Watching Us

Like growing up in the childhome home, like I remember having nightmares constantly, just horrible nightmares that I was too young to even have. Do you believe in guardian angels? In today's story, we'll hear about a townhouse and it's peculiar occurrences, but also the strange balance that has surrounded our storyteller's life. My name is Edwin and here is rachel true scary story. I grew up in rural Ontario, Canada. I grew up in a farmhouse that we were the fourth generations to be in that house, so it was in the family for a long time, and we used to have weird things that would happen. We would have an old door that would stick, and we used to joke that my great great grandpa would hold the door closed because from what we learned is he died on the property, but he was a jokester. He was a jokester, and so the door would seal shut and we'd try to open it and we'd say, Grandpa, let me in, and then it would open up. And I remember we'd hear sounds and my mom would come and be like, hey, do you need help with whatever you're dragging? And we'd be like, no, we're watching TV, what are you talking about? So I think those kind of experiences, although very minor, crimed my experience when I was in university. So I went to the University Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and I was very lucky to get this wonderful townhouse just adjacent to the university. There was work being done on either side, so I didn't have any neighbors for a while. It was mostly just me in the townhouse. I had started renting it with my then boyfriend, but he was on an internship so he was away a lot. The very first night moving into that townhouse, I was alone, and it was in the fall. For some reason, that area is very big with crows, so I remember going to sleep in this empty house and just listening to these crows in the tree outside my window, and there were so many and it was just so loud for the whole night. So it just set the creep factor already. But that townhouse, I'll never forget it. It was just so unique. I remember going to sleep at night in my bed and I would feel a cool breeze just stroking my forehead and it just felt like someone was just stroking my hair as I went to sleep. You would hear sounds in the townhouse as well, which I like to say it was a ghost cat because it just sounded like something playing. You'd be downstairs working and you'd just hear something bouncing across the ceiling above you, and there would just be these buttons that would just appear out of nowhere that you would think that it came off your pants, but I couldn't. I could never find any pants that the buttons came from. It just seemed like there was something playing. People would be touched regularly. I would have people over, we'd have game nights, and just in the middle of the game night, someone would look over to them and they would say, oh, what do you need and we'd be like, what are you talking about. They're like, oh, no, Some and so just touched my arm and we'd say, no, no one touched you. But people would feel they would feel something touching them, or they would feel something. They would start going crazy at their hair and trying to wipe something out because they felt like there was something moving in their hair and they thought it was a It was just so active and just so unique. I think when you're in university, you're open to all these new experiences that you never had growing up, and I think that kind of invites things in and I think that's what happened with me. I remember cooking on the stove one day and it was just grundby for something, and I remember watching the can that I was using to put the grease in, and it just moved across the stove And in my head, I'm watching it, but it doesn't even I don't even factor in to what's going on. It's just okay, maybe something magnetized and the heat magnetize the can, which caused it to move. You come up with these explanations because it just anything else just seems so crazy. It didn't seem threatening. It didn't make me feel scared. But there was one room in the house that I always kept close because there was something in that room that just felt off. It was at the top of the stairs, so you'd have to The way the townhouse was is that you'd have the kitchen and the living room downstairs, and then the bedrooms were upstairs. You'd have to walk up these stairs and go past this room that just had this weirdest feeling. That room was always cold. In the summer, if I didn't have the air conditioner running, it would get quite hot in the house, but in that room it was cold no matter what. And I remember in the winter it was freezing and we'd have to have a space heater in there, because no matter how much I cranked the thermostat, the air would come out or the register or the vent, but it wouldn't be hot. It would just be cold no matter what. So I couldn't figure out what was wrong with that. But there was just such an eerie feeling in that room, so I always kept it closed. I used it for storage, and I didn't I just kept it closed. One night when I had my sister over, both of our partners were at a concert, so we were up late waiting for them. So we were playing a game, and while we were playing cards, we were just talking and I remember just getting cold all of a sudden, and I looked at her and I'm like, did you get cold all of a sudden? Yeah, it's really weird. And then as soon as we said that, it just got so cold that it felt like pin pricks. You know when you're in an ice storm and you feel those little ice bullets. It just it felt like that, and so she looked at me, she said, my arm's hurt. I said, yeah, me too, and then just completely went away and we just kind of looked at each other and Okay, that was weird, and we just kept playing until our partners came home. It was so eerie. Then the negative things that started happening was after I broke up with my partner. It was a really bad breakup. It was very emotional, very high stress. I ended up keeping the apartment, the townhouse, because it was in my name and he had He was in an internship in another city, so it just made sense for him to find an apartment in that city. So once again I was alone. The atmosphere seemed to change. I still had that presence that would stroke my hair at night, but once I changed the layout of the bedroom, it stopped. I