Sweet Hollow Road / The Man in the Basement

As a fan of investigating croopy places. Amanda and her friends here of a supposedly haunted road with tales that would scare just about anybody. So they decided to take a trip there to investigate. But on one of their visits someone followed them. Who was it? My name is Edwin, and here is Amanda. It's true scary story. My name is Amanda Briah. I live in Bethpage, Long Island. Growing up, I lived in Mineola, New York, twenty minutes away from here. Growing up in the late two thousands, I had a group of friends who always wanted to go to different scary places on Long Island. I've always been curious of spooky places. Sleepy Hollow with the headless horsemen. Those stories always fascinated me. My friend Andrew pointed me to Sweet Hollow Road. It's a road that connects Old Country Road to Jericho Turnpike, two of the major roadways on the island. He told us about some of the stories that happened on the road. If you went under the overpass, turn your head lights off and sit there. When you turn your lights on and drive back out, there would be handprints all over your car. They say those are from a couple of teens that had made a pact to end their lives. They're the ones that are doing this to the car. There's other stories about a policeman that's flagging you down on this road. When you go to pull over to help, you realize that he's bleeding and missing the back of his head. He disappears some of those stories and tread me. We got some buy in to go to the road late one night. When you go on this road from Jericho Turnpike, you're driving through woods. There are no lights. There are houses, but you don't really see them, so you drive through. You pass all of these houses. You get to an area where there's a farm. The road's very narrow. Only one car can pass through this part, otherwise you're going to go off until a ditch. Once you come out of the wood clearing, there's an overpass which is the Northern State Parkway. There's a spot where you can pull over, like right before the overpass, a little roundabout type area. Once you pass the overpass, there's the cemetery on the left and there's the road for Old Country Road. It's about two miles long. Cars do pass, but it's not busy. A lot of locals know the area. It's haunted. You see things that you can't explain. We've heard people being run off the road because something walked into the road and they swerve to get out of the way. That road isn't used very often. Me and my friends we get there, pull off to the side of the road. It's really dark. I'm really quiet. We get out of the car. All my friends are starting to have second thoughts about going on the road and checking it out. We didn't come yet for nothing. We're going to try to see anything. Me and my friend Mike decide we're going to try to walk under the overpass to the cemetery on the other side. It's about one hundred and fifty feet two hundred feet. Everybody decided that they weren't going to do it. Me and my friend Mike, we start walking out. We're in the middle of the street. Where we get to the middle of the overpass, I start to see something white standing in the middle of the street by the cemetery. I can't make it out at first, it's just white. I don't say anything to my friend Mike. At first. We continue walking. It becomes a little clearer. It's a person. It's not see through. It's very solid. That's a woman. I can't see any legs. I just see arms, the head. I can make out hair. It was pretty long, it was past her shoulders. That's when I look at my friend Mike and I said, do you see what I see? He's like, yeah, I definitely see what you see. I'm like, all right, let's just keep going. He thought it was a car coming down the road. When you make the right from Old Country Road, you can see headlights. We thought it was a car. We started to move off to the side of the road to make waves so that they don't hit us. It never comes, car, never comes. Nothing ever happens Before we know it. The white thing standing in the roadway just disappears right before our eyes. We both looked at each other. That was Cue four. We need to get out of here. We ran back to the car. Our friends are like, what's going on. We're like, just get in the car, get out here. We need to leave. We just saw something. No way, you couldn't have seen anything. We're like, no, we definitely saw. We were describing it. They're like, there's no stories about that about this white lady in the road. We pile in the car and we take off. We drive under the overpass, past the cemetery, and we make the right back to up towards the Long Island Expressway. Me and my friend Mike don't talk about that night very much. We both know that we saw something. I tried to look more into it as years went on, and I found two stories. One it was about a bride who they say is two different ones. She's either murdered by her husband or she was hit by a car she passed away on her way to the wedding. I didn't really think that that was what I saw. She was in white, but it wasn't a wedding dress. It looked more period clothing style, like the Victorian err I found another story. I don't know if it's true. This is just what the locals say. They talk about a woman named Mary was not a very nice person when she was alive. A lot of the locals believe that she was a witch. She trapped students and tea shirts inside of the school turn