The Witch

When you hear noises around the house, you might go for the logical explanation, But what do you do when those sounds appear to be taunting you? But when the sounds become more than that? As in full manifestations. My name is Edwin and here is Anna through scary story. I think that it's important to start at the very beginning, and that starts before I was born. This took place when my parents had their first child, which is my older sister. At the time, they were living with my grandma. My older sister was a baby. My parents lived with my grandma. They were set up in the house. In the bedroom. Their bed was next to the wall, and my dad slept next to the wall and my mom slept on the other side so that she could be closest to the crib. One night, they were getting ready for bed, my dad went over to the window at the end of the room that faced down to the street below. He went over to shut the window. He got this feeling something's wrong and he should check. He didn't see anything that would cause immediate danger. He's thinking, there's nothing there. I'm just going to dismiss this feeling. He shuts the window and they go to bed. Later in the night, my mom is having a nightmare where she's getting ready to go to bed, and she goes to sit down on the bed put her hands down to climb into bed. As she does that, she realizes that there's someone beneath her. Beneath where she's putting her hands. She turns around and she sees that it's the man. She goes to scream, but the man covers her mouth. She's still trying to scream and trying to fight him. He moves himself from underneath her and climbs on top of her and is holding her mouth down and holding her down. She's feeling this pressure on her chest while she's having the stream. In reality, she was actually screaming. As soon as she starts screaming, the baby starts screaming too. I guess it scared her. My dad jumps over my mom and grabs the baby. When he does this, he wasn't fully awake or even awake at all. My mom screaming, Dad is holding the baby and nothing's happening. They're in the dark until my grandma runs into the room and turns the light on. As soon as she turned the light on. It was as if they woke up. My mom stopped screaming, opened her eyes, my dad opened his eyes, and that's when they were really woken up. And as they were calming down, they noticed that the baby had a scratch on her forehead, my dad had scratches on his cheek, and my mom had scratches across her mouth from one cheek straight to another. This is very alarming because it's not like they were all scratching themselves in their sleep. They were terrified. They were just afraid to really go to bed for many nights after and they would sleep with the lights on. Very shortly after that, my grandma got sick, and she was sick for a very long time. There was really no explanation for it other than maybe she just was sick from the impact of the fear, or perhaps there was something so malicious that caused it. In a way, that story is important to tell because two things. It was the feeling that my dad got before they went to bed for the night, when he was at the window and felt that there was something wrong. He had this feeling of dread, and because my mom had felt that pressure on her chest. Fast forward five years, I was born. My older sister was about five at the time. We're in a new house. I'm about three years old, and this took place in Chino Hills, California. We lived in a small mobile home park, but the houses are small. It's like a little community there. I remember that around this time, when I was three almost four years old, I would see shadows around the house. But I never got a dreadful feeling from it. I was never scared. I felt almost comforted when I would see these shadows. And it wouldn't be like lingering shadows. I was sitting somewhere and all of a sudden, I'd see a shadow zoom by. It was very evident that it was something that was there. It wasn't just my imagination or my eyes playing tricks on me. It wasn't like my older sister. This happened a lot when I was alone. If I was alone in the bedroom or in the bathroom, I would see these shadows. I remember even thinking to myself, maybe it's my grandpa on my dad's side that passed away before I was born. I used to think, maybe he's looking over me, and he's protecting me. It was just this sensation that I got this feeling that it was nice. I was never scared. But what I didn't know was that at the time, my mom had actually suffered a miscarriage. This is why I know that I was about three years old at the time, almost four, because this is when she lost the baby. I don't remember if it was before or after the miscarriage that I was seeing the shadows. I know that before the miscarriage, my parents were also seeing shadows. They started seeing shadows and feeling just that something was off before my mom lost the baby. They also had strange experiences where one time, my mom, my older sister, and I were in the kitchen. We hear just a jumble of noise in the bathroom. We walk over to the bathroom. All the cabinet doors in the bathroom and all the drawers were open. I don't know what my parents thought at the time. I don't remember thinking anything, but it was little things like that that started happening before the miscarriage. My mom started feeling like there was someone