moved to a different wall, I just changed up the bedroom completely, and I remember being up late one night and studying and I'm like, okay, it's two am. I should really go to bed. I have class in the morning. I remember putting my book down on the floor, the light off, and laying down. And this was pre kids, so I wasn't this exhausted pigeon that I am right now. So I had a hard time falling asleep at that time. So I remember lying awake, stressing about my exam, thinking about what I need to do in the morning. But I moved down the bed and so I just froze, I like locked up, and I started explaining it away, trying to think of it scientifically, and like, Okay, maybe the mattress bunched it underneath me when I rolled over to put the book on the floor, and maybe it was just evening out somehow. And as I was thinking that and trying to rationalize it, it pulled me down again to the bottom of the bed. I slept with the light on that night. I didn't really have anywhere else to go, so there was no other option but to stay in the house. But I will never forget how horrifying that was and how scared I was, because that was something I just could not explain. After these experiences, I actually went to the property manager because this townhouse had been there for a long time. It was there back in the nineteen seventies, and it was a regular part of it was there with the university. So I asked the property manager, and I said, hey, has anyone ever had anything weird happened to them? She finished my sentence for me. She knew it was coming, and I said yeah. So I started explaining some of the things that happened, and she said, oh, yeah, you know that someone died in your backyard, right. So back in the seventies, so the way that the townhouses were, they were all lined up in a square with openings for people to wor through, and so it was all facing a backyard area. And the way that my back door was, you would walk straight out and you would hit a shed. So I thought it was just a storage shed for garden pools and stuff like that. It actually used to be a pool house. So in my backyard where that shed is, that pool house, there was a pool, and you can actually see the indent where it used to be. Someone drowned in that pool. So after someone drowned, they filled it in and they just stopped using it. They used it as just lawn. But my backyard is actually the closest place to that pool, so it makes sense that there may have been something there. But yeah, she said that my townhouse wasn't the only townhouse that had occurrences mine. She was really fascinated by the stories. One night I was it was after the breakup, and I was really lonely. I was really lonely. I was upset, and I was I just didn't feel myself. And I remember hearing this meowing at my door, at my front door, and it was insistent. It just kept it kept me out because I thought it was someone bringing their cat in or whatnot. And so I go to the door and here's this beautiful, sweetheart of a cat, and she was a tabby and she just waltz in. This is her home, as cats do because they own everything. She spent the night with me, like she stayed down in the living room with me while I was finiching out my homework. And then when I was going to bed, I just kind of looked at her and I'm like, I'm going to bed, You're welcome to come with. And so she came. She slept the night with me, and then six o'clock in the morning, she woke me up and she wanted to go back. She wanted to go back outside, and I never saw her again. Since moving out of the townhouse, I haven't had a lot of things happen until I got to the house that I'm in right now, until I had my babies, my twins, and I think that maybe my guardian angel, who I think maybe was my Grandma, I don't know, was shielding me in that house more than I realized. Because I had that calming presence of the heir stroking, it would make sense that something would come and visit my sister and I while we were playing a game, to just check in and be like, hey, I'm here with you, and then go away. Rachel eventually moves out of the townhouse and begins a new life where signs of something else begins to make itself known. More on that coming up next. After graduating, I was in Canada for a while and then and I immigrated over to the United States by myself. I'm the only one in my family who was here, and I haven't had anything really happen. In twenty nineteen, my now husband we found out that we were expecting. We weren't expecting it, but unfortunately, when I found out that I was pregnant, my cousin found out that she had stage four cancer. So while I was going through my pregnancy journey, she was going through her cancer journey. We got closer during that time. We were really close growing up, and then once we became teenagers and were in college and everything, I tried to and we tried to stay in contact as much as possible. Then once I moved away, we just kell out of touch. I would going through our journeys together. I would send her pictures and videos of the boys. And there was my one twin, my twin be. He loved music just right from the get go. In the loom, he loved music, and so I would show her videos of playing music and you'd see my belly moving and kicking from him. And she was a music major, and so she's that twin b that's my guy, he's mine, and so we bonded over that, and she just adored him already. And I when I was thirty five weeks, I had some complications that I didn't realize. I felt fine, I felt great. We were just we just moved in and I was unpacking and cleaning and getting yelled at for doing too much. But I went into my scheduled ultrasound and my blood pressure was really high. I remember them taking me for tests and then them saying, hey, don't freak out, but we're actually clearing the er right now because those babies need to come out now, and we need to get your blood pressure down. And turns out that I had I was past preclampsia, and the actually I was had eclampsia and my kidneys and my liver were shutting down, which I didn't realize I was. I felt fine, So that was a sh So my babies were born. They were born October twenty fifth at two thirty pm Pacific time. During all this time, unbeknownst to me, my cousin passed away October twenty fifth at two thirty Eastern time, so she was three hours ahead. The time that she passed away was actually when my