of the century. If she lit the church on fire, as everyone was succumbing to the smoke and the fire, she jumped into the fire to also join them, and she came out of the flames. Locals don't know exactly what happened, but they believed she was buried in the cemetery that's on Sweet Hollow Road. I reached out to my friend Mike and said, I think I know what we saw that night. We discussed it, and we truly believed that we saw the ghost of Mary, this woman who did these awful things way back when. I've been back to the road several times with the same group of friends. We all experience something different. The second time, again late at night, we all pile in the car. There was ten to fifteen of us. We took two vehicles. We go the same route through the woods, through the farm area before the overpass. We pull off to the side of the road. We think it about what we're gonna do. If we're gonna drive, if we're gonna walk the road. We decide we're going to drive under the overpass. We turn the lights off. We're waiting. All my friends are starting to get scared. What if someone touches the car, what if the car starts to move. I'm like, everything's gonna be fine, don't worry about it, nothing happens. We turn on our headlights, we drive out. I don't know what made my friend Andrew decide to make a U turn to go back under the overpass, but we did. I had my mom with us because my mom I told my story about the ghost and she was like, I want to come, she was say. In the car with me and my other friends. We made the U turn, came back down through the overpass, went to the roundabout area, parked there. We all get out. It's cold. It was pretty windy that night too. We were trying to think or figure out what to do if we wanted to go stay on this road or go to the other haunted road, Mount Misery Road. I just felt like somebody was watching us in the distance. I felt like we shouldn't be there anymore. Started giving me the creeps. I said to my friend Andrew, we need to figure out what we're going to do or go back. We all pile back in the car as we were about to leave. I don't even know how we didn't notice this gentleman before, but it was a man looked disheveled, dirty, just didn't look like he lived in the area. And there's no houses over there. I'm not too sure if he lived in the area or he was just passing through. His back was to us. He had gray hair on the top of his head. He was walking hunched over a bit. Where did this guy come from? We were standing outside and we didn't see anything. I got this ominous feeling of dread, that same feeling I had before when I started to feel that the gentleman turned we was like an old butler from those old scary movies back in the day. He just lurched around. When he did that, I could see his face. He had a white beard, but his eyes are what really really scared me. His eyes were a yellowish kind of color, like when you take a picture of a cat and they have that reflection that shows up. It looked exactly like that. The headlights hit his eyes and his eyes did exactly what the cats do, very golden, yellowy color. And he didn't say anything to us. He just looked at us, turned his head around and kept walking. I looked at my friend Andrew, who was driving, and I said, Andrew, I don't know where that guy came from or why he looks like that, but we need to leave. I just have this horrible feeling that something bad is going to happen. He's like, yeah, where'd that guy come from? We had no idea. I wish I could describe the road. It's very desolate, very isolated. There's no lights, just our headlights. For this guy to just be walking, this road had to pass the cemetery, had to go under the overpass. We never saw this guy. We think he appeared out of thin air. We also think he was related to another thing that happens on the road, these black dogs that appear out of nowhere. They walk the road, they come out of the woodline. People swerved to them, but it is not a real dog. We believed we saw this dog, but in human form. We didn't give anybody time to process what was happening. We just made the right and peeled out of there. My mom remembers seeing the gentleman and she was very creeped out by it. She felt like she felt the same thing, like something bad was gonna happen to us if we stayed there any longer. Thinking about the guy right now, he's giving me the creeps, just the way his eyes were. I didn't go back to the road for a long time. We were really scared to go back. But I did go to the road one last time with the same group of friends minus my mom. It put us unnoticed that we were not welcomed on the road anymore. We drive all the way from Mineola to Melville. We came from old country roads. We had passed the cemetery when under the overpass, and we made the left onto the little roundabout. We decide we're going to put baby powder on the back window the windshields. We wanted to see if we would get the handprints on the vehicle. We're putting the powder on, and again I get that same feeling I'm being watched. Someone's in the woodline checking us out. I tell my friend Andrew. He's like, a'm manna stop. We've been through this. This road is haunted. We're just gonna do this and we're gonna leave. We go, We pull out, the headlights are off. We go under the road, under the overpass and sit there for a while. The story is that your car will be pushed against the laws of gravity. If the car is supposed to roll backwards, it's actually going to roll forwards. Because they believe that the children, the three teens who had the packs are the ones that are pushing the vehicle forward. We're sitting there. It's quiet. We could hear the crickets. We have the windows open a little bit, just a crack. All of a sudden, I notice a vehicle comes up behind us from the Jericho Turnpike Way. They went through the woods, but they have no headlights on. I'm like, oh my god, Andrew, we got to get out of the way. The car is coming. The car just stops. We're completely under the overpass. The car stops just before the overpass. It's not moving, it's just running. You can't see who's inside. I think he wants us to move. Andrew's like, all right, puts the headlights back on, turns the car on. We start to move, and the car starts to move with us. As we clear the overpass and we start heading towards the cemetery. The car you hear it rev up. It comes up right behind us with no headlights on. Still my friend Andrew's like, what's going on. He's trying to get him to go around. I'm really scared. We're in the middle of nowhere. My other friends in the back they were like, we need to get out of here. This person's like following us. He floors it. He has this old buickless saber. Those things are like boats. They're big, long, obnoxious. Putting your foot down on that thing it hesitates. It takes time to build back up the speed. We're all like, Andrew's not going anywhere. We gotta get out of here. The car starts to cooperate. We take off. We get to the red light at the end where Old Country Road is. Do we make the right The car comes follows us again, still no headlights on. It gets really close to my friend's bumper and it pulls back up to the back. I'm screaming at this point, pulled off to the side of the road. Andrew's like, I can't, Like, there's no place to pull over. I'm just gonna floor it. We're driving and part of these roads are a pill The cars struggling a little bit. This truck is catching up to us. Finally we get over the hump and we start to see civilization overpass this car. Lie. Everything's moving quickly. My friend's like, is he still back there? Is he still behind us? It's dark. We're looking out the windows. I can't see anything with this powder on the back of his car. We don't think he's there. We sort of to slow down. All of a sudden, the headlights come on. It's the same truck. Andrew panicked. He lost a little bit of control of the car. We ended up getting off onto a road that has a dip. We went off into that. We stopped. Nothing happened to the car. We didn't get injured, but it was really scary. The car ended up making a U turn and going back the way we just came. We never saw the truck again. Didn't know who it was. I think it was just somebody who saw an opportunity and decided to play tricks on us. My friends think was something else. They believe that it was the officer. The story goes is that he's looking for the person who killed him that night. They think that the cop pulled over somebody on Sweet Hollow Road. When he got out of the car to go talk to the person, the person just shot him and left the cop there. He's hunting the road looking for the person that he pulled over that night, so they believe that it was him. I personally don't buy it, but I don't know. I don't know who it was to this day. Initially I thought it was the same man that we saw before. That was the only time that I felt the same feeling was with that gentleman who looked at us with those eyes. I not interested in finding out who it was. Whoever it was could have easily injured us. We never figured out who was and we just never talked about that night. We had enough being adventurers and explorers. We hung up our ghost adventuring belt. I have not been to the road since then. That was back in thousand and eight. I think it's been a long time. I drive past the road all the time for work. I always think back of my stories, and I tend to go past there in the daylight now so I can see everything that's happening that sweet hollow road. Those are other places on the Long Island. We went to the Syke Hospital, the abandoned Syke Hospital, which is pretty famous. Nothing bad happened to us there. We went to the Hanging Hill area where they used to hang witches and pirates. Nothing ever happened to us there. But the road is it's like a rite of passage for a Long Island kid. You go there, you survive the road, you beat the road, you don't see anything good for you, but sometimes you do see things, things that you can't explain. When you get older, it's like, did that really happened? Did I really see what I saw? Believe it or not. I'm not really a believer in the paranormal. I like to explain away things. But those feelings of dread, no, those are very real. Definitely made me believe in something else that night. You think suall roads creepy with the stuff I experienced at my dad house is even creepier. Here her other experiences right after this stay with us. I didn't always live with my dad. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. My dad went his separate way when we wove to Queen's. We reconnected in two thousand and four and went to live with him in Mineola. House was pretty normal, four bedroom, one bathroom, half finished basement of the dream. The first time that I I felt something not right with the house it was a year or two after I started living there. My dad he had the TV set up in the finished side of the basement. There was another side that was where the laundry room was, his little workshop area. The furnace was over there as well. It reminded me of an old bar when I had a weird tiling, an open area space and it actually had a home bar set up. That's where my dad made the living room. I happened to be down there one night by myself. I don't remember if there were people upstairs on the main floor, maybe some of my siblings. I come from a family of six, I'm the oldest. I want to say there was somebody up on the first floor. My dad definitely wasn't there. I'm sitting there watching TV, flipping through the channels. I come across the Dave Chappelle Show watching it laugh. But then I get that same feeling like I'm being watched. Something is behind me. I would turn around on the couch and look to see if there was anybody standing there. Nobody was. I kept going back to watching TV. The remote was on the coffee table in front of me. All of a sudden, the TV flickers, and it's not one of those flat screen TVs we're talking about two thousand and five, two thousand and six to there're those box looking ones. I'm like, hmm, that's odd. I'm starting to get more freaked out I'm still feeling like there's somebody behind me. Before I know it, the TV starts changing channels by itself. It's going through channels pretty quickly. Like grab the remote. Maybe the remote, something's wrong with it, but take the batteries out. But the TV keeps going through the channels. If I jump up, I go to the stairs, look up, and there's nobody there. I'm like, okay, this is creepy. Hello, anybody here. I hear someone say, yeah, Amanda, what's up. I think it was one of my brothers. Where are you? He's like, I'm in my room. Why what's matter? He gets up. He comes out and I'm like, dude, are you messing with the TV down here? No, I'm in my room. What are you talking about? I'm like, is anybody else home? He walks through to the living room, He comes back through the kitchen. He was all connected. He came back out. No, there's nobody on the first floor. That's just weird, all right, whatever. He goes back in his room. I put back on what I was watching, sit back on the couch, relaxing. Not even five ten minutes later, the TV just turns off by itself. I'm like, Okay, press the TV back on. TV doesn't come back on. Whoever's here, please stop messing with the TV. You're freaking me out. I always got the feeling that it was a man, a middle aged man. I don't know why. I just got that feeling. I could see him standing in the doorway. But whenever I would look over at the doorway to the other side of the basement, the unfinished part, there would be nobody there. But I just felt like there was a man standing there. I'm like, Okay, this is too creepy for me. I'm out of here. I just drew the remote on the table and I went back upstairs. My brother's like, what happened? I said, I'm done being down there, man, I think there's somebody down there. He's like, you're crazy, something wrong with you. That's usually how it went with siblings. I told my dad when he came home. He explained it away, and maybe that TV's just going out. It's old. He always had an explanation for something like what I was experiencing. It was never oh, a man, I believe you. It was always stop. There is no such thing as ghosts, he explained it away. I never thought about it fast forward. A couple of years later, my grandmother unexpectedly passed away. It was really hard on all of us, but none so much my sister. My sister started to experience things in the house after my grandmother passing away. She used to say that people were sitting at the foot of her bed staring at her, trying to her. She would get freaked out and run downstairs. She was six years younger than me, a lot more impressionable as we get older. Now she believes that she's a medium, some kind of clairvoyant. She doesn't want to embrace her gift, but I don't think she really entertains them when she does see them. I think it was the old that trauma she experienced with my grandmother passed away, that it triggered something which caused her to start seeing these people in the house. She started seeing this woman that was sitting at the foot of her bed, the most piercing blue eyes she's ever seen in her life. She can't see the face of the person, it's this black, misty mess, but she can see the eyes. That's the only thing she can see. Naturally. She starts screaming, Amanda, Amanda, come upstairs. There's somebody in my room. I ran to the room. There's nothing in the room, Sam, you're crazy, go back to sleep. There's nothing here. No, there's definitely somebody here. I'm not going back to sleep. Stay with me. So I would go in the bed with her, wait until she would fall asleep, and I would leave. This went on for a while. It was like a nightly routine. She would wake up, she would see this misty mass with these piercing blue eyes. Over time, she got used to the person being there. She would wake up, see the person standing there, roll over, and go back to sleep. It was so routine, but she started to see more features. It was always sitting in this one particular chair that was in the room. She would position the chair, not in her view site per se, she would put it where if she was to get up, she could see whatever was sitting there in the chair. She