walking next to her. With a lot of these experiences, and when people experience something paranormal, is that a lot of the times you can't explain it. You can't explain how you know something or how something specifically feels. But she always said it felt like there was a child walking next to her. That was happening before the miscarriage, and unfortunately she did lose the baby. But it was just strange and almost a warning sign no for them, because they were seeing these shadows and having weird experiences before that happened. They say that when things like that happen, it's a warning sign, right, that something's about to happen. This all happened in that house in China Hills, but it was almost as if that whole house or that area the land was kind of tainted in some way. I remember too that my older sister and I would hear children playing or laughing out in the living room. It was always something different, and it happened on several occasions. We would hear that someone was out in the living room and sometimes that was children laughing, or we would hear my mom's decorative bells that she kept on the little dining room table. We would hear them ringing in the night. It was just very strange because we could never make sense of why that was happening. We would go out there expecting to see someone or find something, and it was always just a dark living room or a dark dining room. It was frustrating and confusing. Is when you're a child, if you hear something, you expect to see something making that sound, and we never saw anything. The scariest one of fall during that time was what I always described as the Witch. I'm not sure why exactly I described it as the witch, but it was a laugh a woman laughing, and it sounded or it felt feevil malicious. I would get scared because when I would hear the children laughing or playing. I don't know that I got scared. I was more confused. But when I would hear the witch, that's when I wouldn't want to go out and check the living room. That house always was full of these weird experiences. It's hard to explain, but sometimes we would be woken up. As I think back on it now, perhaps the noises, the sounds of the children laughing, weren't that loud that we would hear them. It was more of a when you hear your phone buzzing when you're dead asleep and you hear your phone buzzing and you're not sure if it's a dream or actually your phone. So you start hearing something and all of a sudden you're awake. I think the sound of the children laughing, or when we would hear the witch or the bells, I think it was directed at my sister, and I was meant for only us to hear. I never heard my parents get up to check on anything. I never saw them get up to check on anything, and they never ever mentioned hearing those sounds that we would hear. It was almost as if we were just woken up on purpose and we started hearing the children laughing or the witch. We always thought that it was someone breaking in or something, because even as a young kid, sometimes you go towards a more logical thing. You expect to see something. If you're hearing a noise, we would always say, okay, there must be someone in the house, and we would grab a hair brush or whatever it may be and go out to check. We thought that we were going to encounter someone, and we just thought, okay, we're doing this. I don't know why we didn't think to wake my parents up, because they were just in the next room. We never found anything. You get more of a sensation of what is there. You don't have to see it with your eyes to feel the presence of children or to feel the presence of something malicious. Was it was someone that did not have good intent. She felt like someone that's putting you down and making fun of you and laughing about it. That's what it felt like, like she was tricking us and messing around with us. During this time that we were hearing children in our house, my neighbors had an experience. One night, my parents were getting ready to go to bed. They're doing their bedtime routine, and they go out into the kitchen. They go move from their bedroom, which is at the end of the house, walk down this hallway and towards the left side of the house there's the kitchen and the entryway. They go and turn the lights off, lock the door. As they're walking back down that same hallway, they get a chill. They think it's weird, but they dismiss it. They go to bed. Later that night, my mom started screaming in her sleep because she started feeling this pressure on her chest, the same pressure that she felt many years ago when they were woken up with scratches on their faces. You know. My dad wakes her up and they talk about it. They're calming down, they're getting ready to fall asleep again. They start seeing lights coming through their window, like flashlights. So they look out the window and they see that there are policemen searching in my parents' cars and underneath the car around our house. They're really worried. They don't know what's going on. They see that my neighbor's out there too. They walk out and they start asking, like, what's going on, what's happening. My neighbor starts telling them that he had heard noises in his living room. He went out to to see what was going on, and he saw that there were children in his living room. The big group of children in his living