Demon in the Barn

While exploring an abandoned farmhouse in rural California, two friends came face to face with something dark, an encounter so chilling that still haunts them decades later. My name is Edwin and here is Dory. It's true scary story. I grew up on my grandparents and great grandparents property the Central Valley of California. In the eighteen hundreds, my family settled there. I'm not sure how they got the land. I think they got it from the Native American Indian tribe that was in the area. I think it's the mewalks. My great grandparents built a big, huge custom home on the property at Peach Orchards, then Walnut Orchards, all the orchards. Then my grandparents built a big branch house on that property as well. When I was a teenager, we moved onto the property, onto a separate house next to my grandparents' house. So we spent a lot of time outside. I had horses and whatnot. Our property was forty acres and we were up on a bluff. The bluff overlooked the top of Walnut Orchards, so we would go down, especially in the summertime. We'd either ride the horses or walk and we'd take this one road that went straight down of almost a mile and our property ended at the river. Good day where this story comes into play. This summer, my friend and I we were going to walk down there, just killing time. We usually went to the east. This time I said, let's go to the west because last week when I was with another friend riding our horses, I rode past this old house that was sitting back off the river, off the road. We could tell from the road far away it's abandoned. I said, let's go check it out. Here's anything cool there. So we start walking down there. It's a small, little white, one bedroom, little square house. Immediately behind it is a very large wooden barn. It was clear that this house was probably built like in the twenties, turn of the century. It's an old, dilapidated house. It's in the middle of nowhere. There's just for as far as you can see in any direction, it's just orchards. So as we were approaching it, we were being kind of quiet because we didn't know if there were like any other random people out there. It was just we were just two girls, so we wanted to be careful that we weren't going to bump into some sairy dudes down there, so we kind of did a big circle around the barn in this house to make sure nobody was there and we were quiet as we were doing it. This barn is massive, huge, huge, huge barn, the size of a two story building, but there was no second story in it. It was just really high rafters. The doors to the barn were slid open. There was probably maybe a five or six feet space between the back wall of where the house was and the back wall of the barn, and the barn was totally intact. There was nothing wrong with it. That thing was solid. The house, on the other hand, half of the walls one half of the house, there were no walls left. Trees had crashed into it, Branches and leaves were everywhere. The front heart of it was intact, but the back wall of the house and the back right side of the house the walls were gone, but you can still see kind of the footing. Three quarters the wall was still standing. We go around to the back of this barn as we were making our loop around to make sure known as there there's an old tractor completely covered by the weeds and dry grass twenty feet thirty feet away from the barn behind us. As we're facing these barn doors, we're looking inside of it. You could tell it's not used anymore. There's cobwebs from ceiling to floor, dust moats floating through the air. It was late in the afternoon, sun shining through. Everything is covered in this real fine layer of dust. It's clear no one uses this barn. On the right hand side of the barn there was like a workbitch that just had odds and ends of stuff that people just never used anymore. Old tools and cans and bottles, suitcases, not a whole lot of stuff, but there was nothing really of any value. Over there. On the left hand side of the barn was big railroad ties, those heavy wooden railroad ties, probably twenty or thirty of them, butted up. It probably took up like fifteen feet long by maybe four feet highs. They were just staffed, not very neatly until they'd been there for years and years and years and years. Cobwebs all over hay, all over dust, and there were barrel hoops thrown on top of them, and pieces of wire that used to be maybe a grape vineyard that was in the empty fields that were around us. They also had peach orchards down there, so there was a lot of old orchard equipment, wooden things and metal rings and wire. And then at the back left corner, all the way up, actually the whole back wall of the barn was hay bales that had fallen apart and were just high piled up there. It was probably five feet high by maybe the width of the house. There must have been tons of bales of hater that fall on apart over ten or twenty years, and it's just laying there, covered in dust, covered in cob webs. So as we walked through, you know, we're kind of breaking through a few cob webs, and I'm afraid of spiders, so I'm giggling about, Oh, I don't want to see any spiders. And we walk around and we're looking, oh, maybe we'll see some old cool tool or some old cool bottle or something interesting, fun, old antique, whatnot to take with us. We walk around in there, we don't see anything of interest, and we walk back out. We go around to the front of the house. On the front porch is a whole bunch of old abandoned washers and dryers and from probably the fifties. As we get into the main part of this little square house, we walked into where there used to be a wall, but there was no more wall there. It was only about two feet high, like the foundation in the bottom part of the wall was there. My friend goes in and as we walk into the house, if we were standing in the dead center of this perfect square, we were both looking at the back wall of this bar because there's no wall there to the house. While of that house was gone. To the left is a kitchen. You can walk into this little tiny kitchen, and then going on that side also as one little bedroom. And I stayed right where I was in the center of this house, and I was looking at what was probably the living room, and there was no wall there. There was a pile of just junk on the ground. There's also branches, leaves, everything kind of mixed up in this pile of junk. So my friend goes to the front part. She's looking through the other rooms, and I'm looking in this pile. And as I'm kind of using a stick and I'm pushing things around, see what's in this pile, I see this staff like a walking stick. It's probably about four or five feet long, and it is intricately carved. There's carving over every inch of it. It's very detailed, ornate carving. And so I'm like poking