started to say, I can make out hair, now I can make out facial features. We used to share a room. I don't see the thing that she saw, and I'm just creeped out. I don't want to stay in this room anymore. I started sleeping in a different part of the house. What really freaked me out about that room upstairs was when she could see the whole person. The person sounded familiar to me who she was describing. I feel like I know who she is. We kind of brushed it off, but she said that they would open their mouth, no words would come out. It was like listening to the TV on mute. That was it for me where I was like, I'm not going in that room anymore. My dad's mister science. He's like, no way. My brother went to college. He gave up the room in the back. I was moving all my stuff from my room down to the other bedroom, and I found all my pictures. I used to take a whole bunch of pictures when I was younger. I was going through the book. My sister's standing next to me. We get to a point in the book where I was visiting my nana in Connecticut. She's my mom's grandmother. My sister's standing there, but she's really little. She doesn't remember. As soon as she looks at the picture, her face turns white. She's like, that's the woman. That's the woman that I've been seeing sitting at the foot of my bed every night for the last year. She didn't put two and two together that this was the same person. I got the chills. My dad, I had blue eyes, really bright blue. It made sense that that's the eyes that she was seeing. I'm like, maybe she was trying to send you a message. She's like, no, it's creepy. It scares me. I would tell her, tell them to go away, leave you alone. When I moved down to the room in the back, I couldn't sleep one night. I was tossing and turning. I'm laying there and this is before fancy smartphones. I'm just laying there trying to go to sleep. All of a sudden, I hear what's like a thousand people in one room. Sounds like a party, all these people talking. It's a whole bunch of mumbling. I'm blinking and shaking my head. What is this? I get up. I could still hear it, all these people. It must be in my dad's TV. You must have fall asleep with the TV on. Again. I go out into the living room. My dad's sleep on the couch, but the TV's not on. Oh my god, what is this? All these people that I'm hearing. I go back into the bedroom, like, go away, leave me alone. Whoever you are just stop. It doesn't stop, it gets louder. I lay back in my bed, I take out my iPod Nano, I put my headphones in and I bless my music to make the voices go away. Whatever it was, it got the hint the voice is stopped. But when I explained it to my sister, she said that that's what she hears. She hears all these people talking. She can't make out what they're saying. She's like, maybe they're trying to talk to you. Who would want to talk to me. I don't believe in this kind of stuff. I don't necessarily think it's true. I got to experience that from what my sister was experiencing. But I think the one thing that happened in my dad's house was what sealed the deal for me. When I first started living there, I always felt like there was an older, middle aged man in the basement, my boyfriend at the time. My dad let him sleep in the basement. I came out of the bathroom, I made the left, and when you make the left from the bathroom and you look down, you could see into the basement. You could see the stairs, the door on the left that leads to the laundry room and the slats where you can look into the other side. I didn't get any weird feelings or anything, but as soon as I looked down, I saw this black figure walk from the laundry room, passed the door to the stairs, and into the common area, where my boyfriend at the time was sleeping. I didn't think anything of it. I called down the stairs. I don't hear anything. Hey, Justin, was that you just now? No answer. I start going down the stairs one at a time. It doesn't help that these stairs creak. It's making the situation a lot more uncomfortable. As I go down the steps, I look through the banister into the common area. He's out cold, snoring, laying on the couch. I stand back up and bolt up the stairs. My dad was sitting in the living room, and he's like, what's the matter. I'm like, I think I just saw something like go from the laundry room to where Justin was. He's like, no, no, it was probably Justin. I said, Dad, he's sleeping. There's no way it was him. It didn't look like him. The more I think about it, the man definitely didn't look like Justin. I could make out features in this dark figure. The light was on in the laundry room was casting some kind of light. That was how I was able to see the shape of this man and everything. I could make out his nose, it was a little bit pointed, no hair. He was wearing overalls like what farmers would wear back in the day. It didn't even acknowledge me that just walked just from that room right across the stairs into the room. I was like, Hugh, I'm not going down there. I know what I saw. I'm just gonna go upstairs sleep in the other room with my sister, which is the room I don't like anyway, but choices. The next morning, I got up come downstairs. Justin's eating breakfast at the table. I'm like, hey, was that you last night? What do you mean? I said, I saw something walk from the laundry room to where you were sleeping. He goes, No, I went downstairs. As soon as I laid