room. They're like climbing on the couches. One of them is scratching at a family picture that he has on a mantle. The kid is just scratching at it. He starts shouting at them, and he runs back to his bedroom to grab a bat and bangs on his brother in law's door. He says, there are some kids in the house, help me get them out. They start running back, but as they're running back, they see that the kids are running out of the house. They go out to chase the kids, but all of a sudden they're gone. They're not on the street. They don't see them anywhere. You can't just run from one house to another without being seen. These weren't big houses, so it's not like it would take them ages to run through a house where then all of a sudden you wouldn't see the kids on the street. That just doesn't make sense. The kids have disappeared. They called the police and they told them there were some kids in my living room. I don't know where they went. I don't know what to do. The police comes over and that's when they started looking for the kids, and that's when my parents saw the lights coming through their windows. They checked the entire area, couldn't find any kids. At the time, we lived in a mobile home park. Everyone knew everyone in that community. Mobile home parks are closed off, they have small streets within them. We knew all the kids in that neighborhood. If there were children in his neighborhood, he would have known who it was. Chino Hills at the time was an area that was not fully developed. A lot of it was still farm land. But it's not like some children from another neighborhood or the next town over just came by to break into people's houses. These were small children. It wasn't like a group of teenagers. It didn't make sense. But the police ended up leaving. They couldn't do anything about it, so they left. My neighbor's wife at the time worked at a gas station a graveyard shift, and she came home while they were still outside talking about the incident, and she's asking what happened because they're out there in the middle of the night. They started telling her that there were these kids that were in the house and that were causing chaos in the living room. As they're telling her about this, she tells them, I saw some kids running from one house to another a few streets over. She was like, there's some now, there's some now. She starts pointing behind her husband and her brother. They saw a group of kids running into an abandoned house. It was just strange that they had a strange experience the same night that my parents had that weird sensation, that dreadful feeling, and that my mom again woke up screaming with that pressure on her chest. It was almost as if something moved from our house over to their house. It's interesting that it was children, because my sister and I always heard the sound of children playing or children laughing in our living room. I don't know the history of that place, but it's just very odd that both of us, both these families had these experiences with children. The occurrences around the house do not end there present. It's about to make it self known and lead to a discovery within their own family. The rest of Anna's story is coming up right after this. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Betterhelp. When I'm not doing podcast stuff, I do regular people things, reading, scrolling on my phone, and listening to music. It's important to strike a balance between doing what you have to do for others and what you have to do for yourself. And that's how therapy can help you get the tools and ideas on how to level things out, and that way you get to keep supporting other people while keeping yourself strong mentally. I used to think therapy was only for those who underwent something traumatic, but it isn't only for that. And it's true when you forget about yourself and do only things for others, you end up feeling burnt out and empty. So if you're thinking of starting therapy, give Better Help a try. It's all online so it's flexible and convenient. All it takes is a brief questionnaire that you have to fill out and then you'll get matched with the licensed therapist. You can switch whenever at no additional charge. Find more balance with better Help Visit Betterhelp dot com slash true scary to get ten percent off your first month. That's better Help h e lp dot com slash true scary. HelloFresh brings you farm fresh, preportion ingredients to make cooking at home easy, fun and affordable. No more having to go to the grocery store for that one item you don't have, and when you finally find it, you only need a little bit and end up not using the rest of it at all. That's what we end up paying more at the grocery store, and HelloFresh is twenty five percent cheaper than takeout. If it's time you're watching out for, HelloFresh also has their quick and easy meals and they have fast and fresh options that are ready in just fifteen minutes or less. I like the options that HelloFresh gives me, from the recipes to the delivery date and now that you get to add snacks and desserts to the box. There's less to worry about. Go to HelloFresh dot com slash true Scary sixteen and use a code true Scary sixteen for sixteen free meals plus free shipping. Again, that's HelloFresh dot com slash true Scary sixteen and use a code true Scary sixteen for sixteen