it with a stick, looking at it, squinting, like what is that? My friend calls me kind of in a panic. I startle and I go kind of hustling back to the front part of the house where she is a lizard scared or something. I said, Kimar, you got to see what's in this pile. This thing's cool. So we walk back to where I was standing at this pile, and from where we're standing, we are probably five or six feet from the back wall of the barn. If you've ever been in an old barn or like an old wooden fence, you could see kind of through the cracks of the wood, just a little tiny bit you can see through the cracks of the wood. And so I get to that pile and I'm like, look, there's this stack here. I start poking around on the pile and there's nothing there. It's not there. And she goes, what what did you see? And I said, there was this stick. And as soon as I started talking about it. There came a sound from inside that barn that was so deafeningly loud. It sounded like somebody had dropped a great train inside that barn. The ground shook, and it was like whatever was at the back of the barn where the doors were, it was like a train, or it was louder than a truck. It was. Whatever it was was so loud to barreling into the barn, so fast, so furious. You could hear the wood flying, you could hear those barrel rings flying, you could hear the railroad ties flying, you could hear those hay everything scattering in there. The walls were shaking, the ground was shaking, the air was just reverted. It was so loud. Everything was moving in there. And then whatever it was hit the back of the wall of that barn, right in front of us, eye level, and you could just hear this guttural rowel and breathing on the other side of this wall. And this wasn't a person, this wasn't a car. This was a sound that I can't even describe how incredibly loud it was. We're both frozen, staring at this wall. Through the slats of this wall, we start to kind of inch our way to the right, to God to walk out away from this house. Staring at the wall as we do, you can tell something's on the other side of the wall. You can see it. Dust is kind of coming through the slats of the wood. You could see eyes through those slats, but you can't make out the shape. You could see something on the other side of the wall. It was dark black. The eyes were like a yellowish, thin kind of red. As we started facing the wall, slowly inching our way out of the house, not taking our eyes off of this wall. It's still breathing and following us, and you could hear things moving on the other side of that wall. We come around where there's a clearing and we take off running. We don't look back. We take off running, and we must have ran three quarters of a mile before one of us just literally collapses on the ground and run itself out. We look at each other. You look around, make sure nothing's following, nothing's following us. We look at each other, what the heck just happened? And we start reliving and recanting what we saw, what we heard. When we both first started talking, we couldn't believe what had just happened. Part of you wanted to say, this can't be what I thought it was. So as I started explaining what I saw, my friend Jennifer starts finishing my sentences, and I'm doing the same for her, like did you see the skin looked like it was leather. Did you see his eyes? Yeah, the eyes were red. What was that we saw? Why was that so loud? But how was that barn still standing? As we're sitting there catching our breath. Another friend was like a younger brother to me, comes up because he was going down the river to go fishing. He's like, what are you guys doing? We tell him what happened. He's like, you guys are full of craft. There's nothing there. You guys are crazy. I'm like, dude, I am not kidding you. I am never lie to you. I am not joking. He was like, all right, then show me. We get up. We start walk back there. I said, I'll walk back there, but I'm not going in there again. I'm never going back in there. So we walk back over there, take a big white berth around it, you know. When we go back to where the barn, I said, I just want to see what you go in that barn, you'll see there are that place is toward the shreds. So we get to the very back and I'm far away and I'm looking at the inside of this barn and it looks like exactly like it did when we first got there. There's still cobwebs hanging on the ceiling. Everything's in the exact same place. Nothing has been moved, no dusts, a skew anywhere. It's exactly the same. I tell him, I was like, hey, go over there in that house and go look in that file over there and see if there's a long stick in that set him and there I'm beginning pick and he's stupid. So he went in there and he's like, there's nothing new here. There's just trash in here. There's old cans and like leaves and trash and there's nothing in air, And what are you talking about? I go back. I start doodling. Later that evening, I'm like doodling, like I can't picture the images that were on that stick, but I've never seen anything like it. Later and Jennifer and I talked about that years later and for days after that. The only thing I can say to describe what we saw what would being. I have a hard time telling the story to people because no one's going to believe it. But at that time, I didn't watch scary stories. I was raised in a very religious family. We weren't allowed to talk about that stuff. Being reolved in that stuff like it was not part of my world, part of my just my experience. It wasn't something I was looking for, It wasn't anything I was expecting. But I know what I saw, and it was from that point on that it really made me wonder what else is out there because I can't explain what I heard and what I saw. Since that time, as an adult, now it has made me interested in what else is out there. There's something else that goes on in our world that's more than just you know, flesh and bone. There's there's something else out there. So I've been interested in reading and studying, trying to figure out but a little bit afraid of finding out exactly what I saw. Since that day, there are very few things that actually scare me. Almost everything else is tangible you can fight your way out of it. There was no fighting. You knew you were completely powerless to this. That terrified me to buy Core, to. Share your story with us. Head on over to true scarystory dot com and throughout the form, and if you know of somebody who might like this podcast, send it to them. Links are in your app and in the description of this episode. And if you want to support the show and listen without ads, try out Scary Plus. It's free for two whole weeks, and then four and ninety nine a month. You can cancel whenever you want. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone. See soon.