on that couch, I went to sleep. But it's funny that you bring that up. I was like, wow, He's like all night, I kept hearing movement behind me behind the couch where there was like a window, and then there was a window seat almost my dad had the pool table back there. He said that he kept hearing dragging, like something being dragged back there. He felt like there was somebody there all the time, watching, standing behind me, lurking over me. But he's like, I never saw anything, So I was like, no, dude, I definitely saw something. It was a man that walked across. He's like, I don't know what to tell you. If you told me that last night, I would have left the house. Once I saw that man, I started to look into the history of the house. Whenever I fell his presence, I always felt like he was angry. He was mad that we were in his house, or I was in his basement. I never saw him on the first floor or the second floor. It was always the basement that I felt that he was there. I just got the vibe that he was angry all the time. I tried doing some research, I couldn't find much on the house. Before Mineola started to build houses, there was a lot of farm land. I just attributed to this was a gentleman that had land. He had a farm at one time. Maybe the land was sold, the house was built, and he's angry that were on his property. I could never find anything concrete about the house, who lived there before, if anyone passed away in the house, or anything like that. Decided that I never wanted to be in the basement alone again. If I spent too much time hanging out in the basement, I started to become angry for no reason. My brother would do the most silliest thing. I would start yelling at him for no reason at all. That's not like me. That's when I knew it was time to leave the basement. My dad decided the basement was just going to become storage area. We never had a living room set up anymore down there. That was very insistent that I know what I saw. You couldn't see through the man. He was solid when he walked past, which is why I thought it was like an actual person walking by. My dad would always say, like, you're crazy, you're seeing things. That was before he started experiencing things in the house. I did not live in the house anymore. Most of my siblings were still there. My dad liked to sleep on the couch in the living room. He would fall asleep watching TV. He fell asleep, he opened one eye. He didn't see anything at first. He closed his eye the TV's on, which just a white noise. So he opens his eye again. There's a little girl standing where his feet are on the couch, looking at him. She was dressed in clothes from the twenties or the thirties, six seven years old. She was solid. You couldn't see through her. At first, he thought it was my sister. Then he realized the wait a minute, my daughter is not six years old anymore. When he realized what he was seeing he opened his eyes, that the girl was gone just poof gave him the chills. He's like, I definitely saw the girl. She was just smiling at him. She didn't say anything to him, in typical dad fashion. He just went back to sleep. But I think as time went on he used to hear the girl laugh in the house. He wouldn't see her, but he would hear her giggling laughing. It's clearly not one of us giggling. He would always hear her. He he running through the house, and unfortunately he got really sick. He passed away. He never really got to figure out who it was, why she was showing herself to him. I think it was an omen that he was going to get sick. He believed that. A couple months later, he started to lose his voice, he started losing the ability to grab things, his depth perception was off. It turns out he had stage four cancer. I truly believe the little girl showed herself only to him because she was trying to say, Hey, you're sick, go to the doctor, or something else is wrong. He never told me this until the end. He was like, Hey, I want to tell you. I believe you that you saw what you saw those years ago. It happened to me. He would tell me about the little girl and that he would hear her constantly in the house. I've never experienced anything since then. I think my dad's house was definitely haunted by who. I have no idea. I could never prove or show who it was, but it was very weird that there was so many different people in the house, the little girl, the man that lives in the basement. I could never figure out who they were, why they were there, or if they were just passing through. That's my dad's house. But I believe it or not, I do miss that house. I miss living with all my siblings, but I don't miss the anger, ominous feelings and the feeling that somebody's standing behind me, glaring at me, yelling at me, and telling me to leave. But that's always the vibes that I got being in the basement. Did you like the episode, Send it to a friend who might be into it, and also make sure to follow it to drop some stars for me in the review section. If these stories are getting to you but just still want something creepy, join me over at Scary Mystery Surprise. It's more conversational. It's a podcast that I co host with my friend Michelle as we tell each other creepy stories. Find us by searching for Scary Mystery Surprise on your app, and if you want to share a story right here, visit true scarystory dot com and fill out the form. Thank you very much for listening. See soon.