free meals plus free shipping. HelloFresh America's number one milkit. For some reason, there was a lot of things that were happening in this house. One time, my older sister and I were playing outside with a group of kids, and it was in a small street. We weren't playing in the backyard. We were playing in the street. Our house is directly facing that street, and kind of to the side of our house was our backyard. The backyard was outlined by a fence, a metal fence that you can see through. It wasn't like a big brick wall or a big picket fence. It was a metal fence that I could see through. We're outside playing and my older sister is holding onto my shirt as I ride my bike. She's on roller skates and I'm riding a bike and She's holding onto my shirt, so I'm pulling her right and I'm getting really mad. I'm getting really annoyed. I start shouting in Spanish. Done done, Tell Norma to leave me alone. Tell Norman to get off. I'm shouting at him in the backyard because I see that there's a man standing there. It was the weirdest thing because I kept going around in circles on the street and I kept shouting at I was growing more and more frustrated because I was like, why isn't my dad doing anything. He's listening to me screaming at him and at my sister, and he's just standing there. I didn't really think about it in that moment, but years on I looked back and I was like, I didn't even see his face. Really, it wasn't I didn't see any distinguishable features on that man. It was just black. It was almost a dark, outlined shadow of a man that was just standing in the backyard. The weirdest part was not only that he wasn't listening to me and he was ignoring me, It was that he wasn't moving. He was just in this pose. It looked like he was maybe holding something or getting ready to grab something. His right arm was in an l position, his forearm was parallel to the ground almost and I just saw him standing there and he wasn't moving, wasn't saying anything. I was growing more and more frustrated. On the last loop that I made around the street, I'm still shouting at him. I'm seeing that shadow or that person standing in the backyard. And at that moment, my dad opened the front door of the house. He comes out and he's like, what, like, what's going on? My mouth dropped. I got so scared because I thought, if you're there, then who's over there. I jumped off my bike, dropped it, and I ran and said it and I told him like, there's someone in the backyard. There's someone in the backyard. They ran out and looked, didn't find anyone. They called the police to check because they thought someone was stealing things. The police didn't find any evidence of anything being moved around. My parents checked the backyard because my dad had a tool shit back there, and they checked all of that and nothing seemed to be missing or nothing was moved or misplaced. If someone were back there, that's it's very probable that they would go to steal something. Or maybe try to find a way to break in. I don't know, something a bit more logical other than just standing there watching us. I think that's the other thing too. I couldn't see I couldn't see anything on that man's face. I can't see any features. But I knew that he was looking at us. I knew that it wasn't his back turned to us. I knew that he was facing us. I knew that it was a man. I don't know how I knew. It was really scary to me because, as I had said before, like I was going round and random circles on the street, like shouting at him. It felt like I had been shouting at him for five minutes. Maybe. For someone to be standing out there for that long not moving definitely felt off to me, even as a child. That's not normal. It is absolutely possible that it could have been an actual human man that was standing out there, but it doesn't seem probable, just because of the area that we were in. Around that same time that we were having these experiences, my older sister had an experience. I was about six years old at the time, my younger sister was about a year old. We only lived in a two bedroom house. My parents slept in one bedroom, and my older sister, my younger sister, and I slept in the other bedroom. We shared a big bed, a big queen's size bed. On this particular night, my dad was putting us to bed, and he got the same sensation that he felt the very first time that they had an experience when my older sister was a baby. He was shutting our bathroom door and he got that feeling of dread and looming danger. He told himself, there's nothing here. I'm seeing everything that's here and I don't see any present danger. He just dismissed it, just brushed it off, put us to bed, went to bed. Later that night, my parents woke up because they heard my older sister crying. They walk into the room and asked what's going on. She says, someone was bothering. Someone was bothering our little sister. They're not letting her. My parents are immediately scared. They think that someone's in the house. They start checking our closet, our bathroom, start looking around, and there's no one there. Our little sisters slept in between my older sister and I. She was tossing and turning. She was whimpering in her sleep, and she wasn't able to really have a RESTful sleep. My older sister wakes up. She never saw anyone, but she felt that there was a man bothering our