blood pressure spiked, and that's when the doctors realized that I that my kidneys and my liver were shutting down, and that if I didn't have the babies now, if they didn't give me an emergency CEA section, I may not have made. It is that bad, which is crazy because I, like again, I felt fine. I was still working and sending work emails being like, Okay, this appointment's taking longer, Okay, the babies are coming out. So I I really think that she had a hand in it, because exactly the moment that she passed away, that's when my blood pressure spiked, and that's when they realized that things were very wrong. I think that she on her way up to heaven, if you believe in that, I think she nudged that along. And I think because of her, that's why I'm here, and that's why the boys are her. And just the fact that afterwards my boys were born on October twenty fifth at two thirty pm, the exact same day and the exact same time that she passed away. It just has to mean something. You can't have timing like that otherwise. But I think she really had a hand in saving us. I think she checks in on them. I remember having the video monitor and the sound and it. I love technology these days because if the boys rolled over, or if there's a sound, or if there's something off, I would get a notification to my phone. Late one night, I got the notification on my phone. So I looked and I checked the app and so there's nothing there. But I heard a female voice say owen ohen and as if someone as if someone was having a conversation as if someone had asked this person, Okay, what's their name again, and they replied Owen, and it just it was just amazing, and it just made me feel that, Okay, yeah, there is someone watching out for my boys, for Owen, especially because that's the twin that she loved the most. That's the one that really loves music, and to this day they still do. He still does. I feel her sometimes. When he got his first cold, he spiked a really bad fever, and I remember ripe before that. I remember just heavy feeling her, not like feeling someone there physically, but I just I just felt this warmth and this memory of her, and it made me think of her. And then after that he spiked a fever, so I think she was, hey, it's okay, this, I got him. I'm watching him and having that. And then this house. I don't feel anything negative in this house, but we have since the boys came. We just have these weirdest things where I'll vacuum the room because as little ones do, they put everything in their mouth, and we have dogs, and so I always wanted to make sure that there was nothing coming in because California is really bad for foxtails, which are these sharp little things burrs, so I never wanted them to run in their mouth. So it was constantly vacuuming and cleaning, and I would after vacuuming, I would find these nails or screws and they would just be strategically placed so that I would see them. It would just be in this strategically play spot. So I would clean and it would be in the middle of the floor. It's like, I just vacuum that. How did that get there? I just vacuum that. Or it would be on top of a book on the floor, so I didn't place that there. How did that get there? And I know, but it was the weirdest thing. I was always so confused because I never felt anything aggressive, not I didn't feel like the townhouse. I've never really felt anything here. But they would just be and it wouldn't just be me. Other people, like my mother in mock comes and watches them and she would be like, hey, I found this and it was right here. It was right on this thing, and she says, I know that I picked everything up, so I don't know where it came from. And it Granted, my husband is very handy and he has he's always fixing something, so it would be logical to assume that something fell out of his pocket, but just to see where it would end up, and it would just be strategically places if someone put it there so that I would see it. And I remember telling my friend about this and she said, well, yeah, it probably fell out of your husband's pocket, and it was probably placing it there so that you would see it, so you'd pick it up so that it wasn't so that the boys wouldn't find it first. And that made a lot of sense to me because I thought, I being a new mom, everything is a threat. And I remember one time just getting really upset because I just cleaned the baby's room and there was a nail on their bed and I remember just getting so mad, and you need to cut this out. This is not okay. You're a guest in this house, but I will make sure that you were out of here if you threaten these babies. But next day, cleaning the boy's room again, just hiding it, and I found a ring. And I don't know where this ring came from. It's a yoga symbol for breathe. They're own and I'm not really into that. I am the only girl in this house. I asked my mother in law, I asked my sister in law, I asked anyone who had been in the house. Because it was during the pandemic, we didn't have a lot of people there, and no one. No one said that it was theirs, and no one was really into yoga. So I remember just the timing of that getting angry and saying you need to cut this out, and finding this ring, and I think it was a peace offering, but I think now that I look back on it, I think it was they were really They're finding these nails and being like, hey, you need to pick this up. I'm putting this here. I can't put it away for you, but I'm putting this here so you see it and pick it up. So it's really nice to know that I've grown up with the Guardian Angel, and I think my boys are growing up with the Guardian Angel as well. So it's really nice to have that thought. Do you have a paranormal experience that you want to share with the rest of us? Find my contact info on the description of this episode and head on over to truscarystory dot com to tell me about it up. Next, check out Dark Memory My podcast where I talk about haunted places and real creepy mysteries. You can find it by searching for Dark Memory on your app right now. Don't forget a tap follow to get more stories sent to you. And if you want to support us and get ad free episodes, go to scaryplus dot com to try a premium show for free. Ways to get in touch with me are in the description of this episode as well. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon.