather it had started becoming a place I didn't feel comfortable walking in for other reasons. There was a vacant house next to mine, and it had been like that for the better part of three years or so. People would come in and out, and the neighbor on the other side of it started saying that he had a strong suspicion the house was haunted. And let me tell you, this guy was a super geeky type of guy, the most logical person you can imagine. He could explain an issue of water pressure or land contaminants for his lawn like a manual. He had done some research about the area, and he had filed several complaints with the city. His theory was a little out there. I couldn't help thinking that it might have been true. He had gotten some dirt tested for composition and found, though a bit exaggerated in my mind, a high concentration of metals and toxins that were likely affecting the groundwater. When you explained this to me, I was obviously confused. I had just gotten over to his garage to ask for a tool to change the brakes on my car. The guy had clearly done his research and needed someone to tell about it. When he noticed that I wasn't getting it, he took off his glasses and looked me right in the eye. Saria was a cemetery dude. I thought he was joking or simply trying to scare me about the house that was right next door. It wasn't falling apart, and it didn't look old, but the owners refused to fix one of the broken windows on the side that faced me, and looking at it from my own living room really gave me the creep. Sometimes we used to talk so much about the house, the strange noises that would come from it at night and very early in the morning, things that simply couldn't be For example, an alarm would begin beeping early in the morning and shut off almost immediately, pretty standard in the neighborhood with houses so close to each other, but this one I was certain was coming from the empty house that, along with the radio with the sound it makes when it's searching for a station, scared me more often than uncomfortable sharing. It wasn't loud, and to the normal person it wasn't anything scary. With the hissing sound of the music and advertising switching so quickly, with the words jumbled up like that, it was another story for me. I thought that's what Greg was going to talk about, but instead he just switched up the conversation to another topic I had forgotten about, the ding Dong ditchers, kids from the neighborhood who would come around and knock on the door or ring the doorbell and then run away. Greg and I would laugh about it, telling our stories because I found it's just so strange how slowly they knocked. The other neighbors said that we were the only ones that would get them coming around because neither of us had fencing around our houses, But we would soon find out that everyone else was wrong. The cameras were installed and I was shown how to use them and get access to the recordings. It was more complicated than the normal ring doorbells that you have nowadays, because everything would be recorded to a single computer thing, and I had a monitor where you could turn it on and see cameras live as well as recordings. The first few days it was fun sitting there and watching at what times a mailman came, and when I discovered who the dog that kept pooping in my yard was. But one night, well I was sleeping, I heard it the radio. One of the cameras that was on the side of the house actually caught movement and I started recording on its own. It was then when I saw them for the first time, the mists. It would come from around the house and to the front, same way that a person who parked their car on the driveway would go when they got home. There were mists in the empty house's backyard, circling around for a few seconds before disappearing. When I showed Greg the next afternoon, he couldn't believe it. He had been logging similar things, but had thought it had been a type of temperature difference. And I don't know what other type of scientific explanations they seemed to make sense. Eventually, the complaints were filed with the town and Greg and some of the neighbors, and I went to the hearing. That's where it became clear the developers of the area had known about the grounds before the houses were built, that it had indeed been a cemetery. I mean that it had been already relocated. All they had done was to put all the remains in broken coffins, all in one deep hull in the ground. All they did was cover it up, And now we have a strong suspicion as to where that place is today. The stories in this episode were written and produced by me Edwin Kobapovness. If you have ideas for a story, send me an email or find me on Instagram, and if you want to hear true stories directly from the people who live them. Use us search bar to find true scary story. It's another podcast that I made, but it is scary to listen to it by yourself. Just a heads up, thanks for listening, See you soon.