little sister. She put the covers over her head, and she was super scared, and all of a sudden, she senses that man is walking over from my side of the bed over to her side of the bed, and again my sister was in the middle in between us. She heard when the man stepped on the grate that was on the floor for the air conditioning and the heating. She heard him step on it. When he got to her side of the bed, she felt a cold gust of air. That's when she started crying. Soon after, my parents ran into the room. She didn't see anyone, but she felt it. She had that sensation of she knows that someone is there, she knows that there bothering our little sister, and our sister is having an actual physical reaction to what my other sister is feeling. She said, there's someone bothering Alex, and Alex is actually moving around, tossing, turning, whimpering in her sleep. After that, she felt the cold gust of air, and she heard that person step on the grate. Our bedroom at the time it did have a window, but the window was behind the bed in order to get through that window, if someone were trying to break in from outside, they would be stepping over us to get into the room. After that experience, my parents actually moved us from that bedroom to the bedroom where they used to sleep. This was the bedroom that was closest to the end of the house. They now slept in the bedroom that had the bathroom and the window behind the bed, and they had a closet to their left. One night, shortly after that experience, I woke up because I was having a nightmare. I couldn't go back to sleep. I went to my parents' room and I told them that I was scared and I wanted to sleep with them. My mom woke up. She told me to stay in bed with my dad. She would go to the other room to sleep with my sisters. I thought, Okay, that's not really what I wanted, but sure, I'll take it. I climb into bed and my dad is sleeping on the right side of the bed. I'm sleeping on the left side of the bed, closest to that closet. I see my mom shut the door on her way out. I'm laying in bed looking up at the ceiling fan. It was somewhere at the time, because the ceiling fan was on and I could see it spinning right. All of a sudden, from the closet, I hear what sounds like my older sister's voice saying my name. I just hear. I thought right away, it's my older sister, right, And I thought, what are you doing here? How did you get in without me seeing you? I reply, and I say what she says from the closet, Ask Dad what you're afraid of? And it sounds like my older sister. Instead of answering the question, I tell her, what are you doing? I'm trying to find an explanation as to why she's in the closet in the middle of the night. Rather than focusing on the question that she's asking me. She ignores this and again repeats the question, Ask Dad what he's afraid of? Ask Dad what he's afraid of? I thought, okay, My dad's back was to me. I nudge him, pushing on his back, and I ask him in Spanish, Dad Norma wants to know what you're afraid of. He's not really answering me, so I keep nudging at him and I repeat the question. Norma wants to know what you're afraid of? What you're afraid and he does get me like an answer, and he says, scary movies and the dark, and I go, Okay. I roll over to my left side again and I tell her Dad says scary movies and the dark. At that same time that I'm to her, I kind of sense that she's moving from the closet to the edge of the bed, but I don't see her. I just sense that. Then from the side of the bed, I hear her say, no, ask Dad what he's really afraid of? No, ask Dad what he's really afraid of. I'm over here peering over the side of the bed, like trying to see where she is, because I couldn't see her when she was in the closet, but the closet was dark, right, But once she was at the side of the bed, I couldn't see her either. She could not have fit underneath the bed. I'm looking around, I don't see her anywhere, and I'm just so confused, wondering, how are you talking to me? If I can't see you. So I go, okay, whatever, right, I'm going to do this. So I started nugging my dad again, and this time he isn't waking up. I tried to tell her Dad's not waking up, my Dad's not waking up, and she doesn't answer, She's gone. The next day, I confront her about that and I tell her, like, why were you asking me that? Why were you telling me to do that? Why were you asking me to ask dad what he was afraid of. She had no clue what I was talking about. I was getting really annoyed because I was saying, like, no, you're lying, You're lying. I know that you were talking to me last night. She keeps denying it. So I go to my mom and I tell her, like, Mom, was Norma? Did Norma leave the room at night? And she said no, My mom had been up watching TV in the bed with my sisters after she had sent me to their bed. My mom would have known if my sister had walked out of the room and went into our bedroom. I know that I wasn't dreaming because I remember those details of I saw the stealing fan. I was lying there and it happened almost immediately after my mom walked out of the room. It wasn't like I had been laying there for thirty minutes or an hour. It was almost immediately after that. So it scares me the most that it said, no, ask Dad what he's really afraid of. I've tried to talk myself out of that experience, but you can't lie to yourself. I know that happened, and it's just one of those things that I've never been able to explain. However, in that moment, I wasn't really afraid, not because I didn't feel negative energy from that, but more so because I was confused. After those two experiences in that bedroom, my parents called my aunt and uncle, who were very involved in the church at that time. They called him over to do a blessing in the house. I don't have a lot of memory from this, but the image that is seared into my mind is when the whole family is in that bedroom that we had the most experiences, and they're in that bedroom. My uncle was standing to the right throwing holy water into the closet. My Dad is on the other side of the bed with another bible. I just remember that scene because I was standing at the entrance of the bedroom with my older sister, my mom, and my aunt. I'm watching this happen. I think my aunt was like praying there. All of a sudden, she grabbed me from the top of the shoulders and she's squeezing me, almost like she was trying to hug me, but it was more of a squeeze. She's looking up and her face is bright red. She's crying like there are tears streaming down her face, and she's speaking in tongues. And it sounds absolutely crazy, But I know that it happened and that it was real because other people experienced it too. Other people heard it, adults heard it. It's not like she could just make up gibberish. It just sounded like another language. She's holding me and she's like looking up with a bright red face, the tears streaming down her face. She's shouting in what sounds like another language, but it's really it's not a language that i'd heard before, that I've heard. Since she was speaking in tongues, I don't know how else to explain that. I've tried to recreate that in my head, and you can't what was coming out of her mouth. It was really no other way to put it. But she was speaking in tongues. And I know it's not just me that interpreted it that way because my parents were there too. My mom was standing right next to her. She has confirmed this. Yes she grabbed you, Yes she was squeezing you. Yes, she was crying and speaking in something that wasn't any language that we know of my aunt. She speaks primarily Spanish. Her English is pretty good, but I don't think she speaks any other language. It was just very scary. What they did say was after the blessing and all of that, they said, just people that are closer to God can sometimes speak in tongues. I'm not sure how much of an explanation that was, but I think that at the time there were so many strange things going on that they didn't really question it as much or push the issue. I did ask my parents about that as well. I asked them, didn't you want to find out more, like why did this happen? But they were just like, no, that's what they told us, and we saw it happen. We know what was happening in the house, so we just figured that it was part of the whole experience. In a way, there's no explanation for it. I've never heard my aunt do that before or after. It was just a very impactful experience. And I remember that while she was squeezing me, because it felt like she was squeezing me for five minutes or something. I just kept thinking, when will this be over? Because she was hurting me at that point. I don't know. I wonder if if anyone has ever experienced something similar, but that was one of the craziest experiences there. From what my parents tell me, the experiences did stop after that in that house, however, we did have several other experiences after we moved. After my aunt and uncle blessed the house, those experiences did stop, and I do not remember experiencing anything else in that house we moved when I was nine. From seven to nine, I do not remember experiencing anything else. We never really got any answers as to who was invading our space or who was haunting the home or the surrounding area. I know, about fifteen years after that experience, my aunt, uncle, and my whole family were having dinner and we were talking about those experiences that we had. I had never told my uncle about what I experienced with the voice coming from the closet. Never told him about that. I had maybe only mentioned it to my parents once or twice. But when we were talking about that, he said, oh, yes, I remember there was something evil in that closet. My jaw dropped because I had never told him about what I heard in that closet. For him to say that kind of validated my experience, and it was the reassurance that I needed that there was something in that closet and that I wasn't just making something up in my own head. Other than that, we didn't get any answers to why we were experiencing that or who any of those entities were. It just happened and then stopped happening. Maybe it was entities that were there before we started living there, because it didn't feel very personal. We didn't know anyone that had passed away at the time. I think that it was something that was in that area before we got there, especially because we weren't the only family that had experiences like this. To share your own story, go to true scarystory dot com and fill out the form to get ad free episodes and early release help out through scaryplus dot com or our Apple podcast Channel. Thanks again for your messages and stories. Let see you soon.